Winston hadn’t even taken his boots off, she noticed, as if he’d assumed he’d be kicked out.

Eve turned to join the group.

“You coming?” she asked him.

After a brief pause, he slipped off his boots and followed.

Erin sat right next to the couch, and the rest of them all squeezed in so tight on it that Sophie ended up on Nessa’s lap and Eve’s legs rested over Amina’s. Lara stood up and said, “I can’t do this,” and sat cross-legged on the floor.

“Well, hi, Byrd!” Nessa reached over to pat his back as a greeting.

“Hi, everybody,” Winston said in a shy mumble.

“Everybody do their resolutions?” Eve grabbed the paper and colored pens from the coffee table and handed some to Winston.

“Yup. I’m going to get the lead in Oklahoma! this spring,” Nessa announced.

They all burst out laughing.

“I don’t think that’s a resolution, hon,” Sophie said. “That’s, like, a goal.”

“A resolution is a goal for how you’re going to change,” Lara told her. “Like, for me, I’m going to care less about what people think.”

“Such a good one!” Sophie grabbed her own paper. “Give me a pen. I have to add that.”

Eve wrote down that she would write once a day. She’d share her writing with someone. And she’d show her true self to the world. Whatever that meant in the year to come.

Eve looked over at Winston and saw him writing furiously, filling up the page.

After a few minutes of watching ball-drop banter on TV, Sophie spoke. “You all hear there’s another list?”

Nessa nodded, her expression grim. “And Rose Reed is number one. Blech. Not ‘blech’ to Rose Reed. ‘Blech’ to more lists.”

“Plus, being number one’s not so easy,” Eve added.

“True.” Sophie caught her eye.

“It’s really sad,” Amina jumped in. “I think. Am I right? It’s sad?” She looked from person to person, maybe wondering if she’d said the wrong thing.

“‘Sad’ is the only word for it, in my opinion!” Lara pronounced before digging into some guacamole.

“Hey, maybe we should try to talk to her,” Nessa suggested.

“Always worth a try,” Sophie said with a look of determination.

Erin threw a popcorn kernel toward the ceiling, then opened her mouth wide and caught it.

“No way! Skills!” Nessa tried to do the same thing, and it landed in her eye.

“All right, guys, it’s almost midnight—which channel do we want to go with?” Sophie fiddled with the remote.

Eve had read some wonderful New Year’s poems online earlier that day. She began to recite one: “There’s a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox that goes: What can be said in New Year rhymes, that’s not been said a thousand times?”

“Here we go…,” Nessa groaned.

“What? I’m a poet!”

Nessa sighed. “Fine. Go on.”

“The new years come, the old years go. We know we dream, we dream we know. We rise up laughing with the light. We lie down weeping with the night. We hug the world until it stings…”