In the very back, behind the cleaning products and the extra sponges, I saw a large green bottle lurking. Red wine? It had been left there so long that the top was dusty, and the big bottle meant it was cheap. Too cheap to be seen in the living-room bar. I vaguely remembered Dad bringing it home a few months ago. To make sangria. Mom had told him, “I said inexpensive wine, not salad dressing.” That was like Dad, though. He did it wrong so Mom remembered not to trouble him with errands.

I paused. Except for tastes of my mom’s champagne at New Year’s or weddings, I hadn’t really ever had a drink. But I might like it, and Tig for sure would be impressed. Plus, Mom owed me some fun. She’d taken all my money and ruined my summer in one fell Monday swoop. And it’s not like I’d get caught. Mom was blind to cheap stuff, and Dad only noticed the things that were not right there waiting when he wanted them. If I made off with the Blanton’s, he’d bellow, Janine! at my mother right at 7:00 p.m. sharp. But this? It was invisible. If my brother had ever looked in this cabinet, he’d have snootched it long ago.

I had to shift half a dozen cleaning products to get the giant jug out, careful to avoid any kind of clanking. Then I put everything back and hurried away, slipping out the back door and into the night.

Tig waited at the edge of the yard, dressed in his uniform as well, though his pants were frayed at the bottom and his hand-me-down shirt had faded from navy to a muddy royal blue. I lumbered toward him, hampered by my guitar, the heavy jug, the tote bag on my shoulder. As I got close, I saw that the bruise on his cheek had faded to an odd army green in the moonlight. Last week he’d gotten into it with Assholio, his mom’s new boyfriend, but he didn’t have new bruises. Not anyplace that I could see. I lofted the jug as I reached him, and he mouthed, Damn, Smiff, yeah!

He always called me by his own slurry, punk-rock version of my surname, Smith. Never Amy. Smiff or Smiffy. I loved how cool it sounded, but I hated that it turned me into some kind of buddy-buddy. Practically a boy.

He took my guitar with careless chivalry, and the two of us hustled in silence for his car. It was a gleaming cherry-red steel tank of a car, a 1967 AMC Ambassador, or most of one. He’d built it himself out of cast-off parts in a garage bay at his ex-stepdad’s garage. It looked as danger-sexy as Tig himself, especially at Brighton, where it hulked among Jeeps and hand-me-down BMWs and convertible Miatas. Now he was gathering chunks of 1978 Chevy Novas and putting them together into another car, maybe to sell.

“Want to practice driving?” he whispered, holding out the Ambassador’s keys.

He’d offered last time, too, but I’d said no, instantly. Not because I didn’t want to. I had my learner’s permit, and I was wild to drive. But I’d worried I wouldn’t fit behind the wheel. I’d had an instant horror flash of my gut catching, of me pushing and grunting and trying to wedge my body in with Tig watching. I’d turned him down, but then I “accidentally” left my purloined Shipley snacks in the car. Once he was settled, I went back for them and tested it. I’d slid onto the bench seat behind the wheel just fine. I hadn’t taken Tig’s long legs into account. I’d been hoping that he’d offer again.

“Hell, yeah,” I whispered now, and took the keys. He had his license, so that made my learner’s permit legal. Or would have, if he’d been a grown-up.

“I been thinking about the band name,” Tig said once we were in the car with the doors shut. In my neighborhood every house was a custom build on its own huge, wooded lot. No one was going to hear us from the road.

“I thought we were the Failicorns?” I said, pulling at the silver hardware on the seat belt, blushing.

The Ambassador had only lap belts, and the one on the driver’s side was set for Tig’s slim frame.

“Failicorns sounds like an all-girl band,” he told me.

“Screw you,” I said. I had the lap belt clicked shut now. I turned the key, and the muscle car’s big engine growled to life. “What’s wrong with an all-girl band?”

He fished in his curls for the joint he’d tucked behind his ear but almost dropped it as I lurched us forward. He laughed, and I tried again, struggling with the clutch pedal. I’d learned to work a manual transmission in driver’s ed, but Tig’s car didn’t handle like Brighton’s limp fleet of hand-me-down mom sedans.

I began winding my way out of the neighborhood. Not to the front entrance, where a decorative wrought-iron gate said waverly place in scrolling letters. Toward the undeveloped land at the back. Tig tucked the joint between his lips and did that cowboy move with his Zippo, zinging it against his jeans so the lid flipped up and the light flared. I hastily rolled my window down; Lysol could only cover so much. He got himself a good lungful, then passed it over.

“Nothing’s wrong with an all-girl band, except that by definition I can’t be in one.” He talked airless and weird, holding smoke.

I rolled my own window down and took the joint, sealing and unsealing my lips to let a lot of air in as I toked. I liked to get high, but not too high. Mildly stoned made me the best kind of hungry; I was always hungry, but high I could eat without feeling the shags of fat hanging off my frame, without feeling invisible eyes judging me, without the aftertaste of shame. I’d even eat in front of Tig—a thing I never did straight—snarfling down whatever Waffle House would bring us. If I oversmoked, I felt a weird pressure, like a band around my chest, squeezing my heart. I also got paranoid, and way too free. What if I got so high I forgot myself? I might lurch at him with my hungry mouth open, my greedy hands grasping his body; it would destroy whatever the hell this weird friendship was between us, and I lived for our rambling lunchtime conversations, our study sessions at the library, and, most of all, these nights.

“What about Ragweed?” I said. “Because I’m such a bitch, and you . . . well, you know.”

Tig shook his head. He didn’t get it.

“Like, I’m always on the rag and you’re always on the weed.”

Tig laughed so hard he snorted. “You don’t go on the weed.”

“I know,” I said wisely. “You do a weed,” and I thought he might bust something. I loved making him laugh, and the farther we got from my house, the lighter I felt. The joint helped, too, so I had another puff off it.

“Ragweed. You and me,” he said, when he could talk again. “Perfect. Especially since the whole damn school is allergic to us.”

I grinned, because it was so true. We were outliers, defaulted into friends because I was fat and he was poor. No one else was either one of those things. Not at Brighton. There were a couple of chunky girls, one podgy boy, but I was the biggest human in the school. Maybe even bigger than the secretary with the huge, mothery boobs and the wig. She was Nana-aged, so no one cared if she was fat. They didn’t even care if she was breathing. She sometimes passed me Starlight Mints, sad eyes downtilted as if to say she understood that we were the same, and I hated her so much in those moments. I took the fucking mints, though.

Tig was actually, really poor, the only full-scholarship kid in the whole school. Every other scholarship was partial, doled out to a few kids with middle-class parents and 4.0s. Tig’s ex-stepdad owned Vintage Wheels, a garage where a clique of Brighton’s major power dads rebuilt classic cars for fun. The ex-step had brought Tig, who was a certified genius, to their attention. Tig took the scholarship, but he didn’t really embed. He walked the halls alone. He read smart-kid books—Brave New World, Cosmos, The Jungle—but he didn’t sit with the smart kids.

Before Tig I’d sat with them, anchored by the desperate friendship of Peg, the second-fattest girl. She’d liked hiding her body in the wider shade of mine, making me fat camouflage, but she’d never once called me up to see a movie on the weekend. Still, I couldn’t have done what Tig did before he had me, just plop down alone at a small corner table, reading while he methodically ate every scrap of food on his school lunch tray. I envied his metabolism. It didn’t occur to me that the free lunch the school gave him was most of what he got to eat on any given day.

I passed the joint, then braked as we got to the railroad tracks. We were out of my neighborhood now, into undeveloped land. Loblolly pines rose high all around us. I lumped us over the tracks, slow and careful.

Tig said, “Pussy move, Smiff,” but with no rancor. He liked to speed up and try to get a jump off, though most of the time he only jarred us so hard it rattled my teeth. Once or twice, though, it had really felt like he’d gotten his muscly steel monster airborne. I was scared to try it. What if I did it wrong? I’d scrape the muffler clean off.

As I turned onto the dirt road, Tig took another huge drag, then carefully tamped out the half joint and left it in the ashtray. He started digging in the bag, hunting meat. He came up with a sandwich.

“Oh, yeah, Smiffy, you are God.”