“Alex, I’ll take her. I haven’t been drinking. You don’t want to get this whole rager shut down, do you?”

I groaned and clutched my sides. “I don’t want to go with him,” I whispered into a cushion. “Get Nic.”

The cushion didn’t reply, and Nic never came.

“OK, Sophie, let’s go.” Alex placed his arms under mine and lifted me off the couch until I teetered unsteadily against him. The world spun around until the faces of Millie, Alex, and Robbie blurred into one strange mosaic of humankind.

“Hang on,” Millie said. “She can’t walk home in those.”

Suddenly there were only two faces in front of me and I couldn’t remember who was who. I thought Alex had blond hair, but the other guy was wearing his blue eyes. I shook my head back and forth to get rid of the fuzziness.

“How much did she drink?”

“I bet she polished off that tequila, man.”

And then I was at the front door, wearing a pair of Ugg boots that didn’t belong to me. My chin got stuck to the top of my chest, and the ground started pulsating up and down.

“Robbie, get her to call me when she’s home, OK? Don’t forget.”

And then we were galloping down the driveway and rounding the bend into an empty street that loomed ahead of me like a black river. Suddenly my head was swelling like a balloon.

“I’ll fall in.”

I jumped across the cracks in the pavement.

Robbie slid his arm around my waist and scooted me forward in a straight line. “Just chill out. You’re a little buzzed right now, that’s all.”

At the mention of the word “buzz,” I felt something in my ear. I jerked my head and slapped my hand against my face. “Get off, get off, get off!”

And then I was outside a row of small box houses that looked like they had been punched in.

“They look so sad,” I moaned into Robbie’s shoulder.

I blinked my eyes, and when I opened them again I was gliding along the sidewalk and squinting into the overbearing starlight. The Priestly house climbed into the sky ahead of me, like a castle.

“There’s a princess in there.” I felt an urgent need to rescue her. And then I forgot what I was thinking about. “I’m exhausted,” I realized as the world around me became silent and still.

We had stopped walking.

“I know.” Robbie propped me against a wall. I was vaguely aware of the uneven stones scratching against my back.

“I haven’t slept for nearly a hundred years,” I remembered. My head lolled until I was looking down at the pavement.

He lifted me back up like a rag doll and squeezed his hands above my waist. “I’ve got you.”

“Am I home?” I asked wearily. Everything was so hard to concentrate on, and I had a bad feeling that any minute now, I would vomit.

“Yeah, just relax, Sophie. Everything is fine.” I felt a finger under my chin, nudging my head. My eyes rolled back as the sensation of warm breath tickled my face. I struggled against my drooping lids, forcing them open. When I did, I found myself staring into two hawklike gray eyes an inch from my face. And just as my body relinquished control of my limbs completely, I felt his hands start to inch up my dress.

Somewhere deep inside me, panic was rising.

“Stop,” I heard myself gasp.

Robbie’s eyes shrank to slits in his puffy face. “Just relax.”

“I don’t want this.” I tried to shake my head, but could only make a sideways figure eight.

He chuckled. “Then why would you show up to a party wearing this?” He tugged at the fabric of my dress. I tried to speak again, but I couldn’t conjure up enough energy to push the words out. He moved a rough finger against my lips and I moaned, feeling saliva pool at the back of my throat. He inched closer. Spittle gathered at the sides of his cracked lips as he said, “Stop playing hard to get.”

His hand moved below my hips and settled on my bare leg, and suddenly it was all I could focus on. He tapped his fingers across my thigh and pressed himself against me, sandwiching my body between his thick frame and the cold wall. He started to run a hand through my hair, tangling it and jerking my head backward.

I struggled to remember how far I was from home, but everything was a blur. The panic grew and pulsed against my skull until it throbbed. I tried to move my arms, but they were unresponsive, crushed beneath his weight as he walked his other hand up toward the hemline of my dress.

My eyes fluttered back in my head as he pushed his salty lips against my mouth. Fleetingly I thought of Nic: how he had tentatively pressed his lips to my mine like he was trying to savor every part of the moment; how excited butterflies had exploded inside me as his hands gently curled around my waist. But these were not his hands, or his lips. Coarse and dry, they mashed against my mouth, pulling it open beneath the force of a snake-like tongue until I collapsed into Robbie, falling farther into the maw that probed mine so relentlessly it began to hurt.

And then the sound of an engine punctured the horrifying silence, and tires screeched to a halt somewhere nearby. Robbie froze with his lips still on mine, and moved his hands back onto my waist. In my dazed state, I imagined we looked like two wooden puppets, propped against each other in the night.

I don’t know how long I leaned against the statue of Robbie Stenson, but I rejoiced in the welcome rush of cool air when his body was ripped away from mine. He let out a strangled yelp as he sailed backward, taking the pressure with him so that my chest expanded again.