She didn’t elaborate. He noticed her water glass was empty so he got up and refilled it, then gathered their takeout detritus and bagged it.

“I should go to bed,” she said.

“Cool. Thanks for dinner.” Stupid, he thought. I brought it to her.

CLAUDIA

After the boy from down the hall left, Claudia called the security desk downstairs and was told, for the third time, that no one had turned in her phone. It had been twenty-four hours and she still had no idea how she’d gotten back to bed, or who she’d been with past eleven o’clock the night before.

She’d blacked out only one other time, on Martha’s Vineyard last summer. After a graduation dinner at a restaurant near their seaside estate, Claudia’s parents had allowed her to stay and drink with her twenty-two-year-old sister, Edie. The bartender made key lime martinis and after two they stumbled down to the yacht club at the Edgartown harbor. Alcohol, the great equalizer: The prep school kids from Boston and New York were sharing a bottle of vodka with the barbacks and servers who worked on the island. The last thing she remembered was accepting someone’s coat around her shoulders. The next morning, after she woke up in a deck chair, her sister informed her that at some point she’d announced to everyone she wasn’t going to let anybody fuck her until college.

“You said it was going to be the ‘Summer of Blow Jobs!’” howled Edie.

“No, I didn’t,” said Claudia, although it sounded like something she might say, especially if she was drunk.

“Nathan is a witness,” said Edie.

“It’s true,” said Nathan, Edie’s scruffy boyfriend from Vassar. He’d spent the summer with them and knocked Edie up that August, right under their parents’ noses.

They were all sitting in the breakfast room, a wall of French doors flung open onto the stone patio. The pool, the grass, the sand, the ocean, the blue sky: Claudia could stand up and run straight into the horizon from the table.

“You were pretty messed up,” said her sister. “I thought you went off to puke, but you never came back.”

“You didn’t try to find me?”

“I figured you’d go home, and I was right.”

“I don’t even remember getting here.”

“You probably blacked out,” said Nathan.