There were stars on the palms of her hands. Two of them, one for each hand, two small dark-metal spots embedded in Kess’s skin. They were set near the top of her palms where her heart line met her palm-reading-is-stupid-so-why-should-she-know line, and they each had five tiny points like stars in a kid’s drawing.

Kess hunkered over in the leather desk chair and scratched at the stars. The metal didn’t come off, but the skin around it swelled red and angry. She gave up and tugged at her hair in frustration. Which was a bad idea, because now her curls were even puffier than usual and she’d have to go down to the party looking like a blonde Raggedy Anne. Solution: never go downstairs.

They were all down there. She could hear them through the floor—the big-footed boys and the girls with pink phone cases, all crowded together, talking too loud, filling the air with body heat and hormone stink and carbon dioxide.

Kess’s palms throbbed where she’d scratched them. The stars weren’t some speck stuck to the surface of her skin—they were embedded deep. How did that happen? Was she sick? That was stupid, sickness didn’t give you stars—Of course she was sick. The eating thing—

She’d have to go to a doctor. She’d have to tell him about the eating thing, and he’d cut into her hand with a sharp, sharp blade.

Ugh. Doctors.

Maybe the stars would go away. Maybe they’d be gone by morning and in the mean time she should just not think about it instead of freaking out like a freak. So she leaned back and put her feet up on the desk, like someone not freaking out would do.

Her foot hit something on the desk that jangled, the sound of metal on metal. She snapped upright. There, hidden under one of the many boring documents on the desktop, was a little white bowl full of brown and silver coins. They glinted in the electric light, and they looked so—so delicious and—

She resisted for maybe three seconds. Then she grabbed up a nickel and popped it into her mouth. It tasted good the way chocolate tastes good—not only sweet, but satisfying. Another nickel, a quarter, a penny. The penny smelled wonderful in a way that surprised her. Looking closer, she saw that it was from 1954, back when they were copper all the way through instead of just a coating on the surface. When she dropped it on her tongue it tasted so good her toes curled in her shoes.

Someone turned the doorknob.

Kess ducked beneath the desk. An instant later she realized that, if she didn’t want to be seen eating someone else’s spare change, she should have just dropped the coins. But now she was hunkered in the dark hollow beneath the desk, and there was no way she was crawling out until the person was gone. At least she had some metal with her. She swallowed a dime and waited.

The person seemed to be checking out the books on the shelves. Then they walked across the room to the desk (probably realizing the books were terrible) and sat down in the chair. They—he, those were male legs—didn’t seem to have seen Kess. She pressed herself back. Okay. She’d just have to stay under the desk until he had to go the bathroom or something. Good plan.

He stretched out his legs.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out. The boy leaped out of the chair, not gracefully, and Kess crawled into the open. The boy—slim and dark-haired with thick eyebrows and deep-set eyes—stood in front of her. He had caught her in deep weirdness. She was so embarrassed she wanted to take a break from being a person. She wanted to be a table for a few hours, or a chair or a rock, then go back to being human once the party was over and slink downstairs in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“You’re forgiven, I guess?” said the boy. “Why are you sorry? What were you doing under there?”

“Would you believe cat burglary?”

For a moment he just stared at her. Those sunken eyes of his made him seem serious and intelligent and sort of wizardly. Wizard eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Cat burglars wear black. I’m Elias.”

“Ksenya. Um. Don’t call me that. It’s Russian, and I haven’t been Russian since I was four. Call me Kess.” And she still hadn’t explained the desk thing. She grasped for something to say and settled on the truth-ish. “I wanted to be alone. That’s why I came up here and that’s why I hid under the desk. I was waiting for you to go away.”

“Okay then. I’ll leave.”

“No! No, I mean, if you came up here you must have hated the party too.”

“Pretty much.” He leaned back against the desk and folded his arms. “Why did you show up at a party you hate?”

Kess sighed. “My sister. She’s downstairs with a boy, who’s the only reason we drove all the way out to Greenlake in the first place. She doesn’t know anyone but him, so she made me come. She said if she didn’t have a girl she knew she’d be weird. Which isn’t even true, because she’s never weird.

“But I said I would come, right? And then we got here, and Danny—that’s the boy—he tried really really hard to make me feel included, and it was really really obvious, and Priya was doing that thing where she laughs a lot more than normal but somehow it’s not fake, and whenever Danny introduced us as sisters people looked surprised. And I mean, it’s reasonable of them to be surprised. We’re adopted, obviously. But the drunker someone was the more surprised they looked until with some of them it was like the most shocking thing they’d ever heard in their life. ‘You’re sisters? Waaaaaaah?’ It was annoying.”

Elias laughed. Which was a good reaction, because it felt like Kess had just talked for a long long long long time.

“I’m here with a cousin. He said it wasn’t going to be loud and boring, but it was loud and boring. I came in here looking for a book.”

“All the books in this room are the worst.”

“I know.” Elias glanced around at the shelves. “Is this guy an accountant or a lawyer?”

“I think he’s either an accountant for lawyers or a lawyer of accountancy.”

“So either way, an unholy mutant hybrid of boring.”

This time Kess laughed.

When Elias smiled the corners of his eyes crinkled. When he was older, he was going to have spiderwebby lines radiating out from the creases of his eyes. Kess imagined it would make him look dignified and even more like a wizard.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t be downstairs being your sister’s wingman? I’d go down with you, if you wanted.”

“Did you see her down there? The really pretty Indian girl with short hair?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, if you’d seen her, you’d know she doesn’t need my help.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

#

Priya liked the way parties sounded. Not the kind of party with blaring dance music, but ones like this where lots of people were talking. If she ever played tapes to go sleep to, they wouldn’t be babbling brooks and rainforests, they’d be the sound of a dozen conversations going on at once. People-noise.

“Are you having fun?” asked Danny, sounding actually concerned.

“It’s good,” said Priya. “If I stayed home one more night I’d explode. Thanks for inviting me.”

Danny was a good guy. Priya had always liked good guys, guys without tempers who got excellent grades out of duty rather than competitiveness. Kess called them “bottled-water boys,” which was a perfect example of a Kess-ism because it was uncannily descriptive if you didn’t think about it but made little sense if you did. Danny also had pretty eyes (echoes of a Chinese grandmother) and soft light brown hair.

Right now he sat beside her on the couch with his arm slung across the seat-back but not actually touching her shoulders, because bottled-water boys move slow. His friends from the soccer team took up the other spots on the couch.

“Pri-ya-ya-ya,” said Rod, the one sitting on her other side. He had broad shoulders and short, tight curls, and his face flushed red as he drank. He sat with his legs awkwardly far apart so that his knee poked into Priya’s thigh. “You drink too slow.” He reached over, took her cup from her hand, took a long swig of it, and gave it back to her.

“Dude.” That was Connor, the third member of the trio. And he definitely was the third member, the follower-behind. He was tall and good-looking in a red-headed way, but so far that night he hadn’t said a word unless Danny or Rod spoke first. “You got your disgusting germ spit on her drink.”

“My spit doesn’t have germs. My spit has powers. If she’s lucky she’ll wake up pregnant with a good-looking baby.”

“Ugh, that’s double gross. You should apologize.”

“What? You apologize.”

Connor hit Rod on the arm, and Rod hit back, and soon they were wrestling on the couch and knocking Priya as they jostled.

“I’ll get you a new drink,” said Danny. After he left, she scooted away from Rod and Connor. A few moments later they settled down, and it seemed like Rod had won the fight.

“Why do guys do that?” Priya asked. “Why do you fight—physically fight—with your friends?”

Rod rolled his eyes. “We follow the ancient warrior codes. Women don’t understand because they never took the oaths.”

“It’s nothing,” said Connor. “It’s messing around.”

“You say that, but it’s not true. It’s not nothing. It really matters to you who wins.”

Danny reappeared with Priya’s drink and slipped into the seat beside her.

“It’s better than what girls do,” said Rod.

“Oh, what do girls do?”

“Like, take that girl you showed up with.”

“You mean my sister? What about her?”

“Where is she?”

“She went to the bathroom.”

He laughed. “She’s been gone for ages. No, she’s mad at you about something, but instead of just bringing it up with you and dealing with it, she’s off sulking like a girl.”

“That’s not—” No. Priya cut herself off, pressing her lips together. She could tell already that arguing with this guy was useless and would only make everyone involved stupider.

“I’ve only known Priya and Kess for a little bit,” said Danny, “but I can tell they’ve got a really good relationship. It’s cute, actually.”

“Oh, they’ve got a really good relationship,” said Rod, as if he could make non-ridiculous things sound ridiculous by pitching his voice high. “It’s cute, actually.”

Instead of arguing, Priya sighed like she was above it all, which she was. Then she leaned into Danny and kissed him on the cheek.

Kess had been gone for a while, though. That was so exactly Kess. She was jealous of her sister’s friends and boyfriends—Priya knew she was—and yet when Priya brought her all the way out to Greenlake to make a first impression on a brand new group of people, Kess slunk off alone.

Priya craned her neck and looked around, trying to spot a puff of yellow hair.

Huh. That was weird.

A boy wandered through the party. But not a boy. He was older, too old for this crowd, in his twenties probably. He was also overdressed, in slacks and a button-up shirt, and his black hair was shellacked back against his skull. He drifted from group to group, never quite joining any of them, but standing a little away and holding up his phone for a long time as if he were taking video of them.

Beside her, Rod smirked. “So you’ve noticed the pervert too, Ya-ya?”

“You don’t know that guy. Don’t say things about him.”

“Why do you think he’s taking video of teenagers?”

“I’m not sure, but I can find out. By asking. With words. Hey! Hey you, with the phone.”

The man turned to them, and Priya waved him over. “Hi, I’m Priya, and this is Danny, Rod and Connor.” And she smiled at him. Priya wasn’t stuck up or anything, but she knew she had an amazing smile.

It didn’t seem to affect this guy much. “Thank you for that information,” he said. Rod gave Priya a look that probably meant I told you he was creepy.

“Well it’s wonderful to meet you,” she said. “Who do you know here?” She gestured at Danny. “He’s the only person I really know. I’m kind of crashing.”

“I know my friend.”

“Who’s your friend?” asked Danny. “We go to school with most of these people, so we probably know him.”

The man nodded at a clump of people talking.

“One of them? Which one?”

He nodded again.

“Okay,” said Priya. “We were wondering what you were doing with your phone. Were you taking video?”

“No,” said the man.

And then there was uncomfortable silence. Priya figured it was time to kill this conversation out of mercy. “Anyway, it was wonderful to meet you.” She’d already said that, hadn’t she? Whatever. “I’m really glad you came.”

“That’s funny,” said Connor, “do you always make it seem like it’s your party?”

She wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Yeah, nice to meet you,” said Rod. “And before you go, let’s see what’s on the pervert phone.” He grabbed the phone from the stranger’s hand. “What is this? It’s numbers and crap. This is even weirder than pictures. What’s up with this?”

The stranger didn’t say anything.

“Come on, give it back,” said Connor. He grabbed for the phone, but Rod turned away and blocked him.

“Rod,” said Danny. “Give him his phone back. Now.” It didn’t sound threatening, even with the “now” tacked on the end. And unlike Connor, he didn’t begin with “dude” or “come on” like what he was saying wasn’t a big deal. Danny sounded simply… sincere. It was the sort of sincerity that gives you power.

“Fine,” said Rod. He tossed the phone to the stranger, and in the moment it hung in the air Priya saw the screen, which was black and covered in a moving stream of numbers in white and blue and red. The stranger caught it and then turned and walked away without saying anything else.

“So we went through that,” said Connor, “and we didn’t find out what that guy was doing?”

Across the room, the stranger held up his phone.

#

Kess was pretty sure she and Elias were “hitting it off,” something she’d never experienced before but which seemed to happen to other people on a regular basis. He listened with apparently sincere interest to her story about the physics competition back in spring, and laughed at her impression of the kid who kept coming up to her between rounds trying to form “an alliance.”

Elias liked a lot of the same bands as her, though he liked them more, or at least more elaborately. He spoke at length and with big, happy hand gestures about Influences and Instrumentation and Which Band’s Bassist Used to Be in Another Band and How That Affected the New Band’s Sound.

He also told her about how sometimes he went onto conspiracy theory forums and pretended to have been abducted by a UFO.

“They’re so earnest,” he said. “And they’ll believe anything I say, even if I change details in the middle. The aliens were gray! The aliens were green!”

“That’s mean,” said Kess, but when she pressed her hands to her face she felt her own smile against her fingertips.

They stood next to each other, leaning against the edge of the desk. She had these strange layered fantasies—about five minutes from now, when he would kiss her, and next week, when he would pick her up from her house, and next year, when they would break up before going off to college but still text sometimes.

“If you give me your number,” he said, “maybe we can get together and tell the hollow earth people we’ve been inside the crust.”

“Hollow earth people?”

“Oh, yeah. The earth is hollow and there’s an advanced civilization living inside. We can say we’ve been through the hole in the north pole. You can back me up.”

“That’s also mean,” she said. But she still put her number in his phone, another thing other girls always seemed to be doing. When she handed the phone back their hands brushed, and her face got hot and her palms prickled. It was the metal stars, she realized, or the skin around them. She tried to look down at her hands without his noticing, but when she looked up again he was standing very close, and that drove all thoughts of the stars from her mind. He smelled like boy, which smelled amazing.

“This is the best party I’ve ever been to,” she said.

And he kissed her, and it was something that happened to other people, and she almost wanted to cry, which was stupid. But she liked it? Yes. Her chest and throat were warm with liking it. It was good like chocolate or copper. Her hands moved without her willing them to, one to his shoulder and one to his neck where his pulse throbbed throbbed throbbed—

Something poured through her hands. Elias’s head jerked back, his eyes wide, his face strained and terrified. There was a high buzzing in Kess’s ears, a tingling in the skin of her palms, and Elias fell to the ground.