Five girls were crowded around the big round booth at Verde. It had been a tradition for nearly two years now, though I’d hoped that during my semester in Europe, the other girls would have found a new lunch spot. We met here after shopping, after the movies, after mani-pedis at the nearby spa. We ordered lunch and drank bottomless iced teas and gossiped. And though I figured I’d already drunk my life’s worth of Verde’s bottomless iced teas, here I sat with them, post mani-pedi, and listened to them gossip about hook-ups and parties and relationships I never even knew had happened, and didn’t actually care about.

“Ladies,” said our waitress, arriving with menus. I sank farther into my seat and avoided eye contact as she started passing them out. It was one of the red-headed waitresses. There were two, and they looked almost exactly alike, but this one was a couple of dress sizes smaller, several hair shades brighter, and about a hundred times meaner than the other one. She was also Tess’s best friend.

“Hannah,” she said flatly as she handed me my menu. “You’re back.”

“Yep.” I gave her a closed-lip smile. “Miss me?”

“No.” She turned around and left.

“What was all that about?” Caitlin asked.

Oh, nothing, Caitlin. It’s just that last semester, while I was stalking the slutbitchskank who stole my boyfriend—not because she stole my boyfriend, mind you, but because I had just found out she was my sister—I spent a lot of time refusing to leave this restaurant, so the red-headed waitress and I grew quite close. Well, as close as enemies can be.

I doubted that would go over well. I also decided then and there not to trust any drinks she served me. She’d probably spit in them.

School started in a little over a week. When it did, I was going to sign up for my parents’ pre-approved schedule and declare myself a comp lit major. I was going to do my work, improve my GPA, and stop being such a screw-up. I was going to sign up to be a French tutor. It was a good plan.

It was a good plan.

After we ordered, the usual lunch commenced, with casual conversation regularly interrupted as the other girls checked their phones for new texts, Instagram updates, and other communications from their friends and love interests. All the friends who I was in regular contact with were sitting at this table, and Boone hadn’t texted me again in a week, so whenever talk around the table died down as everyone got involved with their phone, I clicked through to my blog and checked the stats again. Twelve thousand. People were reading all my other reviews and posts, too. The entire blog had gotten a bump from the Render review. The post on French horror films was particularly popular, and the comment section had turned into a bilingual debate about Inside. I was tempted to jump in, though I knew what I should really do is just delete the blog. This was exactly the kind of distraction and waste of time my parents were talking about.

Only, how could I delete The Final Girl when people were finally noticing it? I kept reading the comments. Some other time, some other Hannah, would have been posting up a storm right now. But I’d promised my parents I’d be good. I promised them I’d get serious.

Still, classes hadn’t started yet. Posting on the blog wasn’t any more of a distraction right now than getting a pedicure. I logged in.

I was halfway through an impassioned defense of Inside as a uniquely feminist take on body horror when I heard Caitlin say my name.

“Isn’t that right, Hannah?”

I looked up, my head full of images of knives and blood and minimalism, to see the table of young women staring at me in the sunny restaurant. “Hmm?”

“Go ahead,” she coaxed. “Tell them about that crazy homeless guy you slept with this summer.”

I shot her a look. That was how the story was going to be categorized? That Time Hannah Slept With a Crazy Homeless Guy?

“He wasn’t homeless,” I said.

“You said he was living on some wreck of a boat.”

“That’s a home,” Emily pointed out.

“No, it’s a boat,” said Caitlin.

“A houseboat?” asked another girl.

“The point is, he wasn’t a bum or anything,” I said. “The way you say it makes it sound like I picked up some guy begging for change on the street.”

Caitlin started ticking off fingers. “Fact: he told you he lived in his car before he started living on his broke-down dump of a boat. Fact: he kept calling you until you went out with him again, and then he was a total jerk and said you couldn’t see each other because of his baggage or whatever. That means he’s crazy. Crazy and basically homeless. What did I get wrong?”

“Nothing.” Everything. “But I’m never telling you anything ever again.”

“What was his baggage?” Emily asked.

I shrugged. This wasn’t lunchtime fodder. I hadn’t even told Caitlin the details. She’d asked me how it was going with my bit of rough and I told her that it wasn’t. My version of the story did not go into detail about where he got the boat or his sordid family history. “If anything, I was the crazy one. I hardly knew anything about him and I let him drive me around not once, but twice, to remote locations. That’s like the beginning of every missing person report ever.”

“But he was cute, right?” said another girl.

“Jeffrey Dahmer was cute,” Caitlin pointed out.

They started talking about whether or not that was true.

“I don’t think I’m cut out for casual hook ups,” I said softly, but no one heard me. I returned to my online conversation about fictional murderers, stuff that scared me a lot less than trying to figure out what in the world had possessed me to go out on a boat with a total stranger after not telling anyone where I was. It was stupid. He could have been a serial killer. This was exactly the kind of risky behavior my parents were so concerned about.

That’s what my next horror screenplay should be about. Except I wasn’t writing any more of those. I had come to my senses. I had a plan. A good plan.

If I kept saying it enough, I’d eventually believe it was true.

---

It was entirely possible this dress was too short for a fundraiser with my parents’ friends. I’d bought it in Paris, and sometimes things that seemed like good ideas in tiny, fashionable boutiques in picturesque foreign cities seemed foolish and over the top once you got home to the country club set in your boring American suburb.

The skirt barely hit mid thigh, and the top of the dress—well, from the front it was nice and modest, but the back fell in a plunging drape to my waist, with thin, sparkling gold chains stretching from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I’d paired the dress with metallic gold strappy sandals and long dangly earrings made of similarly tiny golden strings. With my hair blown out straight and falling over my shoulders like a blonde shower, and my summer tan, I knew the look was a showstopper.

I stared at my reflection in my bedroom mirror and sighed. It was meant for some hot date to a cool club or spectacular night on the town. I was supposed to wear dresses like this when I was impressing some guy, some guy who’d have eyes only for me, who’d think I looked like an angel from heaven in this dress, who’d love me, worship me, live only for me.

The trouble with being raised to be a trophy wife is that first someone actually had to think you made a pretty good trophy. I was beautiful and accomplished, and maybe that would have been enough for Jeffrey Connell and his cold, well-defined business plan, but it wasn’t enough to make a man actually fall in love with me. Dylan may have been dazzled for a few months, he may have appreciated the wardrobe advice I gave him and how cute I looked on his arm, but I wasn’t the girl he wanted. I wasn’t the girl he loved.

The things I’d spent my life focusing on were so useless. Guys didn’t care, and none of my skills helped me one little bit. My cotillion lessons had been a waste of time, my ability to straighten my hair in ten minutes wasn’t going to impress grad schools, and all the French cocktail dresses in the world wouldn’t solve my problems.

There was a knock on my door. “Almost ready, Hannah?” My father. “We’re going to be late.”

No time to question my wardrobe or life choices right now. I needed to go be perfect Hannah Swift at a party for my parents’ friends.

Over the years, I’d probably been to dozens of these shindigs. A few people in my parents’ social circle would take on a cause like breast cancer or illiteracy—I think tonight’s fundraiser was for Alzheimer’s research or something—and throw a fancy party where they probably ended up spending more on hors d’oeuvres than they raised for the charity. There would be dinner, a band, lots of free cocktails and a speech or slideshow or two. It made everyone feel good, like they were doing something with their money that wasn’t solely for their own benefit, but I’m not sure how much it actually helped cancer victims or Alzheimer’s patients.

Tonight’s party was being held in the Monroe House, a beautiful historical mansion in Canton that was a popular spot for weddings and other social events. I’d had my debutante ball there. The main hall was pretty, with one of those picturesque wide staircases like something out of Gone with the Wind, and the historic trust kept the gardens and terraces neat and magazine-spread ready. Ivy and flower vines trailed along all the porch rails, and three stories’ worth of balconies were perfectly staged for photos, either from above or below. I knew how much it cost to rent the space. Those poor patients would probably wind up with pennies.

My parents and I arrived fashionably late and they proceeded to shuffle me through the obligatory meet-and-greet. I knew most of the crowd already. Canton wasn’t that big of a town and these people were all the parents of my friends, high school classmates, fellow cotillion attendees, and other families I’d known all my life. Across the room was my dentist. Over by the buffet stood my parents’ accountant. Their estate lawyer was holding court at the bar. My mom dragged me over to talk to all her club friends, from Mandy Whitman to Suzanne Gardner. I saw Mary Beth Connell pointedly avoiding us, but though I scanned the room for her son Jeffrey, he was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d gone back to Yale. There were very few young people here overall. I’d say the average age of the room was at least forty-five, and that included all the Plasticine second wives, whose dresses were even shorter and tighter than mine. After about twenty minutes of fake smiles and avoiding getting deep into conversations about “how was Europe,” I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room.

I was halfway across the polished parquet floor when I spotted Boone.