Lonnie regains a little composure. “See, this is why you shouldn’t have come,” he says. “You’re not welcome. You think anyone here wants to remember what you did?”

He opens his arms wide, creating an imaginary line: Eric and Danny and Alana and Carrie on one side, himself and Mike Fuller and the rest of their graduating class on the other. They stand behind Lonnie as if waiting for an excuse to move, to start throwing punches and furniture. Tommy Taylor picks up a steak knife from the nearest table, a serrated blade with a chunky, olive-wood handle that probably retails for sixteen bucks at Pottery Barn. Others hold their craft-brew bottles by the necks like they’re trying to figure out how to break them.

Something else is going on here, Carrie realizes. Something is pushing their buttons.

Surprisingly, Buzz Bixby whistles loudly and plants himself right in between them all.

He speaks to Lonnie, but he’s addressing the whole crowd. “Shut up,” he says. “Seriously. All of you. Of course they’re here. And we should be glad.”

That sets off a round of grumbling. The word “bullshit” is repeated more than once.

“You are a bunch of ungrateful dicks, you know that?” he says, smiling but shaking his head. “How many times did these people save you when we were growing up?”

Buzz points at a random guy. “John Dennis,” he says. “Who got you out of the caves under Snake Hill when you were ten?”

John Dennis mumbles something and looks away from Buzz.

“That’s right. My man Danny built a robot that went down there and dragged your dumb ass out. And Mark,” Buzz says, pointing at Mark Hall. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but who did you ask for help when you found that weird chess set and you were crying all the time, talking about your nightmares — ”

“All right, all right,” Mark says, embarrassed. “It was Eric.”

“Damn right. And Darcy,” he says, turning to a blonde woman by the bar. “Who did you go to when your dad’s store was robbed? That’s right: Carrie. And Brandi, what about that creepy guy you said kept following you home, even though nobody else saw it, and you asked Alana to — ”

Then one small voice in the back of the crowd says it: “But what about New Year’s?”

Buzz’s smile switches off. “A lot of bad things happened on New Year’s.”

“Yeah,” someone else says, louder and more belligerent. “But they left.”

And the shouting starts again.

Buzz looks back at Carrie. He steps aside, with a shrug and an expression like, Well, I tried.

With Buzz out of the way, people begin shoving, crowding toward them. Someone flings a bottle. The bartender produces a baseball bat from under the cash register.

And Eric and Alana smile in a way that Carrie really doesn’t like.