Nobody cares, Molly had said. And nobody did. Because nobody argued, nobody turned to comfort Kip, nobody put his arm around her. Nobody even noticed. She meant to find the bathroom—that ever-perfect place for a girl to run when she had problems, emotional or physical. A double hiding place—the room itself, and the cubicle if you really needed solitude. But she turned down the wrong hall once outside the ballroom and when she flung open the door she thought would take her to the women’s room, she found herself in a sort of kitchen. Nobody was cooking anything there; it seemed to be more of a storage area. Its stainless steel counter-tops gleamed, and its refrigerators were spotless. The tiles were tiny beige octagons, and the windows were high above the shelves. And Lee Hamilton was pouring potato chips from enormous yellow cellophane bags into enormous wicker serving baskets. He was glad to see her. And Kip stayed for one reason only: there didn’t seem to be anybody else at the Last Dance who was glad to see her.
