side, watching her out of the corner of his eye even when he seemed to be giving all his attention to something else, noticed that she stabbed her cheek with the straw before finding her lips.
“Do Rollo,” said Andy, egging Jeff on. Rollo was the captain of the wrestling team, a legend around school for his excessive appetite and his exceedingly small brain.
“Me Rollo,” said Jeff. “Me eat. Me eat you.” He held his arms out Frankenstein-style and went toward Lilah with them, but then seeing that she wasn’t into the game, he stopped and said, “Man, you know? Sometimes I wonder. How’s Rollo ever going to survive once he’s got to be out there in the real world?”
Lilah didn’t hang around to hear the answer to the question. “I’m going for a refill,” she said.
“You sure?” Carter said. “It’s going to be a long night.”
“Yes, I’m sure. Anyway, you’re the one who told me to have fun and relax. That’s what I’m doing.”
“It’s just—”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Carter said. “Go ahead, get your drink.”
“Thanks, I will.” Lilah could feel her face turning red.
Reed, who was quieter than the rest of the guys and always attentive to the subtleties of what was going on around him, looked at her with his wide, dark eyes, confused. Jeff, seeing Reed look, started gawking at her, too.
“That’s right, drink up, dude,” said Andy, always ready to lighten the mood, even if he did so in all the wrong ways. “Par-tay! Par-tay! Par-tay!” To prove his point, he tipped his red cup to his mouth and guzzled his beer, spilling half of it down the sides of his chubby cheeks.
God. It made her want to die. And though she knew he hadn’t really done anything wrong, she couldn’t help blaming her boyfriend. “You know, we can’t all be perfect like you, Carter.”
“Come on, Lilah,” he responded. “I didn’t—”
But she’d already stalked off for more rum and Coke, determined this time to get the balance right—ninety-nine percent rum, and a splash of soda.
Twenty minutes later, Carter and the guys were still hanging around on the deck and Lilah still wasn’t back. Though the party continued to swirl crazily around them, they’d moved into a lower key, sitting on the cushioned wooden platforms of the chaise lounges and feeling the sea breeze on their sweaty heads as they compared notes about their college-admissions statuses.
“Looks like I’m down to my safety school,” said Andy with a sigh. “Tallahassee, here I come.”
Jeff smirked and leaned back onto an elbow. “Tallahassee’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll come home next summer with a mullet.”
“At least I get to major in alligator wrangling, like I’ve always wanted to,” said Andy, trying to laugh off his disappointment.
“Jeff can come out from UCLA. And I’ll drive down from Duke,” Reed said. “We’ll film you getting your arm bitten off. We’ll be like the next wave of Jackass.”
“Ha.” Jeff slapped the cushion next to him and fell over himself laughing. “The United Colors of Jackass,” he said.
Carter tracked all this with half an ear. Mostly he was wondering where Lilah had gone, and fighting the urge to go find her. He sat slightly apart from the guys, his chin on his forearm on the deck railing, gazing at the water. It was calm out there tonight.
Noticing Carter’s mood, and wanting to bring him into the group, Jeff asked, “What role would Carter play?”
Carter smiled out of the side of his mouth. He ran his hand through his sandy hair and pulled his attention back to his friends. “I’d be the one who scientifically explained to you all the possible ways the alligator could kill you. Just so you’d know.”
“They couldn’t kill me,” said Andy, grabbing his belly with two hands and shaking the rolls he trapped there. “It takes a whole lot more than the razor-sharp teeth of an alligator to get through all this.”
Everyone laughed, and then one of those natural pauses in the conversation fell over them. They listened to the thwacks of pool noodles on bare skin and watched the bikini-clad girls in the pool, doing battle with one another from the shoulders of Rollo and his wrestling buddies.
Reed was looking around, taking everything in as usual, his head bobbing on his thin neck like it did. Gradually, his attention settled somewhere up high above them. His wide eyes widened even further. Touching Carter’s elbow, he whispered, “Don’t look now, but you might want to check out what’s happening up there.”
When he looked up, Carter couldn’t believe what he saw. There was Lilah, scrambling clumsily on her hands and knees over the curved terra-cotta shingles of the steeply angled roof, her white sundress streaked in places with thick, black grease. She appeared to be trying to raise herself up to stand from a sitting position, but Carter could see that she was too drunk to do this with any confidence.
“Jesus,” he said. He stood up and studied the stucco walls of the house, searching for a climbing path to the roof.
“Jeff, you seeing this?” asked Reed. “You might have a liability issue on your hands.”
Jeff and Andy both saw it now. They all stood up. They all craned their necks to stare at Lilah, three stories up on the roof.
“How’d she even get up there?” asked Carter. He had both hands on the top of his head, holding his hair back as he tried to figure out what to do.
“There’s a ladder built into the wall around the side,” said Jeff.
Lilah had now managed to get herself into a standing position. Her sandals swung from one hooked finger, sometimes slapping into her thigh. She gazed out over the deck, swaying drunkenly as she surveyed the scene down there: the chicken fights in the pool; the clusters of people in the corners of the deck; the wet, tattooed guys in their knee-length, tropical-print swimsuits ducking in and out of the pool house. And of course, Carter and his friends, staring up at her as though they really cared. As though Carter really cared, she thought.
Her body tilted to the right until she lost her balance and lurched. She caught herself before she fell, but just barely.
Carter shouted up to her. “Lilah! Sit down.”
“No,” she shouted back.
“You have to, Lilah,” he said. “You’re going to fall.”
“I’m not gonna fall,” she said defiantly. “You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”
She stumbled again and took two stagger steps toward the edge of the roof before catching herself.
People were noticing. The kids in the pool had stopped their game. The girls had slid down from the
