1.

I met Will Weston during a fire drill on a gray, freezing February Monday, a few days after I turned seventeen. I was in metal shop when the bells went off, and had to go outside in my smock. Why didn’t they have fire drills during homeroom, when we still had our coats? I hid behind a tree to block the wind, and as I studied the gloomy, red-bricked façade of the school for any signs of real fire, I spotted him. Will was leaning against the stone wall, hugging himself in a thin, black sweater. He was tall and he had large, square, hulking shoulders that reminded me of Frankenstein—an aberration in a sea of boys with shoulders so narrow you could lift them off the ground by grabbing their knapsack straps together in one hand. This guy looked too old for high school. His chin was ducked toward his chest and he stared at me forever, and it was clear that he didn’t care that I noticed. I remember looking around, wishing there was someone to talk to, but I was surrounded by the dicks from metal shop. Metal shop was the great dick-alizer—we all behaved like we were in preschool, cutting each other in the soldering lines, hogging the drying shelves, all for the easy As Mr. Blake was famous for doling out. It was not lost on me that an A from Blake would finally kick my average up to an A-minus, a longtime hurdle. Anyway, one minute Will was undressing me from afar, and then he just appeared, as if in a blink.

“Blake or Dolan?” he asked, peering into my face.

“Uh … Blake,” I said, cursing my telltale gingham smock.

“I had him. A girl in my class lost her eye.”

“You were in Lisa Kwan’s class?” I asked, marveling.

“I was.” He nodded modestly.

“What happened? He told us she poked it out.”

“Her vise was loose,” he said. We both tried not to smile. “You don’t use them anymore, vises. Right?”

“No, everything’s on the table,” I explained. “He helps you when you need to make a cut. He’s sick of me. I’m always recutting.” I realized then that there was something weird about his eyes: the left eye was looking at me, but the right eye drifted off toward the Hudson River. It was both off-putting and death-defyingly hot. It also somehow made him seem too smart for me. I wondered if he was a brainiac, like everyone else at Stuyvesant High School, where I’d somehow landed like an alien on the wrong planet. In math and science, at least, which Stuy held sacred above all else, I was the opposite of a brainiac. Not quite a dumbass, but close. I felt like I was working twice as hard to do half as well as anyone else.

“You’ll get an A,” he said, rubbing his forearms for warmth. “Don’t worry. Has he shown you his oliver?”

“His what?” I asked, thinking, He has the most beautiful hair: brown, wavy, and longer than I initially thought.

“His oliver.”

“Oh God. Don’t tell me. Another pervy—”

“Go on, ask him to see the oliver,” he said. “He’ll love you if you ask him.”

“What is it?”

“You don’t want to be surprised?” he teased.

Part of me did, but I shook my head.

“It’s his silver tin of green olives,” he whispered, so that the metal-shop dicks couldn’t hear. “He keeps it in his pocket for martinis. ‘Always keep your oliver on your person.’ That’s what he used to say. You’re a junior?”

I nodded.

“I had him freshman year. He’s toned it down since then. I think he’s a less-happy drunk these days.”

“Aren’t we all,” I said.

“Settle down there, Dorothy Parker.” He held out his hand. “I’m Will Weston.”

“Thea Galehouse,” I said.

“I know.” He smiled proudly.

“How do you know?”

“That yearbook picture of you, sleeping on the desk. Your name was in the caption. ‘Thea takes a breather’ or something stupid like that. Was that during a class? Or homeroom?”

“Homeroom, I think. I was tired.”

“No shit. I could never sleep like that. In the middle of everyone. I wish I could. You have the same hair still. Like wet grass stuck to your face.” He pushed a clump of loose hair into my cheek with his thumb as people started to stream back into the building. “Anyway, don’t stress about Blake.” Will took the steps two at a time, so I did too. “He skews it to the pretty ones.”

We got inside the double doors and I faced him. “Do I look stressed out?”

“Little bit.”

I hate offhand comments about my moods. My mother still makes them constantly. But the way he said it made me think, Maybe I am stressing out about stupid freaking metal shop.

“You know,” Will said, “ever since I saw that picture of you, all schlumped out all over that desk, I’ve wanted to meet you. Do you like burgers?”

“Love ’em,” I said.

“Have a burger with me, then.”

He said it in the nicest way. It was one of the shining moments of my life. A total shock and yet right as rain.

The huge oil painting of peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant, our school’s namesake, loomed over Will by the staircase. School, the place where we spent so much of our time, was so deathly dreary at that moment. It was like Will put it all—the gray walls pockmarked with painted-over thumbtack holes, the gummy stair railings that made your hands smell like spit—into relief. He glanced at a short girl in clogs walking by. She almost stopped to talk, then didn’t. He looked back at me and I got the first jolt. The first java jolt. The first whiff of desire for his big, scary, manly-man body. And the desperation to be included in his thoughts. Me, Thea.

We made a plan to meet Friday.

I tried to think of some cool exit, but I ended up smiling and doing my weird secret-wave thing that my best friend, Vanessa, always makes fun of me for.

“Ask to see the oliver!” he called. I looked back at him. He stood there smiling at me, the sea of people jostling past him.

When I pointed Will out to Vanessa during lunch, he was standing outside between two parked cars, talking to an Asian guy in a ski jacket.

“I see what you mean, kind of,” she said, twirling her long brown curls behind her shoulder.

“What do you mean, kind of?” I asked, annoyed at her.

“I like his little slump,” she said, appeasing me, “like he can’t hold up all that tall, like it’s a real burden. Poor thing. He has a nice smile.”

I stared down at the ripped, stepped-on backs of Vanessa’s long jeans, afraid to look. “What’s his deal?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, he is so not a hipster, but I’ve seen him hang out with them. He almost has an anti-look, it’s so nondescript. Midcentury Gap. White T-shirt–ville.” She looked at me. “It’s fine, though. Completely inoffensive.”

“Do you think he looks like he’s just met someone?”

“Someone meaning you?” Vanessa continued staring blatantly. “I think he went out with Judd Lieberman’s sister.”

“When?” I asked, the squeak of sneakers on the marble floor grating on my nerves.

“Last year,” she said, putting her hand absently on my shoulder. “She graduated. Calm down.”

I went to the library and found Amanda Lieberman in the yearbook. She was pretty in a neat, preppy way I wasn’t: clean, shiny brown hair and wide, bony cheeks sort of like his. I was more blobby—cherubic, not chiseled. I kept my highlighted blond hair dirty because washing it made it limp. When it got too greasy, I sprinkled it with powder, like I read George Washington used to.

At home after school I fell asleep on our gray sectional and had a dream that Will and I were lying together on a car hood in the blazing sun in our underwear. It’s funny how love is like the flu, how one minute you’re fine and the next it digs in and takes over.

“Have you finished your homework?” Mom asked, rousing me out of my coma.

“Haven’t started yet,” I said. “I don’t start till after five.”

“Since when?” she asked, glancing at her Canal Street Chanel watch.

“Since always.” I pried myself out of the split in the sectional.

“You’ll never guess what just happened,” she said, jamming the sleeves of her blazer up her arms.

“What?” I was sitting up now, braced.

“I think I just sold my first flat. The two-bedroom on Astor. Can you believe it? The client made an offer and the seller accepted. I just got the call.” She waved her cell phone around, then combed her fingers into the front of my scalp, “lifting” my hair. “Would it kill you to wear your gorgeous hair down one day? It looks so grotty when it’s in that godforsaken mess at the back of your head.”

“Anyway, congratulations,” I said, falling back onto the couch, taking in the whole picture of what she was wearing: a short black skirt that was possibly shorts, black tights and high-heeled boots that went up to her knees. It was her signature look: a Barneys version of Madonna’s Danceteria phase.

“You wore that to the showing?” I asked.

“Got a problem with it, honey chile?” she asked, her working-class-and-proud-of-it English brogue morphing into a pathetic attempt at ghetto. She strutted into the kitchen, her wavy blond hair hitting her cheeks as she uncorked an open bottle of pinot grigio. “ ’Cause yo momma is some hot shit now, yo momma is yo real estate ho.”

I rolled over onto my stomach. I needed sugar.

“They finally gave me my business cards today,” she called. “Come see.”

I stumbled into the kitchen and she handed one to me. Her fire-engine-red grin ate up the postage stamp–sized photo in the upper left, and in the middle, in royal-blue italics, were the words “Fiona Galehouse, Sales Associate.”

“Galehouse?” I asked, flabbergasted.

“It sounds nicer than Addison,” she sniffed, dropping an ice cube into her glass. I slumped at the kitchen table. Only my mother would take her husband’s surname once they’d finally divorced. “It has a better ring for sales.” She avoided my eyes and I realized the real reason for the switch: she wanted to distance herself from the whole tax-evasion thing. My mother had gotten into some kind of trouble when I was twelve and Fiona’s, her nightclub, was winding down from its heyday. It had to do with taxes, and all I know is that Mom secretly blamed Dad for it, for not being “aggressive enough,” even though it was never really clear to me that he’d had anything to do with it. He worked at an investment bank and never spent time at Fiona’s, or with us, for that matter. It didn’t help that the tax thing coincided with the summer Dad stopped drinking. Everyone was weirdly on edge that summer—Mom screaming on the phone all day, Dad coming home from work with five bottles of Clamato—but then after making such a huge deal about getting Dad to quit drinking, Mom went and divorced him anyway.

After they did the intervention on him and Dad went away to rehab, Mom realized that she was pissed as hell that it took Dad’s boss to get him to stop, when she’d been pleading with him for years. She’d tried leaving—I remember trekking out in the middle of the night many times with my hamster and staying at her friend Maryanne’s—but we always ended up coming back to the same routine: Mom in the bedroom with her plate of cheese and crackers, her phone and the TV, Dad in his leather swivel chair in the living room, ignoring us, with his headphones and piles of paper. They had an uncanny habit of never being in the same room together. But when the almighty Bill Mindorff told Dad he’d get the ax if he didn’t sober up, only then did he take it seriously. Bill Mindorff. I’d never met him, but the picture of him in my head was crystal clear: red tie with little blue polka dots, white shirt, feet up on his desk, wielding his untold powers over Dad.

“Apparently we don’t factor in nearly as importantly as the possibility of not becoming a bloody managing director,” Mom had said one night while Dad was away “drying out.” I’d dabbed my pinky into the tub of her cold cream and swirled it around on my forehead, wondering how Dad could love his job more than us. But the fact that he was gone for all but maybe five hours on the weekends meant it must be true.

“I’ve got some beautiful asparagus for dinner,” Mom said, wiping her hands on the blue-flowered dish towel. “It’s after five. Start your homework.”

“I met a guy,” I said, fishing a rice cake out of its plastic pack.

“Ooh,” she said, downing a sip of wine.

“He’s a senior. His name’s Will Weston.”

“Is he cute?”

“Beyond.”

“Well, well, well, I’m really pleased, Thea,” she said unconvincingly, wiping her lipstick off the rim of her glass. “I’m not surprised. You’re a knockout.” She smiled at me and I studied the crescents of her red-rimmed brown eyes, eyes that looked like she could be crying even when she smiled, as if even though she was smiling, she was never, for a second, forgetting how screwed up the world was. I wondered if anyone thought she was an addict. My mother was a vegetarian who drank wheatgrass shots and herb tinctures and did yoga every day, but she still had red-rimmed druggie eyes. She banged her glass loudly on the slate countertop. “You could have anyone you want. Just take your hair out of that hive.”