If you make it through high school without doing drugs, the whole

world will delight in trying to corrupt you. The coordinates of my eventual

surrender were San Francisco, Ned Klein, and noxious west coast weed.

I was woozy within a few minutes, my throat tightening in pulses. Matt

kept me from throwing up down my dress but just barely, and by the time

he set me down on the bathroom floor I was negotiating the world through

many layers of mental gauze. I barfed, my eyeballs turned a few complete

rotations within my skull, and Matt apologized over and over for not knowing

better than to let me get so sick. I remember that his voice was in that upper

register of distress, and thinking that I might fall straight through the toilet

into Hell.

Mack came in, cautiously, confirmed that I was alive, and then returned to

his attendant breezies.

My nausea subsided long enough to get upstairs to Molly’s bed. I anchored

the room by keeping one foot on the floor, and had a visit from Dr. Klein, just

back from a concert. He hesitated in the doorframe, a gentle and dadly silhouette.

“Ned told me you weren’t feeling too well. Is it alright if I give you a brief

medical exam?”

I whimpered in assent and tried to slide around on the bed. This left me

momentarily unmoored and immediately nauseated.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions. Are you in pain?”

Matt sat me up. I blathered. “I think she just ate something funny,” he lied.

“And can you tell me where it hurts?”

I would have said my stomach and my brain and my mouth had I not been

moved by the spirit of marijuana to slump forward and vomit strawberry slush

all over Molly’s beige carpet.

Molly’s dad was concerned, Matt was mad at himself, and by the next morning

I was feeling well enough to eat a plate of Ned’s scrambled eggs and leave the

house on my own two feet.

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