My legs were burning and my bladder nearly bursting by the time I’d sprinted through the streets of Trivandrum and bounded up the steps of the train station. Just knowing that I’d failed to procure a single piece of toilet tissue, napkin, or paper of any kind only amplified the fear that I might actually wet my pants before making it to a bathroom. Jen and I had used up our emergency stash of scratchy one-ply back at the ashram, and in our haste to say good-bye to Holly, we’d forgotten to replenish the coffers.

Pushing through the mob of Indian travelers clustered in groups on the platform, I found my way back to the hard wooden bench where I’d left Jen babysitting our packs minutes earlier. She was gone—and so were the bags. Scanning the length of the station (even at five feet four, I could still see over most heads here), I tried to stay calm. She had to be here somewhere. She wouldn’t have gotten on the train to Goa without me—right?

Climbing onto the bench to get a better look (a move that drew serious stares from the people shuffling past), I heard the unmistakable ring of Jen’s voice coming through a grate high above my head, on the far side of the wall. Hopping down, I found the door marked LADIES WAITING LOUNGE and pushed my way through.

Within the claustrophobic, ammonia-scented room, a dozen Indian women and their children were chattering and making animated gestures at the spectacle taking place in the adjoining bathroom. Inside, a plump Indian lady spilling out of her blue sari was guiding—or rather strong-arming—a bewildered-looking white girl into a tiny bathroom stall. Jen protested as the woman shoved a hose-and-nozzle contraption into her right hand. The sprayer was similar to the kind attached to most kitchen sinks, but this one was built into the wall near a squat toilet and was clearly meant to wash something other than dishes.

“Amanda! You’re back!” Jen looked visibly relieved as she spotted me. “Pass me the TP before I get a demonstration on how to use this thing.”

I was just confessing that I’d failed at my one and only shopping objective when the woman wrapped her hand around Jen’s and squeezed the nozzle, forcing a stream of water out of the hose and against the tiled wall behind her. Jen jumped, and the spectators in the bathroom giggled at her reaction.

I might have laughed too, except that I had more urgent matters to attend to. Dashing into the stall next to Jen’s, I slammed the door and assumed the all-too-familiar position: feet astride the basin, pants gripped firmly in hand (so as not to drag on the floor), legs locked in a seated position. Not the most relaxing way to go, but better now than in a rocking, cockroach-infested train car.

“So, I’m gathering that we don’t have any toilet paper?” Jen called from her side of the wall. She paused and asked quietly, “Are you gonna use that sprayer thing?”

I considered the hose to my right and the alternative. I picked up the sprayer and held it out in front of me. Was there any chance in hell this process could be sanitary? Did it matter at this point?

“I will if you will!” I called back, screwing my eyes shut as I shot myself with a stream of water. Oh! Huh. It was lukewarm. Kind of…refreshing, actually. I squeezed the sprayer a couple more times for good measure, then shook my lower half like a puppy drying off after running through a sprinkler.

When Jen and I met outside our respective stalls, we giggled like little kids who’d just learned to use the big-girl bathrooms. The seats of our thin cotton yoga pants were both soaked with water.

“This why you must wear sari,” said the woman, motioning to her electric blue outfit and then our backsides. “Make dry more fast.”

Jen thanked her for the advice. We snatched up our packs and bolted for the train just before it could chug out of the station without us.

We arrived in Goa on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, a holiday that seemed incongruous to me now. We were eight thousand miles and ten time zones away from home. Normally during the holiday season, I’d be at my aunt’s place in Peekskill, New York, helping my family devour a twenty-pound bird and two dozen accompanying side dishes before passing out with the group in front of a football game or the perennial James Bond marathon on Spike TV. Now, as Jen and I bumped along in a rickshaw from the train station to the coast, it was the scent of sandalwood and eucalyptus, not roasting turkey and pumpkin pie, that wafted past our faces on salty gusts of air.

“Hey, did you know that Western hippies used Goa as a hideout back in the sixties?” asked Jen, glancing up from Lonely Planet: Southern India. “To make enough cash to hang around, they sold off their guitars and jeans and stuff, which is how the big flea market in Anjuna got started. Could we check it out on Wednesday?”

“Hmm, let me consult my schedule,” I said, scrolling through an imaginary calendar. “I’m pretty busy…but wait. I just had some last-minute cancellations, so I’m totally free from right now till, oh, next June. Shall I pencil you in?”

Jen pretended to slug me with the guidebook.

“Hey, watch it. You washed that thing after the cockroach train, right?” I said, shifting around to avoid it. “No more squashed bug parts?”

“Of course. I scrubbed it down with bleach,” Jen said, grinning as she taunted me. “Here, why don’t you get a closer look?”

As she wiggled the book dangerously close to my face, I felt relieved rather than grossed out. Finally, Jen and I were starting to act like the dorks we’d been in college. Back then, we could utterly amuse ourselves just by racing carts through the aisles of a twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart or by dressing up as a premelt-down Britney Spears (circa “Slave 4 U”) and acting out her latest music videos. I guess I’d taken it for granted that our crazy alter egos—Schmanders and Jen-Ba—would rear their heads on this trip, that just the act of leaving New York would reset the tenor of our whole friendship. We used to be silly and wacky. We’d always said that if we’d met as little kids in the sandbox instead of on the first day of college, we would have conquered the playground together. How odd, then, now that we’d decided to conquer the great big real world together, we’d been at odds over the very grown-up issue of work.

Leaving the ashram, I was relieved not to be returning to pitches and e-mails. On some level, I’d always understood and even respected where Jen had been coming from about writing on the road. What better time would there be to put our pencils down and experience the world with no distractions? But it wasn’t until I’d missed the auditions with the girls at Pathfinder, and remembered the cut of disappointment when an adult let you down, that I really understood the lesson that Jen had been trying to teach me. Working constantly wasn’t just driving a wedge between the two of us, it was keeping me from totally immersing myself in the places I was visiting and forging connections with the people I met. What if I returned home just to realize that while I’d been busy becoming a travel writer, I’d actually missed the point of traveling?

When I’d first told Jen I was taking time off from working, I’d imagined that it would be tough to break myself of the compulsion. But once I’d committed to powering down the laptop, going dark was far easier than I’d ever dreamed. It was only after we arrived at Shraddha that I realized my flaw in timing: just as I’d given myself permission to become a free spirit like Holly, I’d entered the one situation where total discipline was required. Now, on the road again, I found myself chomping at the bit, ready to live totally in the present without worrying about my past or my future.

According to the long line of pleasure seekers who’d visited before us, there’s no better place to experience the non-spiritual side of India than Goa. While Goa is technically the name of the country’s smallest state, most backpackers use the word to refer to the series of choose-your-own-adventure beach villages strung along the coastline. Each town has its own series of quirks and eccentricities, and offers a specific vice to match the vibe.

Judging by the scenery rolling outside the window of our rickshaw, Jen and I had just entered Summer of Love territory—or the Indian approximation of it. Squat bamboo buildings lining the dusty streets were washed in psychedelic pastels; women hawked broomstick skirts, patchouli incense, and wooden prayer beads from behind rickety tables; tree-house cafés beckoned passersby with chalkboard advertisements for everything from garlic naan to falafel wraps to barbecue chicken pizza.

“Where are we meeting Sarah again?” Jen asked.

“Some place called Magdalena’s Guesthouse,” I said, double-checking a note scribbled in the margin of my journal. “She said she’d get there right after lunch.”

Sarah, one of the few friends from home we’d end up connecting with on the road, was a savvy, outgoing journalism student I’d advised during my final months at the magazine. She and I had met during her internship and stayed in touch even after she’d returned to school and I’d made my ungraceful departure from the job. Then a couple months after her graduation—just as Jen, Holly, and I were launching the second leg of our trip—Sarah had e-mailed to say that she’d accepted a position as an HIV educator for an NGO in Mumbai. Would we, by any chance, be heading to India during our travels? Once we realized that our paths would overlap, Sarah and I had immediately scheduled a reunion in a location we were both dying to check out: Goa.

When the driver dumped Jen, me, and our dusty yoga mats by the front entrance of Magdalena’s, I wasn’t sure we’d come to the right place. The cluster of unpainted concrete buildings was guarded unconvincingly by a pack of malnourished dogs. Clotheslines strung across the yard were straining under the weight of still-sopping laundry.

Crunching up the gravel driveway, I was relieved to turn a corner and spot Sarah sitting on a porch, sipping a Kingfisher beer alongside a pair of scruffy-looking guys.

“Oh my gooooooiiiiid!!” Sarah was almost a blur as she streaked across the yard and threw her arms around both of us. “You guys made it! I’m so glad that you’re here!”

“Merry Turkey Day, lady!” I said, grinning at her enthusiasm. I’d yet to experience Sarah on any other channel besides high-octane, super-unleaded outgoing.

“So, you’re gonna love our room,” she said, grabbing our daypacks and leading us back toward the porch where she’d been sitting. “I’m not really sure, but I think Norman Bates might have actually checked me into the room earlier.”

“Oh, jeez. That bad?” asked Jen.

“Well, we’ve got one exposed bulb, a few gross mattresses, and that’s about it. Oh, and I’m not sure if the door actually locks. But if you hate it, we can totally find somewhere else to stay, no problem.”

“Don’t take off yet,” said one of the guys, a lanky British backpacker in board shorts. He braced his tanned feet against the railing. “You won’t find a better deal on the beach.”

“Yeah, you can’t really argue with three quid a night,” added his buddy, a sandy-haired guy in a sweaty gray Quicksilver T-shirt. “Besides, you’ve got us right next door to look out for you, which I reckon sweetens the deal.”

Sarah shook her head and introduced us. “Amanda and Jen, this is Cliff and Stephen—our extremely modest new neighbors.”

Stephen, the guy in the gray shirt, held out a pair of beers as a welcome offering, and we ditched our bags in order to accept them. Within the first few sips, we learned that the guys were taking an extended vacation from their finance jobs in London. They both had a full six weeks off—with pay.

“Really? Why did you choose to stay here then?” I blurted without thinking.

Cliff didn’t take offense and said that they preferred über-cheap hostels to pricey upscale accommodations. “How could we bump into cool travelers like you girls if we’re stuffed away in some swank hotel suite?”

If I’d had any doubt about whether I’d choose a four-star room over a dilapidated, potentially rodent-infested guesthouse, one look inside our bathroom settled the debate. We were just contemplating who’d brave the mildewed shower first when Stephen knocked to let us know that he and Cliff were headed to the beach. Any interest in joining? The three of us were sporting more than twenty-four hours’ worth of travel grime, and, considering the alternative, a dunk in the surf seemed an ideal way to come clean.

Vagator Beach bore little resemblance to the ones we’d visited in Rio, sugary strips that doubled as catwalks for Brazil’s most beautiful bodies. Here the scene was anything but showy. Stands of shaggy palms hemmed a fat, croissant-shaped slice of burnished sand. Arcs of colorful beach umbrellas shaded lounge chairs in front of thatch-roofed cafés. Waiters delivered slender glasses filled with mango lassis and rum punches to tourists. It was a pretty idyllic scene, except for one thing: smack in the middle of everything, a group of fat sun worshipers had beached their large brown bodies across a prime section of the sand, utterly indifferent to the people maneuvering around them.

“They’re actually considered sacred here,” whispered Sarah as we tiptoed past. “No one would even think of trying to kick them off.”

It was the happiest, most satisfied-looking herd of cows I’d ever seen.

As soon as we edged around the holy mooers, women carrying baskets heavy with fruit and girls laden with fabrics, garlands, and jewelry pressed into us, chattering urgent sales pitches as they moved and jingled.

“Please, miss, you very beautiful, but more beautiful with scarf! Or maybe you try bracelet? Or necklace? No have to buy now. Just try. Free to try.”

We didn’t say anything, but my heart lurched. Many of these girls were even younger than the ones at Pathfinder. What was the right thing to do here? Step around them, treat them as if they were invisible—or hand over a few rupees and create an incentive for the girls to keep selling?

“Aye, miss, maybe one-a these fine skirts for ya? Right good, they are.” I couldn’t help myself—I stopped in my tracks as I heard the line delivered in a perfect British Cockney accent. Turning around, I saw that it came from a spindly-limbed teenage girl. She held up an armload of tie-dyed fabric twisted into ropes. “Beautiful skirt for beautiful lady?”

I shook my head, but she didn’t break her stride and followed me across the beach. When the other women peeled away, off to find more pliable targets, she stuck around and followed our group to a café set up under a perky green-and-white awning. I wasn’t going to buy anything from her, but figured it couldn’t hurt to get her something to eat.

Rebecca, as she introduced herself, seemed thrilled to be the center of attention and chattered on about her life as one of Goa’s beach girls. She explained that since her parents had passed away a year earlier, she’d been selling trinkets and clothes on Vagator to support her little brother and sister, to raise enough money to feed them and send them to school. It was tough going out every day and asking people to buy things, but at least the holiday season was approaching: that meant more customers and more sales.

“Do you ever get harassed by the people on the beach?” Sarah asked. “Are you ever afraid to walk home after dark?”

“Sometimes. That’s why me and the other selling ladies, we team up and walk home together. One time a man tried to touch me, and I stood right up and told him to bugger off!” she shrieked, reenacting the scenario.

I wasn’t sure whether the story about her parents was true or not, but I definitely believed one thing: Rebecca was quite the little fighter. I hoped that her instincts would somehow keep her safe from the danger she faced daily by approaching random strangers on the beach. I could imagine how easy it would be for someone to snatch her up, carry her away. I wondered if anyone would go looking for a missing fifteen-year-old.

As she finished her food, I looked through my purse to see if I had enough change left to buy one of the bracelets she was selling, but she waved me off.

“If you don’t got the money today, no worries.”

“Will you be here tomorrow?” I asked, pressing a few rupees into her hand anyway.

“Sure, I’m gonna be here tomorrow, and tomorrow after that. You see me, and then you buy skirt, bracelet, whatever you like. Just remember me. Remember Rebecca.”

Our newly formed crew of five decided to celebrate our American, Indian (and British) Thanksgiving in the exact same spot we’d eaten lunch. Between rounds of tropical fruit cocktails and semideep conversations (discussions such as the need to enforce child labor laws in India and the ever-popular topic of the lack of mandatory vacation time in America), midday transitioned into languid afternoon. The five of us took turns cooling down by running into the surf, commandeering the trampoline that had been set up in front of the restaurant for little kids, and walking along the hard-packed sand to an old fort at the end of the beach. We started a game of volleyball, a sport I’ve always been terrible at, but today, the sweatier and sandier I got, the more liberated I felt (and better I played!). I couldn’t have chosen a better week to immerse myself into the world of the vagabond backpacker.

“Hey, Jen, I think you might have been right about something,” I confessed as we walked back to our table with Sarah and collapsed into the chairs. “This is definitely more fun than hanging out in some smelly old Internet café.”

“Really? Are you sure? I mean, I saw a few on the main road into town,” she teased. “You could still squeeze in a couple hours of work before you go to bed.”

“Screw it. I’m over it,” I said, suddenly possessive of my newfound free time.

“Okay, ladies, where are we going out tonight?” asked Cliff as he and Stephen returned from the beach. “What’s the plan?”

Stephen explained that on any given night in Goa, you could party at one of dozens of bars, lounges, and nightclubs—and over the past couple of weeks, the guys had explored them all. They’d smoked hookahs in the back room at Tito’s, gotten bottle service at Shore Bar, raved to trance anthems at Paradiso, and gone skinny-dipping with a cast of hundreds in the swimming pool at Club Cubana. The pool wasn’t open tonight, but the guys offered to take us somewhere even better to check out the Goan underground culture. We all agreed to let them lead the way and headed back to shower and change before our big night out.

After a couple of hours of barhopping, I was ready to raise the stakes and go dancing, but was shocked when both Jen and Sarah begged off.

“Are you guys kidding?” I was stricken. “You don’t want to stay out?”

“Well, yeah, we do, but maybe not tonight.” said Jen. “I mean, we’ve been drinking all afternoon and…I think Sarah and I are just wiped out.”

“Tomorrow we’ll be rock stars, I promise,” said Sarah.

I was disappointed, but I knew there was no sense in pushing them. Cliff, Stephen, and I put the girls in a rickshaw and headed to the next location.

About an hour later, we approached the entrance of Paradiso, a massive multitiered nightclub built into the limestone cliffs perched above the Arabian Sea. Slipping past the velvet rope, we walked under a darkened passageway cut through the rock and emerged into an outdoor section bathed in lantern light.

At our feet, local women had covered nearly every inch of ground with thistle mats. Most were arranging candy and mints for sale or brewing small pots of chai on miniature burners. Clubgoers wearing thin cotton shirts, loose pants, and colorful sundresses were spread out on the mats, lounging on their elbows, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and sipping cocktails from little plastic cups. The unmistakable, pervasive aroma of hash mixed with sweet tobacco hung like incense over the crowd.

The club was aboveground, but the dense saltiness of the air, the exposed rock walls, and the swath of darkness gave it the feel of an enormous grotto. The skittering electronic beats of Goa trance swelled and reverberated through the cavernous space, and the revelers moved to the waves of sound like an enormous jellyfish. Watching from the fringes, I felt energy firing through my muscles and out my fingertips. We worked our way into a crush of bodies, moving for what seemed like forever to a song that had no beginning or end.

“So, here’s what I’m thinking…” Stephen shouted over the music as he surveyed the crowd. “I’m not really sure if I can handle this place tonight if all we’re doing is drinking, you know?”

Cliff nodded in agreement, wiping his forehead against a T-shirt sleeve to clear the sweat. “Totally, man. It’s a full-on rave in here.”

“Well, if you guys are down, a friend of mine thinks that she can get us something a little stronger.” Stephen looked directly at me. “You know what I mean, right?”

Yes, I knew what he meant. Thanks to Jen’s Lonely Planet research, I’d learned that drugs were as easy to come by in Goa as cups of chai and that travelers down them just as casually. I hadn’t specifically planned to delve into that side of the local culture, but I didn’t want to stand in the way either. I shrugged in response to the question, which the guys took to mean that I was down with whatever.

We walked back upstairs to the area where the chai ladies sat on their mats, and Stephen introduced me to Anna, a skinny German chick with steel-wool dreadlocks, chewed-up fingernails, and a raggedy cotton skirt that clung to her bony hips.

“Hey. This is my boyfriend, Jack,” she said, motioning toward the first beefy Indian guy I’d seen. “He’s gonna come with us.”

“Come with us? Come with us where?” I asked as we started moving toward the exit. “Where are we going?”

“Not far,” said Anna breezily. “Just gotta make a stop to visit my guy.”

I grabbed Cliff’s forearm and sent him a “what’s the deal?” expression.

“I know where we’re going,” he assured me, grabbing my hand. “It’s okay.”

Anna led our group out the front doors of Paradiso, past the electric lights, and up a road that gradually narrowed into a dirt path. Walking away from the beach, we entered a section of Goa where I was sure backpackers weren’t meant to tread. In the watery light of the moon, I could just make out the outlines of tiny shelters, roughly constructed shacks made from wood, cardboard, and corrugated tin. It was some kind of shantytown village tucked away among the trees. What were we doing here?

Up ahead, without fear or hesitation, Anna was shoving back the plastic tarps and gauzy thin fabric that covered the doorways, hissing the name of some guy called Devraj. I could hear muffled sounds and voices inside the shacks, but Anna ignored them. She was a woman on a mission. I willed myself not to freak out, convinced that her raspy voice would act as a bullhorn beckoning local police looking to make an easy bust.

To my relief, Anna finally found the guy she’d been looking for. Together, the five of us ducked our heads and crossed the threshold of a sagging hovel, entering a room lined with emaciated men draped across one another like a litter of abandoned kittens. As we made our presence known, they stirred, rubbing their sleepy eyes and staring at us like the weird white specters we were. The air here was as dense and humid as the inside of a dishwasher and laced with the musky, spicy aroma of too many bodies pressed up against one another.

Devraj, a shrunken man with a tangled gray beard and hollow eyes, wasted no time getting down to business. “You want red pill or blue pill?”

He knelt down before us, holding out the options in gnarled hands thick with calluses, an ersatz Morpheus in my increasingly bizarre Indian-Matrix world.

Cliff paid $5 apiece for a couple of the red pills (which Anna had assured us would be “mellow” and “pure”) and gave one to me. For a second, I was convinced this had all been an elaborate setup. Any second now, the cops would step out of the darkness and haul the idiot Westerners (or maybe just me?) off to prison to rot.

I stared sharply as Anna and Jack, then Cliff and Stephen casually tossed back their pills and chased them with a single bottle of beer passed among them. Okay, so we weren’t getting arrested, but still…did I want to do this? I could have backed out—pretended to take the pill, dropped it on the ground, handed it off to the dirty German girl, and just run back toward the ocean, but I stared at the pill, torn between fear and fascination. What would happen, exactly, if I just stopped thinking so hard about everything and took it?

“I think maybe you better do half that thing.” Anna paused long enough to drag off the cigarette she and Jack were sharing. “That shit is pretty strong.”

I glanced down at the red pill in my hand, then back at her. Gouging my thumbnail into the butterfly stamp in the top, I watched as it split cleanly along the wings. I sat there, contemplating the halves, trying to figure out which of the two was the smaller one. Willing my brain to divorce itself from all rational thought, I grabbed the bottle of beer from Jack’s outstretched hand and allowed myself to get sucked down the rabbit hole.

Anna had not lied—the stuff we’d taken mellowed me out completely. The next few hours passed in a warm, incandescent haze. Once back at Paradiso, our group leased a parcel of straw mat real estate from one of the chai ladies. As the first waves of sensation hit, I looked up at the Indian woman’s face and swore I could feel her disapproval. She poured the milky brew into tin cups, and I watched intently as the liquid landed smoothly in the bottom. Nobody drank.

As the club filled, people came to join us, friends of Anna’s, strangers who wanted sweets, randoms seeking a place to chill. We talked with our new friends, conversations about extremely important issues, none of which I can remember now. I gazed across the endless landscape of the concrete floor, carpets affixed like patches across its bald face, and wondered what the other groups of people were talking about at that moment. What were they thinking? I wanted to find out, absolutely needed to know what was being discussed, but I was superglued to my spot, alternating between incredible swells of warmth and feelings of being sucked into the floor.

Minutes or hours later, I didn’t know, I looked around, glancing at all of the strange faces. I recognized nobody. Where were the dreadlocks? Where were the other new friends I’d just met? How could they all be gone? My watch read 3:08 a.m.

Streaks of reality started to pierce the fog. Cliff and Stephen had already gone home—they’d tried to take me along, but I’d told them I wanted to stay. I couldn’t find Anna and Jack, and even if I could, then what? Arrange a ride with my drug dealers? It was the middle of the night, and I had no idea how to get back. Then I remembered the rickshaws parked in front of the club.

I walked outside, in the direction of the drivers, and was almost instantly mobbed. Men were tugging at my clothes, snatching at my body, loudly demanding, pulling, and insisting that I get inside their vehicle. I could hear myself shriek as I reeled backward toward the entrance.

Almost at once, things turned completely lucid, and I immediately regretted that I’d stayed alone at some nightclub on a beach in India until after 3 a.m. without a safe way to get back. I had no cell phone, no number for our guesthouse, no way to get in touch with anyone who could rescue me. I returned to the club, frantically searching the floors for a face I recognized.

Several desperate minutes passed as I lurched between bodies. In a crowd filled with young people, I was hopelessly alone. I started questioning groups of girls—“Are you leaving soon? What town are you going to?”—aware that I must sound psychotic. Most shrugged or ignored me altogether. Then, from the corner of my eye, I spotted a guy I’d been chatting with for a few hazy minutes on one of the straw mats. He was in the middle of a conversation, but I interrupted anyway.

“So, hey. Hi. Remember me? I was wondering if I could talk you into coming home with me tonight?” I asked, racing through the words. “No…not like come home in that way, I just mean…look, I’ve lost my friends and I can’t take a rickshaw back alone. Could you do me a huge favor and ride with me back to Vagator?”

He shrugged. His hostel was a few streets away, and he wasn’t ready to take off.

“Look, I’ll give you every rupee I have left in my bag if you’ll just ride back with me. I promise. Everything I have after I pay the cab fare.”

He looked about as enthusiastic as a guy facing a vasectomy. It took several minutes and a visual confirmation of the cash—worth about $20—but I somehow dragged him outside and together we plunged into the hornet’s nest of rickshaw drivers. With a guy at my side the transaction and ride home passed without incident.

As I slid out of my seat and onto the ground, the club guy got out behind me.

“Oh, yeah! Here’s the money. Thanks for riding with me,” I said, shoving the crumpled bills in his hands. He took it but didn’t make a move to leave.

“Well, I figured now that I’m here, maybe I should come in with you?” he asked.

I didn’t even respond. Spinning around, I sprinted inside the front gate of Magdalena’s, past the dogs sprawled out on the driveway, and straight to my room (which, thankfully, my friends hadn’t figured out how to lock). Once inside, I shoved the door closed and collapsed next to Sarah in bed. Without bothering to change out of my party clothes, I slipped under the sheet and pulled the grungy top cover up around my shoulders.

It was a warm night, but I was shaking.

The hangover I had the next day couldn’t quite compete with the one I’d had senior year of college (the night I learned that chugging Jägermeister and Goldschläger shots straight from the bottle is a recipe for alcohol poisoning), but it was definitely in the top five.

I was so mortified to be passed out, stinking like a distillery, that I dragged my ass to the beach with Sarah and Jen. Lying on a chair with a towel draped over my head, I felt a little better but apologized to Sarah over and over again. I’d once been her supervisor at the magazine, and now I was a quivering, nauseated mess who’d screwed up royally the night before. Had I totally let her down?

“Of course not,” she insisted. “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. We are way, way past the intern-boss thing. We’re just really good friends now, you know that—right?”

I tried to nod my agreement.

“And second of all—and this you may not realize—you deserve to have a good time. You really do. Just remember that everyone goes a little nuts at some point, and considering how your night went, you must have been overdue for a serious bender.”

“I can vouch for that,” added Jen.

“Thanks, Sar,” I said, grateful that she was trying to make me feel better. “I just feel bad that I’m such a wreck. I guess I’m not the same buttoned-up girl you used to know.”

“And seriously, thank God for that. You know, I always thought you were a pretty cool chick and I totally respected you as a mentor, but yesterday—it was like hanging out with a different person than I knew back in New York.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked, and Sarah laughed.

“No way! Now it’s like you’ve finally given yourself permission to just let go,” she said. “Trust me—that’s a good thing.”

I smiled underneath the terry cloth and felt something bump up against my chair.

“Aye, it’s my America girls! How ya going today?” I recognized the voice as Rebecca’s. I was suddenly mortified all over again, especially when she lifted the edge of my towel and smiled when she saw my expression.

“Ooooh…rough night?” she asked in a way that made me want to laugh and cringe at the same time. No fifteen-year-old girl should understand the meaning of that phrase.

Jen jumped in and explained that I’d eaten some bad chicken tandoori and wasn’t feeling well, which Rebecca seemed to accept.

“Well, I won’t be botherin’ ya long, just wanted to say ’ello…and oh, I made something for you.”

I squinted upward and saw that she was holding out a little fabric bracelet, the kind with the knots that I used to make by the dozens as a kid. This one was done in a chevron pattern of scarlet red, orange, and white. One again, she waved me off when I tried to reach for my cloth bag, saying that she’d made it for me as a token for lunch the day before. I thanked her back a few times, clutching the friendship bracelet as she dashed away from our chairs, sprinting like a kid on her way to recess. I watched as she disappeared down the slope of the beach, off to sell more trinkets to tourists, now feeling more awed than anything else. My new buddy Rebecca had a harder job—and a tougher life—than any young girl should have to endure, but she still ran, laughing as though she didn’t have a care in the world.