style="font-size:15px;"> In the first few days following the demise of Brian Chen, we must have logged five hundred miles on her Civic. She had a playlist called Drive, Fucker, Drive!, which consisted mostly of songs with loads of swears. Hip-hop, obviously, but also some punk and even some country of the shit-kicking variety. We played it full blast with the windows down and drove west into the hills and farmlands near Pennsylvania, where the autumn colors were popping. We turned off the GPS and took roads we didn’t know.
This was something we’d done before, and almost always the plan was to get into adventures. Though our adventures usually consisted of getting dirty looks from old men as we pulled into rural gas stations. It’s illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey, so Tess and I would sit in the car with the stereo still on, singing along to songs about being “higher than a motherfucker,” and the geezers would stand there shaking their heads and mumbling under their breaths until we drove off in a fit of giggles.
Of course, Tess was never higher than a motherfucker. She was responsible like that. Me, not so much. For instance, the Dalton twins had sold me some shrooms a few months before. At a farmer’s market, appropriately enough. I’d only taken them once, during a camping trip to the Poconos. They freaked me out at first, but then the experience mellowed and I eventually became “one with nature” and decided I was willing to give them another shot. I’d stashed them in the base of my bedside lamp and had been saving them for an outdoor concert or some event where my ermahgerd-your-voice-is-full-of-rainbows! shtick would be tolerated.
During one of our drives away from memories of Katelyn and Brian, swear-singing with Tess wasn’t helping me forget enough, so I insisted we stop by a Dunkin’ Donuts. I bought a steaming-hot pumpkin latte and I dropped a double dose of shrooms in it.
“You’re gonna make yourself sick,” Tess said.
“The opposite,” I said. “You brew them in liquid first to make sure you don’t get sick. That’s what Native Americans do.”
“In pumpkin lattes?”
“Well, they had pumpkins at least. Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie. Duh.”
“Yeah. Duh.”
Tess was right. Twenty minutes later I was puking along the side of the road somewhere in the Pinelands. Tess rubbed my back and I imagined her hand was a bear’s paw—but not a scary bear’s paw, a cuddly bear’s paw, a cartoon bear’s paw—and it was at that moment I realized that shit was about to get loopy.
“Someone loves me,” I told her.
“I love you, baby,” Tess said.
“I know that, but I mean a phantom. Someone who lives in space between the spaces.”
“Jesus? Dumbledore?”
“Don’t joke, Tess. You haven’t got your real eyes on.” I meant this last part literally, because instead of her regular brown eyes, she had glimmering diamonds in her head.
“Let’s get you in the car. You can lie down in the back. I’ll play something acoustic. Something soothing.”
“Invigorating. Invigorating. Invigorating,” I said.
“Soothing,” Tess repeated in a voice that fit the word, and she guided me into the backseat.
“He reads my mind,” I said with a gasp. “Do you think he has especially big ears, like satellites that can read brain waves?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tess said.
As she pushed me on the chest and down into the seat, I handed her my phone, which was queued up to my texts. She took a second to read them and handed the phone back. “See. He loves me,” I said.
Tess leaned in and kissed me on the cheek and I felt little happy ants on my skin. “Well, whoever he is, he isn’t here. And I’m guessing he hasn’t shown up at your door yet.”
“Nope. He’s a chicken. Bock-bock-bock,” I clucked, and I wondered why people said chickens sounded like that because I wasn’t sure what they really sounded like, but I knew it wasn’t that. Definitely not that.
My feet were dangling outside, so Tess lifted and placed them on the seat and closed the door to keep them in place. It sounded like the air hatch on a rocket ship sealing shut. Noise, then silence. Then a few seconds later, noise again and Tess was at the controls, firing up the engine and launching us into space. Music burst from the stereo like bats from a cave and I felt every curve and bump of the road. I laughed hysterically as Tess sang along to some dopey song from the sixties or seventies about two friends and how one will always come running to help the other whenever the other calls out his name. Like a dog or something.
you’ve got a friend
Usually in these situations, we’d end up at Tess’s house. Her mom was a single mom and the thing about single moms is they tend to tolerate teenage shenanigans. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been drunk and draped over Tess’s shoulder as she led me upstairs while Paula peered over the top of whatever novel she was reading and remarked, “Hope it was worth it, Mara.”
That said, the other thing about single moms is they tend to date, and when that happens, they prefer not to have their seventeen-year-old daughter and her friend who’s swatting at imaginary dragonflies show up just as they’re pulling the cork from some chardonnay. On this particular night, Paula was on a date with a guy named Paul. It couldn’t possibly work out, for obvious reasons, but she’d asked if Tess could sleep at my house anyway.
This meant that Tess had to smuggle me past my parents. Not mission impossible, but not exactly easy. It was a good thing that Tess was charming and Mom and Dad liked her. They called her Tessy—which I guess she didn’t mind because she never objected—and they were always asking her about field hockey.
“Heard it was a close one, Tessy.”
“How do your playoff chances look, Tessy?”
“Flex your goddamn muscles, Tessy! Flex!”
Okay. Maybe not the last one, but they loved that she was an athlete, even though she wasn’t a star. Only started a few games that year. Didn’t score a single goal. Still, Mom and Dad were jocks in the days of yore and I never was, so Tess might as well have worked for ESPN. She was the one they always talked jock to.
Most of the time, it was annoying, but now it was essential. Tess had to distract them as I tiptoed up to my room. The shrooms were wearing off, but I couldn’t risk saying something embarrassing. And I couldn’t lie. I already told you about my problem with lying.
I know what you’re going to say. “Not telling equals lying!” Well, that’s just bad math.
Example: Say you pleasure yourself. Not that I’m saying you do . . . Actually, yes. I am saying you do because everyone does. But even if you’re the world’s most honest person, do you run downstairs after every sweaty session and holler, “Mom! Dad! Guess what?”
Of course not. Same thing with shrooms, though in this case it was pleasuring the mind. Okay, that’s going a bit too far, but I think you get the point.
As we pulled into the driveway, Tess gave me a pep talk. “All you have to do is make it to the stairs. You can do it, sweetie. I know
