Arthur nodded his head in the direction of the retreating quartet.

“What party?” I asked before I could stop myself, already feeling awash in dread.

“For Josie Sutton. Today’s her birthday. Didn’t you get the invite?”

I hadn’t. And I knew it wasn’t an oversight. My classmate Bronwyn was many things but most of all she was precise. Like a laser. And for some reason she did not like me. Especially lately. The first two months of our infrequent interactions were annoying, but the past six weeks her viciousness seemed focused on me to the point that I searched my brain for some way in which I may have wronged her, but came up empty. Sure, I wasn’t the traditional popular girl, but I had never before considered myself the type to get picked on, either. Overall, I was fairly . . . basic, really. Which made her overt dislike of me such a mystery.

“Is everyone going?” I asked. My voice sounded tight even to my own ears.

“I’m not.”

“But you were invited.”

He shrugged, bored. “Everyone was.”

Not everyone.

I grabbed my cap off the ground, stood, then whacked it against my thigh to dislodge flecks of dead grass, and shoved it back on my head, tucking my long blonde hair beneath with more force than was necessary. My brain felt like it was boiling.

I took my phone out of my coat pocket and pulled up Instagram. It only took a few seconds for me to see the first Insta Story from what were the beginnings of a banging party on the rooftop of La Belle’s, a nearby restaurant owned by Bronwyn’s family, which made it easier for the underage to be served.

I hit refresh twice and both times new posts from different classmates appeared. Smiling faces in selfies. All celebrating a sixteenth birthday. Just not mine.

“Are you going back to Oklahoma for Christmas?” Arthur asked.

The question jolted me out of the vortex of misery I could feel building in the center of my chest. If it had come even twenty seconds earlier, my answer would have been “Nope,” because I had already told everyone as much. My parents, my grandmother, and my best friend, Mia. Since the moment I’d been accepted, I’d had fanciful visions of me wandering the snowy private campus in solitude, reading a book, feeling independent. Like Barrington was my own private retreat.

But that was twenty seconds ago. And a lot had changed in those twenty seconds. So even though I opened my mouth with the intention of saying no, what came out was a very firm “Yes.”