“Well, if you didn’t have some serious brain damage, you wouldn’t ask me that!” Zoe sounded furious, but even so she suddenly pressed in and hugged him, nestling her face against his chest. Her body felt almost feverish compared to Luce’s sleek chill. “If you’re going to keep asking me stupid questions, we should really go somewhere else. I don’t want Steve and Ryan to hear this . . .”

Dorian considered this. His brain was humming with disbelief at how horrible life could be, with vague boiling anger at whoever had hurt her and at the relentless emptiness of the world where he somehow kept on living. But for all Zoe’s aggressive tone, he thought, she obviously wanted to talk in privacy. “Okay.”

She caught his hand and towed him toward the little back foyer then up the stairs. It was a small house with a bedroom at each end of a narrow hallway: the one Ryan shared with his little brother to the right, their parents’ room on the left. Zoe headed left and Dorian followed, feeling a little awkward now. She shut the door behind them and Dorian stared around the wood-paneled room. It was crowded with oversized furniture and knickknacks. He stood to one side as Zoe unlaced her paint-spattered boots, tossing them across the floor, and then scooted to the center of the big double bed. After a moment he sat down, trying to strike the right balance: far enough back that she wouldn’t think he was hitting on her, close enough that it wouldn’t seem cold. The bedspread under them was avocado green with sprouting tufts of yarn. Zoe was looking down, her freshly pink-dyed hair dragging in front of her eyes. She was twisting the tufts a little nervously. “So. What other fucked-up things do you want to ask me?”

There was one huge question pressing up in Dorian, but he didn’t know how to ask it without sounding insane. If Zoe hadn’t burned herself, if it had been someone else, then why was she still sitting there with human legs folded under her? Why hadn’t she let go of her human life and flowed away into the sea with the other broken girls, with Luce and Dana and Nausicaa? Zoe watched him for a minute.

“I bet you want to ask who did it? My stepdad. He’s gone now, thank Gawd, but my mom keeps taking him back. They’ve split up like a million times already.” Her tone was sassy and hard, but Dorian could hear the slight wavering hidden inside it. She was back to tugging at the bedspread, staring down at it as if nothing could be more fascinating.