One Last Thing Before I Go

stuff, Steve called it, even though to Casey it tasted like acid, burning her throat but warming her belly. When she handed it back, Jeremy took another long swallow.
    “She broke up with me, actually.”
    She looked at his face, trying to determine if he was starting a conversation or just stating a fact. In all the years their families had been friendly, she and Jeremy had never had a serious talk. They were more like cousins than friends.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    He shrugged. “It was just sex, anyway. And not even that good, really.”
    Something in the offhanded way he talked about sex thrilled her. In the booze, the sex talk, the kiss on the cheek, she sensed the ways in which her world would be expanding in a few months. When he passed her the flask, she drank two swallows.
    “Easy there, tiger,” he said, grinning.
    It was, quite suddenly, and for no real reason, a sexy grin.
    Jeremy had always been good-looking in a bland, generic way—tall, lean, with thick dark hair that he wore short and unbrushed. Handsome, Casey thought, rather than hot. But now there was an edge to him, something a little darker and jaded, and it occurred to her that if they were strangers, she’d be checking him out. And the steam was rising off the water and swirling in the glow of the pool lights, and the moon was full and low, and Jeremy was giving her this look, maybe, over his whiskey flask, and the whiskey was making her feel flushed and tingly, and suddenly, everything felt electric.
    Jeremy told her about his breakup, and Casey told him about hers, and then he showed her Hadley’s Facebook page on his iPhone. She wasn’t exactly pretty, Hadley, but you could see why guys would think she was hot. Hadley had updated her status to read “blissfully single,” and had posted photos of herself partying with all these greasy
Jersey Shore
–looking guys. Jeremy thought the “blissfully” was uncalled for, so they went to Jeremy’s page and changed his status to read “Free at last.” It was Casey’s idea to add a picture of him and her canoodling. Hadley and Jeremy were still Facebook friends, and she’d have no idea that Casey was just his neighbor. So they started clowning around, doing a whole photo shoot with his phone, and somewhere in there Jeremy took off his shirt, and his skin was hot against hers, like the scotch in her stomach, and a few minutes later they were making out like there was no tomorrow. And somewhere in there, when they were coming up for air, gasping and grinding against each other, he mentioned that his parents were away for the weekend.
    And the moon, the hot summer air, this boy she’d known for her entire life, it all just felt right to her. And so, when the moment of decision arrived and he pulled back a little to say
Are you sure
, she reached down decisively, sliding her hand between the slick wetness of their crotches, grabbed hold of him, and guided him into her.
    Afterward they skinny-dipped and horsed around in the pool, the moonlight bathing them in a silvery hue, and she thought to herself that she couldn’t have planned a better way to lose her virginity if she’d tried.

CHAPTER 10
    S ad Todd is in the lobby, trying to get his twin boys to simmer down. They are five-year-old terrors with flaming red hair and plastic lightsabers, which they are swinging wildly as they jump on and off one of the leather lobby couches. They have spent the weekend mainlining all the sugared crap that is forbidden in their mother’s house, the cereals and ice cream and soda and candy that Sad Todd stocks his shelves with so that they’ll love him back. And so now they run circles around their hapless dad, performing dropkicks off the couch, clambering up and down the two stairs that bisect the lobby into two levels, caroming off passersby, and knocking over the potted ficus trees that grudgingly stand in every unfurnished corner. They bounce frenetically around the room like a couple of Jedi houseflies, standing still only long enough for everyone to see their unbrushed hair, mismatched shirts, and the white stains on their faces that Todd will try to pass off to his ex-wife as milk, but which are obviously the remnants of the boxful of powdered doughnuts they had for dinner.
    They call him Sad Todd because he has been living in the Versailles for more than two years and no one has ever seen him smile. He has still not bought a stick of furniture or hung a picture in his apartment, has