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“Erin has a shit ton of stencils,” I tell her. “She uses them all the time for the food pantry signs.”

“I made you say shit,” Lydia says, with a grin. “And fuck the food pantry. You know that’s not my point.”

“Whatever,” I mutter, and open my laptop, my fingers dancing across the keyboard as I set the audio controls. “Are you ready to record this or what?”

“It’s a girl,” Bristal says suddenly.

“What?”

“Beck’s baby, it’s a girl,” she repeats, her voice flat and odd without the edge of anger that she usually carries.

“Oh . . . well, congrats,” I say.

“That’s part of the reason I want to know about Denise, okay?” Bristal says, raising her eyes to mine. “Beck got fucked, and it sounds like Denise did, too. I just don’t want to see how many generations of girls Henley can keep chewing up and spitting out.”

“Okay,” I say, my own anger suddenly drained. A silence settles over us, and I look down at my audio controls. Everything is set and ready to go, the reason why Bristal and I are sitting here in a linen closet, knee to knee. But it doesn’t feel important right now.

“Was Beck trafficked for drugs in Trash Park?” I blurt.

“Trash Park? I don’t think I know that name,” Bristal says, her face a mask of mock confusion. “Let’s see . . .” She whips out her phone, tapping an address into a mapping app. “Oh wait, I found an Ash Park. You know . . . where I live?”

“Right, yeah, no,” I stammer, the blood rushing to my cheeks. “I mean, it’s on Trillium Lane, right? So I was thinking about Trillium Lane and Ash Park at the same time and it all got tangled up on my tongue and it came out as Trash Park. Isn’t that weird how that happens sometimes? Like your mouth gets ahead of your brain and it all comes out messy like that? I think there’s a name for it. I’m sure there is. Something like being dyslexia but not quite the same?”

“It takes a lot less oxygen to just apologize,” Bristal says.

Crap. I close my eyes, wishing the soft, squishy walls of the recording closet would close in on me.

“Here, I’ll walk you through it,” Bristal says. “Repeat after me—I, Lydia Chass, was wrong.”

“I was wrong,” I say, willing the words past the lump in my throat.

“Wait, hold on, this is for posterity,” Bristal says, and I open my eyes to see her checking her phone. “Okay, start over—I, Lydia Chass, was wrong, at three twenty-three p.m. Eastern time—”

“Oh my God, just stop,” I say. “I’m sorry, all right? Really, actually sorry.”

Bristal nods, accepting the apology. “But no, to answer your question. Beck got pregnant the old-fashioned way: she fell in love; he didn’t.”

“That sucks,” I say, meaning it.

“What sucks more is that you thought she was being passed around like a party favor,” Bristal says.

“It’s what I heard, okay? And I asked out of concern.”

“Maybe you did,” she says. “I’ll give you that, because I think you’re actually a decent person. But the truth is that I hear a lot of things about where I live, and most of them are wrong.”

“Okay,” I say as my laptop screen goes dark, sliding back into sleep as our discussion continues. “Like what?”

“You know all the fires?”

“House fires?” I ask, but I can’t feign like it’s a true question. The fire department is called out to Ash Park a few times a week, and while the official blotter might read that there was a kitchen fire, everyone assumes it’s a meth lab mix-up.

“A few of those were arson,” Bristal says calmly. “Some of the respectable residents of Henley would rather we weren’t residents at all.”

“Were the police told this?” I ask, but Bristal snorts.

“No, people in Ash Park don’t invite the cops into our homes. Beck called nine-one-one in fifth grade after we got that long talk about how the police are our pals; remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember.” The Henley police force had come into the school with Popsicles and rubber bracelets, encouraging all of us to say something if we saw something. “Why’d she call the cops?”