SIXTEEN

. . .

There are worlds beyond our limited “reality.” Go there and roam.

These days he meets me up near Atma Lakshmi: the gift shop’s closed for winter and I’m not risking the front entrance again. His house is far, so mostly we park and keep the heat on, off Route 9 or behind the multiplex; no one goes to movies in the middle of a weekday. We play the Allmans and REM and XTC, sometimes the Cure, and afterward we go to McDonald’s and I eat meat.

It feels regular now, this secret life that I have: regular, adult, and mine. I know what I’m supposed to do with my hands; I know how to make my own decisions and pick my own tapes. I know all the words to the Violent Femmes and half of Aerosmith. We don’t talk as much as before we had sex, but sex is sort of like talking. In a different way.

When Colin picks me up to go to Clint’s, the first snow is clinging to the browned grass, wiping everything clean. I haven’t met Clint before, or Bennett either, though I’ve been hearing about them for at least a month. Clint’s the hard-core prog-rock fan—King Crimson, Rush, and Yes. Bennett listens exclusively to the Grateful Dead, except when Clint and Colin force him not to. They grew up together, skinned knees and Tonka trucks, dirt and Super Friends. Colin and Bennett finished high school, Clint dropped out; Bennett and Colin went to SCCC, then they all hitchhiked to Maine. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a real friend, let alone two, let alone for fifteen years. That’s as long as

I’ve been alive.

“Prepare yourself for the prog-rock onslaught,” Colin says as we wind through the bare hills on the way to Clint’s place. I’ve heard a little Yes before, so it’s okay.

Clint lives right outside town, in a vinyl-sided house that’s divided into apartments. It reminds me of some of the places my mom and I have lived. In the driveway there is an enormous ancient rusted Chevy van. “The Spacemobile,” Colin says, and points to the space landscape mushroom stickers coating the back windows.

Clint answers the door, a big translucent purple plastic tube in his hand, half full with water. Before he says anything he exhales a giant cloud of weird-smelling smoke into our faces. I think it’s pot. “Hey, man,” Clint says to Colin, and then squints at my boobs. “Hey, manna,” he says to me, and laughs.

Clint has slitty weasel eyes and a strawberry blond mullet, and also freckles. He’s skinny and tall and wears a worn, black Jethro Tull shirt. He looks like a rat.

“C’mon in, folks,” he says. “Entree la casa.”

His apartment is one room, filthy yellow linoleum kitchen in a corner, and then a brown plaid couch, a Star Wars blanket–covered bed, and about a zillion record albums. The walls have black light posters and a gigantic Canadian flag. “In tribute to Rush,” Clint says when he sees me staring at it. I look at him, confused.

“They’re Canadian?” he says like it’s extremely obvious.

“Ah,” I say.

He looks at me another beat, then laughs again.

Colin plops down on the bed. I want to sit with him, but I wonder if it’s too weird for us to both be on the bed. I don’t want to sit next to Clint, though.

“Well, have a seat,” he says. I decide on the bed. Clint laughs. “Hot and heavy, huh, you two?” I blush.

Clint goes to the stereo and picks up an album. “Here. Some Canadian education for the young lady.”

“The prog-rock assault begins,” Colin says to me conspiratorially. Very complicated music comes on the stereo, with intense bass lines and a singer with a high, nasal voice.

“The great Geddy Lee,” Clint says, handing the purple plastic tube to Colin. Colin pulls a Zippo from his pocket and lights a little bowl on the outside of the tube, pulling smoke up through the water. The tube clouds till it looks almost solid. Finally he pulls the bowl out, sucks the smoke in fast, and immediately starts coughing hard.

“Harsh!” Clint says, dissolving in laughter. Through the coughing, Colin cracks up too. It’s definitely pot.

I’ve never seen pot, but when I was a really little kid I used to smell it. My dad would come and visit and they’d shut the door, tell me to stay outside and draw. I’d hear them laugh, and then it would get quiet. Other times the laughter would turn into yelling, and I couldn’t tell what was a joke and what was really scary. After my dad stopped visiting for good, my mom quit smoking pot and started drinking wine. My mom said pot impeded her self-actualization. I was six when she told me that, so I just nodded.

Colin hands the purple thing back to Clint. Clint raises his eyebrows. “Aren’t you skipping someone?” He looks at me.

“Oh,” Colin says, like he hadn’t even thought of it. He looks at me too. “Right.”

“Did you—did you want some, Tess?” His voice is half gentle, half embarrassed to be gentle; it comes out sounding stiff.

Clint ping-pongs between the two of us, landing on me. “Wait. Dude. Have you never gotten high before?” I shake my head. “Well I’ll be,” Clint says in a fake redneck-y accent.

“We have ourselves a virgin on our hands,” he says to Colin, leering. Immediately I feel very weird.

Colin inches close, leans in like Clint’s not there, and makes that moment go away. In my head I say, Thank you thank you thank you.

“Tess, do you want some? You don’t have to.”

Somehow the fact that I don’t have to do it makes me kind of want to.

“No, I’ll have some. Sure.”

Right away Colin gets excited like a kid. “Awe-some. Okay. Lesson number one. You hold the bong”—he hands me the purple tube—“and you light the bowl, and put your lips inside and pull as hard as you can without inhaling. Then you pull the bowl out and suck it all in at exactly the same moment. Got that?”

I look at him like, Uh, not really, but I’ll try.

“Here, I’ll light it for you.”

I balance it on my knees and suck in while he lights.

“Pull, pull, pull,” he says. “And”—he snaps the lighter off and pulls the bowl out—“Suck!” My lungs fill up with so much smoke, it’s like they’ll overflow, and I start coughing.

“Harsh!” Clint yells again, and it is. My lungs burn like crazy. Colin hands me his Mountain Dew. I gulp down the cold liquid sugar and let out a huge burp. Instead of being embarrassed, I crack up. So do they.

“You feel anything, Tessa?” Colin asks.

“Sometimes you don’t feel it the first time,” Clint says. “The THC’s gotta build up in your system.” I search myself to see if I feel anything. I don’t know. “Lemme try again,” I say. This time it doesn’t hurt my lungs. Afterward I check myself for signs of feeling it. They watch me like a science experiment. Everyone in the room wants to know what’s happening to me. It’s kind of cool.

“How do I know if I feel it?”

“Look at the bedspread,” Clint says, pointing to the spaceships. “Does it look . . . special?”

The bedspread does look less pilly and gross than it did before, the blue background more blue, the yellow stars more like space. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it special, though. “Lemme try one more.”

This time as soon as I exhale, my feet and legs get heavy and light at the same time, like the feeling right before your leg falls asleep, except it never crosses over into pins and needles. My whole body tickles from the inside, like TV static filling up every cell, rustling them against each other in a slow buzz. Suddenly I realize how much extra energy I’ve been using sitting up straight, propping open my eyelids, holding on and keeping it together. I flop back onto the bed, my muscles melting. “Whoa.”

“All right!” Clint says, and turns the music up. Immediately I understand prog rock. The arrangements interlace with overwhelming complexity; I can hear every note’s relationship to every other note. It’s like a language, the music, or math: it seems incredible that people are capable of creating this. Behind my eyelids everything looks like Colin’s space landscape T-shirt and the stickers on the back of Clint’s van. Ground and gravity dissolve and I’m falling and floating, solid turned to liquid, mattress turned to air.

“Ah, the first time,” Clint says to Colin, and I fall back farther.

I lie on the mattress for what feels like two hours; when I finally sit up, a third guy is on the couch. He’s chubby and wears wire-rimmed glasses and a tie-dyed T-shirt with a dancing teddy bear on it. He has shortish brown hair and a face like a baby, soft where Clint is sharp. He’s plucking out Uncle John’s Band on a guitar; he looks up from the strings when I sit up. “Hey.” He nods. “I’m Bennett.”

“Hey.”

Suddenly I’m starving, a black hole grumbling in my stomach. Clint orders us two pizzas, mushroom and pepperoni. They are the best thing I have ever eaten in my entire life. I polish off almost a whole one by myself and hardly even feel full.

Bennett hands Colin a Baggie half filled with thick clumps of green pot. Clint checks it out. “Ah, the Kind,” he says, “as the Deadheads would say.” He laughs and looks at Bennett. Bennett rolls his eyes. Colin hands him money, slides the bag in his pocket.

“All right, we’re gonna head out,” Colin says, standing up and reaching for my hand.

“Have fun,” Clint says, looking straight at me.

Clint’s place is halfway to Colin’s. On the way we listen to Close to the Edge by Yes.

“I am so glad you wanted to get stoned!” he says. “Are you?”

I’m a little groggy; I can’t speak quite as easily as usual. But I manage to squeak out, “Totally. It was awesome.” It was.

“I’ve been wanting to get you high forever. But I didn’t want to bring it up, you know?”

“Kind of,” I say.

“Well, you know, ‘Just Say No’ and all that. I wanted to make sure you wanted to do it for yourself. Wouldn’t want any Peer Pressure.” He makes an oogabooga face and wiggles his fingers; I laugh.

“No, it was amazing.” I want to describe it more, but I can’t find the words. “Well, it’s a whole new world,” he says, and turns up Yes.

. . . . .

When we get there, his place is cold, January air seeping through the cracks. I rub my arms, pick up a flannel off his floor.

“You won’t need that for long,” he says, pushing me back toward the bed with a smile. “I’ll warm you up.” He leans down on top and kisses me, then stands back up and pulls the bag out of his back pocket. He gets a pipe from the nightstand, rainbow swirly glass, packs it full and hands it over.

I’m not sure I can handle smoking more; my head’s still heavy from before. But he seems eager in a way I haven’t seen him, and I don’t feel like I can let him down. I don’t want to make his happiness go away. I take the pipe.

“You’ll love it,” he whispers in my ear as I light the bowl. “It makes it so amazing,” and I can tell by the way he says it that he’s talking about sex. I’m overwhelmed imagining those two things put together, so cut loose and open, so far from any solid ground. I don’t know what would keep me from coming apart.

He breathes near my ear; it feels good but also kind of creepy. “Make sure and inhale,” he says. “With the pipe you have to kind of try and swallow it.”

I do, and then I cough.

“Good,” he says. “That means you got some.”

He takes a hit, and then another one, then hands it back to me. After I inhale once more, he takes the bowl from my hands, sets it on the nightstand, and pulls me down onto the bed.

I’m looking for that good staticky feeling from before, the one like TV snow inside my skin, but all I feel is spinning. Colin’s pressing on me from above; his mouth takes up my entire universe, and it’s hard to breathe. He’s so into it I can’t say anything. I don’t want to interrupt. I make a little sound, hoping he’ll be able to tell that I feel panicky. I want him to ask if I’m okay, give me a little space to breathe, tell him I’m scared, that I need to slow down, but I think he takes it different because it makes him kiss me harder. His hands run down my hips, pressing them down into the bed. My heart is beating super fast.

He always feels more than I do—I can tell. His body shudders and he shuts his eyes, lost in some place that’s a mystery to me. Sometimes I wish I was lost with him, just so I could keep him nearby. I wonder what it would feel like to be lost too. But now I am, cut loose and spinning, and I don’t feel any closer to him. It’s just scary, the blur of my thoughts and the weight of his breath, the closed-in feeling of underneath and underwater. It makes me feel like I’m alone.

He opens his eyes to take my shirt off, but he doesn’t stop to look at me. Then he flips us over. On top of him I’m freezing, but at least I can breathe. The air pricks my skin; I arch backward, shivering. He makes a noise. I try it again; he makes a noise again. And suddenly I realize: I can make him feel things by how I make myself look. That’s how you do it. That’s the way that I can keep him close. A little chill runs up my spine, and I wonder if it’s what “turned on” feels like. It’s different from what he’s feeling, I can tell, but maybe that’s the difference between guys and girls. I don’t know.

I lean over him, twist my spine and make a sound. It works again; he goes trembly underneath me and I feel a power that I’ve never felt before. He’s like a pup-pet. It’s so easy.

I’ve never been the one who could make people do things: it’s always been somebody else besides me who’s in charge. My dad can drive away and never write and I just have to live with it. My mom can pack us up and put us in the car; she can come home at four a.m. or never; she can get what she wants from anyone with a flick of her eyes or a lilt of her voice, and then tell me what to do and I have to do it. I guess part of that’s being a kid, that you have to do what grown-ups say, but it also always felt like part of it had to do with me, like I was a branch and the world was the wind, and I just had to bend where it blew me. I didn’t ever know how I could be the force that made things move.

Colin is an adult, but now he’s the one on puppet strings. Not me. I’m pulling them. For the first time in my life. He finishes and melts into the sheets. “Didn’t I tell you it was amazing? Was I right?” he says.

“Totally,” I say, and smile.