At one point, the outdoor party was bigger than the indoor one had been. Alice didn’t know where all the kids had come from. Friends of guests and friends of friends of guests, she supposed. That or they’d marched out of the sea. Cybill, who acted like the unofficial hostess, had introduced her to a bunch of the new people, girls whose names all seemed to be flowers and boys with first names that sounded like last ones. She couldn’t keep any of them straight, stopped trying after a while. Now, it was past midnight, and, maybe because the night had started so early, things were starting to die down.

Alice wasn’t talking to anyone at the moment, but she didn’t feel weird about it. On the contrary, she felt relaxed and at ease, separate from her surroundings yet a part of them, too. Mostly she listened in on the back-from-the-school-year conversations going on all around her, people reconnecting after a ten-month gap, whooping greetings at each other, recalling past adventures, predicting future ones. Charlie would come over every twenty minutes or so to check in on her, make sure she was okay, yell at her for still being on her first drink, then return to what she’d been doing before: making fun of the other girls with Cybill, talking back to the boys, being her usual bright-eyed, sharp-tongued, laughing self.

Sometimes Alice would catch people looking at her. But the looks were curious, not judgmental, who might you be? as opposed to who the fuck are you? A couple of them even came up to her, tapped her on the shoulder, asked her if she went to St. Augie’s or Prentice Hall—everyone here seemed to go to one or the other, no matter that they came from up and down the East Coast—and then lost interest when she said no. Not lost interest in a mean way, more in an apologetic one, moving on with a half smile, a rueful shrug of the shoulders.