Isabel a laughed. JonBenét was being very kind, but Isabel a found it hard to look at her straight on for too long. It made the hair on her arms stand up. She thought about the JonBenét footage that showed her in the swimsuit competition of the beauty pageant. She wished she had never seen that part of the documentary. It haunted her.

“So, how did you and Ben meet?” JonBenét asked.

“In a bar,” Isabel a said. Sometimes she tried to make the story a little better, to embel ish it with details. But she didn’t feel like it right then.

“Mike and I met at a wedding,” she said.

“Real y?”

“Yeah, his cousin married one of my friends from col ege. It’s funny, isn’t it? The way things happen?”

Isabel a nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

How she met Ben could have been a cute story, Isabel a realized. If they ended up together, she could tel people, “That Ben! So impatient, so impish!” But for that to happen, Ben would have to be a different person. And he wasn’t. He was just a cocky boy who didn’t want to wait his turn.

That was al . He had to go to the bathroom. That was their story. The next time someone asked, “How did you meet?” Isabel a could say, “Ben had to pee.”

JonBenét chattered on about the different people at the wedding. She talked about her friend’s wedding that she was in next month. “The bridesmaid dresses are beautiful,” JonBenét assured her. Isabel a had never met someone so in love with weddings. She tried to picture JonBenét as a bride, but she kept seeing the real JonBenét, overly made up in a poofy dress.

Ben came back about twenty minutes later, and JonBenét stood up. “I should go find my prince.”

“Where have you been?” Isabel a asked. “I’ve been sitting here by myself for almost an hour.”

“Whadya mean, by yourself? There’s people al around.”

“These aren’t my friends, Ben. You just left me alone. Everyone’s been staring at me. I was sitting al by myself before she came over here.”

“So what? Are you mad because you had to hang out with crazy JonBenét?”

“She’s not that bad, Ben.”

“She’s crazy,” Ben said, like it was a fact. Like it was something everyone knew.

Isabel a felt bad for JonBenét, the way that everyone at the wedding was talking about her, like she was some kind of freak show. No one knew what went on in her relationship with Mike. No one even real y knew her. Maybe she loved Mike more than he liked her. And wasn’t that horrible?

Wasn’t that sad? But people forgot about that. They didn’t see a tragedy, just a good story. To them, it was just some girl they could point to and say, “Wel , at least my life isn’t as fucked up as that.”

“So what if she wants to get married?” Isabel a asked. “Why is that the worst thing in the world? It’s not such a crazy thought. She and Mike have been dating for a while. Isn’t it weirder that Mike is avoiding it?”

Ben shrugged. He took the straw out of his drink and downed the rest of it. “Why do you care?” he asked.

“I just think it’s mean the way that you and your friends treat her. I mean, what about Mike? If he doesn’t want to marry her, then why doesn’t he just break up with her?”

“Not everyone is dying to get married, Isabel a.”

“I’m not saying that everyone is. But she clearly wants to. And if he doesn’t want the same thing, then shouldn’t they just break up?”

“Why are you fighting with me?” Ben asked. She hated when he did this, when he turned things on her. He could act however and say whatever he wanted, and if she cal ed him on it, then she was the bad person who’d instigated the fight.

“I’m not fighting with you,” Isabel a said. She knew that the night was already gone. It was ruined. They should just leave now instead of indulging in an evening of arguments and accusations.

“Real y, wel , that’s what it feels like. I need a new drink,” Ben said, and walked away.

Ben loved this stupid game show cal ed Deal or No Deal. He loved the part when people had the chance to walk away with a ton of money and then made the wrong choice and left with nothing. It made him laugh out loud.

“Don’t you feel bad for them?” Isabel a would ask.

“No,” he always said. “They’re stupid. They deserve it.”

When Isabel a watched him laughing at those people, she felt like she was sitting next to the cruelest person in the world.

Less than a week after the wedding, Ben moved out. They had final y broken up, and it was just as awful as Isabel a thought it would be. She couldn’t sleep and so she stared into the darkness every night. She was alone, and she felt the aloneness in everything she did. But that was just at first. It went away after a while, or maybe she just stopped noticing it.

She never ran into Ben, although she always thought she saw him in a crowded bar or walking down the street. Her eyes played tricks on her everywhere she went. But that, too, went away and then the only time she real y thought about him was when she smel ed pot.

The weird thing was that long after she got over Ben, Isabel a thought about JonBenét. She couldn’t even recal the girl’s real name, and stil she entered her mind with alarming frequency. Isabel a remembered how she had laughed at JonBenét without real y knowing her and how kind the girl had been to her that night. She thought about how everyone gossiped about her behind her back and wondered if she knew. And mostly, Isabel a wondered if JonBenét was final y engaged or even married by now. She almost e-mailed Ben once, just to ask. Isabel a wished for JonBenét when she threw pennies into fountains, when she blew on eyelashes, and when the clock read 5:55. She wished for her that she was married. She wished for her that she had a beautiful wedding. She hoped she was happy.

A bby’s family was weird. She had, on some level, always known this, but as she got older it became much more clear. When Abby was four, her dad’s uncle died and left them al of his money—and there was a lot of it. Instead of using it to buy a house or a boat, like normal people, her parents bought a farm in Vermont and spent their days smoking pot and refurbishing antique furniture. Sometimes her dad cal ed her mom Lil’ Bit, and sometimes they let their friend Patches park his trailer on their property and live there. Yes, Abby’s parents were weird, her sister was even stranger, and the whole lot of them together was sometimes too much to bear.