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humiliating incident wasn’t just partially her fault; it was entirely her fault. Ever since that lunch two Wednesdays ago, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Ray Devine.
    Mainly to keep reminding myself that our relationship bore absolutely no similarity to Lark and Sandro’s.
    Because that just couldn’t be true, or it would mean I’d wasted half my life holding out for someone who would love me the way Ray had.
    But what if it was true?
    I sighed and took a seat on a battered wooden bench at the end of the subway platform. What did it matter now? Ray was gone, and maybe that was all the answer I needed. Maybe it was time to forget about the past and move on with my life. After all, I was a mentor now. I was supposed to be older and wiser. People—well, Lark, anyway—looked up to me.
    An elderly woman passed by and gave me such a concerned, pitying look that I had to wonder if she’d borne witness to my meltdown at Renée’s open house a half hour earlier, even though I didn’t recall seeing her there. “Ma’am?” she said. “Are you all right?”
    I nodded and smiled reassuringly. Of course I was all right. But why was half the population of Brooklyn calling me ma’am all of a sudden?
    Another train roared into the station and I boarded the rear car, taking a seat across from two girls around Lark’s age. The taller one looked like a younger version of myself, with her wavy hair and long, skinny legs clad in tight jeans. She looked unhappy. She probably had an older man of her own, who was currently making her life miserable. I gazed across the aisle at her, hoping to convey my support with a single, comforting glance. I wished I could be her mentor, too, sharing all my hard-won wisdom and experience.
    That was when she looked up, met my eyes, and flinched.
    I pretended not to notice when she gave her friend a subtle nudge and the two of them rose from their seats and moved to the other end of the car. But it wasn’t until the train arrived at my stop and I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of the subway door that I realized why they’d done it.
    The bright red lipstick I’d worn to the open house was smeared halfway across my left cheek. And my fit of hysterical laughter had caused my mascara to migrate down my face in watery black streaks.
    “Some mentor you are,” I muttered under my breath, skulking toward home with my head down, eyes riveted to the sidewalk.

CHAPTER THREE

GULP
    T here was only one item on my to-do list upon arriving back home: Swallow the very last Quaalude in New York City. At least, I was pretty sure it was the very last one; the government had discontinued their manufacture decades earlier. Mine was definitely a bootleg. The ROHRER stamped on the tablet was missing its
h
, but at least they’d gotten the number right: 714.
    The pill had been a graduation gift from my philosophy professor, Dr. Spatzman, who was known around campus—for good reason—as Space Man.
    “I heard you’re moving to New York City,” he’d said on our last day of class, pressing it into my palm. “You’d better be prepared.”
    “For what?”
    He stroked his goatee and stared into the distance. “There are so many answers to that question.”
    I’d been saving the Quaalude for ages, to be used in case of only the most dire emergency. I’d reached for it on various occasions, even held it in my hand with a water chaser at the ready, but I’d always returned it to the little enameled box I kept hidden in the back of my underwear drawer. It seemed that nothing the city of New York threw at me—notrats, not transit strikes, not even the Giuliani administration—would ever be catastrophic enough to warrant its ingestion.
    But the shock of Ray’s demise called for a Quaalude; a pharmaceutical Quaalude, optimally, but where was I supposed to find one of those—the Museum of Banned Substances?
    “Drugs won’t do you any good,” Elinor Ann said, just as I knew she would, during