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“I’m empty.”

“Here.” Alex switches out our bottles, hers heavy and cold, mine light and warm from my grip.

“I’ll get you another one,” Jack says.

“No,” she says simply, eyes still on the tweakers.

“I’ll get rid of the empty, then,” he says, but she shakes her head.

“No.”

“I’ll go get myself another one, come up with a different line of conversation, then come back and sit next to you,” he says, leaning toward her a little too much, taking up more of her personal space than she usually allows.

But she’s smiling when she says, “I would like that.”

He brings out the million-watt smile that’s separated more than a few asses in this room from their panties, but it looks genuine and sweet, like a little kid who found out he’s getting exactly what he wanted for Christmas.

“Okay, be right back,” he says. “Don’t move.”

Alex flaps her arms maniacally in response and he busts out laughing, the sound carrying as he heads to the altar, where there’s a collection of coolers and a keg.

“Um, hey, friend,” I say, nudging her knee with mine. “Part of this whole friendship gig is that you tell me when you like a guy.”

Her mouth curls a little bit in a half smile. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah, it’s totally a thing,” I say, slinging back what turns out is—somehow—the last swallow of the beer Alex gave me. “I need another.”

“So who do you like, friend?” she asks, ignoring my request.

“Adam,” I say automatically, followed by, “Fuck.”

“Why?”

I look at the collection of glass scattered near the bases of the walls, some remnants of long-broken stained-glass windows, most the dull browns and greens of accumulated beer bottles. Even the sharp edges are deceptively beautiful in the flickering firelight and the weak glow of the naked bulbs hooked to the generator. The sea of colors is punctuated by flattened shotgun shells from the hunters who hole up here during deer season, and I spot—for the first time—empty hypodermic needles among them.

“I don’t know,” I finally answer, bringing my bottle back to my lips even though there’s nothing in it. “Force of habit, maybe.”

Alex takes the empty from me, carefully balancing it on a slanted rock between my knees. “Remind me,” she says. “Which one is he?”

I sigh and rub my eyes. In the past few weeks I’ve grown accustomed to Alex’s ignorance of the names of the people we’ve grown up with, so now that I’m forcing her out into society she’s getting a crash course. But right now my brain is slowing down, my tongue growing heavy. Jack hasn’t made it back from the keg yet, his T-shirt snagged on Branley’s fingernails, sharp as blackberry thorns. She’s left Adam behind, and we look at each other across the sputtering fires, his features smeared in the heat shimmer.

And I don’t have the words to identify him anymore. If he’s not my boyfriend, then I don’t know how to differentiate him from the others.

“He’s there,” I say, pointing at him.

“Oh, him,” she says, clearly unimpressed. “I don’t understand.”

She squints at Adam, as if somehow my attraction will make more sense if he’s viewed through a fuzzy lens. And I don’t even know if I’m into him anymore, so it’s not like I can rant about how hot he is or how his eyes make me melt. Because they did back in seventh grade, but that was a hell of a long time ago. I’ve gotten so used to thinking of Adam as my boyfriend that his name and face kick in good memories and I’m salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs even when there’s no food on the way. So maybe that’s all I want anymore, the memories and not actually Adam. The explanation makes sense in my head but I’m a few drinks deep and don’t trust my mouth to make sense of it.

Alex watches Adam watching Branley, who watches Jack, who only has eyes for Alex, and I think if there were lines connecting us all it would be a tangled mess. Jack disengages from Branley, who sulks back to Adam like he’s the consolation prize. A couple of sophomores try to escape into the privacy of the woods without anyone noticing, but the tweakers call them out on it.

“Hey, man,” the shortest one yells. “Don’t let Comstock get her.”

“Long as you get her first,” the blond says, sticking his fist out for a bump, which the sophomore returns even though the girl gives him a dirty glare. They slide into the shadows, but not before she shoots a furtive glance at Alex, wondering if she heard.

“Sorry about that,” Jack says quietly as he joins us, and I don’t know if he’s talking about the fact that it took him so long to get back, or that someone casually dropped the name of Anna’s killer as if he were nothing more than an urban legend. Nothing more than a scary bedtime story to keep girls out of the woods, their pants above their ankles.

He may just be a cheaply bandied-about name now, a capitalized word that makes us shift uncomfortably and drop our voices, but he was a real person only a few years ago. A real person who kept duct tape and a hammer in the trunk of his car, waiting for the right moment. A real person who spread legs and spilled blood.