Most years, I went to the party with Sophie and Lex from school. Moose Junction was so small that the three of us had to ride the bus for forty-five minutes every morning to get to Waukegan County Middle and those forty-five minutes got pretty long if you didn’t like who you were with. Thankfully, we did.

“Abby,” Sophie said suddenly, as we stood outside Coontail’s with our newly purchased bottled waters, “is that—um, is that Blair?”

After what had happened in the spring with her Joffrey audition, Blair had gone from Golden Girl to Ghost. She spent most of her time in her bedroom or at the ballet studio in Milwaukee. And following the prom fiasco, Mom had taken Blair’s car away and was driving her herself. It was a two-hour commute; I barely saw either of them.

I had asked Blair that morning if she wanted to just skip the Memorial Day party all together.

“We could do the paddleboards?” I asked her, standing in her doorway. “Or just hang out on the dock . . .”

“Maybe,” she said. She was digging around in a bag of pointe shoes, trying to find a pair that wasn’t completely destroyed. She could go through a pair of them in a week, easy. My tank top seemed too cheerful and summery in her room; she was dressed in a thick gray Camp McCourt sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. She even had fuzzy gray socks on, covering her ripped-up feet.

Mom popped her head in. “You girls should go to the party. It will be fun,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. I think she just wanted something to stay the same: after a year where it seemed as if all our plans and routines and order had flown out the window, this one thing, this one day, could stay the same as it always was. I didn’t blame her. But I also didn’t blame Blair, who was going to be the center of attention. She was always the center of attention, but it used to be because she was so talented. Now it was because everyone had heard about Joffrey and was doing that awkward don’t-ask-about-it shuffle around her.

I shrugged. “It was just an idea. If you want to go to the party, go to the party.”

Blair sighed, grabbing some jet glue and dabbing it on a slip of fabric that had been worn off the toe. “Yeah, I think I’ll go to Main Street. Whatever. I don’t even know where my swimsuit is.”

That’s because you refuse to wear anything that shows your skin, I wanted to scream. We all stood there awkwardly for a beat before Mom went back to the laundry and I pulled out my phone to text Sophie.

So there we were: at the party. All Blair’s shininess was gone. She was hollow, like an emptied-out tree in the dead of winter. She and I had the same brown hair—Jade got Mom’s blond genes—and while hers used to look thick and beautiful in a French twist with a spotlight on it, it was now so thin that a million bobby pins couldn’t hold it in place. She had kept her sweatshirt on, too, looking completely out of place at a beginning-of-summer party. Our family was pretty pale by nature, and it was spring in Wisconsin, but the skin on her face was nearly see-through. Ghost Girl. Like I said. I felt as if she could take a single step and crack into a thousand pieces, turning into Blair dust and floating around the street.