"Um, hello. You did not mention that Henry would be home this weekend," Candace said, interrupting Olivia's sidewalk monologue about her pursuit of the perfect Homecoming dress. The search had begun over the summer. Olivia could picture it in her head, and after having heard her detailed description twice during our after-school trip to the mall, we could all picture it in vivid detail, too. The dream dress was the color of vanilla buttercream frosting, not too yellow to be summery, and not too white to be bride-like. Ecru, or eggshell, or any pale variation on white that would show off Olivia's glamorous tan, obtained by rowing each morning at summer camp in Canada, would do. Even my daily runs in Florida beneath the blazing sun hadn't rewarded me with a tan as dark as Olivia's.

Olivia was the last among us to turn sixteen, but none of us had our own wheels yet that September. Mischa shared a car with her older sister, who seemed to always have custody of it. Candace's divorced parents were denying her access to wheels until she picked up her grades when report cards were released at the end of the semester, one of the few things upon which they agreed. Taking the bus home from the mall was hardly desirable, but it was less nerdish than having a parent pick up all five of us in an SUV curbside outside Nordstrom. We were in high spirits that afternoon after having slurped down sugary lattes at the mall, dropping our parents' money on earrings and paperback novels just to have purchased something to carry back to Olivia's house. Leaving the mall empty-handed felt strange and wasteful. I had bought a pair of chandelier earrings I thought might be cool for Homecoming, if any boy were to ask me within the next week.

Olivia looked down the block toward her own house, where Candace's eyes had spotted Henry's blue pickup truck in the driveway. Her angelic button nose wrinkled, and she put one hand on her hip as if objecting to her older brother's presence within the three-story house. "Ugh. I didn't know he'd be here," Olivia replied.

"Who's Henry?'

Violet Simmons was new in town. Only a girl who had moved to Willow over the summer could be ignorant of Henry Richmond's identity.

"My brother," Olivia informed her with disgust.

"Her totally hot brother," Candace added. Candace was a brassy blond with a big chest and a loud mouth. Her last name was Cotton, which was abundant reason for every kid in class to crack up whenever a substitute teacher read roll call in Homeroom and announced her name as Cotton, Candy.  She wasn't as pretty as Olivia, but from a distance if you kind of squinted at her when the sun was shining in just the right way, you might believe it if she told you she was a runway model. During my two weeks as an inductee into Olivia's popular circle, I had been endlessly humored by Candace's gravel-voiced musings and observations. Candace suspected that Mr. Tyrrell, the biology teacher, was probably a good kisser. She had been suspended from school for three days at the tail end of our sophomore year, back when I was still the old version of McKenna, for getting caught by Coach Highland under the bleachers during gym class with Isaac Johnston. Candace said exactly what she thought and even though she was hilarious, I was a little terrified of her. It was likely that Candace thought about nothing but kissing boys, every second of every day.

"You are so gross, Candace." Olivia rolled her eyes.

But Candace wasn't alone in thinking Henry was hot. I'd had a crush on Henry Richmond since just about the second grade, way back when it was still the custom in our small town to invite every kid in your elementary school class to your birthday party. Henry was two years older than Olivia and had just started college at Northwestern. He was majoring in Sociology with the goal of getting into law school after undergrad. I only knew all of this because I had practically committed every single photograph and mention of him in my yearbook to memory. Last year, it was likely that Henry had never even noticed me any of the times our paths had crossed in the hallway at school, when he was a graduating senior, already accepted at Northwestern with a generous scholarship, and I was an unremarkable sophomore. It was just as likely that if he had noticed me, he never would have remembered me as a chubby-cheeked second grader sitting at his parents' dining room table, singing Happy Birthday in the dark to Olivia when she turned eight.

"I think it's sweet! He came home for your birthday," Mischa said. Mischa was the complete physical opposite of Candace. Mischa was petite and nimble, the school's star gymnast, with enormous brown eyes and perfectly straight, thick brown hair that hung down her back to her waist, heavy and glossy. She was sharp-tongued and chose her words carefully, but in our two weeks of fast friendship I had gotten the distinct feeling that there was always a storm of thought going on behind her eyes.

"He did not come home for my birthday," Olivia corrected Mischa. "He's probably home because of his stupid foot."

Henry had been on the school's tennis team, bringing Weeping Willow High School its only state title in tennis in over twenty years. He had played most of his senior year season on a stress fracture in his fifth metatarsal, and only after he won the championship in Madison did he go to the doctor and start hobbling around the high school in a soft cast. At graduation, he crossed the stage on crutches and Principal Nylander slapped him proudly on the back. I only knew this because I'd been at graduation, even as a lowly tenth grader, as part of the color guard team. I'd held my huge white flag throughout the entire commencement exercise in the hot June sun, watching Henry Richmond a little in awe of his height, his auburn hair, his twinkling green eyes.

I would be totally lying if I said I wasn't pretty excited about Henry's presence in the Richmond household the night of Olivia's slumber party. It had never occurred to me in a lifetime of having a paralyzing crush on Henry that he would ever return an interest in me. And yet as we approached the Richmonds' house, where we'd be setting up camp in Olivia's carpeted basement for the night, my heart actually began to flutter at the prospect of catching a glimpse of Henry. Of having a chance to peek into his bedroom.

As we marched across the Richmonds' front lawn, all carrying our shopping bags from our mall excursion in addition to our backpacks, the glass storm door of the house opened and Henry stepped out onto the Richmonds' front porch, followed by a good-looking, curly haired guy who I had never seen before.

"Well, look who's finally home! It's the birthday girl," Henry called out to us. The keys to his truck dangled from his index finger.

"Why are you back, nerd?" Olivia asked him, thwacking him with the backpack she pulled off of her shoulder. He deflected it expertly, accustomed to their lifetime together of play fights.

"I wouldn't have missed your little princess party for the world," Henry teased, looking us over. I felt color and heat rising in my cheeks under his gaze as he reviewed us, the collection of the prettiest sixteen-year-old girls Weeping Willow High School had to offer. Surely he knew Candace and Mischa from their years of friendship with Olivia. He was probably, at that very moment, realizing that one familiar face was missing from his sister's gaggle of giggling friends: Emily Morris, the strawberry blond with the big pout had moved to Chicago over the summer. I had Emily's parents to thank for my new status as a popular girl, since Emily's vacancy in Olivia's circle had created an entry point for me.

"Yeah, right," Olivia smirked. "So, where's my present?"

"My presence is your present," Henry joked. "And besides, your birthday is tomorrow. So even if I had brought you back something really cool from campus, you'd have to wait until the morning to find out."

I thought about the silver earrings in the shape of ribbons that I had brought with me, wrapped and tucked away in my backpack to give to Olivia in the morning as a gift. I'd spent the majority of the money I'd gotten from my grandparents and relatives for my own birthday on them.

"Meanie. So who's your friend?" Olivia asked.

Henry's cute friend piped up, "I'm Charlie."

I didn't even have to look over my left shoulder at Candace to know that she was batting her eyelashes, lowering her chin, smiling, and twisting slightly at the waist as she always did when establishing eye contact with a hot guy. Boys always liked Candace. Even just earlier that afternoon, she'd gotten a wink from the barista at the coffee shop at the mall along with her latte. She was more attainable than Olivia, who was so pretty she was intimidating, and whose heart belonged to Pete Nicholson and always would.

"Nice to meet you, Charlie, I'm Candace," Candace said, waving from behind me and Olivia, the plastic, studded bangles on her arm rattling.

Charlie waved back with a warm smile.

"This is Mischa, Violet, and McKenna," Olivia said, nodding her head at each of us as she made our introductions.

"McKenna," Henry said, repeating my name, looking me over with those green, green eyes from head to toe. "I remember you."

I was dumbstruck, unable to reply. Of course he remembered me; it had only been four months since our lockers were spaced twenty feet apart at school. But his tone suggested that he remembered me from before, from long before high school, from perhaps the last time I set foot in the Richmonds' house at the age of eight. As if that chubby sophomore he had last seen in June, sweating during the commencement exercises in my navy blue color guard uniform, hadn't been me at all, but someone else.

"You live over on Martha Road, right?" he asked.

This sudden attention from him was enough to make me stutter and stammer. If I had known when Olivia first asked me to spend the night at her house that Henry would be there, I might have chickened out entirely and made up an excuse about needing to go out of town with my mom.

"Yeah," I managed to reply, kind of curious as to how and why he knew which street I lived on with my mom. The fact that he knew probably shouldn't have boggled me; the year that I was eight, everyone knew where we lived. Everyone used to drive past. But I guess I was surprised that he still remembered, even after so many years.

"Cool," Henry said, nodding without smiling. There was a moment of awkward silence, when I feared that all of us, other than Violet and Charlie, were thinking the same thing. It was the reason why Henry might have remembered me since childhood, one that had nothing to do with prettiness or color guard. It was something no one in town spoke of often, and something I preferred not to think about much; it was the same reason why everyone in town used to drive past our house as if they were just taking a shortcut, but weren't really. Thankfully, no one said a word.

You're McKenna Brady, that girl...

"Charlie's my frat brother on campus," Henry disclosed, breaking the silence. "We're going to check out a Packers' game tomorrow afternoon, after my radiology appointment."

"I knew it," Olivia said to all of us. "See? He's getting X-rays. He doesn't even care that it's my Sweet Sixteen."

"The guy can't help it if football season happens to start on his little sister's birthday," Charlie teased.

"Thank you, Charlie," Henry said. "Now, if you'll excuse us, Mom dispatched us to run some errands in town."

It was almost six o'clock on a Friday night, the early September summer sky a lazy shade of periwinkle.  The weather was still aggravatingly warm, a dry kind of warm that made it impossible for me to focus in class because my brain was convinced that it was still summer break. It was warm enough that Olivia had instructed all of us to bring bathing suits to her party just in case we felt like jumping in the pool before dinner. I wondered if that was still on her mind—that dip in the pool—because although I had worn my new bathing suit a few times in Florida while down at my dad's condo, I had never worn it yet around people who I actually knew in Willow. Debuting it in front of Henry and Charlie thrilled me, and made my heart beat dangerously fast. My weight loss was recent enough that I still kind of couldn't believe my own eyes when I looked in the mirror. It always kind of felt like at any given moment, the pounds could just appear back on my frame in a flash unexpectedly.

On our way into the house, I overheard Henry tell Charlie, "She thinks she's getting a car for her birthday tomorrow."

The Richmonds were wealthy, or at least financially comfortable to the extent that I was pretty sure Olivia's mom didn't clip coupons out of the Sunday paper for dishwashing liquid and frozen low-cal dinners like my mom did.  It was safe to assume that there would be a cute economy car with a bow on it in the Richmonds' driveway waiting for Olivia in the morning. I found myself fighting a sudden surge of jealousy. I'd turned sixteen in July, and I'd known with certainty even months before my own Sweet Sixteen that there would be no car provided to me by my parents.

As the engine of Henry's pickup revved behind us, Candace muttered, "When it's my birthday, can Charlie be my present?'

An hour later, as we all floated in the pool and conversation had once again returned to Homecoming, I watched distractedly as dark, angry storm clouds rolled in from the south. I was lingering in the deep end of the pool, treading water, keeping one hand on a pink floating lounger and one eye on the glass sliding door which led to the Richmonds' living room. My friendship with Olivia was too fresh for me to ask for any information about her brother, and I was too insecure in my own new attractiveness to think I might stand any kind of shot with him. For all I knew, Henry had resurrected his high school relationship with Michelle Kimball, the girl he had dated throughout his junior and senior years. I had heard they'd broken up at the start of the summer, knowing they'd be going to separate colleges in the fall. Michelle was good friends with Amanda, Mischa's older sister, so I assumed it was best to keep my interest in Henry suppressed.

"We're going to Bobby's after Homecoming, definitely," Mischa was saying, drawing my attention back to the girls in the pool and away from the possibility of the door sliding open and Henry and Charlie stepping out onto the patio. "Amanda and Brian are driving me and Matt. Is Pete going to have wheels?"

Mischa was extremely fortunate in that Amanda was a senior who happened to be dating the captain of the varsity football team. Even though Amanda was always putting their shared car to use, Mischa never had to walk to school or ride the bus, because Amanda drove her everywhere. Amanda's own popularity had poured the foundation for Mischa to follow in her footsteps. Amanda had been the captain of the Junior Varsity cheerleading team and that year was the captain of the Varsity team, as spry and athletic as her younger sister.

"That's the plan," Olivia mused lazily, watching her own long, platinum blond hair fan out in the water. Pete was a junior, like us, and had just turned sixteen and gotten his license. His parents had bought him a black Infiniti and he rolled into the parking lot every morning at school like a king. Bobby's was the one and only twenty-four hour diner in town, the place where cool high school kids aggregated after school and football games. Even the McDonald's and KFC in Willow closed at ten o'clock at night. Before junior year, I had never had the nerve to step into Bobby's other than on a weekend morning with my mom for breakfast.

"So, what's the plan? Should we drive together? My dad is going to be a freak if I tell him I'm driving with Isaac alone," Candace said. She was sprawled on her back on the other floating chaise lounge, one that was an aquamarine shade of transparent blue, letting her arms drift across the surface of the water. Candace, for all her boy craziness, sort of had a boyfriend. Isaac, the guy who had been partially responsible for her sophomore year suspension, was a senior that year. He played defense on the football team and was a big guy with a booming laugh. I would have liked him immensely if it weren't for the fact that as recently as five months earlier he had teased me callously about being a dog and a cow. So far, during my junior year, he hadn't dared to utter a single insult at me. That was the power of being pretty, I was finding; not having to constantly dread childish insults being lobbed at me. Isaac wasn't very bright, which seemed to bother Candace, even though she wasn't exactly being invited to join National Honor Society, either.

"Well, we have to figure out what these two nerds are going to do," Olivia said, nodding at me and then at Violet.

Violet and I exchanged glances across the length of the pool, both momentarily hating each other. Neither of us had a boyfriend, or any solid prospects for Homecoming dates. Because my attractiveness was so new, boys who had known me since kindergarten weren't sure what to do with it just yet. To them, I was still McKenna Brady, the smart girl, the girl liked by parents and teachers, the girl with glasses and braces who had lived through that thing back in third grade. I could have no way of knowing if any of them were ever going to work up the nerve to be the first boy to acknowledge that I'd changed by asking me out, even though I was all too aware of their eyes on me in the hallways at school. I could have taken matters into my own hands and asked Dan Marshall, a somewhat friendly junior whose locker was next to mine, or Paul Freeman, who had offered me his algebra notes when I'd been out sick for a week at the end of sophomore year. But asking either of them to be my date would be like an admission of defeat.

Violet was a source of intrigue throughout the high school. While it was not uncommon for people to move away from town, like Emily, and disappear from the world of Willow forever—despite earnest promises to write letters and send emails—it was a rarity for anyone new to appear in the student body. Willow just hadn't been the kind of town to attract new residents for at least a decade, not even after formally changing its name from the rather sad-sounding Weeping Willow to just plain old Willow, Wisconsin. It was far enough away from Green Bay that commuting was almost an hour-long drive for parents who had jobs there. For a long while in the eighties and nineties, there was a pretty big tourism business geared toward the nature lovers who wanted even more autumn leaves and clean air than was offered by Wisconsin Dells to the south of us, or by Door County, to our east. But there was no real reason for anyone to move to Willow. There was no major corporation offering high-paying jobs anywhere nearby. There wasn't any big scientific research laboratory, attracting the families of high-profile scientists. The beach along Lake Winnebago was rocky and surrounded by woods, not anything at all like the white sandy beaches in Tampa near my dad's place, although I guess one could make the argument that Willow was a decent place to live if you were really into boating culture and happened to live in Wisconsin.

So the fact that Violet was new in town was enough to make her an instant celebrity at Weeping Willow High School. The fact that she was also gorgeous only added to her fame. Violet had a heart-shaped face with very wide-set crystal blue eyes, which looked eerily iridescent because the brown hair framing her face was so dark. She was porcelain pale in a town where every other girl made a point of showing off her summer's worth of tanning efforts in September, pushing the limits of the high school dress code with short shorts and tank tops to expose as much bronze flesh as possible. Even two weeks into the school year, none of us knew her very well. She kept to herself and refrained from gossip, most likely because she didn't know anyone at school well enough yet to contribute. She was a hair twirler, a lip biter, and seemingly a daydreamer, drifting off into her own thoughts often at lunchtime until she heard her name called as a command to rejoin the conversation. Everything about her was a little girlish and romantic, right down to the tiny but chic antique locket she wore around her neck.

And the fact that she was new in town meant that boys refrained from approaching her, just like they shied away from me.

"You should ask Jason," Mischa told me when she surfaced from her underwater bolt across the pool. "He told Matt he thinks you're hot. He'd totally say yes."

The Homecoming dance, and absolutely every detail related to it, was terrifying to me. I had never danced in public before, other than at my cousin's wedding. I had never really fooled around with a boy before more than a little kissing, never had the blinding pressure on me to be asked out by a deadline, or else. In this case, I wasn't even sure what the else might entail if no one asked me to the dance. Olivia's wrath? Banishment from the popular group? There was no way of knowing. There was only an increasing despair rising in my chest that the night of the Homecoming game would arrive, and I'd be walking alone through the stadium stands, still dateless. There was already a lavender cocktail-length strapless gown hanging despondently in my closet. I wouldn't wear it to the Homecoming dance the following Saturday night, but I had no way of knowing that in Olivia's pool the night of her party.

"If he thinks I'm hot, then why doesn't he just ask me? I don't like the idea of doing the asking," I grumbled.

"Oh, come on, McKenna! It's not the Middle Ages. You can ask a boy out," Candace scolded me. "You don't even have to ask him outright. Just linger around his locker and ask him if he's going to the dance and if he's asked anyone yet. He'll get the picture. Boys are stupid but they just need to be pointed in the right direction."

"That's not very romantic," I said. Why couldn't my life be just like Olivia's and Candace's, with boys approaching me? The fear of being rebuffed and maybe additionally even insulted was something neither of them had ever experienced.

Violet glared at me quietly from where she was treading water closer to the shallow end.

"What about Trey Emory for Violet?" Mischa suggested. Olivia squealed.

I felt a chill run up my spine and sensed dread filling my stomach. Trey Emory was a guy in the senior class who might as well have been from another planet. He didn't play on any sports teams, didn't go to football games, and mostly kept to himself, other than his occasional outings with the skateboarder guys who often ditched classes to smoke cigarettes near the service entrance of the school cafeteria. He smoldered of danger and mystery; he had an actual tattoo, and it wasn't some silliness he had given himself with a marker and a pin. Teachers despised him. His senior class schedule was a curious arrangement of the required gym class period, wood shop, auto body workshop, remedial English, and inexplicably, Advanced Physics.

And he just happened to live next door to me.

There was no particular reason why any of my new friends would have known where the Emory family lived, or that every once in a great while, Trey and I would exchange solemn waves from our bedroom windows if we just happened to catch a glimpse of each other before closing our blinds at night. Once, toward the end of sophomore year when I was still the old, unpopular McKenna, we stepped out of our houses in unison on a morning when it was pouring rain. He hadn't even really asked me if I wanted a lift, he had just flashed his keys and then lingered in his driveway with his engine idling until I worked up the nerve to dash through the sheets of rain and climb into the passenger side of his crappy, banged-up Toyota Corolla. We had ridden together all the way to school in silence after I awkwardly managed a "thanks" as we'd pulled out of his driveway.

"Oh my god, totally!" Candace agreed. "He's a freak but a hot freak."

"Who's Trey Emory?" Violet asked innocently.

"You know who he is," Olivia taunted. "He's that smoking hot senior guy with the dark hair who wears the green army jacket every day."

"That guy? He gives me the creeps. " Violet leaned back in the water to soak her hair again.

Trey wasn't creepy, I knew. He was the kind of guy who offered his unpopular neighbor a ride to school in the rain. But I dared not leap to his defense and reveal that in some very strange and abstract way, Trey and I were kind of friends. I had a suspicion that an admission of our acquaintance would not be well-received.

"Yeah, so? I still wonder what's under that army jacket," Candace continued. She really was incorrigible.

 One of Violet's slim, lily white legs kicked up, breaking the surface of the water and creating a little ripple that spread out in a circle around her, drifting toward the rest of us. "Whatever he's got under there, I don't want it coming with me to the dance."

Hours later, after pizzas brought home by Henry and Charlie and an ice cream cake served up by Olivia's parents with a cheesy group performance of Happy Birthday, all five of us occupied the Richmonds' basement in our pajamas.

"Yawn," Candace declared as we flipped through the pay-per-view movie options.

It was barely eleven o'clock on a Friday night and we were already out of fresh gossip, Homecoming chat, and songs to which we could emulate moves from music videos. On the last two Friday nights at that hour, the five of us had been tumbling out of movie theaters, giggling and squeamish after watching horror movies.

"What about Blood Harvest?" Mischa suggested. Mischa was the one who especially loved scary flicks. Vampires, zombies, werewolves... she loved being terrified out of her wits.

"Bring it," Olivia commanded from her blanket nest on the couch. One of her deeply tanned legs poked out from beneath the striped wool blanket she had spread across her body. The warm summer evening had turned into a chilly autumn night, and Mr. Richmond had come downstairs with us after pizza to light a fire in the fireplace. I sat on the floor closest to the fireplace, comforted by the popping and crackling of the glowing logs.

"I love Ryan Marten," Candace commented during the movie's opening sequence, during which Ryan Marten, a Hollywood heartthrob portraying a vampire, arrived at a farming community with his loyal clan just as the town was preparing for its annual carnival.

"Can you imagine if vampires came to Weeping Willow for Winnebago Days?" Olivia asked. Winnebago Days was the weekend festival we celebrated in our own town during the second weekend in October, in honor of the Native American tribe that once occupied the land on which all of our aluminum-sided homes were now built. A rinky-dink touring carnival company set up rickety rides and dart-throwing games in the empty lot near the marina, and for three days our entire town smelled like fried dough and kettle corn.

Candace reached into the bag of pretzels that Mischa handed her and popped a mini pretzel into her mouth. "I can't imagine any guy as hot as Ryan Marten ever coming anywhere near this sad-ass town."

"Hey! Pete's as hot as Ryan Marten," Olivia objected.

Candace dramatically rolled her eyes at Olivia across the couch. "Yeah, whatevs. Sure, he is."

I smiled nervously up at both of them, not daring to comment. In my own opinion, Pete Nicholson was every bit as handsome and sexy as Ryan Marten, and just as untouchable as the famous action star, too. Pete looked like an Olympic sprinter from Sweden or something. He was so tall, his facial features were so perfect, he seemed entirely out of place in our town, where most guys were built more like linebackers and were preparing for futures in which they would take over the failing family farms from their dads.  Mischa's boyfriend Matt was cute, but he was as tiny and compact as she was, herself. He wore baseball caps backwards and threw gang signs like a rap star, even though in our tiny town the closest thing to a gang was the Dairy Farmers' Guild. Candace's on-again, off-again boyfriend, Isaac, had a square jaw and probably would have been considered to be good-looking at any American high school, but it was easy to envision the kind of soft-gutted, sunburned farmhand he would be in as few as ten years. There were a lot of men in our town who looked just like Isaac some day would; with faces prematurely wrinkled from long days on a tractor in the hot sun, and dirt beneath their fingernails even at fancy restaurant dinners on Sundays.

Violet was looking down at her hands in her lap. She had rarely mentioned boys or contributed to conversations when boys were the topic in the two weeks since she had entered our world. I wondered for the first time if maybe she had decided that the only boy Willow had to offer worth her interest was Pete.

"Were there a lot more cute guys in your old town?" I asked her suddenly, realizing I couldn't even remember where it was she had told us she had lived before.

"Sure," Violet replied. "I mean, not so many. But my last school had three thousand students, so you know, it's just simple math that out of fifteen hundred boys, there would be more than one or two cute ones."

Three thousand students. That gave the rest of us something to ponder for a few moments. Our high school had barely three hundred students. There were fewer than eighty kids in each class, with the most in the senior class and the fewest in the freshman class. This had a little to do with so many families moving away from Willow in recent years. At the elementary school, there were so few younger kids that the fourth and fifth grades had been combined and were taught by one teacher. It had made the front page of the Willow Gazette; our town's population was dwindling. The town council had been trying to figure out ways to make the town more appealing to our generation in an effort to instill in us the notion that we should return to Willow after earning our degrees elsewhere in Wisconsin, and invest ourselves in the future of the town. Their latest implementation of this strategy was a youth center at the park district where teens could order fresh juice smoothies and use the workout equipment until ten o'clock every night, if we so wished. The fact that the five of us were instead hunkered down in the Richmonds' fancy basement, with its plush wall-to-wall carpeting and suede couch, was testament to the failure of the town's plan. I had never visited the youth center even once, despite the fact that my old friend Cheryl, with whom I had often gone to the mall before my induction into the popular group, had a part-time job serving juice there.

"Fifteen hundred boys," Candace repeated dreamily. "I can't even imagine so many boys under one roof."

"Where are you from, again?" Olivia asked Violet.

"Lake Forest," Violet said. "Outside Chicago."

Chicago. I'd only been there once. My mom had gone to college there, long before she'd met my dad when they taught together at the University of Wisconsin in Sheboygan. She'd been a graduate student teaching Introduction to the World of Natural Science as a requirement for earning her Master's Degree in Biology, way back when she still wanted to be a veterinarian. He'd been an established Psychiatry professor, ten years her senior, already having an established taste for girls younger than him. My poor mom wouldn't realize until she was no longer a young girl that his preference wouldn't change. I felt a pang of guilt suddenly for leaving my mom home alone on a Friday. Before I became popular, Friday nights were when we watched all of our favorite British sitcoms together until our faces hurt from laughing. She was probably relieved to have some time to herself, but I still felt uneasy about it. I felt a little sorry for myself, because I was the only girl in the basement who felt the burden of her mother's loneliness like a weight pressing down on my chest.

"God," Olivia muttered. "I can't wait to get out of this place and live in a real city."

We all lost interest in the movie quickly, none of us particularly caring about the plight of the citizens in the town being invaded by vampires since all we wanted was for Ryan Marten to have more screen time. I was starting to get a little sleepy, but I knew very well what happens to the first girl who falls asleep at slumber parties. I stood and stretched, and excused myself to go upstairs to use the bathroom.

"Me, too," Candace announced, and followed me up the stairs leading to the kitchen.

"One of you can use my bathroom on the second floor," Olivia called after us.

We reached the top of the stairs and I suddenly felt strange—like a burglar—in the Richmonds' house. I could sense a television on upstairs upon one of the house's upper floors. The ice cream cake had already been cleaned up by Mrs. Richmond, and the kitchen was quiet other than for the buzzing of the stainless steel fridge.

"Olivia's room is to the right at the top of the stairs," Candace told me as she stepped into the bathroom off the kitchen and flipped on the light.

I remembered the approximate layout of the Richmonds' house from when I'd played there as a little kid. As I walked down the hallway toward the front of the house, where I could ascend the staircase which led up to the house's second floor, I stopped to peek through the front windows at the driveway where it looked like a red Toyota had been parked next to Henry's blue pickup truck. The Toyota had a big pink bow on it. I immediately looked away, feeling guilty about spotting Olivia's grand birthday present before she did.

On the way up the stairs, I heard a door open on the second floor, and music leaked into the hallway. Suddenly Henry was at the top of the stairs, smiling at me. We crossed paths in the middle of the staircase, and he was carrying a plastic cup in his left hand, presumably on his way down to the kitchen for a refill of whatever flavor of soda he'd been drinking.

"Hey," he said.

"Hi," I replied, realizing in a hot panic that I was wearing very, very short red shorts and a tank top as pajamas that I hadn't really intended to model for any boys when I'd stuffed them into my backpack earlier that morning in preparation for the slumber party.

"You shouldn't sweat Homecoming so much," he said.

"What do you mean?" I asked, blushing furiously, hoping he had not overheard our discussion in the pool.

"It's just a dumb dance," he said with a friendly smile, his eyes locking with mine intently.  "Just a bunch of idiots clapping their hands to bad music. It's not the end of the world if you don't go."

"Well, that's a relief, because I don't think I'm going to go," I said, only aware as the words left my mouth of how true they were.

"I mean, you could go," Henry backtracked, studying my face. "I mean, I might happen to be back in town next weekend for my last radiology appointment. It would be kind of fun to be back in the high school gymnasium one more time. It would also be kind of fun to spy on my sister and ruin her big night of romance. If the only thing keeping you from going is not having a date, that is."

My heart was beating awfully fast. I felt like I might have been starting to perspire under his gaze.

"Are you, like... asking me to the Homecoming dance?" I asked with a confused smile, desperate to not be making a pathetic, wrong assumption. If I was, and if Henry told Olivia that I'd jumped to a silly hopeful conclusion about him asking me out on a date, I would die of embarrassment.

"I guess I am," Henry said. "I mean, if that's allowed. I guess since I'm not technically a student at Weeping Willow anymore, you'd have to ask me."

"Uh, okay," I said, having a hard time believing that this was actually happening. That Henry Richmond was actually asking me— me—out. "Olivia might get kind of mad, though. You know, about you being there, as you said, to ruin her big night."

Henry smiled his killer megawatt smile.  "Come on, McKenna. She'll get over it. It'll be fun. I know my sister pretty well and I think she'd rather have you come to the dance with me than not go at all. So, what do you say?"

I danced across Olivia's dark bedroom, taking care not to step on any of the discarded clothing or shoes littering her floor on my way to the adjoining bathroom. It might have been the happiest moment of my whole teenage life, being asked to Homecoming by a college guy, way, way cuter than any of the guys who still went to Weeping Willow High School. I smiled at my own reflection in the mirror over Olivia's bathroom sink. My nose was peeling a little bit from my fading tan and my hair was wavy from having air-dried after the quick shower I'd taken before dinner. I was going to have to remember to thank Rhonda for the millionth time for making so many salads for me over the summer, and for dragging me with her to dance aerobics classes.

Briefly, as I washed my hands, I wondered if Trey Emory would be going to Homecoming. The mere thought was so ridiculous that I rolled my eyes in the mirror. Trey Emory would not wear a polyester suit and dare to show his face in the high school gymnasium, or do the step-and-clap dance beneath red and black streamers. It would just never happen.

Back in the basement, the movie was ending, and Candace was turning off the lamps on both sides of the couch to make the setting spookier for ghost stories.

"You first, Mischa," Olivia insisted. "Mischa tells the best ghost stories," she informed Violet.

Mischa's eyes began glowing with enthusiasm. "Okay... what about Bloody Heather?"

"Oh, man," Candance whined. "You always tell that one. I've heard it, like, a million times."

"Yeah, but Violet's never heard it," Olivia said.

I had a vague idea of the story they were talking about, but I couldn't recall ever having heard it in detail, either. Ghost stories were one of the many things that kids who had older siblings heard before everyone else. Important information about dating was another one of those things. I didn't have older siblings, and my only older cousin, Krista, had moved away from Willow with Aunt JoAnne and Uncle Marty when I was in seventh grade.

"Okay, okay," Candace relented. "But tell the abridged version. If you tell the whole thing, it'll take all night."

I wasn't in the mood to hear a ghost story; I was still so excited about my exchange with Henry upstairs that I could barely sit still. It had already crossed my mind that despite what Henry had said, Olivia was going to be furious if he actually came to Homecoming as my date. Mischa might be upset, too, if there was a possibility that her older sister might assume I was trying to push Henry's ex-girlfriend further out of the picture. One trip upstairs to the bathroom had complicated my night infinitely, I was realizing as the initial rush of excitement passed.

 Mischa dropped her voice mischievously to a low whisper as she began excitedly telling the story. "There's a stretch of Route 32 that passes the St. Augustine cemetery. It's way on out past the airport, and my family used to pass it every summer on our drive up to our summer home near Lake Superior—ˮ

"What ever happened to that summer house? We should totally go up there over Christmas break," Candace interrupted.

"My Uncle Roger lives there now year-round since he lost his house. Now stop interrupting," Mischa scolded. "Anyway. So a couple miles before the cemetery, there's this little bar called Sven's, managed by this old Swedish couple. It's nothing fancy, just a crappy little sports bar, you know the kind, with florescent beer signs in the windows.  So, my mom's boss goes in there one night after work last winter to watch the Packers' game. Has two or three beers, probably shouldn't drive home at that point but figures it's okay because he's eaten a big sandwich and doesn't feel drunk and everyone in the bar keeps saying a blizzard's on the way. At this point it's maybe, like, ten o'clock at night? Not too late. But late enough that it's dark, because it's December, and the roads are really empty because it's like, a Wednesday or something and there's really not much traffic up there because it's just farms in every direction."

We were all listening carefully, leaning in to be able to hear Mischa better. The television was still on, but playing music videos on mute.

"So he's driving along, and snow's just starting to fall. At first, there are just a few tiny flakes that he sees in his headlights, then the flakes start getting fatter, heavier. He's so busy watching the snow, he almost doesn't even see this girl walking along the side of the highway as his car approaches her. From the back, she looks young, you know, like our age. She's wearing a red skirt and carrying her shoes in one hand. He passes her, thinking the last thing he needs is to get into some kind of trouble with the police or with his wife for picking up a young girl on the side of the road, but then he slows down because he realizes he's being ridiculous. It's cold out, the snow's getting heavier, and this girl isn't wearing a coat, so he thinks maybe she's in some kind of trouble and just needs a ride home. He might realistically be the only person to drive by for hours. So he backs up a little, and lowers his window to ask her if she needs a lift."

"The girl is, like, super thankful, like, thank you so much, it's so cold out, and whatever, and she gets into the back seat of the car and pushes all of his flyers over to the other side of the seat. My mom is a real estate broker," Mischa explained for Violet's information, not realizing that I'd also never heard her tell this story before and benefitted from the explanation. "So, her boss's car had all these open house flyers in the back seat. And he's like, trying to be polite and considerate but really wants to know what this chick's story is, so he turns down the radio and checks her out in the rearview mirror. He said she was really pretty, with long blond hair like Olivia's, and dark eyes, and she wasn't shivering at all even though it was really cold out and she was just wearing a sweater. There were snowflakes stuck to her eyelashes and she didn't even seem to notice."

Mischa's lips began to hint at a smile; I could tell she was enjoying how tense we were all becoming, hanging on her every word. She began slipping in between the present and past tenses in her haste to push the entire story through her mouth, telling the story as if it had just occurred days ago.

"He asked her where he could drop her off, and she gave him some street address on Bluegrass Lane and some directions on how to get there. The thing was, the address she gave him wasn't even too far from where she'd been walking, which coincidentally was right outside the gates of the cemetery, only my mom's boss didn't realize that until later because he's so used to driving past there on his way home from work. As he turns the corner onto the street where she told him she lived, he asks, Do you mind if I ask what you're doing out so late at night by yourself without a coat on? And she doesn't answer right away, but he's busy looking at the numbers on the houses he's passing, driving real slowly to try to find her house, and then he looks in the rearview mirror again, and almost has a heart attack. Because she looks back at him, and this time her whole face is bloody. Like her nose is bleeding, her eyes are bleeding, there's blood gushing out of her mouth—"

"Ew!" Olivia shrieked, even though she'd presumably heard Mischa's retelling of this part of the story, as Candace said, millions of times.

"And she reaches up for him like this," Mischa said, her brown eyes huge and round, lifting her arms forward like a zombie, "Her mouth was moving and he thought she was trying to tell him something but he was so freaked out, understandably, that he swerved his car hard to the left and it went off the road into this little ditch right in front of someone's house. After he hit the brakes and looked back in the rearview mirror again, the girl was gone. Gone. He got out of the car to see if maybe somehow, in the blink of an eye, she'd jumped out of the back seat. But she was nowhere. It was like she'd never existed at all. Except all of those flyers in the back seat of his car were drenched with blood."

"Wow," Violet said solemnly, believing every word of it.

"So then, of course, he looked up and realized that he'd just run his own car off the road right in front of the house that the girl said was hers. He completely freaked out, got back in the car, drove all the way back into town in the blizzard and straight to the police station. At this point he was thinking he was going to be framed for murder or something if that girl was missing and her blood was all over his car."

"This is the best part," Candace informed us.

"So he stumbled into the police station, heart pounding, sweat—just like—pouring off of his forehead because on the whole drive back into town he was terrified that he was going to look into his rearview mirror and see her back there, bleeding all over the place again. He ran up to the cop on night duty at the front desk and was like, The craziest thing just happened. I saw this girl walking along the side of the road, I asked her if she needed a ride, and the policeman just looked at him, and was like, and then you looked in your rearview mirror, and she was gone."

I got a chill. It was a dumb story, but Mischa was doing an admirable job of making it scary.

"And my mom's boss was like, Yeah! How did you know? And how freaky is this? The cop was like, we get people in here all the time every winter, saying the exact same thing. Blond girl on the side of the road, carrying her shoes. Always right by the St. Augustine cemetery. Sometimes they look in their rearview mirror and she's all bloody. Sometimes she's just gone. She always gives them the same address, on Bluegrass Lane. It turns out, this girl named Heather Szymanski, or some Polish last name like that, had been hit by a car after breaking up with her boyfriend at Sven's forty years ago. She was walking home from the bar and whoever hit her just left her on the street to die. And it was in December of that year. My mom's boss looked the whole thing up after he calmed down about it, and this girl's parents actually lived on Bluegrass Lane back in the Seventies when this all allegedly happened. So, the legend is, the ghost of this girl only appears to people leaving Sven's, driving home past the cemetery. It's only men who see her."

"Oh my god that is so scary," Olivia said. "I feel like I'm going to barf."

 "What about the blood?" Violet asked. "On the flyers?"

"Oh yeah, that," Mischa said, annoyed with herself for having left out a detail. "He had brought the flyers into the police station with him as evidence, like, you know, Check out all this blood, this really happened.  He was waving the flyers around like a mad man in the police station, but by the time he'd told the cop what had happened and looked down at them in his hand, the blood was gone. They were just plain old open house flyers, no different than they'd been earlier that day when he'd been handing them out. Split-level ranch, three bedrooms, one bath."

"So what about your mom's boss?" I asked. The daughter of a psychiatrist, I could never distance myself from the emotional aftermath of anything. No matter how horrific the ghost story had been, my thoughts always drifted to the psychological recovery of the victim.

"Oh, him," Mischa said with a smile, delighted that I'd asked. "Total nervous breakdown. Got rid of his car as fast as he could, bought a fancy new one that he couldn't afford with his credit card, divorced his wife before winter was over. She thought he was totally nuts when he told her the story about Bloody Heather. He never drives at night anymore."

"Good job," Olivia commended Mischa. "What about the story of the six white horses?"

"God, no!" Candace protested. "That story is soooo long."

Violet sat upright on the floor and folded her hands in her lap. "What about Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board? Have you guys ever played that?"

Olivia rolled her eyes. "Geez, not since middle-school."

"I don't like that," Candace shook her head. "I don't like the idea of messing with spirits. Too scary."

"It's not spirits," I interjected. "It's group hypnosis. My dad has written papers on this. That's why it works better for younger kids than for older people. The chanting hypnotizes everyone playing the game."  The game involved one participant making up an elaborate story about the future death of another participant, who would stretch out on the floor. All of the other players would kneel around the girl laying down, sliding their fingertips underneath her body. At the end of the story, which was usually either remarkably gory or silly enough to inspire giggling, everyone but the girl laying down would chant, "light as a feather, stiff as a board," while raising the reclining girl toward the ceiling using nothing but the slightest bit of pressure from their fingertips. I could never figure out exactly how it worked, because during my own childhood, the handful of times when I'd played the game and the hypnosis had been successful, the body had been raised effortlessly over everyone's heads. Inevitably, the state of hypnosis would be interrupted by one of the players, ruining the effect for everyone, and the body of the unfortunate girl who had been lifted into the air would crash down to the floor.

"I don't believe that at all," Candace told me, making me feel kind of like an idiot for speaking up. "When it works, it's scary as hell."

"Let's play!" Mischa insisted, pulling a pillow off of the couch. "I want to be the storyteller first."

Olivia reached for her mobile phone, checking her newly received text. "It's Pete," she announced. "It's midnight. He wanted to be the first one to wish me a happy birthday. Isn't that sweet?"

We all agreed that it was quite sweet, and Mischa decided that Olivia would be the first subject in our game. I had a queasy feeling about participating even though I knew in my head what my father had told me was true. There was nothing occult or mystical about this game. But for me, making up stories about death scenarios didn't feel right. Death had already visited my home in my lifetime and I didn't like the idea of tempting it, even just for the sake of a game.

Olivia lay on her back with her head balanced on the pillow which rested upon Mischa's knees. I knelt along Olivia's right side, facing Violet, who knelt along her left side. Candace knelt at Olivia's feet, tickling them lightly to make Olivia kick and squirm before Mischa got started. Olivia accidentally kicked a little too high and knocked Candace in the chin.

"Ow!" Candace wailed.

"No tickling!" Olivia bellowed. Since Candace and Olivia had been best friends the longest, Candace knew that Olivia was wildly ticklish.

"Quiet, everyone!" Mischa commanded with authority. "Everyone must be very serious for this to work! I mean it."

Without exchanging any words, we all agreed to settle down. Mischa waited until the only noise in the basement was the crackling of the fire. We could distantly hear the talk show being watched upstairs by Olivia's parents two floors above us, the fuzzy applause of its audience. Mischa placed her fingertips on Olivia's temples and began concentrating on a wholly original description of Olivia's future death, which was how the game went. 

"It was the night before Homecoming," Mischa began in her scariest storyteller voice.

"Not the night before Homecoming," Olivia complained. "Can't I at least die the night after Homecoming so I have a chance to fool around with Pete one last time before I die?"

Candace smirked. "You've already fooled around with Pete plenty."

Violet and I blushed. The full details of how much Olivia and Pete had fooled around so far hadn't really been disclosed to either of us yet. We were juniors in high school; naturally we were curious about who among us had gone all the way. I had barely gone any part of the way, except for a few chaste kisses I'd exchanged over the summer with a guy named Rob who lived in the same condominium community as my dad and Rhonda. He'd been cute, but I knew our little romance had no future. I wouldn't be in Florida again until the week after Christmas, and I wasn't so naïve as to think that sixteen-year-olds were capable of sustaining a long distance romance.

"Quiet!" Mischa ordered. "I'm the storyteller, and I decide! Okay, fine. It was the night after Homecoming. Olivia Richmond had been grounded by her parents for staying out way past her extended curfew the night of the dance, having innocently fallen asleep in the big field behind the high school track beneath the stars with Pete. No matter how many times Olivia insisted to her parents that she was only guilty of being sleepy, they wouldn't believe her, because they knew their daughter and her boyfriend were total horndogs who couldn't keep their hands off each other."

"You're gross," Olivia said without opening her eyes.

"The problem with being grounded," Mischa continued, "was that Pete had told Olivia he wanted to show her something very special that night, the night after Homecoming. So Olivia waited until her parents fell asleep, and decided to sneak out of the house to meet him down by Shawano Lake."

Candace resisted the urge to make an insinuating, "Ooooh" noise.

"She got out of bed and changed out of her blue satin pajamas and into her skinny jeans and the totally amazing cashmere sweater that her best friend Mischa had given to her for her sixteenth birthday."

"Nice touch," Candace whispered off to my left.

"She raised the window of her second floor bedroom, and removed the screen. But as she climbed through the window, the fabric of her skinny jeans caught on a rusty nail in her window frame. When she reached for the drain pipe she intended to use to climb down the side of the house toward the ground, she realized that her leg was stuck. She forcefully jerked her leg to try to break free, and in doing so lost her grip on the drain pipe and fell forward. Her pants tore, and she tumbled to the ground, breaking her neck in the fall. However, she did not die instantly. She writhed in pain, struggling to breathe, paralyzed, until dawn. She drew her last excruciating breath as sunlight broke over the horizon. Hours later, Mrs. Richmond found Olivia's dead, lifeless body when she entered the girl's bedroom to wake her up for church services. She saw the window open, and leaned through it to see Olivia's broken and twisted body below on the grass."

"Two days later at the funeral home, to the horror of her friends and loved ones, Olivia's body rested in her coffin, light as a feather, stiff as a board."

"Light as a feather, stiff as a board," we all chanted in unison, our expectant fingertips beneath Olivia's limbs gently pushing her heavy body upward.

"This isn't working," Candace said after about five iterations of the chant.

"I don't feel anything happening," Olivia announced. She opened her eyes and sat straight up.

"Can I try?" Violet asked, looking directly at Mischa, implying that she wanted to take a turn at playing the role of storyteller.

"Sure," Mischa said, handing her the pillow that she'd been balancing on her knees.

I really wish Mischa hadn't relinquished her cherished role as the storyteller so easily. Because when Violet began telling stories, the trouble began.