Sara Shepard - Stunning

The girls were all staring at her so quizzically that Spencer began to feel insecure. She wondered if it was a requirement to eat the food, like an Ivy rite of passage. Maybe she had no choice. “Thanks,” she said, accepting a bite. Harper was right: The brownie was gooey and delicious, and Spencer couldn’t even taste the baked-in pot. Her stomach rumbled in response; she hadn’t eaten since last night. One little brownie wouldn’t hurt, would it?

“Okay, you convinced me,” Spencer said, rising from her seat to get a brownie square for herself.

When she returned, having eaten almost the whole brownie by the time she sat down again, the girls were talking about how they wanted to make a film to enter into the Princeton Student Film contest. “I want to make one about toy tops, just like Charles and Ray Eames did,” Quinn said.

“I was thinking of making a movie about Bethany. Remember how I told you about her? The really fat girl who sits in front of me in Intro to Psych?” Jessie rolled her eyes. “It could be called Girl Who Eats Donuts .”

Spencer took a bite of brownie and wished she was brave enough to tell Jessie she wasn’t exactly a sylph. For some reason, the word sylph suddenly struck her as funny. The oversize freckles on Jessie’s cheeks were kind of funny, too. Jessie looked at her strangely. “What?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Spencer said, taking another nibble of the brownie. A few crumbs fell onto her lap, reminding her of gerbil poops. She started laughing again.

Harper stood, giving Spencer a you’re hopelessly weird look. “I’m going to get another brownie. Girls, you in?”

“Grab me one,” Quinn said. Jessie nodded too.

The brownies. That was why Spencer found everything so funny. She’d only smoked pot twice before, both times at parties at Noel Kahn’s house, but the familiar sensations rushed back. Her pulse slowed. Her normally obsessive tendencies began to fade into the background. She leaned back and grinned at the beautiful kids around her, marveling at their brightly colored dresses and silk ties. Her eyelids felt heavy, and her limbs relaxed into the couch.

Suddenly, she roused herself. A couple was making out across the room, their hands all over each other, their tongues flailing. Another couple was kissing by the grand piano. They were so into it that they leaned on the keys, a tinkle of sounds ringing out. There was a clump of kids staring at a glass-paned china cabinet in the corner, remarking on how amazing the plate patterns were. Quinn was standing in the doorway, telling a story about how her housekeeper always said acrossed instead of across in a snotty, cleaning-people-are- such- lower-class-citizens voice. Jessie’s eyes were glassy and red, and she was wiggling her fingernails in front of her face like they were amazing.

Spencer rubbed her eyes. How long had she been out?

“Streaker!” someone yelled, and a guy in a Princeton beanie and nothing else ran through the parlor, a half-eaten brownie in his hand. A couple of kids stripped off their clothes and followed him down the hall.

Harper appeared above Spencer and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s join in, sleepyhead!”

Spencer woozily pulled her cotton dress over her head, feeling naked in her slip. They followed a string of students through the library, the dining room, and then the kitchen. There were pots and pans all over the floor in the kitchen, an upturned tray of nachos on the table, and, for some reason, a roll of toilet paper was strung around the chandelier over the prep island. Her tray of brownies was almost empty. Spencer grabbed the last square and popped it into her mouth.

When they got back to the parlor, even more kids were making out, and a group was playing a version of Strip Twister, using the large rug in the center of the room as the board. Spencer flopped back on the couch. “Is it me, or has this party suddenly gotten really wild?” she asked Harper.

“Isn’t it awesome?” Harper’s eyes gleamed. “Everyone is flying high, right?”

Uh, isn’t that the point? Spencer wanted to say, but Harper had already whipped around and was staring at the windows. “Hey, you know what I want to do?” she said excitedly. “Make myself a dress out of the curtains just like Scarlett O’Hara did in Gone with the Wind !”

She leapt onto the windowsill and ripped the curtains from the poles before anyone could stop her. Then, grabbing a letter opener from the nearby desk, she slashed the fabric into long strips. Spencer half-giggled, half-winced. Those were probably valuable antique curtains.

Quinn pulled out her cell phone. “This is amazing. It should be our film for the festival!”

“And I want us all to be the stars!” Harper said sloppily, stumbling over the syllables. She looked at Spencer. “Can you record us on your phone?”

“Okay,” Spencer said. She called up the video function on her iPhone and started recording. Harper yanked down more curtains and pulled the stuffing out of the pillows on the leather couch, looking crazed.

“Yeah!” Daniel, the boy who’d hosted the party on Friday, grabbed a swath of curtain fabric and wrapped it around his naked body—he’d been part of the streaking parade—like a toga. A few other guys followed suit, and they all marched around in a circle chanting “To- ga ! To- ga ! To- ga !”

As they paraded past, Spencer caught a glimpse of a guy with longish dark hair. Was that Phineas ? She hadn’t seen him since before her run-in with the law at Penn last year. But when she blinked, he’d vanished, like he’d never been there at all. She pressed her fingers to her temples and made several slow circles. She was so high.

Spencer turned back to Harper. She had seemingly grown bored of ruining the curtains and was now lying on the carpet with her legs up in the air. “I just feel so . . . alive ,” she trilled. Then she eyed Spencer. “Hey. I have something to tell you. You know that guy, Raif—Reefer? He has a crush on you.”

Spencer groaned. “What a loser. How’d he get into Princeton, anyway? Is he a legacy?”

Harper’s eyes grew wide. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

Harper put her fingers to her lips and giggled. “Spencer, Reefer is, like, a genius . Like Einstein.”

Spencer snickered. “Uh, I don’t think so.”

“No, I’m serious.” Suddenly Harper looked dead sober. “He got a full scholarship. He invented some chemical process that, like, converts plants into renewable energy really cheaply. He received a MacArthur Genius Grant.”

Spencer snorted. “Um, are we talking about the same person?”

Harper’s expression was still serious. Spencer leaned back on her elbows and let this sink in. Reefer was . . . smart? Ridiculously smart? She thought about what he said yesterday at his house. Don’t judge a book by its cover. She started to laugh. The giggles came so fast and furious tears started to stream from her eyes and she could barely breathe.

Harper started laughing, too. “What’s so funny?”

Spencer shook her head, not even sure. “I’ve had one too many pot brownies, I think. I’m a lightweight.”

Harper frowned. “Pot brownies? Where?”

The muscles in Spencer’s mouth felt gummy and loose. She studied Harper carefully, wondering if this was a hallucination, too. “I baked pot into the brownies I brought,” she said in an isn’t-it-obvious voice.

Harper’s mouth made an O . “No way ,” she whispered, slapping Spencer five. “That’s the best idea ever. ” She started to laugh for real. “No wonder I feel so bubbly! And here I thought someone spiked the punch with absinthe!”