“Do a little turn for me, sugar tits.”

“How dare you treat me like an object,” I said, but I stood and turned for her and she whistled.

“You’re a dapper young lady-killer.”

Then Georgia and Muz arrived and brought Pongo downstairs and we started playing Never Have I Ever with vodka shots, but by sunset my nerves were still getting the better of me, so I snuck a bottle of red wine from my parents’ liquor cabinet and took it back to the basement and drank a glass. When that did nothing to calm my nerves, I drank another glass, and a third, until it was time to go and almost the whole bottle was gone. By the time we got there and the cool, pink-tinged light of sunset was settling over the fairground, we were all swaying, drunk not only on booze but on the magical possibility of the night ahead.

La interlocked her arm with mine as we made our way into the fairground. “Are you ready for this?” she said.

“No.”

“What do you think she’ll be like?”

“I can never predict what she’s going to do. All her East River friends are going to be here, so I assume I’ll say hello and happy birthday and that’ll be it. That’s all I want to do, really. Let’s just have fun, La. You and me against the world. Screw the rest.”

“Sounds like a mighty fine plan, darling.”

I didn’t know where Grace would be, only that she’d be here somewhere, surrounded by people I wouldn’t recognize. The five of us made our way through the crowds toward the Ferris wheel, its multicolored baskets shining like hard candies in the evening light. The speakers of an antique carousel crackled out Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” while an old couple danced in line for fries at a food truck.

And as the music played, I saw her through the crowd. The people parted around us as if they could feel me staring at her.

Grace Town was not Grace Town.

She was dressed in a red coat with red lipstick on her lips. Her hair was washed and curled and honey blond and fell around her face in soft waves. There was color in her skin, like she’d been out in the sun all weekend. Blush on her cheeks, even, like she’d made a real effort with her appearance. I could see what Lola meant when she said Grace looked like Edie Sedgwick. They both had that femme-fatale, might’ve-just-overdosed-on-heroin-and-been-brought-back-to-life-by-adrenaline look. She was set alight, shining, the stars that died to give her all the atoms that made her glowing from beyond the grave. I’d never seen anything so excruciatingly, heartbreakingly beautiful.

Grace was surrounded, as I knew she would be. I’d seen glimpses of the girl she’d been before—the type of girl who could fill a fairground with friends—but here was proof, in the flesh. Grace saw me staring then, and she smiled and beckoned me over.

“Henry,” whispered Lola, squeezing my arm. “Don’t.”

“Look at her, Lola.”

“I am looking. All I see is bait.” I said nothing, but because La was my best friend, and because we’d known each other all our lives, she sighed and let me go. “Be careful.”

Grace and I walked toward each other through the crowd, our steps slower than the people bustling around us. Time seemed to slow, too, as if it were coated in honey, thick and sweet and golden.

“Look at you,” I said to her, and she smiled tiredly, the way she did.

“It’s been a long time,” she said, smoothing out the red woolen fabric of her coat. I could tell from her lightness, the way her voice sounded so sweet and carefree, that she, too, was already drunk. “I hardly feel myself in these clothes.”

I ran my fingers across her cold cheek and Grace smiled and kissed my palm. “You’re beautiful,” I said. “I missed you.”

“We can fix that.”

Then she took my hand and led me away from my friends and her friends. I’d expected to spend the evening at a distance from her, stealing glances across the fairground, maybe having a brief conversation. Now my hand was in hers, our fingers entwined, like they had been that one night we’d walked home from the movies together. The night I’d been sure we would be together.

It was like a montage out of a film, everything seen as if through a filter. We wandered the fairground for hours, me with my arm around her waist, and she didn’t even seem to care that people would see us. That night, Grace was not Grace; she was effervescent, lighthearted, a character out of a book. We competed against each other at bumper cars. Fed each other cotton candy. At the top of the Ferris wheel, we took swigs of straight vodka from her flask. The city, sprawled out in the distance, looked small from up there, a collection of toy buildings in a tilt-shift photograph. I even won her a prize at the laughing clowns. And I lapped it up, every moment of it, thinking that this was how things would be from now on.

Grace took my hand again—God, why was it so easy for her to touch me when she’d been drinking?—and led me away from the crowds, down toward the empty field next to the Ferris wheel, where it was quieter and there were fewer people.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she said when we came to a stop.

My chest and face immediately started burning. My ears felt like they were on fire. For weeks I’d been working toward this moment, certain that it would never come, and now it was here and instead of feeling elated, I felt like I was going to vomit. I wanted so badly to stick to my guns, to make her feel bad for the weeks of hell she’d put me through when she chose her dead boyfriend over me.

You chose somebody else, I said in my head, for the hundredth time. How am I ever supposed to get over that?

But because she was beautiful and I wanted her so badly and here she was, finally saying the thing I desperately wanted her to say, I just said, “Grace, I really don’t . . .” My voice trailed off and she started talking over the top of me and with every beautiful word that dripped from her mouth like poison, I grew sicker and sicker, like Murray had said I would, and wanted her more and more.