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“You are minors. You have more protections than adults,” Greg Thrasher was saying from the driver’s seat. “You not only have the right to an attorney, but you have the right to your legal guardian.”

Jodi stared down into her lap, twisting the ring she wore around her thumb. She knew these things. She should have used her freaking brain and realized that she didn’t need to answer any questions without her dad there.

Zack was the only one who didn’t need a parent, and even then, he should have lawyered up. Though he’d always looked like the youngest of them, with his baby face and inviting blue eyes, Zack’s eighteenth birthday had been in March. He’d been held back when he was younger, repeating second grade and joining the class below—Jodi’s class. She’d been the only kid not to make fun of him for being “stupid.” Four years later, he’d been diagnosed with ADHD.

“What if they have something on us?” Julian asked, leaning forward in the seat next to her. “We’d all been drinking. The cop that came for me and the girls made it sound like we were being carted away and Breathalyzed.”

“‘Good evening, officer. Am I under arrest?’” Mr. Thrasher recited, turning the car onto the freeway. “‘Am I allowed to call my father? I’m seventeen years old.’ Say it with witnesses. If he denies your request, you better hope those camera phones were on.”

“Oh god.” Zack ran his hand over his face. “Dad, there were a lot of phones in our faces at the party—”

“I know. I’m having Patricia draft a statement.”

“Dad. I don’t need your firm to put out a press release.”

“You do if you five want to go to college.”

Jodi’s eyes widened, and the boys fell silent. “Is that—is that a possibility? That colleges will see?”

“It wasn’t an arrest. How would it go on our record?”

“Just from TikTok?”

“I’m just saying”—he raised a placating hand—“that you need to keep all your records clean.”

The car was silent as they turned off the freeway. Jodi pulled out her phone for the first time since the party and saw thousands of notifications—tags on Instagram, X, TikTok; Snapchat messages, texts, DMs. It would take her hours to go through these and untag herself in the videos taken at the party. But there was nothing from her dad.

“Mr. Thrasher, did you… did you call my dad?”

“No, I was going to leave that to you, Jodi. I didn’t know if he was home.” He turned around in the seat.

“Yeah, he’s here this weekend. I guess I’ll go home and explain it to him.”

He smoothly switched into the left-turn lane and took them away from the nice side of town.

Zack stared straight ahead, tapping his fingers on the armrest. Julian’s gaze was out the window, faced away from her. Despite being the worst student of them all, Julian was all about college. He wanted East Coast, and he wanted it now. If you so much as brought up college applications, he would talk your ear off about which water polo schools were coming to see him play this fall. He needed to get out of Sacramento like he needed air.

Jodi didn’t have that. The only extracurricular she had was art, but with her grades, she could at least get into state school, maybe one or two UCs if she buckled down senior year. Having college ripped from her—that didn’t really scare her. What scared her was Zack going to USC and never speaking to her again. Lucy becoming a movie star and forgetting her name. Paige running for Congress in ten years and trying to bury pictures of them. She’d thought about just moving to LA, finding an apartment, and starting city college there, just to be close to Zack. But it made her feel pathetic.

The car turned onto her street and slowed to find the narrow lane packed with cars and people on lawns. The neighbor three houses down always threw parties on Friday nights, and as Mr. Thrasher slowed to squeeze between a double-parked car, Jodi flushed bright red.

It made her uncomfortable to be seen getting out of Zack’s Mustang on this street, but the BMW made it ten times worse. She felt her neighbors’ eyes on the car as they stopped at her house. Her dad’s old Corolla was in their driveway.

“Thank you,” she said, unclicking her seat belt. “I promise I’ll tell my dad.”

“Have him call me if he has questions. I’m going to look into what Chelsea filed on you all, so if anything happens like this again, we’ll be prepared.”

Jodi nodded, saying her goodbyes. As she rounded the car, Zack’s window rolled down.

“Hey, I’ll text you tomorrow.”

Then Julian’s voice called out from the back seat, “Snapchat!”

Some of the weight lifted off her heart. She walked up the driveway, fumbling the house key out of her bra. They waited for her to open the door and wave before driving off, and then Jodi kicked off her shoes and tiptoed into the living room.

Her dad was just where she’d left him, round belly protruding from the armchair toward the television, infomercials blasting loud enough to wake a normal person. A heavy snore rang to her ears, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Her dad’s snoring was legendary, but sometimes he didn’t make a sound, and Jodi had to press her shaking fingers to the pulse in his neck just to give herself peace of mind.

Hank Dillon was a truck driver for a big delivery company. He would spend six or seven days on the road, sleeping in his truck or stopping at a motel, before unloading and turning back around. He was gone every other weekend, but Jodi was fine with it as long as they had one day a week to get dinner at their favorite hole-in-the-wall or go to the Roseville golfing arena. When he was on the road, Jodi had the Burnses next door for emergencies, or she’d spend the night with her friends. Sometimes if he was assigned to the Florida route, she’d stay with her grandmother and aunt for the week, but it was hard to hear her mom’s sister and mother talk about how much of a failure her dad was. They’d whisper about how Jodi didn’t eat carrots, didn’t exercise, didn’t go to church anymore. It was annoying.

Her dad gave a mighty snore, and Jodi quickly bent to pick up the beer bottles at his feet and took them to the kitchen. She turned the TV off, turned the fan on, and grabbed a glass of water for each of them.

The school newsletter hung on the fridge under a Goofy magnet, and Jodi let her eyes pass over the memorized words.

As many of you know, we suffered the tragic loss of Emily Mills (Class of ’26) in May. The Millses would like to invite the entire school to a memorial on the New Helvetia football field on August 9.

That was just under two weeks from now. Jodi stared at Emily’s yearbook photo, which was included in the announcement. Just behind it, conveniently covered by other magnets, was a short note Jodi had been ignoring all month. It was from Emily’s mother, Maureen, inviting her over any time if she was sad or wanted to talk about Emily.

Jodi had asked the others if they’d gotten a note in the mail, too. They hadn’t.

She couldn’t imagine sitting down with Maureen Mills, lying to her about what good friends she and Emily had been and trying to tell her stories about their fun times together. Sure, Jodi had been conned into a few more shopping and movie dates than the others, but that’s because saying no to Emily Mills was like kicking a puppy.

A girl is dead because we didn’t invite her in our prom limo.

Was Lucy right? Were they partially to blame for this? Was that why Detective Harding was looking into them?

No one had invited Emily in the limo. Emily shouldn’t have assumed they would—she wasn’t friends with them. Not close enough, at least. She wondered where Emily’s wires had gotten crossed. Sophomores needed to be invited by upperclassmen to prom, so there must have been a misunderstanding if she was in her dress when she died.

Shaking her head clear, Jodi set a water glass next to her dad and went to her room. It was themed in monochromatic gray with pops of blue—a pillow, her desk lamp, the art on the wall. Her desk was cluttered with summer reading she was ignoring, opened makeup palettes, and her sketchbooks. Jodi’s charcoals and watercolors hung on the walls next to pictures of her and Zack. She climbed into her bed after a quick scrub with a makeup remover wipe, dismissing the notifications flashing on her phone. Too many tags to go through now. There was a text from Lucy, asking her if she got home okay—which she always sent to each of them after a night out. She responded and saw that she’d missed texts from her while they were at the party. Pictures of Lucy and Paige dancing, and the question WHEER RU?

Jodi tapped the picture to save it to the folder on her phone labeled Blackmail that she always joked about, but stopped when she realized a lens flare had cut a slice through both of their faces. If it had been done on purpose, it was awfully artsy. But by accident, it was odd. Like a knife slashing in the light, crossing their cheeks and jaws. It gave her the chills.

Just before she shut her phone off for the night, her eyes were drawn to the unknown number in her text list.

are you having a nice summer?

Jodi frowned and texted back, Who is this?

She waited twenty minutes for a response before finally lying back and waiting for sleep to come.

“You’re Jodi Dillon.”

Jodi looked up from her calculus homework to find a blond girl staring down at her. “Yeah?”

“Cool.” The girl took the seat next to her. “I’m Emily. I follow you on Instagram. I’m EmilySmiles on there.”

She sure was. Her teeth were oddly wide for her mouth, and her eyes were big and bright. She stared at Jodi like she expected her to know all of her followers by their handle.

“Hi, Emily.” She didn’t know what else to say, so she flashed her a quick grin and turned back to her book.

“You’re Zack Thrasher’s best friend.”

There it was. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time that someone decided to talk to her, only looking for a way to get closer to Zack. It was unusual that the person was so forward with their intentions.

Jodi took a deep breath and looked up again. “Yep. That’s me.” She shut her book, ready to engage fully. “Are you a junior?”

“Sophomore. But I’m in your bio class.”

“Oh.” A flush rose in her cheeks. “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you—”

“It’s okay,” Emily said. “I sit behind you.”

Jodi nodded, staring at her and trying to figure out what it was about this girl that had the back of her neck prickling. “Did you… did you want to study sometime? Or was there something you…?”

“No, no!” Emily shook her head and her hair fell into her eyes. She didn’t push it away. “I just wanted to meet you.”

“Right. ‘Zack Thrasher’s Best Friend.’” Jodi pointed a sarcastic thumb at herself, ready to begin her excuses for why she needed to get going.

“No, you . I wanted to meet you.” Emily’s blue eyes seemed to sparkle to life as she stared deep into Jodi’s. “You’re Jodi Dillon.”

She blinked at Emily, waiting for her to elaborate, but it seemed that “Jodi Dillon” was enough for her.

She felt her chest warm and something long-forgotten swell.

When Jodi stumbled to the kitchen in the morning and opened the cupboards, she heaved a sigh. Nothing, or at least, nothing edible. She glanced at the empty chair in front of the TV and the undrunk glass of water, the snores now coming from the closed bedroom door at the end of the hall.

She’d texted him about groceries yesterday afternoon, and he’d agreed to pick them up. Jodi opened the fridge. The only new items were the beers.

Jodi scrubbed her face, slipped into the last of her clean clothes, and walked to the bus stop. Two stops later, she was shopping at the nearest store, her arm sagging under the weight of a grocery carrier filled with a gallon of milk, two boxes of cereal, and ten-for-$10 frozen dinners. She heard her name by the checkout.

“Jodi.”

Maureen Mills was standing behind a shopping cart, a genuine smile on her tired face and fingertips playing with her crucifix necklace. Jodi’s lungs seized. She felt like she was underwater.

“Mrs. Mills. Hi.”

Jodi saw a woman throwing herself over a body bag, screaming.

“It’s good to see you.” Mrs. Mills pushed her cart to the side, filled with vegetables, bread, and meat. Jodi tried to shift her carrier behind her. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”

Finding her voice, Jodi finally said, “I got your note in the mail. I’m really sorry that I haven’t come by.”

Mrs. Mills gave her a watery grin. “I understand. Everyone has different grief.”

Grief. Right. She was grieving Emily—that’s why she couldn’t bring herself to face her parents.

“I, um… I’m looking forward to the memorial in August. Not—not looking forward to it, but—”

“I get it,” Mrs. Mills said kindly. “We had such a small service for the funeral, didn’t really invite anyone outside the family. I’m glad the school organized a way to let her friends say goodbye.”

Jodi nodded, wondering which friends Mrs. Mills meant. Did she know the police had questioned the only people who might fall into that category?

It was quiet for a moment that felt like an eternity. Jodi itched for something else to say in response, before finally settling on something. “Emily was a really nice person.”

Mrs. Mills’s left eye twitched at her daughter’s name, and her mouth wobbled into a grateful smile.

When she said nothing in return, Jodi continued. “How’s Hannah?”

“She’s—she’s still processing,” Maureen said. “We sent her to a computer science camp this summer to get her mind off everything, but she starts at New Helvetia this year.”

Jodi’s mouth opened and closed. “Great.”

“Listen, Jodi.” Mrs. Mills stepped closer and gripped her necklace in white fingers. “I know how much you meant to Emily. And I want to thank you for being there for her in April…”

“In April?”

“When she first tried. And you stopped her.”

Swallowing hard, Jodi said, “Tried what?”

Mrs. Mills’s lips quivered. “We found it in her journal. When you stopped her from killing herself.”

Jodi felt like a bucket of ice had been dumped down her shirt. “In April?” Her voice was weak.

“She wrote about it. So we know that she had been struggling for some time.” Maureen wiped her eyes. “Robert and I are just so glad you talked her out of it then, so we all had a little more time with her.”

Jodi felt like she’d misheard, like the entire universe had skipped forward and left her behind. “I’m so sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. I had no idea Emily tried to kill herself in April.”

Maureen tilted her head, surprised. “She wrote it in her journal.”

“Can I see it?” Jodi’s heart was pounding.

“We don’t have it.” Maureen looked apologetic. “It’s… well, it’s with Detective Harding.”

Jodi’s eyes widened at the detective’s name. Harding’s questions flared to life in her memory. But she never talked to you about suicide?

“Mrs. Mills, I promise you. If Emily had mentioned it to me, I would have told an adult.” She rubbed her palm, searching her memories. “Maybe I didn’t understand what she was saying at the time—”

“It’s alright, Jodi,” she said with a smile. “We’re just so glad that—that you helped Emily when she needed it.”

Acid rose in her stomach. It felt like a lie when Jodi smiled, agreeing.

“Well, I’ll let you continue with your shopping.” Mrs. Mills reached for her cart. “And if you ever need anything, please call. Emily told us that your dad is”—her eyes flicked to the frozen dinners—“out of town a lot.”

Her cheeks heated. “Thanks. It was great to see you. I’ll try to stop by soon. And um, I’ll try to bring Zack and the others.”

All the warmth drained from Maureen’s face. “That’s not necessary. Thank you.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach, like someone had punched her in the gut. “I have no interest in seeing that boy ever again.”

She blinked at Maureen. There was a sloshing in Jodi’s ears. She felt herself sinking.

Maureen squeezed her shoulder with a tight smile. “Good to see you.” Then she was pushing her cart down toward the whole grain crackers and out of sight.

Jodi struggled to catch her breath as she ran to the checkout, feeling like water was filling her lungs and closing her throat. She paid for her groceries and walked to the bus stop in a fog.

There was a journal, and the police needed it for some reason.

There was a journal, and Jodi wasn’t sure they could trust what was inside of it.