Arch asked my mother about our Thanksgiving. He commented on the weather, complimented me on how well I was doing at Yeatman. Mr. Haltom handed my mother a flute of champagne. My mother thanked him and took a dainty sip.

“Come on,” Arch said. “Everybody’s in the pool house.”

I glanced over at my mother, now surrounded by both Mr. and Mrs. Haltom and Mrs. Creigh. She looked both elated and a bit helpless.

“I should probably stay with my mom,” I said. “She doesn’t know anybody.”

“She’ll be fine,” Arch said. “Come on.”

In the pool house, we found Jamie and Vanessa, along with the Barfield sisters, Alice Hudson, a few kids from Arch’s class, and maybe half a dozen other kids I didn’t recognize. A football game was on the television.

“I thought you’d never get here,” Jamie said. “Vanessa keeps trying to leave me alone with Alice Hudson.”

I looked over my shoulder at sweet Alice, who had long been branded as disagreeable by Jamie and the rest of the Yeatman boys, for reasons I could not discern but did not contradict. Vanessa had persuaded me to ask Alice to the homecoming dance a few weeks prior. We’d had a fine time. Alice was gracious and funny and clever, easy to talk to, amiable, and apparently sincere. Furthermore, her father was a radiologist, her mother was heiress to a substantial insurance company fortune, and her grandmother was board chair at Steptoe. But no one pointed this out to me until much later; hence, to me, she was just poor Alice, a “good girl,” pretty enough in most company but plain when compared to the likes of Vanessa.

“Come on,” Jamie said. “I’m dying for a smoke.”

I followed him around the pool and back into the woods, where he had found a tree with a knot that curved down into a bowl shape, into which he deposited his butts.

“Behold,” he said. “My ash tree.”

He lit up, while I glanced around to see if anyone might notice us there.

“There are a lot of people here,” I said.

“It was bigger last year. This time, Mother wanted something more—what was the word she used? Intimate.”

I gazed back through the woods at the amber rectangles of the pool house windows. Vanessa was chatting with a tall boy, distinguished by his coat and tie (everyone else wore sweaters or button-downs) and a prominent Adam’s apple.

“Who’s that talking to Vanessa?” I asked.

“Rhys Portis. He goes to Deerfield. It’s a boarding school.”

“Is he from Nashville?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jamie says. “He lives right down the block, in the yellow house with the fountain in front.”

“Why doesn’t he go to Yeatman?” I asked.

“Believe it or not, there are people who think they’re too good for Yeatman.”