1
6:47 A.M.

THERE WAS THE PAIN, first and last, that booming drumbeat of agony in her head—the kind of pain that made her want to curl up and die. It was woefully familiar. She recognized that pounding, that rhythm: her heartbeat, as slow and regular as a muffled bass drum from the worst band in the world, playing their worst song over and over. Vodka-based pain, she’d once called it—a dismal, throbbing ache.

She tried to squint her eyes tighter against the glare—the white glare, like a dentist’s lamp—and that made the pain worse. She was curled up in fetal position, coated in slime that she recognized as her own sweat, overheated beneath some kind of impossibly smooth fabric like the metallic surface of an oven mitt, her hair tangled hopelessly around her face, her ears and head ringing with that endless drumbeat.

Hangover, she thought. I’ve got a hangover—a really bad one. It’s my birthday and I’ve got the worst hangover in the world.

Mary fixated on those two facts, holding on to them like floating planks after a shipwreck in a heavy storm, for the simple reason that, beyond those rudimentary ideas, she was stumped. Her name was Mary and she was seventeen—just seventeen, today—and her head was suffering the kind of rhythmic, merciless killing blows ordinarily reserved for tennis balls or nailheads. But that was it. Whatever was supposed to be occurring to her, it just wasn’t coming.

Happy birthday, she told herself weakly.

Squinting made her head hurt more, but opening her eyes fully was out of the question—it was as bright as the surface of the sun out there. She twisted around in her envelope of sweat and smooth fabric and tangled black hair that smelled of sweat and Neutrogena and tried to figure out what time it was, where she was, and how she had gotten there.

In bed, I’m in bed, she concluded. Ten points for that one. The problem was that she didn’t know which bed. There were several obvious candidates. Her own bed, that creaky, narrow, loved-and-hated wooden-framed contraption she’d slept in since she was five, which still had pink and orange paint on its headboard from when her father helped her decorate her bedroom? The bed none of her friends had ever seen, because she’d never invited them to brave the Upper West Side and visit her, because she was embarrassed by her family’s tiny, run-down apartment?

But it wasn’t her bed, because the mattress was just too good—too wide and smooth and firm. Her own bed was bearable, edging into comfortable, but it was nothing like where she was now. I’m not at home.

Patrick’s bed? That was the next possibility: that wide, deep, soft, platform bed that always had perfectly steam-laundered sheets with the highest thread count available, not that Patrick ever made the bed. He didn’t have to, with the cleaning girls and the concierge and the entire staff of Trick’s five-star hotel waiting on him hand and foot all the time, pretending to ignore the tequila bottles and thumbed-open plastic bags they cleared out of the way as he bounded off to school and they began the hopeless task of cleaning his suite.

Mary wrinkled her nose and decided she wasn’t there. No booze smell, she noticed groggily. No Hugo Boss cologne, no Dunhill cigarettes. None of the expensive continental aromas of the young, wealthy gentleman who’s been affecting high-class vices since before he started shaving. The bed-clothes—their smooth, unearthly, sweat-drenched surfaces like some kind of NASA space-program fabric against her naked skin—felt expensive enough to be Patrick’s, but again, no young-dangerous-man-of-the-world smells.

So I’m at Amy’s, Mary thought, through the ongoing drumbeat in her head. That was reassuring, somehow: it made her feel safe. I’m in a beautiful Upper East Side town house, she thought hopefully, on Amy’s big quilt-covered chaise longue, the one she’s always begging me to sleep in so I don’t have to go home in the middle of the night.

But no.

There just was no way. Mary began to open her eyes, facing a solid horizontal bar of pure diamond brilliance, a blade of white light that nearly made her throw up with renewed pain and queasiness. I could be anywhere, she told herself as her headache seemed, incredibly, to get worse, that drumbeat increasing like the sound of a tribal ritual, like a group of cannibals who were all through playing around and were about to start their main course of Brunette Girl. I’m not at home; I’m not at Patrick’s; I’m not at Amy’s.

It occurred to her in that moment that she was naked—she’d noticed it before but blocked it out—and, for the first time since that drumbeat from hell had awakened her, she began to feel uneasy, even a little bit afraid. Mary’s heart began racing; then she heard the cannibals’ drums get faster and louder as adrenaline flooded her bloodstream like an electrical current and she began to feel frightened in earnest.

I have to open my eyes, Mary thought. I have to open my eyes now.

Taking a deep, trembling breath, she got her eyes open and winced in stinging pain at the unbelievable brightness, blinking repeatedly to shed the blind spots. Her vision blurred with caked sleep and smeared mascara and then the details of her surroundings began to penetrate through the white blur.

She was in a room as big as a gymnasium. There was another bed only a few feet from hers—a big queen-size bed with a cherrywood frame. The room was filled with beds: steel-framed modernist beds; beds with suede headboards and beds with white faux leopardskin headboards; beds with gleaming, ornate brass frames. Beyond the rows of beds were faceted-glass side tables and Asian-influenced end pieces with gold trim and wide black leather couches and oak desks, room-size groups of expensive-looking furniture, all arranged into ensembles like a series of bad soap-opera sets.

Mary turned her head, squinting against blinding sunlight. Her bed was inches from a window that ran all the way from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, its brightness interrupted by regular shadows that she suddenly realized were words—huge, backward white letters imprinted across the glass like a movie title seen in a mirror:

CRATE&BARREL

She sat up in bed and her body went rigid. She was frozen, mortified, staring out at the vast, morning sky beyond the enormous letters, trying to convince herself that she was dreaming—but she knew she was awake. This was actually happening—she was sitting bare-naked on a display bed in the second-floor window of Crate and Barrel, the biggest furniture and housewares store in SoHo.

Outside the glass, down below, she could see motionless morning traffic up and down Houston Street, the lines of honking cabs and SUVs and delivery vans stretching out in both directions. A hundred eyes were staring at her—a thick crowd of Manhattan gawkers had formed on the sidewalk, right below the window, craning their necks as they stared at the naked girl.

Bike messengers with dirty satchels and baggy rolled-up jeans gazed slack-jawed at her like they’d just found free Internet porn. A gang of preppy businessmen clutched their morning Starbucks and grinned like naughty schoolboys. A frizzy-haired woman in a faux Chanel jacket and white sneakers scowled with disgust. A few joggers gazed halfheartedly as they ran in place, and a group of fanny-packed Euro tourists stared in amazement, thrusting out their camera phones like handguns and relentlessly firing off shot after shot of her nude body.

Dreaming—this is a dream, Mary told herself helplessly, fumbling with the comforter and trying to pull it around her. I’ve got to be dreaming—this has to be a nightmare. That kind of thing happened all the time, didn’t it? You thought you’d woken up, but you were actually still dreaming, so when—

There was blood on the bed.

What—?

Four razor-thin streaks of drying blood snaked down the mattress. Mary reached awkwardly behind her back and winced from the sudden painful sting. Riding her fingertips along her broken skin, she could trace the tender, rough scratches from her smooth shoulder blades all the way down to her waist.

Oh my God—oh my God.

Mary was paralyzed with shock. She felt tears welling up in her eyes and chills emanating from the back of her neck, crawling across every inch of her skin. Her head felt like a delicate ice sculpture, a fragile, melting, crystalline jewel about to crack and shatter. Her ears were humming and her throat was dry. She didn’t know what time it was—she didn’t know how long she’d been lying beneath the comforter, on this bed in a row of beds lined up rank and file like headstones in a graveyard. Before she could completely panic, she lunged to pull the comforter around herself, its metallic fabric hissing against the mattress, and spun away from the window, ducking her head and trying to get herself out of sight.

Her bare feet slapped against the vast floor—cold, hard, grooved linoleum that had been textured to look and feel like wood. Through the glass, she could hear the muffled catcalls and shouts and murmurs of the crowd outside, the random passersby who had chosen the right Friday morning to walk down Houston Street and cast their eyes upward at the naked teenage girl in the display window.

Mary felt desperately sick. Her back itched painfully—a reminder of the unexplained scratches that had left bloody trails. DNA, she thought randomly. I’m leaving my DNA all over Crate and Barrel for the cops to find; they’re going to hunt me down and make me pay for what I did to the bed display.

And I’m naked, she thought helplessly. I’m naked. What do I do?

In one convulsive movement, Mary staggered to her feet, trying to pull the comforter after her. It didn’t quite work. The comforter got caught on the bed and slid heavily to the floor. The crowd outside cheered. This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, she thought dazedly.

Bending down to tug at the comforter (and trying as hard as she could not to think about the view she was giving her audience), Mary pulled it off the floor, again, and tried fruitlessly to get its billowing white folds around herself. A loud bang, very close by, made her jump. Frantically staring around, she saw white-painted pipes and recessed sprinklers against the wide ceiling … and nothing else. No explanation of what had made that noise.

The light from the big plate-glass windows was becoming brighter. Mary heard her own rasping, hoarse breath as she finally pulled the comforter free, wrapped it around her shoulders, and began walking—shuffling, really—across the wide, empty showroom, toward the steel-framed, backlit EXIT sign over a doorway against the far wall.

Is the store open? Mary wasn’t sure. The entire floor seemed empty, but there was no way to tell what time it was. People could be walking in any moment.

Mary’s feet squeaked and thumped against the textured fake-wood floor. The comforter dragged behind her, hissing its way around the display beds as she got to the edge of the showroom, beneath the glowing, ruby-red EXIT sign, where a wide, dark metal door faced her, with no handle except a big red steel bar labeled EMERGENCY EXIT and WARNING ALARM WILL SOUND.

“Come on,” Mary heard herself murmuring, pleading. “Come on, come on—”

There had to be another way out, didn’t there? If an alarm sounded, she would have to deal with store security, or even worse, the actual cops, the NYPD, New York’s Finest, with their slow, patient questions and their cordial dislike of private-school kids’ amusing problems. And it would all take so long and it might even get in the newspaper, for God’s sake … and she still didn’t have any clothes. She pictured herself in a holding cell (or whatever you called them) like on television, still wrapped in this billowing comforter made of oven mitt, sweaty hair tangled over her face as she tried to answer the leering cops’ questions…. No.

Staring at the metal sign, the word EMERGENCY swimming in her watery vision, she almost blacked out again. Her head spun and her body collapsed sideways against the wall, her bare shoulder scratching the rough paint as she shuddered. She was going to be sick…. Her head was still pounding and her vision was darkening … and then the wave passed and she pushed against the wall and stood up again.

What the hell—? How much did I have to drink, anyway? She couldn’t remember ever feeling so weak and dizzy—except once: her first hangover, the very first one after she and her little sister drank the leftover wine from one of their parents’ cocktail parties, back when they had two parents and the young girls would sneak into the living room and approach the coffee table covered in half-empty glasses and sodden paper napkins, and dare each other to drink the sweet-smelling Chablis. She had ended up curled in bed with her mom cleaning vomit from the bathroom floor as her father’s rough hands stroked her hot face and he told her that everything would be all right, that the pain would go away.

Bang. Clang. Bang. That same dull metallic noise, from close by now. Somebody’s here—

“Hello?” Mary called out.

She had turned a corner, past the edge of the store’s display panels and was headed toward a doorway she hadn’t seen; a metal doorframe with a paper calendar Scotch-taped to its inner surface. In the small room beyond the door, Mary could see nothing but a dented plastic Diet Coke bottle on the linoleum floor and a grimy time clock bolted to the white cinder-block wall. She could hear salsa music, dimly, from somewhere inside.

“Hello? Anybody here?”

The flawless white comforter snaked behind her like a snail’s trail as Mary moved forward through the doorway. She nearly jumped when she saw a middle-aged woman in a coverall—a dowdy-looking polyester dress that you’d have to call beige (it didn’t really qualify as taupe)—slumped behind a plastic table, reading a Spanish-language newspaper and peering at her. The woman didn’t move; she and Mary had locked eyes. An acrid smell of bleach permeated the room.

“Hello?”

“¿Sí?”

Great, Mary thought dismally. A language barrier, just to make this more fun.” Can you help me? I can’t—I lost my clothes. I don’t have my clothes.”

“¿Que?”

“Look.” Mary stepped forward, stumbling on the edge of the comforter, reaching for the cleaning lady’s arm. “I need clothes; I need something to wear and I’ve got”—the woman flinched as Mary plucked at the rough fabric of her sleeve—“I’ve got no money; I need to get home.”

The woman squinted at Mary. Her eyes were like black flint. She didn’t move. Mary could feel rivulets of sweat sliding down her body beneath the comforter, down the curves of her back, across the raw edges of the fresh scratches along her spine. Come on! she wanted to shout. Are you blind? I need help! Mary was trembling with cold now, the dirty linoleum pressed against her bare feet like a sheet of ice. Come on, lady—I’ll come back here later and pay you what I owe; I’ll make Patrick buy you a Prada outfit, I’ll do anything….

The woman rose to her feet, without any change in her expression. She leaned close, so that the veined cracks and wrinkles in her face were visible, around the ragged edge of her brown lipstick; Mary could barely smell some kind of geriatric floral scent.

“Wrong,” the woman said with a thick Spanish accent.

“What? What do you—”

“Something wrong,” the woman went on, nodding firmly. Mary’s forehead was coated in cold, clammy sweat as she stared into the cleaning lady’s black eyes. The woman was pointing at her with a bent arthritic finger. “Something wrong with you. You go to church.”

“Look.” Mary was in no mood for whatever Sunday-school lecture the cleaning woman wanted to give her. “You don’t understand. It’s not my fault I’m—”

Mary stopped talking because she’d noticed something incredible, the first recognizable thing she’d seen since waking up. Just past the woman’s shoulder, on a bare wooden shelf, was an electrifying, familiar sight.

“You go to church, you say prayers,” the woman repeated, turning away toward a green storage locker. “I help you—I give you money. I no have much, but I give you—”

“My phone.” Mary pointed at the small, gleaming black and maroon BlackBerry she’d spotted, nearly dropping the comforter again. “That’s my phone, ma’am. If I could just—”

The cleaning woman seemed to have some kind of special need to move as slowly as humanly possible. She was painstakingly pulling out a coverall identical to the one she was wearing. She slammed the locker shut—Mary winced at the loud bang—laboriously turned to follow Mary’s slim arm and saw the phone. The BlackBerry’s green light flashed right then—the phone was on.

“Is yours? I find it,” the cleaning woman explained, picking up the BlackBerry delicately, like it was a piece of Steuben glass. “On the floor, I find it when I—”

“Yes, that’s mine,” Mary said, stumbling as she reached for it. “Thank you, thank you—”

I dropped it on the way in, she thought. Whenever that was—whatever I was doing here.

Whomever I was with.

But she still couldn’t remember a thing.

Once the phone was in her hand she felt better. Flipping it open, she saw no messages, no texts, no missed calls—and a nearly dead battery. One bar, flickering.

“Such a pretty young girl; you no need to be in such trouble. You go to confession,” the cleaning lady told her. She was handing over a beautiful new twenty-dollar bill that nearly made Mary salivate because she needed it so badly. The comforter was slipping to the floor as she took the money—and the cleaning woman took her hand and squeezed it. “You confess your sins, you feel better.”

“Right.” Confess my sins? She would have settled for remembering her sins.

THE AIR WAS DAMP and cool. The sky was white, as featureless as untrampled snow—it was the kind of windless, overcast day that could make you squint from the glare of the city’s low, cold blanket of clouds. The echoes of SoHo traffic ricocheted harshly around her ears, around the cloud of dirty black hair she swept back from her sweaty forehead as she pressed forward, hurrying down the shaded edge of the sidewalk.

Everyone was looking at her, the eyes of passersby widening before they turned quickly away. Mary understood: she saw her fast-moving reflection flow past in the windows of the storefronts along Houston and knew that she looked like a homeless waif, a drug casualty, a hospital escapee or a runaway, her makeup smeared, her hair askew, her body clad in a ridiculous beige coverall that fit her all wrong, with a waistline high up on her rib cage, and a zipper she couldn’t reach tugging painfully on a tangle in her hair, making her eyes water with every step. Her feet were clad in oversize white tennis shoes that had seen better days; a blackened wad of gum was smeared over one of the soles.

She hunched her shoulders against the cold March air as she darted around a pair of skateboarders who grinned wildly, obviously reacting to her crazy Amy Winehouse appearance. Her ankles were aching from the speed at which she’d been moving. The polyester coverall was rubbing against the cuts on her back, rhythmically scratching them like sandpaper.

Mary had to swallow to hold off a sudden need to vomit—and the faint, nauseatingly stale taste of tomato sauce filled her dry throat.

Why am I tasting tomato sauce?

A fleeting image of a dark red tablecloth flickered into her mind. Faint opera music in the background … the clatter of silverware and the babble of dozens of voices …

Nothing else. She couldn’t remember.

I’ve got to get home, Mary thought. It was a few minutes past seven, according to a big, old-fashioned clock on a bank she was passing. I’ve got to get home and get dressed for school—and get ready for my birthday.

Mary wasn’t quite ready to think about that part yet. Here it finally was—the morning of her seventeenth birthday, a day she’d looked forward to for years—and it wasn’t exactly starting the way she’d imagined. Nobody was bringing her breakfast in bed and handing over brightly wrapped presents. None of her friends had texted her with a morning birthday greeting.

Come on—it’s early yet, she told herself. Everybody’s just waking up.

But were her friends waking up with hangovers too?

Whom was I with? What happened?

Walking into the shadow of a fire escape, Mary realized that the air was thickening with heavy humidity; already the flat white sky was darkening, showing watery gray traces of lower, heavier clouds. Five cabs had cruised past, each with its sign maddeningly unlit. Like all Manhattan residents, Mary knew that the chances of finding an empty taxicab downtown in the morning were about the same as the chances of finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk.

Eduardo’s!

That was it. She suddenly remembered going to Eduardo’s—the, well, the “budget” Italian restaurant in her neighborhood—with her sister and her mother, who didn’t think of the local one-star spot as a budget restaurant at all, since she almost never ate out (or even left the apartment). Mom took us to dinner—a pre-birthday dinner, Mary remembered. The stale, ghostly tomato taste in her mouth made sense now: she could dimly remember the tiny, cramped restaurant and the red tablecloths and the piped-in opera and the plate of fettuccine marinara that Patrick or her friends Amy and Joon would have taken one look at and refused to touch, sending it scornfully back to the kitchen—and then bodily dragged her down to Balthazar or a place more her speed.

Because that was the point of Mary Shayne’s birthday; it had been the point since forever. It was always something big, something crazy. In middle school it had been tame stuff: pizza parties at Two Boots, ice-skating parties at Chelsea Piers, frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity. Then it had changed; it had exploded into an underground legend for the private school set—New York’s self-described “playas under eighteen.” Mary never even planned the parties; they just formed out of the ether like darkening storm clouds: last year’s ridiculous scene at Nana’s, an underage speakeasy by the West Side Highway; two years ago, when they commandeered Inganno on Gansevoort Street and distributed free pancakes to everyone in the restaurant on Mary’s friends’ dime; a succession of bottle service bills and backstage passes and ragers in parent-free apartments, escalating—everyone knew—to the big One Seven, Mary’s last Chadwick blowout, and to whatever was coming tonight.

Which was why Mom had taken them out last night—rather than try to compete with all that—actually leaving their apartment and bringing Mary and Ellen to that red-draped table at Eduardo’s. Mary remembered it all now: chewing and swallowing the mediocre fettuccine and drinking the red wine they’d brought, sitting through the awkwardness while Mom watched her proudly across the yellow candlelight and beamed, her little girl already seventeen (or nearly), my God, how time flies. Which was the last thing Mary wanted to hear, because she just knew what came next: It’s too bad your father’s not here to see this …, Mom’s cue to get misty about her husband, which Ellen always encouraged. Wanting to be anywhere else; refusing dessert (even while looking around for a waiter with a cupcake and a candle in it, ready to smile and cover her face as the restaurant patrons sang “Happy Birthday,” but that never happened); finishing the wine … as Mom (her feelings hurt, as usual) made a big self-pitying show of dropping money on the table and leaving early; and after that, Mary and Ellen getting the check and their coats and then …

And then what?

She had no idea what had happened next.

“Taxi!” Mary yelled, vaulting forward into the street. A lone cab was approaching, its rooftop lights shining. Mary was still so queasy that she was afraid she’d stumble and faint with the effort of running, but she was already in a footrace with a pinstriped Wall Street type who obviously had to get to the trading floor by the first bell and wasn’t going to let a crazy-looking teenage cleaning lady take his cab away no matter how high her cheekbones or how luminous her pale blue eyes, glittering through slits of smeared mascara.

“Taxi, taxi!” she called out again, burping up more marinara-flavored stomach gas and sprinting toward the cab.

She won the race—barely—grabbing the cab’s chrome door handle and giving Wall Street Man a pleading look (with a slight pout), which seemed to do the trick: he smiled tightly as she heaved the door open and tumbled inside the cab.

“Ninety-fourth and Amsterdam,” she told the driver, who obediently hit the gas. Behind them, she caught a dwindling view of Wall Street Man scanning the empty street.

Have I got enough money? she wondered suddenly. SoHo to the Upper West Side—five miles of Manhattan traffic—was going to cost more than twenty dollars. Yet another thing to worry about.

Deal with it later, she told herself. One problem at a time.

The back of the taxi was freezing. Mary had her arms wrapped around herself as she huddled against the backrest, still shivering (nonstop since she’d awakened), her dried-sweat-covered skin scratching against the cheap weave of the borrowed coverall (which she was so tired of being grateful for, because she hated it), the cuts on her back itching.

Mary’s BlackBerry was giving its familiar, hateful LO BATT chime. She peered at the screen again—still no calls, no texts, no e-mails. It’s my birthday and nobody cares, she thought dismally, before reminding herself that it was only 7:08 A.M. (according to the BlackBerry’s display). Scrolling back a day, she saw the indicator for a “To Do” item and thumbed it—and stared at it, suddenly remembering.

THURS EVE TEST PREP SCOTT

That’s right, Mary realized, leaning forward as the taxicab banged over steel plates in the street, heading west. Of course, of course—that’s what happened next.

Or what was supposed to have happened next.

The one blight on her day, today, the one flaw in the perfect diamond of her seventeenth birthday, was Mr. Shama and his hateful physics test—something about Bernoulli’s Principle, which she had never come close to understanding. Shama’s frantic blackboard scribbling—all those symbols and numbers scrawled across the board while the diminutive teacher waved his arms, fluorescent lights gleaming on his bald head—was nonsense to her, pure hieroglyphics. Which was where Scott Sanders came in.

Scott was in the class with her. He was quiet and shy and round-faced, with gold-rimmed eyeglasses like those worn by Mr. Shama, whose every utterance Scott seemed to instantly comprehend in his preternaturally calm way. Scott had gotten early acceptance at Princeton or Stanford—Mary couldn’t remember which—and would soon be joining the ranks of pasty-skinned, virginal Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica fans who handled all the engineering and ran all the computers in the world.

But, more important than any of that, Scott was Mary’s “nerd lifeline” (although she’d never say it that way to him). Out of the goodness of his heart and his Borg Collective brain, Scott had agreed to help her with physics (just like he’d helped her with chemistry and geometry last year, and, come to think of it, every hard class they’d shared since he’d arrived at Chadwick in eighth grade). In a school full of snarky pseudo-debutantes and trust-fund jocks, Scott was that wonder of wonders: a legitimately nice person who was willing to help those less endowed with genius than himself. How many times had Scott’s homemade flash cards and drill sheets and “private tutorials”—evening hours spent together at Chadwick or at the Midtown branch library—completely saved her? Mary wasn’t sure, but the thing that amazed her the most was that Scott never seemed to want anything in return. He was “happy to help”—he was always happy to help, and left it at that.

And that was the next stop, Mary remembered now, her head throbbing as she stared across the Hudson River’s pale, gleaming surface at the haze-choked New Jersey buildings that stood far away, beneath the cold white sky. After dinner with Mom and Ellen, she was supposed to meet Scott at the Midtown library. He was going to be there anyway, he had explained, working on some kind of Advanced Placement research paper or whatever he had said—and Mary was welcome to join him and get a quick prep for the Shama test today. That was the plan—dinner with Mom (groan) and then a cab ride to the library and one of Scott’s patented tutorials.

But what happened next? What really happened?

Mary still couldn’t remember any of it. Fettuccine, red wine, Mom’s proud, watery eyes—and then, nothing.

Her thumb was already scrolling through the BlackBerry’s contact list, finding Scott’s cell number and dialing it. The phone gave another of its LO BATT chimes, and Mary clenched her teeth in frustration as she raised the handset to her aching head, straining to hear the low hum of Scott’s cell phone ringing.

“Hel—hello?”

Scott’s voice—thank God for small favors. He sounded groggy; she was pretty sure she’d woken him up.

“Scott!” she began, pressing the phone closer to her ear. “Can you hear me?”

“Wh-what—?”

“It’s Mary,” she went on, more loudly. The connection wasn’t that great—Scott seemed to have dropped out. “You there, Scott? I need your help.”

“Mary—wait, what?” Scott sounded profoundly confused, like he was still half-asleep. “You’re Mary. What the—What day is it?”

“It’s Friday,” Mary said impatiently. This was not going well. Who would have guessed that the smartest kid in school would be such a basket case when he woke up? Some little nerd-wife was going to have to deal with that, sometime—if Scott ever got married, which was doubtful, since he always seemed more interested in equations than girls. “Friday, Scott, the day of the physics test—the big killer test. We were supposed to meet last night to power-cram, remember?”

“Physics test,” Scott repeated, as if she was speaking a foreign language. “The physics test—of course. But—but, holy shit, that’s—”

“It’s today, Scott. Come on—will you wake up, damn it? Snap out of it! This is serious.”

“Serious,” Scott repeated. It took all of Mary’s self-control not to scream into the phone, to insist that he put his brain back in or perform whatever mysterious morning ritual turned him from this confused zombie into the super-genius she knew. “Right, I was—you were supposed to meet me—I forgot that we were—But—”

“Scott!” Mary tried again. The phone was dying; there was no getting around that. Mary stared over the cabdriver’s shoulder at the West Side buildings. “Scott, I’m trying to remember last night—what happened last night, I mean. I’m blacking out on some of it and I can’t remember if I met you after dinner or—Hello?”

Nothing. Silence. The call was over; the BlackBerry’s glowing display told her the call was ended. LO BATT indeed. As she stared, the phone’s screen went dead.

*   *   *

THE TINY FIFTH-FLOOR LANDING of the Shaynes’ apartment building was warm and dark, filled with the familiar smells of musty air and Pine-Sol cleanser and that faint garlic aroma that never seemed to go away, barely lit by the dim yellow light from what must have been a five-watt bulb within a cracked glass fixture on the brown-painted wall. The ancient elevator door was rolling shut behind Mary as she approached her family’s black front door, enormous borrowed tennis shoes squeaking on the cracked tiles.

What she hoped for, what would have been really ideal, was for Mom to be still asleep and Ellen to be right there, on the other side of the door, loudly moving around as she prepared to leave for school. Pressing her ear against the door, Mary strained to hear, hoping for the familiar sounds of Ellen’s quick footsteps creaking on the floorboards.

Nothing. No such luck. Silence.

Taking a deep breath, Mary raised her fist and pounded on the door.

The dizziness wasn’t quite as bad now, but it was still there. The cold metal of the door was soothing against her cheek. She pressed the doorbell, and heard its piercing buzzer rattling deep inside the apartment, and then the slow, dull padding of her mother’s slipper-covered feet coming closer.

“Just a minute,” Mom called out in her perpetually weak woe-is-me soprano. “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Mom,” Mary said. “Sorry—I don’t have my keys.”

Or my clothes. Or my bag. Or anything else.

The door’s five latches thumped and clattered as Mom slowly threw them open. Mom did everything slowly—Mary and Ellen were used to that. “Just a minute, honey,” Mom called out.

Mary felt herself stiffening as the door swung open. She had watched all her friends get yelled at by their parents at one time or another. Even Joon, whose formal, austere mom and dad seemed to believe that she walked on water—Mary had seen Joon return from Sunday lunch-and-mani-pedi with her own mother and had noticed the dim pain in Joon’s eyes, the ordeal of getting called out by your parents when you were old enough to realize just how little their opinions really mattered but still young enough to feel it in your gut: that unavoidable shame and fear that made it seem like you were five years old again—the last remnant of childhood that you knew—you hoped—you’d finally grow out of, one day.

But for Mary, it was different. Mom never yelled at her. Since Dad died there’d never been a single time when Mary could remember her mother scolding her, even mildly. When the usual argument started, like at dinner last night, Mom made her favorite move: she just left. It was like all of Dawn Shayne’s parental instinct—even the occasional desire to play the role of a stern mother—had vanished on that winter day ten years ago when her husband was taken from her.

And honestly, Mary missed it. She hated to admit that—she loved to tell her friends about how great it was to have a truly “hands-off” single parent and watch their eyes widen with jealousy at the concept of being left alone the way Mary was. But it wasn’t really true.

Now, as Mary’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and her mother stood in front of her in a pale yellow nightgown, her unbrushed graying hair clouded around her head like a dandelion flower gone to seed, Mary knew she wasn’t going to get scolded. No “Where have you been?” No “What happened to you last night?” No nothing.

And, of course, no “Happy birthday”—but you got that last night, remember? Mary told herself. You got a whole plate of fettuccine from her. Don’t push your luck.

“Hi, Mom.” Mary entered the warm apartment, shivering again as the door swung shut. The familiar Mom smells of cigarette smoke and aloe filled Mary’s nostrils. “Um—sorry; I didn’t have my keys.”

“That’s okay, angel,” Mom told her while she slowly twisted the five latches, not looking at her. Mom hadn’t seemed to notice Mary’s bizarre attire or her escaped-maniac wild hair and smeared makeup. “I was awake…. It’s almost time for my meds anyway.”

“Is Ellen still here?” Mary asked, following Mom down the apartment’s narrow corridor, past the kitchen and the hall closet and the study door, which was tightly closed as usual. Dad’s “study”—the apartment’s tiny fourth bedroom—hadn’t changed in a decade, and both Mary and Mom avoided going in there (although Ellen apparently found it a soothing place to read, which was all she ever liked to do). Even after ten years, the unmistakable aroma of Dad’s pipe smoke (Borkum Riff tobacco—Mary still remembered) had barely dissipated; probably nothing short of a fire could remove that distinctive smell from the walls and rugs and furniture in there. The slightest whiff forced a nostalgia trip that Mary was never in the mood for, and she usually found herself holding her breath as she passed the study door. The corridor could have used a paint job—like the rest of the apartment—but nothing like that had happened in a long time. They were living off Dad’s life insurance, which was a good thing, because Mom couldn’t work. The insurance kept them in groceries and necessities, but nobody was hiring any painters anytime soon. “Mom? Is Ellen—”

“I think so; she didn’t say goodbye yet, sweetie.” Mom was moving as quickly as she ever did, back toward her bedroom. She didn’t like to be away from her own bed for longer than absolutely necessary. “I’ve got to take my pills now.”

“Okay, Mom,” Mary said, noticing the line of bright yellow light beneath Ellen’s door that meant her sister was in there. “Thanks.”

And would it kill you to say happy birthday?

Apparently it would. The bedroom door swung shut, the noise echoing in Mary’s still-aching head, and she was alone in the hallway. She turned to Ellen’s door, pushed it open without knocking and propelled herself inside.

“MY GOD, GIRL!” ELLEN stared at her in surprise, smiling with her eyes wide. “What the hell happened to you?”

“That,” Mary said, nodding weakly as she collapsed into Ellen’s desk chair, “is definitely the million-dollar question.”

“But what happened?” Ellen was covering her mouth, obviously trying not to laugh. This was Ellen Shayne every single morning before school: facedown on the bed, her feet resting on her pillow, her head at the foot of the bed, thrift-store book in her hands, pinky in her mouth and her secondhand laptop open next to her for intellectual blogging. The laptop had been slowly crumbling to pieces, but she managed to hold it together with gaffer’s tape and vintage David Bowie stickers. For some reason, Ellen had recently switched from listening to those unbearable old Kate Bush albums to David Bowie. Even her musical tastes leaned toward ancient history. “Nobody had any idea where you were! I had the usual suspects”—Ellen’s cute term for Mary’s friends—“all calling me, all evening. Amy Twersky called; Joon Park called….” Ellen ticked them off on her fingers. It’s almost like they’re her friends, Mary thought bemusedly. Ellen was so used to fielding Mary’s calls, she’d developed her own rapport with the popular seniors Mary hung out with (even though they absolutely weren’t Ellen’s type). “Even Patrick couldn’t find you.”

So I wasn’t with any of them, Mary realized. Who was I with?

“They each called twice, as usual. You should see yourself,” Ellen went on. “You look like—I don’t even know what you look like.”

“I know, I know. You wouldn’t believe it. I was—”

“Where were you?”

“At Crate and Barrel—I woke up in one of the damned display beds at Crate and Barrel. Listen, can you help me figure out—”

Ellen was laughing uncontrollably. “I’m sorry,” she told Mary, shaking her head. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to laugh. But that’s—I mean, that’s pretty spectacular even for you. A display bed? Why are you dressed like that?”

“I borrowed this from some cleaning lady. Listen, Ellie-belle, this is serious—I can’t figure out what happened to me. I mean, I can’t remember any of—”

“‘Borrowed’ like you’ll return it, or Mary Shayne—borrowed?”

Mary shook her head impatiently—which was a mistake, given the lingering, painful fog inside her skull. “We had dinner with Mom at Eduardo’s; I remember that part. But after that”—she spread her hands helplessly—“who knows.”

“Poor Mary.” Ellen pouted, slapping her laptop shut. When Ellen did that, when she made a face like that, Mary could see the ghost outline of her sister’s attractiveness hidden behind her glasses and boring hair. She’s not as pretty as I am, Mary thought—she tended to dispense with false modesty inside the privacy of her own mind—but she’s definitely got something, if she only let herself realize it.

Mary really didn’t get it. The only crushes her sister ever had were on yellowing history books that she’d found in the dollar bin at the Strand bookstore. The only clothes she ever wore were solid-colored hoodies and cords from the Gap. It was a shame, too, because Ellie could have been pretty if she’d just been willing to try the tiniest bit. She actually looked a little like Mary, but with her dark hair always cut in a shapeless bob (Ellen called it practical), and her refusal to wear makeup (Ellen called it naturale), it was hard to see the similarity.

It wasn’t the first time Mary had thought that, but she’d learned not to bring it up. Ellen didn’t react well to discussions of her appearance. She didn’t think it was important. She wanted to be judged as who she was, damn it, she kept telling Mary, not by what she looked like. The hidden rebuke was hard to miss, but Mary politely ignored it. Ellen wasn’t interested in boys or clothes or anything like that, and Mary had stopped trying to change her mind.

The only boy Ellen ever spent time with was Dylan something, a quiet intellectual type she’d met at—big shocker—a book fair near Columbia University. On those few occasions when Mary had seen Scruffy Dylan in the kitchen, he had been so painfully quiet that she’d thought he was an exchange student. Mary had repeatedly explained to Ellen that having a male best friend—even if Scruffy Dylan was, technically, an Ivy League freshman—was the absolute kiss of death if she wanted to land a guy, but Ellen didn’t care, since she wasn’t in the market for a boyfriend.

“Okay, let’s be systematic,” Ellen began wearily. “You remember Eduardo’s—”

“Yeah.” Mary’s memory focused, now that she was facing Ellie again. “And Mom left first, right? She got into one of her—”

“We talked about Dad.” Ellen put it matter-of-factly, as she always did, and Mary had to force herself to remember that her sister wasn’t upsetting her on purpose—she just didn’t seem to realize how uninterested Mary was in that endless, ongoing argument. “You remember? Mom said that she wished he was here to see you turn seventeen, and you couldn’t—”

“All right, all right.” And can we drop it? Morton Shayne had been in the ground for ten years, but his absence was always a fresh topic for her mother and sister at precisely the moments that Mary was trying to have a good time. “I didn’t say the right solemn thing and Mom got all sad and left. Can we not—”

“Whatever, whatever.” Ellen waved a hand impatiently. “Sorry—it is what it is. Anyway we stayed another ten minutes, and then you had somewhere to go.”

“Where?” Mary tried to concentrate, but she couldn’t recall anything about what her motives or whims had been—besides, of course, getting away. “Did I say where I was going? Did anyone call me?”

Ellen shook her head serenely. “You got in a cab and took off. You were in some kind of hurry, but you didn’t say anything else.”

“Ellie, this is serious—I’m freaked that I can’t remember what I did.”

“Oh, you’re fine—come on,” Ellen said dismissively. The lamplight gleamed off her glasses as she checked her watch. “Nothing happened—you met some people and killed some brain cells and—”

“Ellie—”

“—partied somewhere until you did a face-plant and stumbled home in the morning just like a million other nights. Honestly, get over it.”

“Mary …? Ellen …?”

Both sisters’ shoulders slumped, in unison.

Even though their mother’s voice, muffled by two closed bedroom doors, was barely audible, it still cut through to Mary’s ears like a surgical scalpel. That voice, with the double shot of eternal tragedy and helplessness, like she was calling her daughters’ names through mosquito netting as she lay dying in a Ugandan leper colony.

“Mary-fairy? Ellie-belle? Can you come here?”

Every morning was exactly the same. Before the girls left for school, rain or shine, Mom had to have her broncho-dilating drugs for her emphysema and a glass of diluted orange juice (two parts Tropicana, one part Fiji). She needed it all brought to her in bed, followed by her pack of Virginia Slims from the dresser and her antidepressants and mood stabilizers for the bipolar disorder and her OxyContin and B12 for the chronic fatigue syndrome. It had been the same nearly every day for a decade—for so long that Mary could barely remember what her mother had been like before, when Dad was still alive. It was like she had been a different person altogether.

Ellen and Mary stared at each other, hopelessly.

“Can you take this one?” Mary asked.

Ellen gave her a nasty smile. “What’s it worth to you?”

“Come on, Elle! Look at me! It’s already like eight o’clock and I’ve got to take a shower and figure—”

“It’s only seven-forty-five.”

“—out what to wear. I will buy you a pony, I will steal you a new laptop, I will do your dishes for a month….”

And you don’t really mind, she added silently. It was true. Ellen obviously got some kind of codependent satisfaction from taking care of Mom. If Ellen ended up doing it more often, Mary had determined, it had to be because, on some level, she wanted to; it made up for not having a boyfriend to take care of.

Not that Mary would have ever said that to Ellen.

“Ellie? Mary-fairy?” Mary heard Mom’s stricken voice, that patented deathbed voice, calling for them again. “I need you, honey….”

“Please, please, please,” Mary chanted, gazing yearningly at her sister. “You’re already dressed! I’ve got to change, I’ve got the worst hangover in the history of America, I’ve got a Shama test I haven’t even studied for—”

“And it’s your birthday.”

“What?”

Ellen was smiling at her, gently, sweetly, but her eyes were flat and expressionless behind her glasses. “What’d you think—I forgot?”

Mary hadn’t thought that Ellen had forgotten. But hearing her mention it, Mary felt a familiar wave of anxiety passing over her. My birthday, she thought, with a sinking feeling. All the attention, all the praise … all the pressure to be perfect, to give everyone the little bit of me they need. All the energy it took to play the part—to be Mary Shayne for another day—was going to be amped up double, triple, today. Gorgeous! Bold! Raven-haired! Stylish without trying, cynical without being too dark, smart without being intimidating, funny without pissing anybody off, sociable but unapproachable … all those qualities she had to effortlessly exude, all the responsibilities of being the senior class’s very own superstar for another day. And she hadn’t even begun to figure out what to wear, which was a major struggle in and of itself. It was the kind of thing Ellen would never understand.

“You don’t have to do the dishes—that’s silly,” Ellen said. “But there’s one thing you can do for me today.”

“Anything,” Mary pleaded desperately. “Anything, I swear.”

But the desperation was an act—Mary was already relaxing. Ellen was going to do it; she was going to take care of Mom and let Mary off the hook. Mary could tell.

“What I want you to do”—Ellen had leaned crazily to one side and was reaching down for her canvas book bag, on the book-cluttered floor beside her bed—“is have a wonderful birthday.”

Mary stared at Ellen, who held out a small object—something wrapped in a pretty cloud of bright purple tissue paper with a gold ribbon. A birthday present.

“Where are you …?” Mom called plaintively.

“Go ahead,” Ellen said. “Take it. I’ll totally handle Mom; don’t worry about it. I’ve got three free periods anyway—I was going to skip homeroom and chill. You go ahead and I’ll see you at school.”

“Oh, Ellen …” Mary lunged over and grabbed her sister, pulling her into a bear hug. It should have lasted only a few seconds, but Mary found herself not wanting to let go. “Ellie-belle, you are a goddess.”

“Yuck!” Ellen’s voice was muffled by Mary’s crazy, matted hair as she firmly hugged back. “You smell awful, girl. Hurry up and take a shower while I do Mom.”

“Thank you,” Mary whispered, giving Ellen a final squeeze before letting go. “Thank you.”

“Here,” Ellen said awkwardly, pressing the gift into Mary’s hand. “Now, come on—stop wasting time. You’re seventeen—go out there and seize the day.”

“You’re a goddess—truly,” Mary repeated, rising to her feet. One part of her mind was already scanning through her wardrobe, facing the terrifying challenge of figuring out what to wear. “You’re sure you’re okay with this?”

Ellen smiled serenely. “Of course I am, dear sister. Now get out of here.”