I thread my way into Rack’s kitchen. The place is mobbed with people I’ve never seen before. It’s loud and dark and smoky, and the walls are throbbing with the music. Everybody looks like they’re having the best time they’ve ever had in their lives. I keep looking for Mike. I see a head rising above the crowd. It’s Grimshaw, still in the wedding dress. If she weren’t so drunk, she’d be half frozen. She’s walking in extremely high platform shoes—Angel’s, of course—stepping from chair to chair, picking her way across the room. She stands up on the kitchen table, which is covered with beer bottles and pitchers of melting ice and plates of cigarette butts and half-empty bags of chips. She bends down to pick up a jug of vodka and continues across the table. I still don’t see Mike. I see Angel nuzzling with some anonymous underclassman—it’s Brian, whose stock has risen since he accidentally won the game against Bavaria—feeding off the dazzled look in his eyes. I haven’t seen Rack since we got here.

The sliding plate glass door to the patio opens, and Junior and the Cougars’ quarterback step into the kitchen with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Everybody cheers. They’ve been wrestling outside in the snow, and they’re smeared with mud. As a committed athlete, Junior doesn’t drink, but it looks like the enemy quarterback does, and lost the fight.

“Somebody get this man some alcohol!” Junior yells.

“I have some!” Grimshaw holds out her bottle of vodka, and Junior holds up his hands, like he’s going to catch the football. Grimshaw cocks her arm behind her head and extends her other arm, like she’s going to throw the bottle in a Hail Mary pass into the end zone. But instead of letting go of it, she holds on to it, and Junior keeps his hands next to his face ready to catch it, and their eyes lock on to each other, and they just stare at each other, smiling across the room like they share a secret, private moment of open mutual admiration. All in the same split second, I remember the lilac blossoms Junior put in her hair during the Western Civ exam and I remember the bargain she struck with Rack over the summer and where that stands now that the cheerleading dream has come to nothing, and I wonder if Rack really is pregnant, and I worry because Mike Lyle is here right now, and I wish I had appreciated how uncomplicated life was when Grimshaw and I had only had one friend apiece. Then she gets an idea, and her eyes open wide.