As though conjured, Rob enters the kitchen and thrusts his hips at Kit. Automatically she handles his crotch, mashing it like a stress ball. Hazel covers her mouth to avoid yelling out, but Rob looks natural, gazing at a chip in the wall. The coat of paint underneath was tangerine, a spark against the current beige.

“Wait,” Hazel says. “I thought you were a lesbian.”

“I am,” says Kit.

When Kit moved to Lexington at age eleven, she was already out to her parents and her whole Montessori school. Kit invited Hazel and Melissa to a sleepover at the beginning of this year, before she really knew them. They sat on her bed eating Smartfood, and Kit said, “I have a personal secret.”

But now, here in Esther’s kitchen, Kit is manhandling a penis and scrotum like it’s nothing. Hazel says, “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Shut it,” says Rob.

Hazel goes unsteady, gripping her chair with both hands. Kit’s wide face is flushed, eyebrows raised, nose crinkled. What have Kit and Melissa been doing in this house all these weeks? Are they lost to Hazel already? Kit’s expression is unfamiliar, her mouth loose and accommodating. Hazel watches her fingers, memorizing the pattern of her kneading, in case later she has to perform the task herself.

A door off the living room flies open, cracking against the plaster to reveal a woman in a nightgown. As soon as Hazel can bend her knees, stiff with the shock of seeing a grown-up here, she ducks under the table. This woman will certainly call her father. He’ll yell at her for the whole drive home. She’s comforted by the idea of the dark car: dry heat cycling through the vents, her father’s possessive anger, his heavy palming of the wheel.

From where Hazel crouches under the table, the woman looms tall, the base of her chin bobbing as she speaks to Esther in another language, indicating the door that Rob left open. The nightgown blows around her like tissue, and she clutches it at her throat. Hazel retreats further until all she can see are the woman’s toes, painted the color of her skin.

The woman takes a step toward Esther, placing her feet carefully and solidly, as though on the deck of a ship. Esther yells a sharp word. The woman spins and slams herself back inside.

“Don’t listen to her,” Esther says as Hazel climbs back into her chair. “She thinks she’s still in Cambodia.”

Hazel wonders what Esther’s word was, if she could use it on her own parents, if she could even pronounce it. She imagines shouting the word at her father, his head springing back on his spine, eyes brightening in their nests of beige skin. She can’t steady herself on the chair knowing there’s a mother here who’s unable to change the course of the party. The front door is still open, snowflakes absorbing into the armchair.

“Can we close the door?” Hazel asks, but Esther and Kit ignore her. The heat from the baseboards bleeds into the night, and Hazel jams her arms under the waistband of her snow pants and her normal pants so they clench her naked thighs.