In another window, kids crowd around a ping-pong table bouncing a ball into plastic cups. No one has any paddles. I watch until my teeth chatter, then I get moving so I don’t freeze.

Three houses down, the porch is packed with people and as I walk past, a shirtless guy yells, “Hey, you!”

I look back.

“Yeah, you!” His hairless chest is splotchy red from the cold. “I know you. Girl from lit class! I know you.”

“I don’t think…” I struggle for words. I felt invisible and it seems wrong that he can see me.

He jumps over the porch railing and stands really close to me. He has a round face and cheeks that are too chubby for the rest of him. A mane of shaggy hair like a lion. “Margaret, right?”

“April,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah, April. April,” Lion Boy says like he’s stuck on the word. “April. April from lit class.” He stares hard and I worry he might kiss me. “Have a beer!” He pushes his cup into my hand.

His buddy jumps down next to him. Bare-chested too, shirt tied around his head like a turban. “Who’d you give your beer to, man?”

“Dude! This is April from lit class,” Lion Boy tells him, pointing at me like his friend wouldn’t know who he was talking about otherwise.

“Girls like their own beers,” the turban guy says with a smirk that gives him dimples. “Get April from lit class her own beer. She doesn’t want your cooties.”

“April,” Lion Boy says, grabbing my arm, “I’ll get you your own beer.”

I know this is stupid and I don’t even like beer, but I’m cold and hungry and lonely and they think I belong, so I let Lion Boy lead me into the house. I don’t want to be one of those girls who ends up duct taped to a chair in someone’s basement like in the articles Margo clips for me. She always says she worries no one taught me to be wary of people in the right way, but I don’t think Lion Boy and his friends count. They’re not even adults.

It’s warm inside. Stuffy from too many people breathing in too small a space, but I don’t care. I have hope of being able to feel my face again. There are broken hockey sticks mounted on the walls, crisscrossed like those swords you see over a fireplace in movies about British people. The couch is covered in NHL bedsheets, and someone is burning incense that smells like dirty feet.