In the basement, we played the game where you press on someone’s chest and they say ha ha ha until they begin to laugh. The girls did it to each other and the boys watched.

Maddie heard her dad’s car pull into the garage above. The boys hid in the exercise room, the linen closet, and the old wine cellar that was now a crawl space filled with ski equipment. Mr. Beerman came downstairs. The girls giggled, held their thumbs in their palms, and looked at the floor. He opened a closet and a few boys slid out. Then more doors and more boys. Maddie’s dad shooed them out of the basement.

We heard their keys clicking and cars unlocking, the shudders of BMWs and Audis and Mercedes Benzs beeping, then rolling down the driveway. The boys would be warm inside their mother’s cars.

Mr. Beerman pulled Maddie’s arm and the rest of her body followed him upstairs. We waited in a circle at the bottom of the stairs and played with the elastic of our spaghetti straps, fearing whose arm might be grabbed by Maddie’s father next. We heard him shout and Maddie sigh.

Her apathy might have been the reason for her appearance when she returned downstairs, closing the door softly behind her. One of her cheeks was red. She was crying. A few of us comforted her, and some kept our eyes on the floor. Then, as if from outside our circle, laughter erupted.

We took turns. Maddie in the middle, the eight of us surrounding her. Our hands slapped her soft cheeks, hard. Laughter rang through the basement. Both cheeks were rosier than ever, and there was no longer a distinction between slapped and un-slapped cheek. “Slap Beerman,” we shouted. “Slap Beerman!” Someone in the circle took a photo and posted it. Hashtag Slap Beerman.

One hand hit hard enough to make Maddie lose her balance. She fell. Another hand reached to help her up but slapped her instead. Slapped her again and again. She was on the floor now.

“Slap Beerman! Slap Beerman!”

We hadn’t realized Maddie was no longer laughing until we saw her on our hands, which we wiped on our tank tops and shorts. One of us got on our knees and pushed on Maddie’s chest.

“Ha ha ha,” we called, “ha ha ha.”

I went over to play in Madeline Beerman’s pool. She lived in a development where all the houses resembled one another; her’s was number 29, only her mailbox had just been stolen by some of Eli’s friends, the same friends that forged Thaddius’s signature for the auction of the gingerbread gym. My mom had trouble finding the right house.

Brona Beerman was Jews-for-Jesus and my first introduction to church. On the phone, Mom would mention something called an ‘hourglass figure,’ and then I knew she was talking to Brona.

Maddie and I laid out on the burning cement eating dog treats, inches from the cold chlorine. Maddie squeezed a green noodle between her thighs, flailing it back and forth.

She’d been baptized in this pool. Two men held Maddie in the water. They dipped her backward, head first, just beneath the surface. There was a spread of bagels and lox and an ice cream cake imprinted with a photo of Maddie. She told me she smushed her face into the cake, like how we kissed our reflections in the mirror. It was a tradition. In her room were photos from birthdays, a slightly different cake on a slightly different Maddie’s face.

“Listen, listen,” Maddie said. She sat up. The noodle fell over her left thigh. “This one time, this girl I know—are you listening?”

“Yeah, I’m listening to you.”

“Well actually, Libby Stone knows her, but Libby Stone told me that this one girl would always swim to the bottom of her pool to try and touch the drain, like we do, you know how we do that?”

“Yeah…”

“And this one time she got her hand caught in the drain. And she couldn’t get it out, and it sucked her right up into the drain—well, actually, she didn’t get sucked up, but she drowned ‘cause her nanny wasn’t watching her really, and she got stuck down there in the pool, and she died.”

Madeline swapped her noodle for a brick from behind the patio wall. She held it in her arms like a baby. She approached the water. Then she stopped.

“Just watch me, watch this. Hey, ready? Are you watching me?”

“I’m watching, Maddie.”

“Are you watching?”

“Just go.”

I watched as she gently sank to the bottom, sitting in a perfect pretzel with the brick on her thighs.

At 11:45 pm, her parents received a call. An older girl was throwing a Surfer Bros-and-Hawaiian-Hoes-themed party, and their daughter was found rolling down a hill in the backyard, covered in vomit, and needed to be taken home.

The daughter’s friend’s mother collected her from the party and brought her to the parking lot of the town’s bagel store. In the parking lot, she continued to vomit on the backseats of her friend’s mother’s SUV.

When the parents brought their daughter home she was unconscious. Still wearing her lei, bralette, and high-waisted shorts, the parents put her in a cold shower. She wouldn’t wake up. The parents asked the neighbor, a doctor, to come over. The neighbor asked the father if he was crazy. Putting a person in a shower when they are intoxicated! That is the last thing you do. You are supposed to keep them on their stomach so they don’t choke on their vomit. The neighbor advised the parents to take their daughter to the hospital.

At the hospital, the daughter was brought to a room with eight beds in a row, each divided by a curtain. She was given an IV with fluids for hydration. Seven of the beds were now occupied by intoxicated teenagers, a nurse remarked.

The next morning the daughter woke up in her bed at home. She’d dreamt she was rolling down a hill, but the hospital socks and the bruises on her arms and legs proved otherwise. The parents recounted the night to her: that she had ripped out her IV and peed her pants, that she had called the nurse a fucking bitch, given her the middle finger and bitten her. The daughter found it funny that seven of the eight beds were occupied by drunk teenagers like herself. “But who was in the eighth bed?” she asked.