Part I

Afterward, Jake Ridges liked to joke that the whole thing started—the game, the

challenges, the lying and the sneaking around, all of it—because of Sophia Robertson’s

boobs.

There was more than a little truth in it. If the other girls at Carp High were Toyotas

and Hondas—some of them a little more beat-up than others, some of them handled a

little too much already, showing signs of previous owners—Sophia Robertson was a

Lamborghini: exotic, gorgeous, and a little bit terrifying. The other girls were familiar.

Even if the mechanism of their deepest, inner workings, their engine parts, remained

largely mysterious, you knew how to get them to unlock, how to drive them, for Christ’s

sake.

Not so with Sophia Robertson.

She was a cipher, an angel, a tease or a bitch, depending on who you asked. Her

family had money, at least for Carp; her father owned three dealerships in nearby Leeds.

It showed. While other girls were blurry, displaying cracks or, at the very least, seams—

ripped jeans, coffee-stained T-shirts, hair that poufed up in the rain—Sophia always

looked sharp, clear, as if the resolution had been turned up on a microscope and angled

straight at her, as if the money had formed a kind of shrink wrap that kept her protected

from the normal destruction of the everyday.

Everyone dreamed of touching her but no one had dared so far. If Sophia understood

the extent of her power, she gave no sign of it, just like she’d showed no inclination to

date or even hook up with boys or girls (even after a brief rumor had gone around
sophomore year that she was a lesbian, a rumor no doubt fueled by desperately

disappointed guys to justify why she would not at least, at least, be convinced to give a

hand job to someone).

It was Jake Ridge’s assertion that no one would have been stupid enough to even

think about running under the train if it weren’t for the simple fact that Sophia Robertson

had offered to show her boobs to whoever did it first.

It was June, and there were five of them drinking by the tracks that cut a few miles

south of Carp on their way to bigger, better places. Jake Ridge always thought it was

right that the trains never stopped in Carp, even the freight trains, as if all that steel was

trying to run away as fast as it could.

Besides Jake, there was Mike Dickinson—“the Dick,” as he’d been rechristened two

weeks ago, when four hours after being crowned prom king, he’d wound up in the back

of Big Bill Kelly’s squad car, supposedly busted for selling oxy to Carly Withers’s mom,

though somehow within days Mrs. Withers had managed to produce a prescription and

Dickinson was released after he claimed he was merely collecting a reward for returning

the pills to her—TJ Ruiz, and miraculously, Sophia Robertson, and Savannah Fenn, who

went everywhere Sophia went, did everything Sophia did, and was to Sophia as the moon

tailing after the sun, pretty in its own right but completely eclipsed by any comparison of

the two.

The Dick had told Jake and TJ he’d invited Sophia, but no one had actually believed

she would show, much less that she would show with two six-packs and a bottle of Jim

Beam tucked in the back of her low-riding jeans. But that was the essence of Sophia

Robertson: she was a mystery, a shape so intricate it required its own geometry.
 They’d gone through Sophia’s beer quickly. It was hot. That—the heat—along with

the beer and the heat and the proximity of Sophia’s breasts worked on the guys like a

fast-acting drug, and they felt much drunker and braver and dumber than they should

have. A train went by at six o’clock, as the light was just showing its first signs of

withdrawing: a big, rattling, lumbering freight train, so loud that for the length of its

passing, everyone had to shout and gesture to be heard. The Dick pointed out that the oil

tankers were at least four or five feet off the ground—plenty of space, he said, to allow a

person to pass.

“Yeah, right.” Jake chucked his beer can down the slope as the train rattled off into

the distance, wondering if Sophia had noticed how good his arm was. “You’d get crushed

before you were all the way through. You’d get pinned by the wheels.”

“No way,” the Dick insisted. “The train’s not going that fast. Twenty miles an hour,

tops.”

“So? How fast do you think you can run?”

“I bet I could do it,” Mike said.

This set off a heated round of debate, fueled half by the alcohol—Savannah had

uncapped the Jim Beam by now and started circulating it—and half by the fact that

Sophia Robertson seemed amused and even interested by the conversation. TJ, who was

very drunk—he was a lightweight, a scrawny kid, all bones and muscles, who in the

mysterious alchemy of high school politics had somehow always been popular despite the

fact that no one liked him—started talking about velocity and relativity, two subjects he

knew nothing about, and eventually, mostly to shut him up, Jake changed the subject.
 The conversation skipped erratically from prom to the Dick’s arrest to high school

graduation plans to the fact that the 7-Eleven had recently installed a Big Gulp machine,

and from Big Gulps they moved into talking about sex, of course, since that was really all

they wanted to talk about. Jake was hoping Sophia would take the bait and admit to

something—even hearing her talk about giving another guy a blow job would have been a

huge coup—but she only listened, and smiled, and occasionally leaned forward to grab

the bottle, giving the guys a brief, tantalizing view of her cleavage.

Jake forgot about the train conversation; he was sure Mike and TJ had forgotten about

it too. Mike had his arm around Savannah’s shoulder, fiddling idly with her bra strap,

apparently having decided the certainty of something was better than the possibility of

something spectacular.

They were thus totally surprised when Sophia tilted her head and said, “Listen.

Another train’s coming.” She looked at the small group. Her eyes were very bright.

Otherwise, she seemed sober. “So who’s going to do it?”

“Who’s going to do what?” TJ said.

Her smile lit up gradually, like a candle slow to catch. But then it was there, blazing

across her face. “Make a run for it beneath one of the oilers.” There was a moment of

silence. “Prove it, one way or another.”

There was a brief moment of silence. Jake blurted, “It was Mike’s idea.” His face

burned when Sophia turned to stare at him. She had a way of looking at you suddenly,

unexpectedly, with vague detached interest, like a scientist in the middle of a dissection.
 “Yeah, sure.” Mike took his arm off Savannah’s shoulder, and she whined and

pressed herself against him. Mike wiped his upper lip, which was beaded with sweat.

“Yeah, sure I’ll do it. For a price.” His eyes flashed. “What’ll you give me?”

TJ was rolling a joint. “The freshman fund,” he said, without looking up.

The freshman fund was a senior tradition. A few of the biggest guys—or the meanest

guys, in TJ’s case—would tax the incoming class randomly. Take a dollar here, five

bucks there. Sometimes steal a jacket. They could do what they wanted—that was the

point of being a senior. They were bigger and stronger and they could make your life hell.

Over the past year, Mike, TJ, and occasionally Jake had gathered over two thousand

dollars between them. They’d spent a big portion of it on a keg party at the Ridge after

prom—TJ insisted on buying these weird pervert blow-up dolls from the internet and

floating them in the creek—but they still had a grand left.

“All of it?” Mike said.

“All of it,” TJ said.

Mike laughed. Then TJ laughed and Savannah joined in, although it was obvious she

didn’t quite get the joke. Jake felt a loosening in his chest. It was a joke. Of course it was

a joke; even Mike wasn’t stupid enough to try something like that. Even the noise of the

train, which Jake finally made out, sounded harmless, the distant toot-toot of a child’s

toy.

But then Sophia stood up, smacking off the back of her jeans. “Whoever jumps first,”

she announced, “gets to see my tits.”

They were stunned. Savannah started to laugh, a high-pitched giggle that turned into a

fit of hiccups.
 “She’s serious,” Savannah said. She was slurring her words a little. “She’ll do it.

She’ll do anything.”

Sophia’s eyes ticked momentarily to her friend, but her expression didn’t change. She

still had the same mysterious smile on her face, like someone who knows a very big

secret, and also knows she’ll never tell.

The train was louder now. Now, it didn’t sound like a child’s toy at all. It sounded

like metal and pistons grinding wheels against the tracks.

“So?” Sophia raised an eyebrow. “Who’s in?”