“You’re insane,” Melissa says, her voice tumbling out wildly. “I never realized this before, but you’re literally insane, aren’t you?”

Hazel pushes back against her chair and stands. Anthony and Rob and Esther and Kit watch her like she’s a dog that’s slipped its collar and they don’t know yet whether she’ll run or attack or soil herself.

“Show us,” Esther whispers, and it’s like she can see into Hazel’s mind.

“Come on,” Hazel says. A push enters her voice. She takes Melissa’s wrist, which is as cool and hard as plastic. She expects Melissa to yank free, but she stiffens, her focus shifting between Anthony and Rob. As though they’d ever help. They just sit there, useless.

“Hazel,” Kit says. “Watch it.” But she won’t get involved until she has to.

Now that Hazel has hold of Melissa, she should shove her to the floor, like the president pushing a cigar into the girl people say was a kid—though she looks more like a mom—standing back to admire what he’d made. She’s about to say they should shut down the party, that the practice sex is too terrifying in the end, when Ratty swims against her hip. She doesn’t stop him as he eases his body into the leg of her snow pants, fingernails poking through the nylon, spine brushing her shin, lowering himself all the way down her leg. Of course he’s saving her. Of course.

He reaches her ankle and emerges from the cuff, paws starfished and clinging to the cotton of her socks. His head, emerging, is so painfully tiny and perfect that Hazel’s eyes sting: those whiskers sparkling in the fluorescence, pink claws testing carpet, that nose so tender the flesh would break at one touch.

What will the days be now that Melissa and Kit are so far away? She’ll return to the utility room for lunch, her chicken dripping on the bleached floor. She’ll shut herself in there after school too, wait out the rush so she won’t have to see Melissa and Kit off on some new journey. She wants to cry, but she can’t. It’s New Year’s.

Outside the window, potassium lamps bake the snow in lukewarm light. As Ratty’s tail unravels out of Hazel’s cuff, as Esther and Anthony suck in breath, Hazel clings tighter to Melissa’s wrist, pulling it toward her chest. She concentrates on a distant sound, far beyond Esther’s apartment: someone singing, miles away. The voices of people she doesn’t know yet, their heads tipped to the sky, yelling for the next year, and all to come after that.

Pink Knives

WE MEET IN THE PLAGUE. YOUR GRAY ROOTS HAVE grown out four or five inches into the red—we’re that deep in. We sit on opposite hips of a circle printed on the grass in a crowded public park in San Francisco. Around us are first-date kisses, teens huddled dangerously close together on tarps, techies dancing to rubberized jewel-toned radios. Everyone massing into Dolores Park for whatever they need: sex, friendship, family, work meetings, chess lessons, air, rigorous jump rope, letting their toddlers scream like wolves, pudgy arms extended, anticipating a fall. Toddlers who will grow up warped by this time, unused to the touch of peers.