It turned out Luke wouldn’t have to choose. Ann was soon so exhausted that she herself urged them to go to Sun Valley. She went along, renting a condo nearby with Tad’s help. He’d rearranged his life exactly as he’d wanted it. They left the summer before Luke and I would have started high school. I felt completely alone.

That summer, without Luke and Blair, I was adrift. A fourteen-year-old’s idea of the worst-case scenario is pretty limited if she’s lucky, and this was mine. I moped around, and Penny and Emily let me tag along to Sanders Beach and the occasional house party or bonfire, where I shamelessly clung to them.

By that time, Penny’s life revolved around her two main interests: horses and boys. She volunteered three days a week at a local stables with an equine therapy program for children and adults with disabilities. The stables adored her so much, they let her ride the horses anytime she wanted to. Even as a teenager, Penny was a helper, someone whose life was about being there for others.

I visited Penny at the stables every now and then. I liked the horses: they were big and strong and graceful; I felt like they got me. One afternoon, my mom and I arrived early to pick Penny up. She was on the paddock with her favorite charge, Matthew, who suffered from severe cerebral palsy, and I watched as she chatted to him and he smiled sweetly back at her. I knew I’d never have the patience for what she was doing.

“You’re so good with him,” I said to her once she and Matthew had brushed out the pinto he’d been riding and returned her to her stall.

“Matthew’s one of my best buds.” Penny shrugged. I felt guilty that I didn’t understand. But I never questioned Penny’s goodness; it was so evident, ran so deep.

I got my first kiss at CDA High School during my freshman year, and it was a fiasco. As predicted, I’d started to feel differently about boys as adolescence took hold. There was one in particular who caught my eye, Matt Berman, a dreamboat and basketball star in my sister’s year. The crush wouldn’t have amounted to much if I hadn’t gone to a house party with Penny that fall. After summer was over and all of us were back in school, the standing invitation to hang out with Emily and Penny had been rescinded, so whenever I was invited to something, I jumped. Being surrounded by my peers—with whom I had nothing in common—at school all day was only making me lonelier. The party in question was at a basketball player’s house, meaning Matt would be there.