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  Dad tunes the car radio to NPR as we leave Savannah behind. In my head, I whisper little goodbyes to all the old buildings in and around Chatham County. The low-hanging Spanish moss, obscuring every doorway. Those lush, humid, swampy greens, and the battered white exteriors of old houses. This really has been a beautiful place to study art. I feel the bile begin to rise up in my throat again. I'm sad to be leaving, yes, but more than that—I'm angry. One part of me feels like a failure for letting one night with one cretin ruin this amazing place for me. But another part, the part that's turning in on itself, is happy to see all this Southern Gothic shit go, hopefully along with the memories it brings. I wonder if I'll ever come back here again.

  My Dad clears his throat beside me—an ancient sign, in our language, that he's ready to listen if I'm willing to talk. But I don't take the bait.

  “So I spoke to Mrs. Woyzeck in the admissions department,” Dad says, after we've cleared city limits. “And I think we're a go! You can start as a second-year in August, provided you take a couple make-up cores this semester. English and such. How does that sound?”

  Super, I don't say. More English and Science. Exactly what I was trying to avoid with the whole “art school” thing. Instead, I reach across the seat and pat my Dad lightly on the shoulder. We aren’t a particularly physical family—we don't really hug or kiss on the cheek or anything like that—but I can recognize that it must have been a small pain for him to bug his former colleagues at SDU into admitting his deadbeat daughter on a last-minute transfer. Not that I haven't done well in Savannah, but it's a tall order to make credits like “Textiles” and “Eighteenth Century Brush Technique” transfer to a big state school.

  “What do you think you’re gonna major in?”

  “I don't know, Dad.”

  “Not...art?”

  “I dunno. Maybe it's time for a change.” I lean my head against the window, directing my gaze towards my phone. Zooey's already pinged me with a dozen sad-faced SnapChats and texts. I hope I'm not making the biggest mistake of my life.

  “It's funny you should have mentioned those Kelly boys,” my Dad says, after another mile or so has passed us by. In spite of the rain cloud I'm under, I feel myself perking up. “They're both at SDU, you know. And I read something in the paper the other day about the littler one—”

  “They're twins, Dad!”

  “The physically littler one. Don't be a wiseass.”

  “Brendan?”

  “The one who'd always eat our fruit roll-ups, and blame it on his brother. Real quick with a dirty joke. That's Brendan?”

  I smile.

  There was definitely no one in Savannah quite like the Kellys—and maybe that's why their memories have been surfacing so much. I lost touch with my two middle-school best friends when the pressures of prom and Homecoming took over, but if I'm being honest, I never stopped keeping an eye on the twins. The treehouse fort we all built behind the creek in my backyard might have toppled over time, but there remains something about those two. Maybe some people just stick with you, in spite of reason and time. Some people stick, and direct traffic in your autobiography, and won't be shaken away no matter how many years pass by.

  “He went a little off the rails in high-school, right? Didn't that Brendan kid—he pulled a quick stint in Juvie, right?”

  “He was arrested but never charged. Resisting arrest and disturbing the peace.” God, I remember that night. Too funny.

  “Sounds like a winner. Well, anyways. Mrs. Woyzeck says he's calmed down, some. He came to mind because his rock n' roll band has been getting on the radio a little. When we get a bit closer in, I'll see if we can pick them up.”

  “Local radio?”

  “California. So, I guess?” Dad flashes me a quick smile, and it feels as quick and forbidden as a burp. “Not really my cup of tea, but I thought you'd be interested to know that there are still some arty types in our neck of the woods.”

  Well, good for Brendan Kelly. What little I knew of his “band” could be summarized in few words: basement, weed, free-form-jazz-odyssey. There was a short time toward the beginning of high school when I still hung out with the Kellys; Melora hadn't fully sunk her claws into Chase yet, and Brendan hadn't fallen in with his whole Lords of Dogtown crew. I remember plenty of eighth-grade evenings spent baked in the smelly enclave that was the “littler” Kelly brother's basement studio, passing around a bowl and listening to Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead on vinyl. If memory served, Brendan's band wasn't any good, but the way his honey-blonde hair fell into his eyes while he played the bass guitar had been useful motivation for a kinda-sorta-groupie.

  When I catch his eye in the rearview mirror, Dad is smiling at me again.

  “And you're sure you never went out with one of those two?”

  “Da-ad!”

  “Two boys were knocking around the house day and night for years, and not one of ‘em ever once took you to a dance?”

  “Dad, men and women can be just friends sometimes. Like you and Mrs. Woyzeck.” Frank raises his eyebrows like he's about to burst my bubble, but mercifully falls silent again.

  “Whatever you say, Avery,” he says, not bothering to conceal his smile now. “Whatever you say.” I close my eyes. I let Savannah drift away, and live for a while in my dreams.

  Chapter Two

  During the last three weeks I've spent in my childhood home, lurking in one of two rooms and watching a shit-ton of reality TV, Dad and I didn't bother to take my bags out of the trunk—so it's easy to unpack when I get to my new dorm. What's less easy to unpack is the student body of SDU: unlike in Savannah, where three-plus piercings and a neon-dye job was the norm, this California state school is a sea of jocks, Valley Girls, and casual hippies.

  “Don't be so judgmental,” my Dad murmurs at me, somewhat clairvoyantly. He's got a spring in his step, which makes one of us. Security guards keep doffing their caps to him, like he's a war buddy. Who knew the secret campus security alliance ran so deep?

  A gangly hippie kid drifts by in a baja. He takes one look at my Dad's beat-up old Gremlin and nods his approval.

  Avery, I don't think we're in the South anymore.

  “Fuck me—are you the new girl?” The voice behind this remark is shrill and nasal, kind of like what’s-her-face on Will & Grace. The tiny little person attached to the sound is all of five foot two, and her dark brown hair is pulled back into a taut...ponytail.

  “Oh-my-god, I'm Tara Rubenstein. You're new here?” Tara Rubenstein pushes an invisible strand of hair behind her ear. She appears the epitome of perky: her face is spotted with light brown freckles, her teeth are glittery white with veneers. She's wearing yoga pants. Zooey and I used to have an awful habit of making fun of girls in yoga pants, back in Savannah. We called it “Camel Toe Watch.”

  My Dad taps at the back of my knee with the toe of his boot. I concede: the old man has a point. I need to make friends at my new school. I have to embrace the change I orchestrated in the first place.

  “Hey, Tara,” I grumble. “Yeah. I'm headed up to the third floor.”

  “302?”

  “Yeah, 302.”

  “I know everything about the third floor,” Tara puffs out her meager chest. “Because I'm fucking the RA.” I laugh, surprised, but my new roommate just flashes her veneers. I can practically feel my Dad's whole body frowning, behind us. He's not a fan of swearing, or, I imagine, sexually empowered twenty year old girls. “You ever need any of those extra condoms they leave out in bowls everywhere, or special discount packages to, like, the roller rink? You talk to me.”

  I laugh easily, waiting for Tara to join me in a roommate-bonding kinda way—but she just smiles tightly again, dropping some of the perky facade in the process. It's actually a little...maniacal. I can't tell if she's kidding.

  “I like your hair,” Tara says quickly. “You guys need help moving stuff? I'm little, but I'm strong.”

  Without waiting for a response, my new roomie heads to the Gr
emlin's trunk and hoists my paint-box out, resting it high on her shoulder.

  “Wait—actually, you can leave that one,” I mutter. Tara cocks her head at me, like a bird—and for a second, I see her as she must see me: pale, thin, tall-when-not-slouching. My platinum-dyed hair is growing in at the roots, which feels way too Courtney Love for this town. My shorts are torn, my legs are goosey, and the ample breasts I've been trying to hide my whole life in baggy shirts are tamped down today under a ratty old black t-shirt with a print of Escher's never-ending staircase. I bet I look anti-social. For the first time since high school graduation, I'm aware of being...the weird girl.

  “But you look like an artist,” Tara pronounces—and it doesn't actually sound like a critique, the way she says it. Which is not what I expected. “C'mon. There's plenty of space. I'll move some of my shit around, it's no big deal.” Dismissing the issue as if it's settled, she dives back into the truck and slings one of my duffel bags over her other tanned shoulder. Without waiting for us to protest, she trots towards my new home. I follow, like a puppy.

  Tara Rubenstein continues to surprise me. The second my Dad kisses me wetly on the cheek and turns the Gremlin back in the direction of my childhood home, my bizarre new roommate pulls an American Spirit from a silver case on her desk. She asks me with a look if I want one.

  “I didn't think anyone in San Diego smoked anymore,” I say, taking a cig gratefully. We smoked all the time in Savannah. It was just something the art kids were expected to do. Plus, smoking was a nice, built-in reason to take breaks during long sessions at the studio. In lieu of jamming a paint-brush through a canvas in a fit frustration, one could just take the sane way out and inhale some nicotine for a few minutes.

  Tara arches a perfectly-tweezed eyebrow at me. “Thought you left all the hipsters behind at your old school, huh?”

  “I dunno. It seems a little white-bread here. I guess I just expected...” I have no way to finish this sentence. Instead, I shrug at Tara, and direct a stream of smoke out of our window, in the direction of the quad.

  The new dorm is more spacious than my digs in Savannah, though there's no private bathroom. Tara's clutter is draped over every surface on her side of our wide suite, but her mess is precise—exactly half of the area around the mini-fridge is covered with empty Miller Lites, just as exactly half the floor is covered with the kinds of bras I always assumed only existed for magazines—red, lacy, satiny things. I fold my arms over my chest.

  “There are actually a lot of cool people,” Tara says, her expression toggling between a grin and something more tense. It's like her programming won't accommodate a frown. “There's a decent music scene. A lot of the jocks are nice. And the best head of my life was a business school kid. Freshman. Last week.”

  “I thought you were with the RA?”

  “And I thought you were from some fancy-ass cosmopolis?” Again, I wait for Tara to laugh with me, but she just smiles her weirdly forced smile again. “Here, art kid. Catch.” I find myself ducking as a big rectangle flies right past my face, just about slicing my cheek. When I swivel and see what it is Tara's thrown at me, I laugh again. It's a big heavy hardback, titled The Enlightened Orgasm.

  “Okay. We're gonna need to get started now to be at all timely for Halloween-in-July. You can unpack later.” Tara stubs out her smoke and turns her focus to the sliding-door closet separating our twin beds. She immediately begins to yank things off hangers with abandon—ridiculous, glittery, patterned things that call to mind the dressing room of a Burlesque show. Like, a Burlesque show in 1985.

  “Are you in the theatre department or something? Where'd you get all this?”

  “Fashion merchandising. And I'm good at yard sales. Here.” Tara's ponytail bobs back and forth as she marches across our room toward me, a big white garment in tow. I straighten as she holds the dress up to my frame, her muscular little arm extending high to adjust for our height difference. I marvel, again, at her shiny, efficient head. She's like a sassy robot.

  “This should fit. So that just leaves your hair.”

  “I'm sorry, what? And also, where? Also—why?”

  “Try to keep up, Savannah. The guys on Frat Row throw a big party for all the summer-school scumbags, and it's tonight. You want to land at SDU with a splash? Come out with us tonight, and look good.”

  “Dress-up isn't really my bag.”

  “Don't be coy. You have a killer figure and a pretty face. You're going to do just fine here.” Tara begins to buzz around the room, like a fly. I give up on trying to predict her next move, and instead hug the white dress she's given me to my body and take a look at myself in the full-length closet mirror. I can't help but blush a little. Killer figure and pretty face? No one's ever said that to me before.

  Tara reappears at my elbow, brandishing two cardboard boxes—each adorned with smiling women. At once, I put the pieces together.

  “We'll just touch up your roots, and then you'll be the perfect Marilyn Monroe.”

  If Zooey could see me now.

  But wait, of course she can! I pull my phone from its nest in my cleavage (“It's what Marilyn would have done,” Tara claims) and take a pouty-face selfie. My lips are crimson red, my hair is freshly bleached, dyed, blow-dried and rolled, and the rest of me is powdered as it's never been powdered before. Tara kept me hostage in the bathroom for nearly an hour as she debated where to place Marilyn's trademark mole on my face. Together, we'd settled on the right side.

  “I could still be Madonna. That feels a bit more me, to be honest.” Tara'd just spent twenty minutes squeezing herself into a pleather catsuit, and was painting a slick line across each eyelid. “Don't be ridiculous,” my new roommate told me. “Halloween is about being someone that's like, the opposite of you.” I was so tickled by the incidental compliment—did Tara really think I wasn't the opposite of Madonna?—that I forgot to question her choice in going as Catwoman. So far, Tara had struck me as nothing so much as a sleek, savvy, sexual super-person. By her own logic, a crime-fighting vigilante didn't seem so far off.

  Tara is suddenly at my side again, angling for more space in the full-length. She looks at me in my white, halter dress (suitable for subway grates) and smiles at her handiwork. For the first time all day, the grin seems genuine.

  “Let's go raise some hell, Savannah,” she says, turning so fast her cape snaps on my naked arms. “We're a couple of bad bitches.” I laugh. The door of our dorm room closes with a final, frightening click behind us. Life at SDU, take one... I type across my selfie to Zo, as we stroll down the hallway. I imagine my best friend's face as she's confronted with my...froufy-ness. Hmm. I save the image, instead of sending it.

  As we walk up Frat Row I start to feel giddy and nervous. The day has passed in such a whirlwind that I keep forgetting it's my first spent on a new campus—something about SDU's proximity to my childhood home makes me feel like less of a stranger, even though I'm definitely fresh meat. The architecture of all the buildings—faux adobe brick—is the same employed throughout my neighborhood. In high school, we used to take trips to SDU to visit the big library. And when Dad worked here, I was always having to wander around the quad as I waited for his shift to start or end. The college students today seem just as large and intimidating to me as they had then, when I was actually a kid.

  Then again, I recognize faces. The kids who went to Carver Elementary, and then Blair Middle, Giuliani High—a good two thirds of these kids ended up at their state school. As I traipse through the night, self-conscious in my low-cut dress, it's like I'm flicking through an old yearbook: there's Sandy Dennys, the kid who, in sixth grade, got his jollies smacking his head against his desk until it bled. There's Shiloh Mueller, who brought in Creole food for International Day when we were eleven. And there's Gili VanHollen, the girl who threw up on Chase's shoes in the eighth grade during the MSA, and cried in his presence for years after the fact. And somewhere, hidden among the bougainvillea and textbooks and stoner kids and preppy kids, t
here's Chase Kelly in-the-flesh.

  Not that I think I'm going to run into him. Thirty thousand other people go to this school. What are the odds?

  I still don't know why he's plaguing me.

  We saw each other almost every single day, for nine years. Even after he made Varsity baseball our sophomore year (unheard of at the time), our lockers were only three doors down. We smiled at each other every single day. Always said 'good morning.' Sometimes stopped for small-talk.

  And at the beginning, of course, it was much more than that.

  The day after that fateful mile, I became running buddies with Chase. We made a mockery of gym class, and Mr. Seidman ate it up. He gave us passes on all the easy stuff the uncoordinated kids were left to do (Wall Ball, Tetherball, Medicine Ball...) and let us jog around the soccer field during class, instead. One day, Chase even convinced Mr. S. to let us spend a class practicing “bending it like Beckham.” That was a fun day.

  Though I can't remember what class Brendan was supposed to be in during that period—it wasn't gym—he started hanging around, too. Not as athletic but smarter than both of us, Brendan liked to clench his fist into a ball and play “Commentator” while Chase and I played one on one. The smaller Kelly would always embroider his running remarks with a bunch of stupid jokes and puns, often at the expense of his golden brother. When Chase and I would get tired, we'd slump together around the base of the old oak tree at the edge of the playground, one place where the teachers would always forget to look. It was there that I received much of my “musical education,” in the form of Brendan Kelly Original Mix CDS, made just for me. These had titles like, “Prog: An Odyssey” and, “Highway Driving, 101.” (Never mind that I wasn't then old enough to drive, by a long shot.) We took turns passing around a beat-up Walkman and offering our thoughts on Brendan's “cool new tunes of the week.” Often, Chase would get bored with this part of our day and leave Brendan and I to talk tunes while he shot hoops.