Cover

Dedication

For Sean

April 2008

1

The texts started going out at noon on Friday: There’s a party at the house going up by the river. Can you get beer? Make it a keg. Just our crew, no kids. Are you holding? You up for a Philly run? Park on the road—no cars by the house.

A backpack hummed against a chair leg, the phone inside set to vibrate. Will O’Connor sat in the back row of his calculus classroom. He slipped his hand into his bag, glanced down at the screen, and then flicked his eyes back to the board.

Plans were made and the slouching students stirred, their eyes drifting to the windows. It was April, but it was warm, and graduation for New Falls High was only six weeks away. Final projects were just about in, and these last weeks of classes didn’t really matter for the seniors. The students knew it, and the teachers knew it. The lessons were halfhearted and geared toward showing movies whenever possible. In any case, the kids who were going to college already had their acceptances, and their places in the class of 2012 were secured with Daddy’s check. And the kids who weren’t going to college never worried about it too much anyway.

Will watched through the window as a few of his friends slipped out of the cafeteria doors and hopped into a car that would head down I-95 to a neighborhood in North Philadelphia, about an hour away. They knew a block there where they could buy coke just by rolling down the car window, like picking up fries at the McDonald’s drive-thru. Booze was even easier—they could just get a keg at Mason’s in town, where Mr. Mason barely looked at their fake ID’s before handing them a tap.

The bell rang. Only two more periods to go. Will slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked down the hall to his AP history class.

At five o’clock there were already a few cars parked near the house on River Road. It was a mix of the pricey and the practical, just like the town itself: a late model BMW, a handful of beat-up Civics and station wagons, and an open-top Jeep.

New Falls sat on the outskirts of the Philadelphia suburbs, nestled into the rolling hills of Hart County. The town, originally an old ferry crossing, was inseparable from the river that bordered it, and over the years it had tried on and shed a few different personalities: artists’ colony, tourist attraction, and suburban outpost. In the hills around town, sprawling horse estates sat side by side with tree farms.