“That’s the study.” Seeing her eager gaze, he showed her the study, the living room, the kitchen, the heavy grandfather clock in the family room that looked like a glass eye following their every movement.

Her own apartment in Fox Hill, she’d always thought of as a place where she ate and slept, a place that belonged to no one, not her, not her family. But Gideon clearly did not share this viewpoint of his house. All the rooms, the furniture, the such-and-such knickknacks they’d bought on various vacations, were “mine” or “ours”; he had ownership over everything. Ownership, Ivy noticed, had a very specific sound. You could hear its authoritative quality in a person’s voice, in Gideon’s evenly paced sentences and clear enunciations. During their poetry recitations last marking period, Mr. Markle, who was also the debate coach, had lavished praises on Gideon for his oratory skills, and Gideon had explained in front of the entire class that he used to stutter and had been enrolled in speech therapy for ten years. “Why, everyone should enroll!” Mr. Markle had joked, and while everyone else had laughed, Ivy had been astounded because she couldn’t fathom that something as easy as talking would require effort and diligence on Gideon’s part, the same kind of effort Nan exerted into her little blue dictionary. She’d assumed everything about Gideon was innate and effortless. Did that mean that ownership, then, was something that could be learned?

In the foyer, they ran into Gideon’s older sister, Sylvia Speyer, a senior at Grove, on her way upstairs, balancing a tray containing a pint of H?agen-Dazs, a Starbucks coffee, and a little tumbler filled with ice and yellowish liquid.

“Where’d you find the cabinet key?” said Gideon.

“In Ted’s penholder. Want some?”

“No.”

Sylvia caught Ivy staring—Ivy looked away, pretending to examine a photo along the staircase of the siblings in their swimsuits, curled up in lawn chairs, laughing toward a setting sun.

“That’s Finn Oaks,” said Sylvia, following Ivy’s gaze.

“What’s that?”

“Our summer cottage in Cattahasset.”

Summer cottage, Ivy added to her repertoire.

“Have you been there yet?”

“No,” said Ivy. She couldn’t look at Sylvia straight on, the loveliness was too blinding.

“Well, Giddy’s always bringing his friends in the summers.”

This hinted-at invitation, so carelessly tossed, sent Ivy’s heart racing with a longing so acute she felt dizzy. “I’m Ivy,” she whispered.

“Like the plant,” said Sylvia.

“Dad knows about the penholder, Sib,” said Gideon, “so you should put it back soon.

Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Puh-leease. He has a six a.m. flight tomorrow. He won’t notice a thing.” She floated upstairs with soundless footsteps, a pristine maid doll in her pressed black skirt and servant tray. Her perfume lingered in the air: something tangy, like lemons, and the ocean.

No one acknowledged Ivy when she descended into the basement, at least not overtly, only in side glances and cool smiles. This was a sign of welcome. To fuss over her would have been to state that she didn’t belong. Gideon showed Ivy the area with the sleeping bags and told her she could leave her things there. Tom Cross snatched the gift bag from Gideon’s hands—“What’s this?”—and proceeded to read Ivy’s card in a long, drawn-out tone—I hope we have some classes together next year, Gideon… Tom was a performer: chestnut curls, so many freckles he looked as if he had a year-round tan; he always had an audience. When he was done, he tossed the binoculars in the pile of pillows. “Doesn’t your dad have something like this?”

“Yeah, but I don’t,” said Gideon.

“Where’s my birthday present?” Tom asked Ivy.

“When’s your birthday?”

Tom’s eyes widened. “She speaks!”

Only Una Kim looked furious to see Ivy. They had actually been sort-of-friends once: two Asian loners, Ivy the quiet and poor, Una the rich and chubby. Then Una went to Korea the summer before seventh grade and came back fifteen pounds lighter, with permed hair, contacts, and a higher nasal bridge. She had lost no time in casting Ivy away, the feckless barnacle, by tattling to Liza Johnson that Ivy had called her “a dumb cow” (untrue) who “couldn’t pronounce words longer than five letters” (true). The most infuriating part of this entire thing was that Ivy had been contemplating casting Una off, had even planned where she would sit at lunch instead (at the fountain, reading books with a sophisticated air of mystery), but Una had beaten her to the punch. From this experience Ivy had learned a critical lesson: timing was everything.

Liza and the twins left the boys and came over to Ivy. Una reluctantly followed. They sat in a circle. Violet Satterfield offered to crimp Ivy’s hair. Ivy saw that, indeed, the other girls’ hair was all in various states of aggressive squiggles, as if they’d been electrocuted. “Okay,” she said gamely. Now was surely when Violet would torch her hair on fire, or shear her head bald. She hid the slight trembling in her lips by blowing bubbles with her stale gum.

Violet returned with the crimper. She snapped at Una to scoot over. Una said, “You scoot over,” but she did as she was told, angling her body to the left until she was slightly outside the circle. Una, Ivy saw, was not wearing a bra underneath her dress. The imprints of her nipples rose up through the thin cotton fabric, the size of quarters. Henry Fitzgerald and Blake Whitney tried to find out if Una was ticklish and they took turns squeezing her ribs, mesmerized by her voluptuous breasts, bouncing like water balloons.

“What’s that monkey called,” Liza asked no one in particular. “The one with the pink face?”

“A baboon?” suggested Henry.

“That’s the one! Una looks like a great big bouncing baboon.” In that moment, with her translucent skin flushed pink with shame, Una really did. That was when Ivy realized why Liza and the twins were being so nice to her: they were punishing Una for her breasts. This discovery filled Ivy with hope. It was the oldest law in physics: the system itself can never change, it can only be rearranged.

* * *

AFTER WASHING HER hands with the Speyers’ mint-scented hand soap, Ivy took her time tousling her hair, fixing her shirt, squeezing her cheeks so they appeared more flushed. Idly, she opened the mirror cabinet and inspected the contents: Advil, cotton balls, extra hand soap embedded with exfoliating suds. In the back corner, she noticed a half-empty bottle of a French perfume. She spritzed some on her neck, her wrists. Deeper in the cabinet, she pushed aside a box of Band-Aids to discover an old hair tie, threads of silvery gold hair knotted around the black elastic. Ivy slid it over her wrist. “Hey, Gideon,” she whispered, attempting Sylvia’s ethereal gaze. She closed the cabinet door and went back downstairs.

At nine o’clock, Gideon’s parents came down with four boxes of pizza, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and two tubs of vanilla ice cream. You can know everything about a person by looking at his family, and Ivy felt as if she had discovered the key to Gideon’s makeup: in his youthful mom with her cropped khaki trousers and green sleeveless blouse that revealed two luminous, white arms; his dad, a Massachusetts state senator, who was dignified and trim and knew all of Gideon’s friends by name—“I don’t think we’ve met yet,” he said, enveloping Ivy’s hand in a hearty handshake. At her look of glowing adoration, he added that she was welcome at their house anytime.