So I get out. I take Aaron’s sleeping bag outside and lurk by the gates of Versailles and watch the fireflies blink while I wait for Ruby to pick me up. As for the scene that just happened, it doesn’t even bear thinking about. They need a babysitter, and they can’t afford to pay anyone. I’ll just tell Nora and Zack that instead of having a swimming hole, they now have a secret swimming hole. The fact that Scot now works from home complicates things, but I’ll figure something out. It’s not like the guy’s a genius. My sister’s analysis is that when the woman makes more money than the man, the man has to make up for it by swaggering around and threatening everybody and yelling a lot. Allegra says Scot’s affair with Nanci Lee is his way of equalizing the difference in intelligence and power between him and Mom. As far as staying away from the Grimshaws, I can’t say anything about it to Grimshaw. It will take her less than one second to guess why I’ve been forbidden to bring Zack and Nora over to play. She’s very sensitive that way.

Eventually, Ruby’s truck rolls up and stops. Only his parking lights are on.

“Melody’s there already,” he reports when I get in. “She went down with Dale and Lisa.”

“Lisa’s back?”

“Yeah. She just came back tonight. The kids were happier to see her than she was to see them.”

We head down into the Valley, stopping to buy beer and pick up three of Ruby’s friends, who all cram in front of the pickup with him. I stretch out in back with the Rottweilers and watch the stars go by over my head. I think about what Scot said about my father. He died when I was so young that I don’t have any memory of him at all. If I ever ask anything about him, it’s like it’s none of my business and I should stop being so nosy and be grateful for what I have.

By the time we arrive, the party is raging. It’s in a deep, ferny gorge above Colchis where tiny feathery waterfalls spill down steps of black shale into the same stream that winds in back of Grimshaw’s house. A huge bonfire licks at the sky. A bunch of guys with their shirts tied around their heads are watching the fire. Some guys from the football team throw a car seat on the fire, and a column of sparks rises about thirty feet in the air, twisting around itself. Ruby puts a can of beer in my hands and then dissolves into the shadows. I crack it, take the first sip, and wander off in search of Grimshaw. The firelight makes people’s faces strange and their shadows lurch against the trees. Cars keep pulling in, and their headlights illuminate more clumps of people leaning against cars and drinking. I thread through them. The gorge is the melting pot of Colchis. All the discrete, mildly antagonistic lifestyles—rednecks, jocks, stoners, even Christians—are like one-celled organisms whose membranes become permeable at parties to beer and drugs and sexually transmitted diseases. Nobody talks to me, though.