Lacy was quiet, watching the stars cross the ceiling. “A senior girl showed me,” she said. “We were in her car with the sun coming in, everything beautiful, and she let me try hers. I watched the smoke in the sunlight, feeling good and clean with that cotton candy taste in my mouth. And suddenly, there were no programmed memories anymore, no false attachments, just this fuzzy cloud of electromagnetic energy rushing toward me, turning even my thoughts into pure crystal code. Then my toes curled and my jaw got so tight I had to pry my lips open just to laugh.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun,” Joey said. “You’re ruining your card.”

“You can get two or three scrapes and they’re still functional. Plus, I don’t have to use mine. The popular girls are always getting upgrades. They throw theirs in the bathroom trash or sell them.” Lacy had forgotten to pull the blinds closed, and the moonlight came in through the tree branches, casting shadows of leaves across her face.

“I don’t like it,” Joey said.

“Everything’s fine,” Lacy told him. “Just don’t tell Mom or Dad.”

So, when Joey saw Lacy’s bloodshot eyes at dinner, he didn’t tell their parents. And when he found her card, scraped raw and useless in the dresser drawer, he kept her secret. The houses on their block filled with ghosts and pumpkins, coffins and gravestones, and his mother took him to Halloween City, where he wanted a werewolf mask with a hairy snout and furry clawed hands. The costume, his mother told him, was too expensive. Look, she said, holding up a plastic bodysuit that was on sale, he could be Buzz Lightyear.

The Lightyear costume hung in his closet when she picked him up and drove them to his sister’s school instead of home. Lacy wasn’t in the principal’s office when they arrived, but his father was, and the principal ushered Joey’s parents into her office.

“You stay out there for a bit,” Ms. Jones said to Joey. “I’ll call you in a minute.”