So David failed at his one job, and he and Sarah went their separate ways: David wandered aimlessly down her moneyed suburban street in the manner of one who murders his classmate in broad daylight and then turns up standing mildly in the parking lot an hour later, bloody knife still in hand, and Sarah locked the bedroom door, debated texting Beth, but instead retreated deeper into her bed, her inquiries effectively resolved (there were two separate weirdnesses, David and Greg, Burst Marrow and Half Blessed), and when she came she snorted into the pillow thinking about one of the acts David had described, where the group had two people sit naked back-to-back, unspeaking, and the exercise didn’t end until you’d guessed who the other person was by their breathing; you wrote their projected name down on a card in front of you (it was used later).

What were Beth and her brother Greg doing during all of this? Well, Beth came home from school as usual, and as she entered the darkened house, Greg—who had been truant that day—launched out at her from behind the front door where he’d been crouched and put her in a chokehold. Beth had grown to expect behavior like this from her older brother and thus knew not to tense too much or struggle when it happened, but just to kind of let her body go limp (she pictured Greg as a goth version of the tiger in Calvin and Hobbes), and she let herself fall backward into him same as usual and prostrate him on the ground. This time he held on longer than usual, pressed his fingers tighter, and she lost consciousness briefly before he let go, and on Tuesday she went to school with bruises on her neck, which she chose not to cover up and refused to acknowledge. Sarah noticed and said nothing, but approached her interactions with Beth that day with pointed sympathy; she assumed if Beth wanted to talk about it, she would. But once the rumblings started up around Beth, they persisted, and between fifth and sixth period, as Beth passed the art rooms, she saw Claire in the hallway—with whom Sarah seemed to have bizarrely become friends but whom Beth had never been able to satisfactorily impress—who smiled slyly at her from the corner of her pierced mouth, and Beth knew it was because Claire thought Beth had let someone choke her during sex. She felt enraged, hated Claire for that smile, but that became the story.