He never mentioned Rick or Taz or Budge or Candace. I was keen to make sure that version of me was never invoked—not in the slightest. I asked about the music, and he talked for a while about some concert venue called Red Rocks and a crazy bridge between “Dark Star” and “Brokedown Palace.” While we chatted, I reached over to his giant socked feet and began to rub them.
“That feels amazing,” he said.
“Doesn’t it?”
The point was to be nuts. I was aiming for a kind of beatific vacancy, as though I could return to innocence by way of insanity. I rubbed his feet for a while, then got up, utterly aloof, and went back to my room in time for check-in. I felt certifiable. But my act worked: Leighton, disarmed or otherwise unconcerned, invited me to meet him and some other buddies in another sixth former’s room to get high. I’d never even seen pot before. On the appointed evening I ducked under the tapestry that was hung, in open defiance of fire-safety rules, across the threshold, calling out, “Hello?,” and was immediately and loudly shushed. Two dressers faced me—another obstacle to any faculty member who dared to venture in. I cut right around them and found a cavelike space beneath loft beds, where a group of guys huddled toward what I gathered was a bong.
It was red plastic, the size of a child’s telescope, and translucent. It bubbled in a pleasing way. The closest referent I had was a lava lamp, or the tiny red oil lights that my childhood friend Wendy had on her Christmas tree and which made my dad hysterical with fear. “Boiling oil is basically a bomb! That tree would go up in a heartbeat!” I recognized the smell of pot, and for the first time knew what it was.
“’Sup?” someone said.
“Hey.”
Leighton patted the floor beside him. “You’re up next.”
I scooched into place and waited. The bong was held to my face. Across the circle, a student I’d never spoken to flicked open a lighter and held the flame to a little metal cup at its base.
I stared.
Leighton whispered, “Inhale.”
I pointed to the mouth of the bong. “There?”
Everyone laughed. “Yeah.”
I lowered my face to the red plastic opening and inhaled as best I could. The snap-snap sound of the student’s lighter flint pleased me, like a train clicking over its track, like we were together helping me arrive somewhere else.
My cheeks puffed fat as a chipmunk’s, I raised my head.
Everyone laughed again. “No, inhale,” said Leighton. He patted his chest and filled it, to show me.
I had never so much as smoked a cigarette, but I gulped some of the fiery air in my mouth down into my lungs. The moment I did, I realized my mistake.
My throat tore open. I was ignited, I was sure of it. The pain was astonishing. I hadn’t remembered. I hadn’t thought.
I burst out coughing and crying, and the first smiles that had appeared around the circle closed quickly into faces of concern.
“Dude. Is she okay? Are you okay?”
I had to cough, but coughing was awful. Tears were running down my face, and I was waving a hand in front of my mouth as though to cool myself.
“Jesus.”
“Okay, no tokes for you, kiddo.”
“Christ.”
“Is she, like, allergic?”
“Maybe she’s just super-wired to weed.”
Someone laughed. “Totally. Like, built for it. Like, a Polaroid with weed. Just show it to her and she lights up.”
Leighton clapped me on the back. “Awesome. Welcome.”
I didn’t even have to talk. I sat there, watching the red bong glow from hand to hand, listening to the laughter and the crackle of the flame in the bowl, the endless, low, insipid tones of some long-ago Dead concert on the stereo. I waited to get high, but nothing happened. My throat hurt so much that I let spit pool in my mouth before I worked up the courage to swallow. One guy across the way smiled a particularly large smile at me. He had long red hair that fell in a lush drape over his face, and he kept pushing it aside so he could see me. I thought how funny it would be if we became girlfriend and boyfriend, how much shit people would give us for both having red hair. He had the same idea. This was Timothy Macalester. He was interested in social justice, Northern California, and smoking weed. In no time at all he was walking me to class and home at night, and I never again had to pretend to try to get high.
I don’t remember what we talked about, Tim and I. He was thoughtful and independent and funny and mild, and I remember best his enormous smile. It took up half his face, and he coupled it with the longish red hair in a silly way, but because he was not self-conscious, all you saw was a really nice guy whose face could make you smile. Everywhere we went, we were told we’d have redheaded children. I was just happy not to be alone.
He never asked about Rick or Taz or Budge, and I never volunteered anything about them. He liked to kiss. This was fine with me, though my body remained cold—whatever high glitter had swept through me the spring before, kissing Shep beneath the lamplight, was gone now. We did not engage in much beyond this. I recall only vaguely our intimacy. It was my duty as his girlfriend, I understood, and it was a small price to pay for the fact that other boys had stopped promising to, say, fuck my freckles on the way to Environmental Science class. No more calls from college
