“Oh yeah. I’m a very sore loser.”

Summer hmmms for a few seconds. “Have you two ever played Chain Story?”

Fox explains, “You start with a random prompt and whoever goes first has sixty seconds to tell a true story from their life. They then pick one element from their story, usually a single word, and the person who goes next. That person then has to do the same thing. Whoever tells the best story wins.”

“But there’s less time each turn,” Summer says. “There’s four of us so the first person gets sixty seconds. Second will get forty-eight seconds, then thirty-six, then twenty-four.”

“Drunk math. I’m impressed,” Joy says kindly.

“Really?” Summer grins.

“It’s true. You should go first. How do we pick the prompt?”

Summer ends up telling a story about the first concert she ever tried to go to alone but got the dates mixed up for. She went to the venue on the wrong day, but the doorman let her in, and instead of seeing the Jonas Brothers she watched a metal concert. It turned out to be quite the formative experience for her—her nose got broken in a mosh pit.

“Is that true?” Joy asks Fox.

“Could be. It was before my time.”

“That’s why I have a lump here.” She points to her nose—and accidentally leaves a smear of mustard behind. “The doctor set it weird so it healed crooked. Anyway, I choose you, Joy. Your word is”—she mimes a drumroll—“crush.”

“Ooh, okay. Crush.” Joy tries to think quickly and snaps her fingers when it comes to her. “Crush. Celebrity crush. This is the story of my brief but incredibly intense crush on Naomi Campbell, and how it ended with my dad fighting the pastor in the sanctuary because he told me I was going to hell. Forty-eight seconds on the clock, please?”

“And go,” Fox says.

Long story short, when Joy was six she became obsessed with Naomi Campbell. She told everyone she was going to marry her, because young children say things they don’t understand all the time. Her pastor, however, heard her, condemned her to hell for being gay, and then her dad punched him in the middle of service. Her entire family switched to a more accepting church after that.

“Your dad is badass,” Summer says.

“Yeah, he is,” Joy says proudly. “Someday, I’ll tell you what my mom did.” The petty apple doesn’t fall far from the petty tree.

“I’m going to forfeit. It doesn’t matter what word I get, I don’t have a story better than that,” Malcolm says, grinning.

Fox says, “Me either.”

“So I win? Why am I surprised? Of course I did.”