For Nana, friendships had been different, easier. The sports teams helped, the way they sealed those packs of boys together, giving them names with which to define their togetherness—the Tornadoes, the Grizzlies, the Vipers. A herd of predators, prowling. Our house used to be overrun with basketball players. On those days when my mother worked the night shift, I would sometimes find them dozing off their boozy parties in our living room, a forest of sleeping giants.

    Nana had always been well liked, but after he became the best basketball player in the city, his coolness turned boundless. At Publix, where the two of us went to buy groceries for our slapdash dinners, the cashiers would say, “We’ll be at the game on Saturday, Nana.” It was strange to hear my brother’s name come out of the lips of so many Alabamians, their diphthong-heavy accents slowing down the vowels until it sounded like another name entirely. When I heard his name through their mouths, looked at him through their eyes, he didn’t feel like my brother at all. This Nana, Naaw-naaw the hometown hero, was not the same as the one who lived in my house, the one who heated up his milk before adding cereal to it, the one who was scared of spiders, who had peed the bed until age twelve.

He was quiet but he was good with people, good at parties. I was never old enough to go out with him, and on the nights when he brought the parties to our house I was bribed twenty dollars to stay in my room. I didn’t mind. Pious little girl that I was, I would sit on my bed, read my Bible, and pray that God would save their souls from the eternal damnation that seemed inevitable. When I was sure they’d gone to sleep, I would tiptoe through the forest, scared of waking a giant. If Nana was up, sometimes he’d demand his twenty back, but sometimes he would fix me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before sending me away. He’d shoo everyone out and then spend the rest of the early morning cleaning frantically until our mother returned.

“Nana, what’s this?” she would ask, always, always, spotting the bottle cap that had fallen behind the window frame, the beer stain on the dishrag.

“Brent came over,” he’d say before sending me a look that said, Tell her and die.

I never told her, but there were times I wish I had. Like the time not long after his accident, when his party had included faces I didn’t normally see and had lasted longer than these events normally lasted. The OxyContin bottle had started to dwindle, and soon Nana would tell my mother that his pain was worsening instead of getting better. Soon the doctor would refill the prescription and we would watch that bottle, and half of the next one, disappear before cutting him off. My mother would find pills in his light fixture. But that night, before I knew to be afraid, I snuck down to the staircase and watched my brother standing on the coffee table, putting more weight on his bum ankle than he was supposed to, and I watched his friends, circled around him, cheering for something that I couldn’t see, and I so desperately wished to have whatever it was that he had that made people want to gather around, that made them want to cheer.

* * *

—

    When I had my first drink at that party in the middle of my sophomore year, I thought, Maybe this is it, maybe I’ve unlocked the secret. I spent the rest of that night talking and laughing and dancing, waiting for the cheers. I could see my dormmates looking at me with eyebrows raised, amazed that I had come out, surprised that I was fun. I was surprised too. I was drinking but I hadn’t been turned into a pillar of salt.

“You came,” Anne said, pulling me into a hug when she got to the party. She glanced down quickly at the cup in my hand but didn’t comment.

“I’ve been here for a while now, actually,” I said.

“I can see that.”

She had a couple of her friends with her but before long we had lost them. More and more people filed in. The room got darker, danker, the music louder. I had been nursing my drink for an hour or more, and finally, Anne took it out of my hands and set it down.

“Dance with me,” she said. And before I could say anything she was on a table, her hand outstretched. She pulled me up, pulled me closer. “Are you having a good time?” she whisper-shouted in my ear.

    “This isn’t really my thing,” I said. “It’s too loud; there are too many people.”

She nodded. “Okay. Quiet, uncrowded, got it. I’m storing all of this in my ‘How to Win Gifty Over’ file.”

“There’s a file?”

“Oh yes. A whole spreadsheet. You’d love it.”

I rolled my eyes at her as the song changed to something slower. Anne wrapped her arms around my waist and my breath quickened. On the floor beside us, a group of men dog-whistled.

“Do you like me better when I’ve been drinking?” I asked Anne, nervous to hear the answer.

“I like you best when you’re waxing rhapsodic about Jesus,” she said. “I like you best when you’re feeling holy. You make me feel holy too.”

I threw my head back and laughed.

* * *

—

A week later, the two of us borrowed one of Anne’s friends’ cars, so that we could drive to Harvard Forest in Petersham. The drive should have only taken an hour and fifteen minutes, but there was an accident on the highway and we’d crawled along in the car for two hours, just waiting for it to clear. When we finally passed by the wreckage, a hunk of metal that hardly even resembled a car anymore, I started having second thoughts about the mushrooms I’d agreed to do.

“The thing about it is, you just have to do it,” Anne said. “Like who knows what euphoria actually means until they feel it? It’s just a word.”

I mumbled noncommittedly.

“It’ll be beautiful,” Anne said. “Honestly, it’s like a religious experience. You’ll like it, I promise.”

    Anne had taken a freshman seminar that spent two weekends exploring the forest, and so she knew it better than most. She guided me off trail until we found a clearing, encircled by trees that seemed to me to be improbably tall. Years later, when I got to California and set my eyes on a redwood for the first time, I thought back to the trees in Harvard Forest, their height a toddling infant compared with the giants that lived on the other side of the country.

But that day, I was impressed. Anne spread out a picnic blanket and lay on top of it for a moment, just staring up. She pulled a crumpled plastic bag from her back pocket and shook the mushrooms into her palm.

“Ready?” she asked, handing me mine. I nodded, popped a gram into my mouth, and waited for it to hit me.

I don’t know how long it took. Time stretched out before me so slowly that I felt like an hour was passing between each of my blinks. It was like my entire body was made of thread wound tightly around a spool, and as I sat there, it unspooled, centimeter by centimeter, until I was a puddle on the blanket. Beside me, Anne looked at me with such beautiful benevolence. I took her hand. We were on our backs, looking at each other, looking at the trees, while the trees looked back at us. “Living-man trees,” I said, and Anne nodded like she understood, and maybe she did.

When I came down, Anne was already there to meet me. “So?” she asked, watching me expectantly.

“I remembered this story my father used to tell my brother,” I said. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”

“What’s the story?” Anne asked, but I just shook my head. I didn’t have anything else to give. I didn’t want to tell her my stories. I couldn’t imagine living the way she lived, free, like an exposed wire ready and willing to touch whatever it touched. I couldn’t imagine being willing, and even after those few stolen moments of psychedelic transcendence, nonaddictive, harmless, and, yes, euphoric, I still couldn’t imagine being free.

* * *

—

    By the end of that semester Anne and I were in the thick of a friendship so intimate it felt romantic; it was romantic. We had kissed and a little more, but I couldn’t define it and Anne didn’t care to. As her graduation loomed closer, Anne spent most of her time in my room or at the library, hunched over her MCAT practice books, her hair, still awkwardly growing out its old perm, in a disheveled topknot.

Samurai Anne I called her when I wanted to annoy her, or when I just wanted her to look up from her work and pay attention to me.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” she said. She took her hair down and twisted strands of it around her finger.

“Something you don’t know?”

“Yes. Please, save me from the boredom of this practice test. I might actually die if I have to do another one. Can you imagine? Death by MCAT as you strive to become a doctor.”

“I don’t have any good stories,” I said.