She emptied the bucket into the toilet, rinsed it in the tub, took a bleary-eyed look at herself in the mirror. So, this is how a fourteen-year-old girl looks when she gets hammered. Not a pretty sight. She could barely remember what Vince had given her to try the night before, stuff he’d snuck out of his house. A couple of cans of Bud, some vodka, gin, an already-opened bottle of red wine. She’d promised to bring some of her dad’s rum, but had chickened out in the end.

Something was niggling at her. Something about the bedrooms.

She splashed cold water on her face, dried off with a towel. Cynthia took a deep breath, tried to pull herself together, in case her mother was waiting for her on the other side of the door.

She wasn’t.

Cynthia headed back to her room, feeling the broadloom under her toes. Along the way, she glanced into her brother Todd’s room, then her parents’. The beds were made. Her mother didn’t usually get around to making them until later in the morning—Todd never made his own, and their mother let him get away with it—but here they were, looking as though they’d never been slept in.

Cynthia felt a wave of panic. Was she already late for school? Just how late was it?

She could see Todd’s clock on his bedside table from where she stood. Just ten before eight. Nearly half an hour before she usually left for her first class.

The house was still.

She could usually hear her parents down in the kitchen about this time. Even if they weren’t speaking to each other, which was often the case, there’d be the faint sounds of the fridge opening and closing, a spatula scraping against a frying pan, the muffled rattling of dishes in the sink. Someone, her father usually, leafing through the pages of the morning newspaper, grunting about something in the news that irritated him.

Weird.

She went into her room, the walls plastered with posters of KISS and other soul-destroying performers that gave her parents fits, and closed the door. Pull it together, she told herself. Show up for breakfast like nothing ever happened. Pretend there wasn’t a screaming match the night before. Act like her father hadn’t dragged her out of her much older boyfriend’s car and taken her home.

She glanced at her ninth-grade math text sitting atop her open notebook on her desk. She’d only managed half the questions before she’d gone out the night before, deluded herself into thinking that if she got up early enough she could finish them in the morning.

Yeah, that was gonna happen.