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before?” asked Kayla. “My parents go to bed early , so I can leave whenever I want as long as I’m quiet. Just tell your parents you’re not going out, then wait until they’re asleep and then boom , you’re at a party with the hottest guy that’s ever talked to you.”
    Haven thought about it for a moment. “They usually go to bed around nine if I’m not out of the house.”
    “So we’ll be a few minutes late. Big deal. It won’t really get started until we show up anyway.”
    “Oh, yeah, we’re real party animals,” said Haven.
    Kayla hugged her. “That’s the spirit.”
     

 
     
     
    4
     
    C olton started the long walk home from the homeless shelter. The path he always took wasn’t the quickest, but he thought it was the most scenic. He passed three parks along the way, their wide, grassy fields providing a calm, momentary escape from the concrete jungle everywhere else in the city.
    The apartment building where he was staying was just on the edge of Parkchester in an area that barely clung to the image of wealth and power that had been slowly receding for decades. Even with the steady decline in real estate value, apartments in the building where Colton lived still cost a small fortune to rent. He tried to convince Reece to move someplace more affordable, but Reece needed what he called “the flash”. He didn’t seem to care that they could be paying half of what they shelled out every month and still live in a decent part of town.
    Reece’s family had money.
    His father was a partner at a major law firm in Manhattan and his mother was a well-known news anchor in the city. It was impossible to walk downtown without turning a corner and seeing a bench or a billboard plastered with one of their smiling faces. His father’s picture was on the benches, and as such suffered the wrath of marker-wielding teenagers who never stopped inventing new ways to draw a mustache on his face.
    Colton looked up at a huge banner hanging on the side of a tall building as he walked past. “Channel 8 News: Your Source For Truth”. Reece’s mother smiled down at him, beaming with confidence, sympathy, and wisdom all at once. If Colton actually watched the news, or any television for that matter, he would probably watch her show. Reece hated his parents’ success—even though it allowed him to live comfortably—and quickly changed the channel every time one of their advertisements aired.
    “Lousy phonies,” he would say, shaking his head. “If people only knew!”
    Colton had met them at a dinner party months ago when he first moved to New York. They seemed genuine enough to him, and as he watched their interactions with Reece over the course of the evening, he figured out that they were embarrassed by their son. Reece resented them for thinking they were better than everyone else—just not enough to stop taking the checks they sent him every month.
    Eventually, the small divide between Reece and his parents turned into a chasm. His father told him that they would pay for him to go to any college or trade school, but Reece sneered at the offer and told his father outright that it would never happen. He continued to accept the sizable checks they sent him every month, but beyond that he had no contact with his parents whatsoever.
    Reece’s biggest problem—as Colton saw it—was that he had never really had any true ambition. When he became old enough to realize that he could get away with not working a day in his entire life—thanks to the copious sums his parents raked in every year—he decided to become a “student of life”, casting aside all responsibility and doing his best to live every day as if it were his last. Usually, that meant throwing as many parties as possible and drinking himself into unconsciousness, but every once in a great while he did something really stupid just to mix things up.
    Colton had barely been able to tolerate that crazy lifestyle before he got his new job at the