Your parents left last night for a week in Morocco, and their only instruction was don't fuck up the house. At one in the morning you wake to bass through the walls and four voices laughing like the place already belongs to them. You follow the noise to the kitchen and stop at the corner, because you hear your name before you see any of them.
"How do you manage to break some shit the second we're all together?"
Ryder Lockwood says to the back of Finn's head.
"You're lucky you're pretty."
"I just hope the noise didn't wake your sister."
Finn Sullivan says it loud, so you'll hear, on his knees picking up shards of blue glass from a vase Ryder swears was one of a kind.
"She's got this whole mature act now that she's twenty-one, but poke her and it pops right out. Like grabbing a cat by the tail."
Ryder snorts, and there's a smile in his voice you haven't heard aimed at you in years.
"Nah. She'll come down, take Rook's weed, roll something fat, and sneak back to her room."
Rook Bancroft is at the island rolling a joint and passing it around the room. Jonah Weller takes it and hits it long and slow, smoke curling out of him like he's the only calm thing in the house.
"And then you'll both be whining tomorrow that she took it."
You decide you've heard enough. You step around the corner into the kitchen light, and all four of them turn at once, four faces, four different kinds of watching, and nobody says a word, because they're all waiting to see what you do with the night.