“I dunno. Somebody tagged me.” I’d gotten to the bottom of the grid and my daughter took her phone back. “Anyway.” She patted my hand and, noticing that I was lost in thought, left the kitchen. Sometimes, my sweet teenage daughter’s cool exterior could thaw. I heard her door close upstairs, and I was by myself again, looking at the flickering lights of the television. I swept the wheat bits from the table into my palm and dropped them back into the box.

My own phone was on the table. I flicked through contacts and pushed “call.”

The warm, dulcet tones of Cassidy’s voice mail did not flow out of the speaker like I expected. The phone rang only once before a shrill noise introduced a mechanical operator’s words: “The number you are trying to reach is no longer in service.” I hadn’t talked to her in a long while. Why hadn’t I tried to make contact after everything we’d been through? Sure, I’d been upset about the tour but we’d been friends too. Out of all the Gloss girls, I was the closest to Cassidy.

I tapped the edge of the phone on the counter, thinking. Why couldn’t I have put those feelings aside and helped her? Now I didn’t know what she’d been up to, how she’d felt, for a decade. The years yawned backward like a chasm.

3.

July 2000

Houston

Cassidy

I watched my friends walk across the stage five weeks ago. I sat with Joanna’s mother, Mrs. Sherman, who screamed when her daughter’s tassel was flicked to the opposite side of her cap. By the time the caps flew up into the air, my throat was raw from cheering and my heart ached that I had been left out of the celebration. I found my friends after the ceremony, Edie ripping off her black graduation gown to expose yet another black dress underneath it, and Joanna combing her fro back into place after removing her cap. One of our classmates, Elana, was having a party at her house in the Heights. Even though I knew Edie and I would’ve preferred eating ice cream at her house and watching Drew Barrymore movies until five in the morning, the four of us planned to go because Alex was dating Elana’s best friend, Brittany.

“You’ll be good, right?” Mrs. Sherman said to us. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Joanna rolled her eyes. “I’m premed. I’m gonna study to find out how to save people, not kill them.”

“I know, baby girl. I just have to be a mom sometimes.”

At Elana’s, there were bags of chips and bowls of queso, and anyone who had an older sibling found a way to bring alcohol, but the good beer was claimed immediately and the rest of us were left with the dregs. I held a plastic cup of Mad Dog 20/20 and sipped it cautiously as the people around me tried to dance to *NSYNC.

“How’s that?” Edie asked, pointing at my cup.

I shouted over the music. “It tastes like sweet death.”

“Gimme it.” She took a gulp from my cup and made a face. “God, why would anyone make banana liqueur? Why would they color it red? Hey, where’d Alex go?”

“Probably went to find Brittany,” I replied. Edie’s sour face deepened. “I’ll take my gross mashed banana drink back now, please.”

Alex pushed through a throng of people on the stairs and grabbed the cup from Edie’s hand, draining it immediately.

“Um, you okay?”

He stormed into the kitchen and came back with the rest of the Mad Dog bottle, drinking directly from the neck. Joanna trotted behind him with a bottled water. “Dude, that isn’t a beer,” she said, making a move as if to take it from him.

“No shit,” he said.

Joanna gave me a look—Alex didn’t really listen to her or Edie, but I could exert some influence over him. After he gulped a few more mouthfuls, I eased the bottle away and said, “Look, you can’t hog this delicious banana daiquiri. I’m gonna need some too.” I sipped it, shuddering at how bad it was.

“It was the last thing of liquor in there,” Alex said morosely. After a beat, he added by way of explanation, “Britt broke up with me.”

“Oh, honey,” Joanna said tenderly.

“Yeah.” A note of anger came through in his voice. “What’s worse, she had Elana do it for her. She couldn’t even break up with me to my face! We’re at the same party! How hard can it be?”

“Well, you can’t drink alone,” Edie said, and the three of us passed the bottle around until it was done. Then Alex saw Britt dancing inside so we moved to the porch, even though it was still ninety degrees out and my face misted with sweat immediately.

As I watched some of my former classmates kick cans in the yard and make out in dark corners, my thoughts turned inward, self-critically evaluating my life. As stupid and aimless as they seemed right now, they were all going to move on to the next phases of their lives, while I—well. It turns out that when you miss five months of school for an out-of-state, televised singing competition, there is no feasible way to catch up on all of your studies.

From being on 20 million television sets to not even finishing senior year on time. My future felt stalled. Something to discuss at therapy the following Tuesday, I supposed. My parents had me checking in with Dr. Brant every two weeks.

Edie, all four feet ten inches of her, felt the effects of the alcohol first. She hugged us fiercely. “I’m going to miss you guys.”

Joanna patted her back. “Aw, come on. We still have all summer.”

Alex spoke up. “I’ve got that poli-sci internship.” He loved all things political; Alex spoke of wanting to run for office one day: President Hernandez, he’d joke. “And Edie has her thing in Portland . . .”

“Well, I’ll be here serving pizzas until the very last day I can, and then I’m off to Michigan,” Joanna said. “But it’s not a very demanding job. I can still hang out in my off time.”

And I’ll be going to summer school, I’d thought to myself. My tongue felt blurry as I said, “You know what? I just want to say thanks for being there for me after that TV shit.”

“Oh, girl,” Joanna waved a hand dismissively. “You don’t have to go through that again. We know. We’re good.”

“Well, I know I checked out pretty hard during winter break. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own head . . .”

“Hey.” Edie put a tiny, sticky hand on my shoulder and rubbed hair out of my face. “It’s fine, okay?”

“This party sucks,” Alex said abruptly. “There’s no more alcohol and they don’t even have any cookies. Wanna go?”

Joanna had driven us back to her apartment. I’d puked in the parking lot and Alex laughed as he held my hair away from my chin and told me I couldn’t hold my liquor. I remember gazing up at him from the concrete where I crouched—his dark silhouette against the brighter night sky—and arguing that banana wine didn’t count as liquor. It was after midnight and the world seemed to have no depth at all: the sky was a milky blue slathered in a glaze of thin, stretched clouds.

Edie had gone off to her summer program; Joanna’s schedule was so erratic that I barely saw her; and Alex picked up a second job—he said it was to offset the future costs of his dorm expenses, but I figured he was trying to keep his mind off Britt—so he was too exhausted to hang out more than once a week. Summer was a blur of air-conditioning and ceiling fans, sitting in a boring classroom for hours on end, and shuttling my siblings around town.