Excerpt from Marilou Is Everywhere by Sarah Elaine Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The second night of the trip, the boys took them on a hike through some path that wound around the massive blocks of limestone stories below the lookout pavilion. They took secret avenues through the rock where slim light fell through, silvery and ancient. At the Ravens Rock Overlook, they had produced homemade blackberry wine in a three-liter Pepsi bottle. They were romance minded, of course. The girls didn't rebuff them too hard at first. It is sometimes nice to see a little attention. A little of that light lands on you, say, on a dizzy vista, and sweet wine is sweet, or so I'm told.

Thrill seekers prefer Ravens Rock Overlook because it is unfenced. The view isn't troubled by those coin-op lookie-loos. It feels likely, if you place a foot wrong, that you will spin off into the sky and never again trouble with gravity. So the boys dared to touch the girls in the dark, on the small of the back, the casual first declaration. It was romance. Apparently Kayla even held hands with Shawn, the tall one with the buff of his arms showing through his cut-up T-shirt. They talked about the souls of animals and the things the stars looked like, and they talked about their idiot worried parents and how they would all be just fine.

Shawn walked Kayla closer to the edge. He said he wanted to show her a place where you could see the river down below like a moving silver chain. Close to the drop, he kicked her in the back of the knee, sly, to make her stumble and grab on to him dearly. Kayla pantomimed this by pinwheeling her arms in dismay when she told me the story. Shawn had probably intended for her to swoon into his arms, but she instead shrieked and tore back up from the edge, and running blind in the dark she turned her ankle in a gopher hole. The boys carried her back to camp and bound her ankle with duct tape and even went to the Eagle Lodge CafŽ to bring her ice, a Coke, a stack of cordwood to apologize.

But things had turned. Suddenly Kayla's absent boyfriend asserted himself a bit more firmly in her memory. She started to talk about him a lot. Maybe she was trying to remind herself as much as anything, but she did allude to Lyle's WPIAL wrestling trophies and bow-hunting expertise something on the heavy side. The musk wore down to a lean little smell. But the boys kept working their angle, saying how cold a night for May. Saying, man, what a lonely thing, to sleep alone on a night so cold. When the girls didn't respond they laid it down for a while and kept up the friendliness, but Jude had already heard the sour note. She said she didn't like their manners and they could go bang their dicks together if they were so fucking cold. The smallest of the boys, B.D., feint-stepped to her with his hand rared back, like he would slap her in the face, and they noticed then that he had a knife. It was nothing special, with a black plastic handle like for a kitchen, but he let it wave around meanly all the same. Jude brought out a canister of pepper spray-none of the others knew she even carried such a thing-and scorched B.D. right at the bridge of his nose.

Tia and Crystal and Kayla wanted to leave immediately, but it had already been dark for some time and they had left the cars outside the park limits to avoid the vehicle fee. Jude and Amber doubted the boys would come back, and with Kayla on one foot it would take forever to hike out in the dark. But the boys did pass through a few times in the night to thrash around in the underbrush and scare them, muttering under their breath in a simmering way: bitches, bitches, bitches. Crystal was sure someone had peed on her tent in the middle of the night.

In the morning, they broke camp as soon as the light started to change and hiked back out of the park. Jude's car was scratched up with key marks that bit down to the metal. They had not told the boys where they'd left their cars, but Jude realized one must have followed her when she had made the trek to get bug spray from the trunk. Still, she didn't seem scared, they said. Pissed off, though, like anyone would be.

Excerpted from Marilou Is Everywhere by Sarah Elaine Smith. Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Elaine Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.