The boys stared at each other, eyes hard, muscles tensed. Alice couldn’t help but be struck by how good-looking they both were: Jude’s features technically better, but too delicate and small-boned for her tastes. She much preferred Tommy’s more rugged brand of handsomeness. It was a clean, healthy kind of handsome, the kind of handsome meant for sunshine and outdoors. There was something decadent about Jude’s beauty, like he was beautiful almost the way a girl was beautiful. For a moment it looked as if the two were going to come to blows. Then Jude lifted a hang-on finger. A second later, puke exploded from his mouth, narrowly missing Tommy’s bare feet, landing on the fire. And a second after that, Jude dropped to the sand, unconscious. It was a miracle: a KO without a single punch being thrown.

After that, the party really did end. Once the bonfire was thoroughly doused, covered in sand and seawater, everyone began the trek up the beach, back to the lot by the clubhouse where the cars were parked. Everyone, that is, except Jude. He got left in the heap he collapsed in, though Cybill did roll him onto his stomach so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit, assuming that there was any vomit left to choke on. She also relieved him of his flask, which apparently wasn’t as empty as Alice had guessed because Cybill and Charlie kept passing it back and forth as they walked, doing their level best to shake off the sobriety that Jude and Tommy’s near fisticuffs had forced on them.

When they were in sight of the parking lot, Cybill turned to Bianca, that night’s designated driver—designated by Cybill, of course—and said, “You and Sasha wait by the car. Charlie, Alice, and I are going to make a quick pit stop.”

“Where?” said Charlie. “It’s late. Everything’s closed.”

Cybill flung an arm at the clubhouse, a couple hundred yards away. “I got to go peeps.”

“So go peeps in the bushes like a normal person.”

“And risk getting poison ivy or Lyme disease? No thanks. It’ll just take a second.”

Alice quit craning her neck, trying to catch sight of Tommy, see which car he got in, to say to her sister, “We have to go in there, anyway. We left mom’s jacket. Remember?”

“Oh yeah,” Charlie said.

Cybill grabbed Charlie’s hand, Charlie grabbed Alice’s, and the three of them made their lurching way to the back door of the clubhouse.

• • •