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“Hey, guys.”
I turned. Everly Hadleigh stood behind me, her long blonde hair forming a wispy mane around her face. She usually spent time with the art kids and was wearing a long, loose black smock with white paint flecked across the skirt. Her hands were clasped behind her back, and her voice was so soft I could barely hear her over the other conversations happening around us.
Victoria popped her lips, looking around. “Did youhearsomething, Juniper? Or is it just windy over here?”
I laughed, but I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t have a problem with Everly. She was weird as hell, and way too soft to ever be friends with me, but Victoriahatedher. I knew why, of course. Everyone knew why.
“Can I borrow some money?” Everly said, her voice softening even further. “Meredith forgot to give me lunch money this morning.”
“Mom has a lot on her plate, you know?” Victoria said, rummaging in her purse. “Her focus tends to be on her kids, after all.”
I winced. Mrs. Hadleigh — Meredith — wasn’t Everly’s mom. When someone as illustrious as Kent had an affair with his own secretary, rumors were bound to get around. When a child resulted from that affair, it only got worse. People said Everly’s mom wasn’t stable, and that was why Everly lived with Kent and Meredith.
But her mom still worked at the Historical Society with Kent. It had never made sense to me, but I wasn’t one to judge anyone else’s weird family situations. It wasn’t as if mine was any better.
“Please?” Everly pulled her hair over her shoulder, her fingers plucking at her dress. “I’ll just get something from the vending machine.”
“Ugh,fine,” Victoria groaned, pulling a five-dollar bill from her wallet. She held it out, but just as Everly was about to take it, she snatched it back. Everly sighed, her shoulders slumping.
“I’ll do your math homework,” she said. “For a week.”
Victoria smiled, placing a hand over her heart before she finally handed over the cash. “Aww, Ev, that’s so sweet of you to offer!” Her smile vanished the moment Everly turned away. “By the way, Jerry, I’m using the car later.”
Jeremiah glared at her as I snuck chips off his plate. “Uh, no, me and Brendon are going to Hyper Bowl.”
“Then Brendon can pick you up.” Victoria shrugged.
“No way, you used the car last time! Have Mom give you a ride!”
“Jerry, I’m using the car, and I’m either going to use it with your body in the trunk, or without.”
Despite an argument that drew out over the rest of the lunch hour, we got the car that afternoon without needing to murder Jeremiah in the process.
“Where did you tell your mom you were going?” Victoria said, turning the music down just enough to speak. I’d let her pick the place where we’d drop acid tonight, and she was driving us north along the bay, where the trees were thick and houses were few and far between. I thought staying at a hotel or a friend’s house would have been better for our first trip, but she insisted being outdoors would be more “magical.”
“My mom will be hungover at least until tomorrow,” I said. “She wouldn’t notice if I was gone for a week.”
“Lucky.” Victoria pouted. “My mom micromanageseverything. I told her we were spending the night at Kim’s.”
Victoria pulled the BMW X5 off the asphalt, driving along a narrow, rutted dirt road. The ground was bright green with moss, with ferns clustered around fallen logs and massive roots. She parked, rolled down the windows and opened the moonroof, turning off the engine. The sounds of the forest were all that remained: the wind in the trees, the singing birds, the groan of the boughs overhead.
“Here,” she said. “This is perfect.”
I wasn’t sure when the acid kicked in. Between the time I put the tab on my tongue and the time that the colors around me began to slide into a bizarre amalgam, time had lost its meaning. “You Are a Memory”by Message to Bears was playing from my phone, and I swore the song had gone on forever. For hours and hours.
We got out of the car, and as I stretched my arms toward the sky, I was certain I could touch the clouds. I could feel every little crackle of the dry bark beneath my fingers as I climbed up a fallen tree. The air was so crisp — crisp, like overly-carbonated soda — and the sensation made me giggle. Then I kept giggling, because I couldn’t stop, and everything I looked at just made it funnier.
“Are you feeling it?” Victoria sounded like a tape-recording playing too slow, and that made me laugh more. I nodded and laughed, laughed and nodded, and she began to laugh too.
Time kept changing. I could measure it in steps, in breaths. I could measure it in those bizarre waves that rose up in my chest, tight like a band but filling me like air under the wings of a bird. Acid could come in waves, but were those waves minutes? Hours? Eternities?
The sun had dipped low, and I was laying in the grass, watching the kaleidoscope of trees overhead against the pale pink sky. Everything was rippling, oozing, and changing.
Victoria’s face appeared above me. She looked strange, buteverythinglooked very strange.
“Juniper, we should go for a walk.”
I shook my head. I hoped she could see it too: the colors, the swirling, how everything wasbreathing. She reached down her hand, and I had a funny thought that her hand and her head weren’t connected at all.
