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Lola had a barbecue in her backyard the weekend after school was out. It was an end-of-year party, an event that I didn’t have the wherewithal to refuse, especially since her overtures had increased in frequency and urgency as I’d begun to drift. She called several times a week. Did I want to go get some frozen yogurt? Did I want to shop for purses with her? I always told her no, though even as I tried to dodge her calls, I found something admirable about her dogged persistence in the face of constant rejection.

“You’re coming on Saturday?” she’d said every day during the final week of school, as if by sheer stubbornness she could bend my will. And it felt, in the end, like the least I could do.

Bayard and I went together and shared one of the green plastic Adirondack chairs, him in the seat, me perched uncomfortably on one of the wide arms. Paper plates of hot dogs and chips sat balanced on our laps. I watched the scene from a distance. Lola’s dad manned the grill, her mother brought out trays of bright blue virgin cocktails, the flag team huddled around a picnic table, the JV quarterback, a wiry guy named Lucas something, stood beside one of the house’s downspouts and looked bored. There weren’t very many people and no graduated seniors since it was daytime, without alcohol and with parents. Lola bounded nervously around, scanning the sparse crowd and whispering furious-looking orders to her parents, who then did needless things like bring out more chips or drag the kitchen garbage can onto the patio. “You can throw out your stuff here,” Lola announced, waving her arms officiously.

“Can we go yet?” I’d whispered to Bayard minutes after we’d arrived, initially a joke, though I kept repeating it at regular intervals. He kept shushing me.

Lola circled most closely around Lucas the quarterback, touching his arm a lot. She was telling him a story, a loud one about a really funny commercial she’d seen on TV with a dog driving a sports car. “It was a
dalmatian,”
she said, the apparent punch line, and Lucas flashed a thin smile. When he dipped inside—an escape to the bathroom?—she came our way.

“You guys having fun?” she asked loudly. Lola had been asking this or a variation on this every twenty minutes or so. Tension belied her usual cheerfulness. She bit the corner of her lip and checked her watch with a ticlike frequency. It was four. The party was supposed to have started at two-thirty.

“Fun, fun,” Bayard said in typical Bayard fashion, the line between sincere and sarcastic indiscernible. “It’s good,” I said, a pronoun intentionally without a referent. Having steeled myself for a flurry of unwanted attentions and sympathies, I had expected the party to be different. But aside from Mrs. Pepper having asked about my parents as I came in and one of the flag girls squeezing my hand too hard and asking a meaningful “How are you doing?” there had been nothing. People ate their potato salad with quiet determination. Flag girls stuck their blue tongues out at each other. This tepid barbeque brought that same feeling of erasure.

I had no idea what I was doing here. How had I ended up as someone who came to Lola Pepper’s end-of-year party with the French exchange student? Narration ran continually through my head, as if I were trying to convince myself that what was happening was in fact happening:
Here we are eating our hot dogs and pickles. Here we are listening to a story about the camp for kids with cancer where Lola will soon be a counselor.

“So what have you two been up to?” Lola said, attempting to sound breezy, though she eyed me and Bayard in much the same way she’d come to in recent weeks, with a probing, what-exactly-is-going-on-here? look.

“Nothing much,” Bayard said.
Nuzzin match.

“Flag won’t be the same without you next year,” Lola said, pressing a palm against his shoulder.

“No, it will not,” he said, not one for false modesty.

“When will you go back to France?” she said.

He explained how his parents were vacationing at the beach through July. Bayard did not like the beach. Too much sun, too many people. He would stay here till August, then return to Chateau -renaud when his parents were home.

“You’ll like it?” she said, glancing at the sliding door for signs of Lucas.

“Will I like Chateaurenaud?” he said.

Lola looked at him like he was being silly. She checked her watch. “What?”

“Will I like what?” Bayard said.

“What?” she said again, her brow knitting with confusion, her eyes clouding for a second. Something dark passed over her face. A flush of red deepened her cheeks. She looked suddenly angry—about this failed party? I wondered. About the shifting configuration of the three of us? It was one of the few times I wondered if I might have underestimated Lola Pepper. But as quickly as it appeared, it disappeared, replaced by her toothy smile and her fervent voice. “I’m so glad you came,” she said, quavering with sentiment.

“Of course,” I said, because I felt for her. She was made up of only two things, good intentions and need. If I had been a sweeter and more forgiving girl, less prone to judgment and scorn, I would have stayed friends with her. Even as I sat in her backyard, desperate for this to be the last time, already envisioning how the summer would grow long between us, her phone calls finally petering out without my even noticing, I looked at her speckled skin and bright eyes and almost convinced myself that maybe I was wrong, maybe we’d forge on together. “Thanks for inviting us,” I said.

She gave me a quick, unexpected hug, squashing my plate between us. “Careful,” I said, meaning the ketchup and her dress, though it came out more stern and she let go quickly and I didn’t explain.

“I thought there’d be more people,” she said, her shoulders drooping just a bit. When Lucas came back out, she did not see him. I watched as he grabbed his windbreaker from a patio chair and disappeared
quickly back into the house. Bayard watched too, and neither of us told her that he’d gone.

•  •  •

I spent the summer at the McAllisters’, escaping my house most mornings before my mother was awake. The nightmares had begun in earnest by then—ones that would continue for years—of Danny, broken-faced and gurgling bloody words, or Elvin Tate slithering beneath my blankets into my bed, or my mouth filled with loamy earth. So my sleeplessness, if possible, was even more pitched and intense than usual. Mornings, then, became the time to coax myself back into normalcy, to talk myself into the coming day.

Usually I arrived well before Bayard was out of bed, when Mr. and Mrs. McAllister were still scurrying around getting ready for work, Fick and Fack bleary-eyed before day camp. I helped tie Fick’s shoes. I offered to clean the dishes. I asked if they had any errands needing done. Mrs. McAllister always told me not to be silly. She told me to sit and offered cooling scraps of bacon. Sometimes she kissed me on the top of my head before she left, just the same way she did to Fick and Fack. It often made me want to cry.

After everyone was gone, I fingered ceramic ducks and Russian nesting dolls. I scanned up and back, up and back through the several hundred TV stations. I flipped randomly through the paper, reading headlines aloud. “Sales tax will go up a quarter cent in September,” I announced to no one. “Fourteen people died in Gaza.” I spun the chore chart. I slammed kitchen cabinets and turned up the volume of the TV to wake Bayard.

“What do you want to do?” I would say as soon as he appeared. He usually just rubbed his eyes and blinked at me, his hair nappy on
his head. It took Bayard a long time to fully wake, to shower, to start his day with me, when we would walk around the neighborhood or flip through TV channels or just sit. Bayard was often trying to convince me to just sit. I hated the just sitting. “Come on,” I was always telling him.

When Fick and Fack returned each afternoon from day camp, I would watch the princess cartoons and Power Rangers shows with them for a little while before trying to bribe them into going outside. I would help them make a lemonade stand, I said. I would find them a big anthill. I liked the way they ran themselves ragged in the yard. I liked their blur of motion, their “What next? What next?,” their go and go and go.

“I’ll draw you a hopscotch course,” I said. “I’ll turn on the hose.” The hose was one of their favorites, me spreading my thumb over the spout, creating a wide, feathery arc for them to leap in and out of. They’d scream beneath the freezing water, their hair plastered to their heads, the outlines of their ribs visible along their scrawny chests. Sometimes they grabbed me with their wet hands and I worried they could feel something red-hot in return, some unstable electricity beneath my skin, but they never gave any indication, never stopped their jumping around and yelping.

I showed them how to whistle through fat blades of grass, how to weave crowns of dandelions. I told them rambling stories of Miggleman, the imaginary man Danny had made up when we were little. Miggleman lived under beds of sleeping kids and came out at night to eat cookies and play with dogs.

“Don’t scare them,” Bayard called to me from the front porch.
Dun skeer zem.

“Miggleman isn’t scary,” I said, feeling stupid for the defen-siveness in my voice. Danny used to whisper to me about Miggle-man when our parents thought we were both asleep, the window of
time after we were put to bed when they were socked away in some downstairs room. Danny would sneak over from his room and crouch at the end of my bed. In the dark, I could see only his glinting teeth or the flash of fingernail as he moved his hand excitedly through the air, whispering wildly. I loved Miggleman stories, the way it seemed like the entire upstairs was ours and we could stay like that all night.

I taught Fick and Fack an outdoor version of the bridge game, lining up deck chairs and Big Wheels and an emptied kiddie pool in a long trail across the front lawn. They threw themselves into the game with the same abandon they threw themselves into everything. Fack stomped across his belongings and made a big display of balancing on one foot on the seat of his Big Wheels while it wobbled beneath him. Fick dragged over a plastic home plate and a bevy of beach pails. It was only occasionally that I had to walk away to sit briefly in the shade of their maple tree, ignoring the way the kids called my name, reminding myself to breathe and breathe and breathe.

We were in the middle of the latest round, Bayard lying prone in his usual spot on the porch, Fick crying to Fack about him having dragged out her Barbie nail salon, a prized possession she didn’t want to use for the game, when a woman rode by on her bike, wearing an incongruous outfit of a ripped flannel shirt and old gym shorts. She hauled a small, rusty, two-wheeled trailer of empty beer bottles and pop cans behind her. Sweat dripped down her face; I could smell the BO from where I stood. A drizzle of rancid, hoppy liquid leaked from her trailer, that stink potent in the heat too.

I was on my way over to the kids about to intervene in their fight when the woman glanced at the four of us, eyes beady in her round head. Though her stringy hair was gray rather than bluish black, the sight of her made my legs quiver.

It was Melissa Anne. I was sure of it.

My throat grew both gluey and dry. “Yaa,” I said, something be-tween
You?
and
Yo!

Fack held a thumb and finger over his nose. “ Pee-yew,” he said from atop his tom-tom.

Melissa Anne was concentrating hard on propelling herself forward, her whole body leaning into each pedal, her ass high off the seat, but she paused to look toward Fack, an unreadable expression on her face. Was that a smile? A wince? Her eyes were doing the same thing they’d done months before on my porch, skittering around in their sockets. Bayard called out some admonishment. I wasn’t sure to whom. Fack? Melissa Anne? My body was frozen, caught between the impulse to flee and the impulse to scream her name.

“What you got?” Fick yelled to her. This, the way they were with strangers, running to ones walking big dogs or riding past on skateboards. Everyone, a benign fascination.

Melissa Anne’s face broke open even wider. She was, it appeared, baring her teeth. She’d stopped pedaling now, and the bike was coasting, the wheels of the trailer letting out a low squeal. It seemed like she could leap right off, could bound easily onto the McAllisters’ lawn and toward these children.

Something unraveled in me as I watched the scene. The actual physical sensation of unloosing was so strong I could have sworn that my bladder had opened, that piss ran down my leg and puddled on the grass. Fack stepped down from his drum and walked toward the sidewalk. Before any thought, there was movement: me running toward him, yelling, “Get!” and flapping my hands in the air. “Get!” I kept yelling, so loud that both kids whipped their heads around, staring at me openmouthed. Melissa Anne, as if noticing me there for the first time, stared too, or as close as she could come: her eyes
skipped across my face and flitted to something behind me. I waited for whatever terrible thing was sure to follow, whatever bile might spew from her mouth.

But quick as that she sat back in her seat, focused again on the sidewalk in front of her, and resumed her pedaling. She regained momentum and swiftly moved several feet past us, beyond the next house and the next.

It was over in a matter of seconds. I watched as she neared the end of the block, thinking she would turn and look at me again, thinking she would come back. But she didn’t. She rounded the cor-ner without even a glance, leaving only the drizzly, splattered trail in her wake. The street returned to its normal noises—far-off cars, a radio in someone else’s backyard—and I just stood there, an ache in my belly like I’d just been punched. If it was a relief for her to be disappeared again, the lack of recognition was unexpectedly crushing. It made me feel invisible. Like nothing.

The kids had already started back to their game. I heard Fick saying something about her Barbie nail salon, and I was galled at the speed of their reset. In an instant I went after both of them, grabbing their wrists, lassoing them to me, shouting about strangers, about danger, about
you never know.
Fick let out a little yelp. Bayard called my name. I shouted about
you can’t just la-dee-dah around
and
you need to stay on the lawn, do you understand what I’m telling you because I’m serious.
Soon Bayard was on me, pulling at my arms, telling me to let go. I could not remember Bayard ever touching me before. The kids’ faces were red and quivery, and they looked far more scared of me than they’d just been of Melissa Anne.