I don’t know how much of my drunkenness Garrett witnessed last night, but he’s not calling or texting about our date tonight, so I’m guessing it’s more than I would have wanted him to see. He would not approve of the level of sloppy intoxication I achieved.

It doesn’t fucking matter. I don’t fucking care.

I’m lying. Obviously.

But I need to pull myself together so I can make some money to send to Liza like I promised. It’s a warm, sunny day with a cool breeze, the kind of day that pulls people outside—a perfect day to busk. So around noon, I say goodbye to Bethany, pop a few Excedrin, and head downtown with my cello.

I set up at my usual bench, my cello between my knees. My pulse is furious in my temples. No Garrett; of course I look for him everywhere I go. Fuck.

My bow is angry against the strings today, and I’m making things up, ripping at my instrument and sliding into strange, angular melodies. The jagged sounds are like needles in my ears, aggravating my hangover headache, and that just makes me play harder—I deserve to suffer. A crowd gathers, curious and slack-jawed at my playing. Am I bad or am I good? I hate the scratchy, feral noises coming from the cello, but my case is filling with bills. I tear at the strings until the hairs from my bow begin to break away and my arm muscles are weak from exertion.

After a short break, I come back to my bench and finish my session with more traditional fare, some Bach, a little Haydn, a few simple folk tunes. The crowd dissipates. Why does everyone like me best when I’m uncomfortable?

I gather my money and count it—a hundred and forty dollars in two hours, more than I’ve ever made in one afternoon, though nearly all of it was made before my break, when I was playing like a crazy woman. I roll my cello down the sidewalk toward my car, pausing by a bag lady who’s sitting in a heap in front of a cafe. But I keep my money this time. For a second, I forget to be angry with myself, forget that I have a splitting headache, forget to feel guilty about a stranger to whom I owe nothing. I’m just happy I can send Liza the hundred dollars I promised her.

Back at the dorm, I make myself a box of macaroni and cheese for a late lunch. I crave Garrett’s fancy food. I crave…Garrett. He’d stick his nose up at this imitation shit. But I sit on my bed and eat the whole box anyway, like a gluttonous pig. Daphne is still out, and there is no sign she’s even come home: her bed is still smooth from when Bethany made it up this morning. Her laptop is closed and off.

Rome and I are supposed to study, and though my head is pounding, I meet him downstairs in the lobby. I’m in no state for a trek to the library, but I think we can study in the lounge today—it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday and no one is around. But Rome has a blanket under his arm. “The weather is dope today. You up for studying under a tree? I promise I won’t try to be romantic.” He winks.

I laugh in spite of my still-throbbing head. “Fine by me.”

We set up under the tree out front where Garrett always waits for me. For an hour or so, we compare our class notes to the material from our required reading. I’m trying to focus, I’m doing my best, but I can’t stop rubbing my temples. I keep glancing at my phone hoping for the text that I know is not going to come.

“Hey girl, you okay today? You seem kind of…out of it.”

“I have a headache. Hangover.”

“Ah.” He sets his book aside. “We’ve done a lot already. Let’s chill for a bit and enjoy the breeze.”

A few students mill about, wandering to and from the commons. The rays of light slanting through the leaf canopy are as warm and soothing as a blanket. “Yeah,” I say. “I could do that.” I let myself sink backward until I’m lying flat on my back, and close my eyes. For a brief moment, everything feels right; but the moment is a time-encapsulated bubble, and outside of this single, protected moment, everything is very, very wrong. Oily rainbows curl and slide over the surface of the bubble, echoes of my mother’s death intertwined with the headache of today’s reality—a multicolored braid of grief. I shouldn’t have tried to wash her away with tequila, shouldn’t have had such high hopes for Garrett. As if he could do anything to fill the space my mother left behind.

I exhale a sad sigh, and then suddenly my mom’s face is swimming in my vision, as oily and incandescent as the rainbows, as ephemeral as the bubble. But I feel her with me as solidly as when she was alive. I think This must be a dream, but it’s more than that; I’ve done something amazing, here and now—something that undid all the bad things. I fixed something, did everything exactly right, and here she is, she’s really here, she’s reaching for me…

“Yo, Garrett.”

The rainbow bubble bursts with a brilliant, color-dashing splash. My eyes flutter open. Did I fall asleep?

“Rome.” Garrett looms over me, silhouetted by the beams of light shooting through the treetops.

I jerk to sitting, my mother’s face still swimming in my mind. They know each other?

“Garrett,” I say, and my voice is high-pitched. Guilty. I’m smoothing my hair flat with my hands, trying to make sense of the moment. Yes, I fell asleep. Must have.

“Busy studying?” Garrett says, his face as calm as a windless sea.

I nod and pick at the corner of my closed book. My heart is pounding with such force that I can’t feel my headache anymore. Or maybe I slept it off.

“I was dropping by to check if you wanted to come over early, Malory, but I see you’re occupied.” I’m sure I detect a bit of tightness around his mouth. Fuck.

I can’t tell him I’d rather go with him, that Rome is just a stupid nobody and wouldn’t know how to give me whatever it is that Garrett gives me that makes me feel like my heart’s been tied in a knot. I stare, silent, like my tongue’s been cut out.

“You hear anything about the stuff from Ty?” Rome says, his voice casual.

“Not here.” Garrett’s eyes flick to me for a fraction of a second. “I’ll message you.”

I thought he didn’t use social media? Didn’t he get the messaging app just for me?

“Looks like you had a great time at that party last night, Malory,” Garrett says, and my heart stutters and stops and restarts because now I know that he saw. He saw me taking shot after shot and stumbling and hanging on Bethany and maybe he even saw me puke. But doesn’t he remember that I was sad? That I had reason to be sad?

He walks away without another word, and for a few moments I’m so wracked with shame that I can’t breathe. I’ve just lost something I could have had with Garrett, if only I’d chosen a different path. I shouldn’t have gotten totally trashed last night. I shouldn’t have been hanging out here right now with Rome. I’ve done nothing wrong, not really, I can logically see this is true, and yet my chest is tight with the feeling that I’ve ruined…something.

“That’s the guy you’ve been seeing?” Rome turns to me, his eyes narrowed in bewilderment.

My heart is roaring in my temples, and the headache is back, flashing at me like a strobe, but I lie down on the blanket and close my eyes, try to pretend I’m calm. “We’re just hanging out.”

Rome doesn’t respond, so I open my eyes and look up at him. “What?”

“So you’re not serious about him?” A thin line of worry has appeared in the middle of his forehead.

Can he see my chest flushing? My face? My ears? I shrug. “Like I said, just hanging out. How do you know him?”

“We…work together sometimes.”

I have to laugh. “You sell insurance?”

One of Rome’s eyebrows goes up. “Nah, Mal, I don’t sell…insurance.” His tone is mocking—he’s making fun of me.

“What, so you both sell weed? Big deal. I don’t care what Garrett does in his spare time.” I close my eyes again, try to pretend it doesn’t bother me that I didn’t know this about him.

Rome makes a little huffing sound. “Well, he cares what you do in your spare time. He didn’t like seeing you with me. Not one little bit.”

Rome is right. There was an unmistakable stiffness to Garrett’s responses. I cross my arms over my chest. “Well, he can’t tell me who to see.” But I’m thinking that from now on I’ll be more careful about where I meet with Rome to study.

“The way you’re acting today—it have anything to do with him?”

“No.”

“Malory…”

Stop it, Rome. “Yesterday was the anniversary of my mom’s suicide.” It’s cruel to toss this information at Rome like a hot potato, but I want to shock him into leaving me alone about Garrett.

“Fuck, Malory.” My eyes are still closed, but the way his voice sounds, I imagine he’s put his head in his hands.

I sigh.

“We could’ve…” He stammers a little, as if he’s fishing for the right thing to say. “I dunno, done something different. We didn’t have to study.”

“It’s good to keep moving forward. Stay busy.”

I feel him lie down next to me, hear him inhale deep and let it go.

Garrett and I are definitely not getting together tonight. My chest hollows out as this truth settles in my mind, and the emptiness—it’s too much. I don’t want to think, don’t want to feel. “Let’s go get high,” I tell Rome.

“Fuck yes.”

---

Rome’s dorm room is neater than I expected—or at least, his side is. His roommate’s side is covered in clothes and papers, an iPod, headphones, a few textbooks. But the slob himself isn’t here. Rome sits at his desk and rolls a blunt, his brown boy-fingers strangely adept at the task, as if smoking pot is an art form. The leaves he uses to stuff the cigar paper are sea green and covered in crystals that look like morning dew. The scent is clean and herbal, overwhelming in the tiny room.

Rome lifts his eyes at me while he licks the blunt to seal it, and something in the twitch of his mouth tells me he senses my discomfort. I’m standing in the center of the room with my arms crossed because the only places to sit are Rome’s roommate’s desk chair, covered in clothes, or Rome’s bed, which…I’m just not sure I should sit there. It feels too intimate.

“I finally got you up here, see,” he says with a wink.

I can’t help but grin. “You’re an asshole.”

“Gotta take this outside.” He stands and slips the blunt into his pocket, very careful. “Someone on our floor got caught a few nights ago and they’ve been patrolling.”

“Outside? In the open?”

“I know a place.”

I follow him downstairs, and he leads me around the back of the dorm to an alleyway between our building and the one behind it. There’s enough space to shrink from view but escape out the other side if anyone comes by.

Rome leans against the brick wall and lights the blunt, puffing on it and squinting against the smoke, then passes it to me. I puff on it gently, trying not to be too brave about it, afraid I’ll end up coughing like I’ve seen others do. I’ve only smoked once before and I wonder if I should have warned him in case I make an ass of myself.

“You ain’t gonna get high like that, girl,” he says. The way he’s scrutinizing me, that mocking little half-smile—I’m sure he can tell I’m a newbie.

I roll my eyes. “Leave me alone.” But I try again, pulling deeper with my inhale, and then I feel the smoke bloom in my lungs. I double over, hacking and croaking, and by the time I stand up, tears are running down my face and the world is a whole different place than it was a few minutes ago, bending and pulsing and billowing like a flag. I feel like, if I take a step, the ground will rise up to meet me.

“Fuck,” I say.

Rome laughs and it echoes through my head, a rubber mallet ricocheting off a steel drum. “The coughing makes it hit you a lot harder.” His voice is distorted, like it rolled out of the same steel drum as his laugh.

“Fuck,” I say again. I grab onto the brick wall.

“You don’t smoke much, do you?”

I laugh, because wow Rome’s voice is hilarious—can he honestly not hear how musical it is? And I want to tell him that, how his voice is music in my ears, but it doesn’t make sense, so the words stay stuck inside my head. “Goddammit I am so high,” I say instead.

He’s looking at me with his lips pursed like he wants to laugh at me.

“Go ahead,” I say. “Make fun of me. You know you want to.”

He snickers. “You feel a little better, at least?”

I nod, and I can practically see myself, head bobbing slowly back and forth, eyes half shut, smiling like an iguana.

“We’d better get you upstairs. I didn’t realize you didn’t smoke. You just smoked some major high-grade shit, girl.”

“Awesome,” I hear my voice say even though I don’t remember my brain telling my mouth it was okay to speak.

The sun has gone down and there is only a faint purple glow where it was a few minutes before. Rome takes another quick drag off the blunt and extinguishes it on the brick behind him. “Come on.” I’m being dragged along and it feels like the earth is moving underneath me instead of my feet moving over the earth. I have no idea how my legs are walking. I think Rome’s arm is linked in mine.

“Stand up straight when we go through the lobby. I don’t need to have my room searched.”

Somehow my body forces itself erect, and again I don’t know where the command originated. My conscious thoughts are disconnected from the part of my brain that does things automatically. Or maybe they’ve switched places, and now I’ll have to think very hard about breathing and blinking, but conversation will happen involuntarily. I giggle at the idea—god, I’m clever—and suddenly we’re standing in front of the elevator waiting for it to ding.

My lungs fill with air, expanding my diaphragm, and then, without the slightest bit of effort, they deflate—I’m empty again. Repeat. It’s incredible that these two symmetrical mounds of muscle with all their thousands of root-like bronchioles are able to vacuum air from the atmosphere surrounding our faces, separate out the oxygen, expel the bullshit carbon dioxide, and then send the oxygen into our bloodstreams so we don’t suffocate. Breathing is a miracle! Good job, evolution, you fucking sorcerer, you.

Rome stares at me while the elevator rises, still with that half-smile, but his eyes are droopy as hell, so I know he’s high too. I smile at him, and now we’re just a pair of buds leaning against opposite elevator walls and smiling at each other like idiots, reading each other’s high-ass minds. I know he’s thinking that I look stoned and I know that he knows I’m looking at him and thinking the same thing. This is all just so goddamn reciprocal.

The elevator doors open, but we don’t get out right away.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” he says.

I’m too high to feel that usual drop in my stomach when I think of my beautiful mother. I push off the elevator wall and step out into the hallway. “Life’s a bitch,” I say. But then I correct myself: “No…death is a bitch. Death is a real fucking party-pooper.”

“A-fucking-men,” says Rome, and we’re standing in front of my dorm door and I’m fumbling with the key because it keeps wriggling in my hands—I can’t get a grip on it. The door opens on its own and there’s Daphne, staring at me somberly and she is NOT HIGH, not high at all, and damn, can she tell how fucked up I am? Her eyes are accusing as hell. I breeze into the room, raising my eyebrows at her like Go ahead and say something.

Then I’m lying flat on my back on my bed. How did I get here? But who cares, I’m here, that’s all that matters. Is it wrong to eat two boxes of macaroni and cheese in one day? Pretty sure I’ve got another box in the cabinet.

Rome’s steel drum voice: “I’ve got plans, but maybe you could keep an eye on her? I didn’t uh…know she wasn’t used to it.”

Daphne’s not responding, but that’s okay. I’m not going anywhere. Garrett’s not inviting me to his place to be his cum dumpster tonight. But god, if he touched me right now my skin would probably sizzle right off.

I hear the door latch closed, and then Daphne is hovering over me, her tangle of blond hair a disorderly halo backlit by the ceiling light overhead.

“I’m so fucking high,” I tell her, because she really needs to understand just how high I am. But then I see her eyes are puffy and she still has those dark circles and I’m trying to push through my fogginess to feel whatever it is I’m supposed to feel for her. Why can’t I feel? “What happened to you?” I finally say, the words floating out of me without my doing, with the same detachment as when I stood up straight in the lobby, the same as when I managed to walk across the undulating earth.

“I did something last night,” she says. Her hands are shaking and the cords in her neck are growing taut with the strain of some secret she doesn’t want to tell.

“Gabby?” I think I remember seeing them kissing at the party.

“It was just for fun, just for fun…” She’s still hovering over me, shaking, but she’s turned her head, looking out the window like she can’t bear to face me.

“If it was just for fun, why are you so upset?” The words tumble out of my mouth, and I’m not sure if they are the right words or not. Am I missing something, or am I just too fucking high?

“It wasn’t just for fun,” she whispers, her eyes still on the scene outside the window, and for a second I think her hushed words are the wind rushing in from outside.

Then I’m scooting toward the wall and patting the bed next to me, and she’s climbing in, lying on her back beside me and still shaking from head to toe—her teeth are actually chattering, I can hear them. “You mean,” I say, “for you, it wasn’t just for fun.”

“No,” she breathes. “Oh, no, no, no.” Her voice still sounds like wind, the sad, sighing kind that comes before a devastating storm.

“Gabby was just…oh, for attention? From guys?”

She gives a sad little moan that is so laden with humiliation, I turn on my side and put an arm around her. Her shoulders are hard and knobby. I picture myself shoving Gabby down a flight of stairs.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m in the wrong life,” she says, and she turns to face me with her arms crossed over her chest, tucking her chin and hugging herself as she snuggles into me. “Or…” she whispers, “that there is just something wrong…with me.”

Daphne and her devastating storm. I stroke her hair away from her face the way my mom used to do for me, even after she became a shell of herself. And after she died, Liza and I took our mother’s place, just like Daphne and me now: curled up on each other like a pair of embryos seeking comfort.

“You’re perfect exactly how you are,” I tell her, and then she lets loose a hiccupping sob, opening the floodgates to a river of tears.