The Leftovers

group as a whole got to vote on whether a couple could leave the circle and retire to a private space. The voting added an element of strategy into what was otherwise a simple game of chance. You had to keep track of a whole range of possibilities, recalculating with every spin who you wanted to keep around and who you wanted to eliminate as a rival. The goal—aside from the obvious one of hooking up with someone you were attracted to—was to avoid being one of the last two players in the circle, because they had to get a room, too, though Jill knew from experience that they mostly just sat around feeling like losers. In a way it was better with an uneven number of players, despite the embarrassment of finding yourself alone at the end, the odd one out.
    Aimee rubbed her hands together for luck, smiled at Nick Lazarro—he was every girl’s first choice—and flicked the spinner, which came from a game of Twister. The arrow blurred, then slowed, regaining its shape as it ticked around the circle, inching past Nick to land squarely on Zoe Grantham.
    “Jesus,” Zoe groaned. She was a pretty, voluptuously chunky girl with Cleopatra bangs and juicy red lips that left their marks all over people’s necks and faces. “Not again.”
    “Oh, come on,” Aimee pouted. “It’s not that bad.”
    They scuttled toward each other on their hands and knees and kissed in the center of the circle. It was nothing special—no tongue, no groping, just a polite liplock—but Jason Waldron started clapping and hooting as if they were going at it like porn stars.
    “Hell, yeah!” he bellowed, the way he always did when there was lesbian action under way, no matter how listless. “These bitches need to get a room!”
    No one seconded the motion. Nick spun next, but the arrow landed on Dmitri, so he got to go again. Those were the sexist rules they played by: Girls had to make out with each other, but the guys didn’t, for reasons that were supposed to be self-explanatory. Jill was annoyed by this double standard, not because she had anything against kissing girls—she liked it just fine, with the single exception of Aimee, who was a little too much like a sister—but because it was bound up with a second injustice: Girls could kiss, but they could never get a room, on the grounds that that would mean stranding two guys without female partners, disturbing the heterosexual symmetry of the game. Jill had tried a couple of times to get the others to reconsider this policy, but no one backed her up on it, not even Jeannie Chun, who would have been the most obvious beneficiary of the change.
    On his second spin, Nick got Zoe, and they went at it enthusiastically enough that Max Connolly suggested they get a room. Jeannie seconded the motion, but everyone else voted no—Jill and Aimee because they wanted to keep Nick in the game, Dmitri because he had a crush on Zoe, and Jason because he was Nick’s lackey and never voted for Nick to get a room with anyone but Aimee.
    That was the problem these days—there weren’t enough players, and all the suspense was gone. Back in the summer, it had been crazy; on some nights they had close to thirty people in the circle—this was out in Mark Sollers’s backyard—many of whom were strangers to one another. The voting was raucous and unpredictable; you were just as likely to get a room for a lame kiss as a steamy one. The first time she played, Jill ended up with a college guy who turned out to be a good friend of her brother’s. They fooled around a bit, but then gave up and spent a long time talking about Tom, a conversation that taught her more about her brother than she knew from living in the same house with him for all those years. The second time she got a room with Nick, whom she knew from school but had never spoken to. He was beautiful, a quiet, dark-eyed boy with lank hair and a watchful expression, and she felt beautiful with him, absolutely certain that she belonged in his arms.
    The game got smaller and duller in September, when the college kids headed back to school, and it continued to shrink throughout the fall, their number dwindling down to a hard core of eight players, and every session was more or less the same: Aimee went off with Nick, Jill and Zoe duked it out for Max and Dmitri, and Jeannie and Jason ended up together by default. Jill didn’t even know why they bothered anymore—the game mostly felt like a bad habit to her, a ritual that had outlived its