“No bueno,” said Ezra, uncapping an energy drink.
“So one of them, this girl named Sharzad, like, climbed on the Ping-Pong table,” Lila/Lily continued, “and it collapsed underneath her. So Sharzad goes, like, crashing to the ground, and then MacKenna sees them, and she’s like, ‘What are you assholes doing here?’ So they start running, and half the boys go racing after them. It was epic.” Lila/Lily smirked, ate a forkful of salad, and turned to Beatrice.
“You went to boarding school, right?” She waited for Beatrice’s nod, then looked Beatrice’s outfit over with a slow up and down. “Did they have a dress code there?”
“You just had to dress neatly. No crop tops, no shirts with political slogans. Other than that, you could wear what you wanted.”
“Lucky,” the other girl said with a sigh. “God, I’d give anything if I didn’t have to live with my parents.” She leaned closer to Beatrice, her blue eyes wide. “Could you like, do anything? Stay up all night? Have parties?”
“Um, we had dorm supervisors. So no, not really. I mean, kids did sneak out sometimes…”
Lily/Lila sighed, as if Beatrice was describing paradise, and not forays to drink warm vodka in the laundry room, or outside, if it was warm enough （between October and March in New Hampshire, she’d learned, it was hardly ever warm enough）。 “You could get expelled if you got caught.”
Julia cut her eyes at Cade, who gave her a blank look before turning to Beatrice with his toothy Kennedy smile.
“So why’d you leave?”
“I got kicked out,” Beatrice said, after she’d chewed and swallowed her cracker. That got the table’s attention. All the girls were looking at her. Cade pulled back his chair for a better view. Even Ezra had put down his energy drink.
“Really?” asked Finn.
“What’d you do?” asked the girl who was either Lila or Lily.
Beatrice swiped her tongue over her front teeth to remove any traces of food. She could lie, and say that her expulsion had something to do with drinking or drugs or boys, and probably impress these kids. But she didn’t think that these were kids she wanted to impress, so she said, “Part of it was that I was running an Etsy shop. I do a lot of crafting—crochet and needle-felting, mostly—and I was spending more time doing that and not”—she hooked her fingers into air quotes—“？‘focusing on my academics.’？”
“How much money were you making, doing that?”
“Oh, like four or five hundred dollars a month. It depended on how much work I took on.” She pulled out her phone to show a few of the dogs she’d sculpted. “That’s so cool!” said Lily or Lila, and Finn asked, “You get a hundred dollars for each one you make?”
“Sometimes more.”
Finn looked impressed. Then Julia tossed her hair and said, “You guys remember Kenzie Dawes? Well, she makes bank on Instagram. She gets, like, older guys to tell her things to say to them, and then she says it. She doesn’t, like, take her clothes off or anything. She just whispers stuff. ‘You’re my daddy,’ or whatever, and they Venmo her, like, fifty bucks.”
The other girls murmured approval at Kenzie’s ingenuity. Beatrice felt herself scowling. She took a bite of carrot, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Another reason I got expelled was that two of my friends and I painted the word ‘rapist’ on a boy’s door.”
The table went very quiet. Julia’s face was flushed, and the girl who was either Lily or Lila was glaring at her. “Why?” asked Finn.
Beatrice stared at him. “Because,” she said, speaking slowly, “he raped one of my friends. And the school didn’t do anything about it.”
Julia nudged Cade, giving Cade a meaningful look, one that Beatrice couldn’t read. But Cade’s toothy smile was firmly in place when he turned to Beatrice.
“So you’re an activist.”
Beatrice patted her lips with a paper napkin. Looking right at Cade, and only at Cade, she said, “I think it’s important to do the right thing.” If this boy was really, actually interested in her, it was better that he knew who she was and what she believed in, right up front.
Cade looked impressed. But the girls, and most of the guys, all seemed to be varying degrees of shocked. Ezra and Finn both looked angry. Lily and Lila were whispering to each other, and Julia was glaring at Beatrice with unmitigated hostility.
“What?” Beatrice finally asked.