Madison shook her head. “That was a couple weeks ago and he hasn’t said anything since. Honestly, I feel sorry for him. He’s just sad and pathetic and lonely.”

“You’re way too nice,” Julie said, but ultimately she sided with Madison, and we dropped it.

“How do you even end up like that?” Ben asked, reaching for another cigarette.

“What?” Elise said.

“Like Dawkins. Pathetic and creepy.”

“Maybe he was always pathetic and creepy,” Julie said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. Everyone turned to stare at me, surprised that I’d interjected. With Elise and her friends, I’d always felt a little out of my depth and liked to stay under the radar.

“What do you mean?” Elise asked.

“Just—” I thought of my parents. They couldn’t have always been what they were now. They had to have loved each other at some point. There were photographs around the house with genuine smiles, with affection in their eyes. “People change,” I said. “They change and get weird and bitter, and I guess, creepy.”

“God, I hope that doesn’t happen to me,” Madison said, flopping onto her back, pulling Julie down next to her.

“I wonder about that sometimes,” Jae said softly, staring at the ground. “Do you like any of the adults you know? I mean, do you want to be like them—your parents, your teachers? Sometimes I think about that and I just want nothing to do with them.”

“Yeah,” Elise answered, voice quiet. “I know what you mean.”

“My mom’s okay,” Julie said. “But I don’t want her life. She just seems trapped. Stuck.” Madison took her hand and squeezed it.

“Like, my parents thought it was a waste of time when I started doing magic,” Jae said. “But when I started getting all this attention, they got excited and made me work at it constantly until I hated it. They still show people that stupid clip of me on Good Morning America even though I quit pretty much right after I went on the show.” He also stretched back down onto the ground, closing his eyes. “Maybe that’s what happens to people.”

“What?” Madison asked.

“The universe takes the things they love and turns them into the things they hate,” he said. I thought of my parents then, what they let the universe take from them. How they ended up trapped and unhappy, their misery compounded by their efforts to hide it.

“That’s just your parents being assholes,” Elise said. “There’s no way I’m going to be anything like mine.”

“How do you know?” Jae asked.

Elise simply smiled and said: “The universe only takes things from you if you let it. So don’t.”

• • •

Later that night, when it was just the two of us, we went to the Pink Mansion, where we could be alone, her father gone for the night. Out on the balcony, Elise sat on the bannister even though it made me nervous. The drop to the river below was steep, and in the dark it was hard to see anything and that made it seem even farther away.