A few of us did it on a couple’s night out a while back. It was a lot of fun: we rented a van and a driver. All of our teams had color names. The Green Team won, not that we’re bragging. We invited Rebecca, but she didn’t come. (We didn’t blame her! She was still grieving!) Even so, it would have been nice if she’d specifically declined instead of just not showing up. It was that night that Brandy said she saw Rebecca getting a blowout on a random Thursday evening in February, when nobody had any plans to go out. And she was dressed up too. Not in her teacher clothes. She was wearing a pair of to-the-knee leather boots Brandy had never seen before.

It was probably nothing.

Boda Borg is not cheap. Nicole was on a budget that summer, not that she wanted everybody to know about Mason losing his job, but Riley begged and begged and begged for her Boda Borg party. She’d been counting on this all year. So Nicole had to put a limit on it, that’s all. That’s why she ended up not including Morgan or Katie.

It was nobody’s fault. Looking back, at the end of the summer, we suppose it’s possible that that’s where some of the drama started.

Call Boda Borg yourself, if you don’t believe us about the price.

36.

Alexa

Once Katie was asleep Alexa sat cross-legged on the couch, deep into Google.

She tried “Giordano” and “crime.” “Giordano” and “jail.” “Giordano” and “New Jersey” and “crime” and “jail.”

Bingo.

Google returned approximately one million articles on the arrest of a man named Bobby Giordano and three other men for the murder of a teenage girl named Madison Miller in New Jersey. The first article Alexa clicked on said that the men were rumored to be a little-known part of the New Jersey Cambellini crime family—an offshoot, as they were described. A smaller branch. They made it sound almost friendly, like the smaller, suburban banks that went with a larger city bank.

Madison Miller’s body had been found in a shallow grave in a wooded area on the outskirts of a city park by a dog walker seventeen days after she had gone missing from a local Target. She had been strangled. The four men who were tried for her murder admitted in court that Madison Miller had seen something in one of their trucks that she shouldn’t have seen.

Alexa felt like she was going to throw up, especially when she saw the photo of Madison Miller, in which she looked perky and nice, like somebody Alexa might like to be friends with, or anyway, like someone who might want to be friends with Alexa.

She kept reading. She continued googling. The trial was all over the Jersey news. Google, google, google. Her fingers flew over the phone screen.