On the walk back to Fox Hill, Roux was utterly silent. Ivy felt dirtied by what she’d seen but a part of her was also slightly thrilled, it stirred something in her stomach, like a soft sigh. She looked down at her hand, still clutching the plastic bottle dripping with cold condensation. “Oh! I forgot to pay for my Mountain Dew!”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” said Roux finally, in disgust.

Ivy opened her mouth to say—what? That she felt his shame as her own? That their mothers sounded like angry ravens? Instead, she found herself telling him about the thieving.

Roux’s reaction was one of delight. “I knew you were hiding something. I knew I was right about you.”

“Okay but—”

“And your grandmother?”

“She only—”

“But which houses?”

Ivy tried to explain that it wasn’t truly stealing, they were only taking small objects Americans themselves didn’t value. Roux didn’t care. He was already looking at her with a new respect in his eyes—and something else, insistent and hungry. She noted the dimple on his right cheek, like a comma on an unmarked page, and she wondered why he didn’t spend any effort to clean himself up. Certainly, he could be cute if he tried even a little. Wear the right clothes, get a haircut, smile at a few girls, and bam—transformation. It would be so easy for him to disguise himself as any other all-American boy, and yet he made no effort to do so, whereas she, who took such pains with her clothes and mannerisms, would always have yellow skin and black hair and a squat nose, her exterior self hiding the truth that she was American! American! American!—the injustice of it stung deeply.

* * *

“THAT RUSSIAN BOY is no good,” Nan said one day, out of the blue.

Ivy knew immediately who Nan was referring to. “He’s Romanian,” she said.

“That boy is stupid. How can he be anything else without a father? And what does his mother do for him? Nothing. I see her coming home in the mornings with her hair pulled up in that ridiculous way. Where does she go all night long, leaving her son alone at home? There are only two types of people who stay out all night: burglars and bad women. You stay away from him, you hear me?”

Ivy jabbed at her rice.

“And they’re poor,” Nan added in afterthought. “They live here.”

“So do we.”

“We’re different,” Nan said sharply. “Baba has a master’s degree.”

Ivy pointed out that Roux’s father could have a PhD for all they knew.

“Stop talking nonsense. Go help Grandma with dinner. I have to study.” Every hour Nan wasn’t bagging groceries at the Hong Kong grocery store on Route 9, she was poring over her tiny blue Chinese-English dictionary in a self-organized curriculum only she understood. Ivy once remarked facetiously at dinner that if Nan bagged groceries at an American supermarket, maybe she would learn English faster. It was the first and only time her father slapped her—on the back of the head, without a word, forceful enough to make Ivy’s ears ache for hours afterward.

That fall, Shen started his new job as the computer technician at Grove Preparatory Academy and Ivy was transferred to her new school. Her parents did not say it was because of Roux, but of course, Ivy knew it was.

“What are you wearing?” Roux crowed the first time he saw her in her uniform, so fresh out of the shrink wrap everything still smelled of plastic. “Is that a clip-on tie?” He reached for her neck—he was always snatching whatever he wanted from her—and Ivy couldn’t jerk away fast enough to avoid his greasy fingers, which had been shoveling down a slice of Giovanni’s pizza moments ago, from soiling her pristine white collar.

“Look what you did!” she yelled, but he only sneered in his usual condescending way. She licked her thumb and dabbed at the stain. “It’s Grove Academy’s uniform,” she snapped, knowing instinctively this would hurt him. “I go there now. Over in Andover.”

“Your family win the lottery?”

“I tested in,” she lied, “on scholarship.” She’d read plenty of novels about scholarship students at fancy boarding schools conquering the social chasm through a mixture of grit, charm, and beauty (most of all beauty), to find love among the heather and horse stables. Up to then, she had been perfectly content imagining herself at the local public school, like every other kid in Fox Hill. Now it was beneath her.

She tried her best to avoid Roux after that, sensing the growing divide between them, but he who was so astute at sniffing out her embarrassment was surprisingly dense when it came to her intentions toward him, mistaking her reticence for timidity. He didn’t get the point until the day he’d asked her, for the fifth time, to hang out with his “boys”—the same boys he’d once called fart-knockers—and Ivy finally exploded.

“I would never hang out with those people.”

“Aw, they’re not that scary.”

“They’re poor trash.” Nan’s words. How far Ivy had already come.

All color drained from Roux’s face except for the ears, which turned a scalded pink. She could see the film of sweat over his upper lip where the faint shadow of a mustache was starting to grow.

“When’d you become such a stuck-up bitch?”

“When’d you become a total loser?”

He raised one hand—Ivy instinctively shielded herself—but he was only reaching into his back pocket. He threw something at her, yellow and small, it hit her squarely on the chest and bounced to her feet. She picked it up. It was an old photo of herself in a threadbare blue dress, clearly one of Meifeng’s yard sale finds, with a cheap costume-like sheen over the balloon skirt. She couldn’t fathom where Roux had gotten the photo until she turned it around and saw the dry patches of glue—and then she remembered her old scrapbook, the magazine cutouts, the first time she’d discovered the empty gap between Stacey and Kristy, where she assumed her own picture had somehow come loose and was lost.

* * *

WITHOUT ROUX, IVY had no friends whatsoever. She was lonely but what she craved wasn’t friendship. Girls and boys “hung out” at school but real progress was made outside of school, at parties, and Ivy was never invited to any parties. She’d learned (in theory) the mechanics of popular games like suck and blow, spin the bottle, seven minutes in heaven, apple biting, wink, the classic truth or dare, and other acts that were not games but real life. In the girls’ locker room, she heard Liza Johnson tell the story of when Tom Cross had unzipped his fly and guided her hand to his crotch—“while my dad was driving in the front seat,” Liza said with fake horror. Ivy wondered if Gideon did such things as well. He and Tom were best friends; they did everything together. Ivy wondered what she would do if Gideon were to grab her hand and guide it to the mysterious, slightly grotesque manhood underneath his shorts, or lean over and kiss her with tongue the way Henry Fitzgerald kissed Nikki Satterfield in her cheerleader uniform at the last pep rally, one pom-pom dangling from Nikki’s hand like a shower of blue-and-white confetti. But Ivy had never even held a guy’s hand, let alone kissed one, and the only time she ever felt desirable was when she looked at the photo of herself in her childish blue-sheen dress (why had Roux kept it all this time?) and then a restless longing would throb throughout her entire body, keeping her tossing into the night, waking with bruised tender eyes, so that Meifeng would feel her forehead in the morning for fever.

Then one morning, two weeks into summer break, Gideon Speyer telephoned and invited her to a small gathering to celebrate his fourteenth birthday—“just a sleepover with friends”—and amidst all of Ivy’s stammers and high-pitched giggling, she somehow managed to choke out that she’d be there. Afterward, she stormed to the bedroom she shared with Meifeng (“Where are you running off to now?”) and stuffed her face underneath her pillow until her mouth was full of cotton, muffling the screams of panicked happiness. That night, she wrote in her diary: Everything will be different now.

But there was the problem of getting permission from Nan. Ivy told her mother she was invited to spend the night at her classmate Una Kim’s house. She even used the line she reserved for emergencies: If you’re not going to let me make friends, then why even send me to this rich-people school? It was sheer luck that Una lived three blocks down from Gideon in the new homes over in Andover. Nan’s expression had been a scowl, she didn’t say yes or no—a bad sign as Nan’s thoughts typically turned more paranoid over time.