“Oh my God, he’s blushing. That is adorable.” Tyra leaned over the seat, and I felt her breath on my neck. “What’s your name?”

“Gibby.”

“How old are you, Gibby?”

“He’s eighteen,” Jason said. “His birthday was last week.”

“Oh my God. So adorable.” Tyra squeezed my shoulders, laughing, but my eyes found Sara’s. They were blue, shot with green, and they watched me from a calm, still place. “It’s very nice to meet you, Gibby. Is this your car?” I stammered something, and she leaned forward, showing a second glimpse of the same pale skin. “It suits you, I think. The lines of it.”

She leaned back after that, and looked away. I felt a flutter, an emptiness. Jason’s knowing smile returned.

“All right, boys and girls.” He fired the big engine. “Who’s ready to party?”

The party started in the car and moved, over an hour’s drive, to a gravel road that twisted through undeveloped forest at the southern shoreline of the state’s largest lake. Sunlight slanted in, and water glinted beyond the trees. Pale dust rose behind the car as Jason took us farther from the neighborhoods and boat ramps and parks. The girls were on a second bottle of wine, talking a lot and asking questions that Jason apparently wanted me to answer. He rarely replied to any of them, choosing instead to smile or tip back a beer or say something like, You know who has a funny story like that?

Thing was, I did have funny stories. Whenever he said that and looked my way, I knew exactly what to say and how to say it. Maybe it was the beer, or maybe his confidence was contagious. Whatever the case, the girls responded. Tyra liked to laugh in a full-throated way, her lips as pink as the inside of a shell, her teeth as glistening and damp. Sara’s responses were subdued but more gratifying. She’d touch my shoulder and lean close, her smile softer and intimate and small. As a spell, I wished it to remain unbroken. The streaming hair. The heat of her hand.

“Where are you taking us, anyway?”

Tyra raised her voice to ask the question, but Jason didn’t respond. He turned right when the road forked, and bounced us down a weed-filled track that ended at a meadow filled with wildflowers. Beyond it, the lake stretched for miles, a spill of glass fringed by forest and hills and high, empty sky. When the car stopped, Tyra stood, pulling off her sunglasses. “Oh my God.”

We got out of the car, the stillness remarkable in its perfection. “How’d you find this place?” I asked.

“It wasn’t me. It was Robert.”