She started by asking Beth, whom we hadn’t gotten to yet, either, and while Beth agreed Greg was weird, as she always had, it was in a sisterly way and thus wasn’t systematized. Sarah bounced from person to person in this manner until she talked to Claire, who herself was an agent of the dark and had, truth be told, her own separate agenda that was as yet unconnected to ours. “Yeah,” Claire said, skimming her eyes over the long line of cars waiting to exit the parking lot. It was second lunch period, when sophomores and juniors ate, and they were outside Adena High. The unlikely bond between the two of them had formed over a shared and wicked love of mid-2000s pop punk, which Sarah had developed before they were friendly but after she learned of Claire’s interest in such music, so she was genuinely passionate about it but the passion had a larger goal; anyway, Claire said, “Do you know anything about Half Blessed?”

“I think I’ve heard the name,” Sarah said, which was typically how she engaged with Claire’s expansive cultural milieu. Claire at present had a shaggy Chelsea haircut that was dyed blue, and wore a seasonal leather jacket whose pins changed daily, which lent her the kind of standoffish wisdom of someone who inhabits multiple eras. Had you asked Claire, at this point, she wouldn’t have called her and Sarah “friends,” exactly, nor would she have admitted that her love for pop punk—a genre she had never experienced in its contemporary moment—was anything but ironic. “Is that like a band?” Sarah said.

“I guess it was a band after the fact”—another common answer, there was always an obscure band buried somewhere—“but it’s more of a belief system,” Claire said.

“A belief system? Like some kind of religious thing?”

Claire shrugged. “I mean, as much as you’d consider iconography ‘religious.’” (She used air quotes.) “You’d see plenty of inverted crosses and whatnot but they’re not exactly burning churches, not in this decade anyway.” She paused and bit her lip, seeming to consider. “I guess it’s more of a society, is how they would put it, with some magical overtones. Basically teenage illuminati, but more social, like about ostracizing and status-climbing. Or like they’ll squat your house and slaughter a pig in the living room, blind fires, stuff like that. Basically it’s just a clique but with secret handshakes, sex pacts, and blood rituals—to appeal to the high school crowd.”