Attending Spence, an elite prep school, should make Carole Mason feel privileged but it’s a torturous experience for this shy, 16 year old. She started too late to be in any of the cliques so when Naomi, who is a bit wild and unconventional, enters her life Carole finally finds a sense of belonging.
Unfortunately Naomi is quite calculating and manipulative. She teaches Carole to smoke, shoplift and before too long, the two have formed a pact to lose their virginity to college dropout, Eddie Lindbaeck while on a ski vacation.
Matters quickly spin out of control when Rita, a friend of Eddie’s, also arrives at the ski vacation. Carole was too drunk to remember details but she knows Rita has died and she helped bury the body, and now she shares a dangerous secret with Eddie and Naomi.
What Carole didn’t realize is that Naomi and Eddie will use this secret to manipulate her and torment her. She finds no way out of the situation except to disappear from her comfortable life and family. Pam Lewis takes the reader through a hippie commune in San Francisco and back to Vermont as Carole is forever trying to hide from Eddie. Luck is not always on her side as he keeps appearing and disrupting Carole’s attempt at a normal life.
I didn’t find many surprises in this book but nevertheless I couldn’t stop reading. I thought Lewis wrote an engaging story of a friend’s betrayal, guilt and the burden of secrets. How easy it would have been for Carole to have acted in a different way after the night at the cabin but this is a novel of choices and the consequences that come with those choices.