Not long before Peter died—halfway through Alexa’s junior year—she told him she might want to take a gap year. She thought she might want to live in California for a while. Her class was suffering from collective stress and anxiety; people were hav ing contests about how little sleep they could get by on; it was a particularly long, gray New England winter, where time and time again they opened the door for Bernice to go outside and do her business and they all swore she shook her head and backed away.

Peter didn’t say, You can’t do that. He didn’t say, That’s not in the plan. He said, “Let’s do this. Let’s do your college visits, and you take your standardized tests, and you do your applications. Just to cover your bases. And when the time comes to decide, we’ll have a conversation about it with your mom.”

Alexa didn’t understand how Peter could be so reasonable and so patient all the time. She had only seen him get truly angry twice, once when somebody keyed his car in the North End in Boston while they were all having dinner at Carmelina’s, and in 2018 when the Patriots lost to the Eagles in the Super Bowl.

Then Peter was gone. Poof. She thought that if Peter were here he’d be proud of what she’d built, and somehow his imaginary approval got intertwined with her efforts too. Later, after her fight with Caitlin and Destiny, after months and months of feeling removed from her mother’s and Morgan’s grief, her desire for a new life, a faraway life, got braided in as well. And now here she was, sixteen thousand subscribers strong.

Neither she nor her mother brought up the college visits: nobody had the time or the energy to make them happen. She visited and applied only to Colby, her mother’s alma mater, and to UMass, and got into both. As Silk Stockings gained steam, her interest in college narrowed and narrowed until it was the size of a pinhole. In May she had taken a deep breath, called Colby, and given up her spot. Come September, she would head to Los Angeles, where Silk Stockings would be but the first step in making Alexa Thornhill a brand.

She had a few things to sort out, such as, where would she live in L.A.? How much money did she actually need to get started? When would she tell her mother that she wasn’t going to Colby? She’d confided rather ill-advisedly in Tyler, but she’d sworn him to secrecy. And she’d begun to mention her plans to move to L.A. casually in the occasional video (the one about understanding current market conditions, for example), aware, as any rising YouTuber was, of the possibility of the eyeballs of a talent scout coming to rest on her channel.

She turned off the camera and checked the comments and likes on her last video, about cryptocurrency, one of her more challenging endeavors. A few hundred comments, including the usual: people who liked her dress, people who didn’t like her dress, someone who thought there was too much of a glare coming in through the window, someone who saw fit to bash the person who complained about the glare, and so on and so forth. Not too many people had much to say about the actual content. Never mind: YouTube empires had been founded on less. She scrolled down until her eyes snagged on a comment from jt76. This person had been popping up more and more in the comments, and always had something kind to say.

She thought of jt76 as a he, but of course it could be a lovesick lesbian or a transitioning teenager or a masquerading Mom Squad member. Maybe jt76 wasn’t even kind! Maybe he (or she) was from the SEC and was going to arrest her for some sort of violation she didn’t even know she’d committed.

This time it was: Really succinct explanation, I’ve never really understood this topic before! Thank you for condensing it so well!

At least somebody thought she was good at something. Even if nobody thought she was nice.

17.

The Squad

We’re not sure where you heard this, but honestly. Somebody told you Esther would be the homecoming queen? No. Sorry. You’ve been misinformed. Esther was more like that girl who manages the boys’ teams

instead of playing her own sport. You know that girl, right? Always walking around with a clipboard, telling people where

they needed to be and what time the bus was leaving. That was Esther. Homecoming queen? Please.

18.

Sherri

Sherri’s counselor had done a lot of legwork to help them settle into their new lives, greasing the wheels in important and invisible ways. Apparently the surf camp at the beginning of the summer was nearly impossible to get into without a lot of prior planning! And Katie had secured a spot. Now Katie was enrolled in a series of one-week camps through the Youth Services program in town (this week’s was Knitting for Preteens; Sherri had never learned to knit herself and was in awe of the collections of stitches Katie had been bringing home each day) and Sherri, also with the counselor’s help, had a job interview. Here she was at Derma-You, a medical spa in Danvers, interviewing with the office manager, a woman named Jan. Sherri was carrying her fake resumé in a new bag she’d bought for $29.99 at Marshalls. She thought it looked like it cost quite a bit more than that, though.

It had been a long time since Sherri had held a job. She’d stopped working after she and Bobby got married. She hadn’t exactly been changing the world; she’d been working as a receptionist at a hair salon and frankly had been happy to give it up and concentrate on getting pregnant, which took longer than she thought it would. Now, the prospect of a job interview filled her with equal parts terror and feverish, trembling excitement. She, Sherri Griffin, was going to reenter the work force!