I don’t make eye contact with anyone. I remain standing and blow gray smoke up at the ceiling, my mind lulling and eyelids slowly closing. I’m almost always surrounded by people—friends and acquaintances from Dalton Academy—and even when I stand in a room with them, even when I’m physically here, I always mentally check out for a few seconds.

More if I can.

I always want to be alone, but then when I’m alone, I want to be with people. It’s a fucking curse.

Whoever built my mind needs to redo the wires and find better balance because I’m leaning all over the place. I’m tilted and sideways and so fucked up—this isn’t even half of it.

The weed is making you a paranoid shit.

I suck the joint one last time before passing it to Rachel, who hesitates before putting it between her lips. She takes one short drag and then coughs into her fist.

Nathan and two other guys give her a hard time. I don’t come to her defense—since she’s going to be in a sorority anyway. It’s not like she’s going to need to know how to smoke a joint.

“Your deal, Abbey,” Nathan tells me, stretching over the table to pass me the deck of cards. I begin to shuffle.

A girl clears her throat loudly, sort of adjacent to me. “Hi, um…” She taps Rachel’s shoulder. I’m not surprised. Rachel looks the most approachable.

Most of the guys are smoking and drinking, one even wears a gargoyle mask from a Halloween store, more stacked behind him on a leather chair. The other girls here have low-cut tank tops and nose piercings.

Rachel is the only one that looks like someone you’d take home to your parents. Though I’ve brought them all over to my house before. I don’t discriminate.

I barely make out the girl’s features among the smoke. All I can tell for certain: she’s wearing overalls, like the saggy kind you’d put on to paint a house.

I frown. She can’t live around here.

“Hi?” Rachel says uncertainly.

Not surprisingly, Nathan takes over, standing from his chair. “How’d you get in here?” He makes it seem like his party is invitation-only, when in fact most of Dalton Academy has been traipsing in and out all night.

“I…uh, the front door was open?”

“I mean the neighborhood. It’s gated,” he says.

The girl takes a step back, more towards me, but I stay still, as uncertain as her, as uncertain as everyone else. My eyelids are heavy, and it takes more control not to sink into my seat and just finish dealing slowly.

“The gate was open…someone was coming in, and I followed them through,” she explains. “I’m just trying to find someone. I know he lives in this neighborhood, and I thought you’d be able to point out his house—”

Nathan snorts, and two of my other friends start snickering. “Let me guess—you want to see Loren Hale.”

“Yeah,” she says softly.