July was smoke and haze. The cherry taste of calorie-free energy drinks, nicotine-stained hands, cocaine bumps at three in the morning. Laughter ricocheting off the walls of Odilie’s bedroom, the room dark except for the glare of the laptop, showing old reality shows, sitcoms from the sixties, soft-core porn. Anything Peri was in the mood to watch. They’d been kicked out of the living room, from the TV, because they’d ashed cigarettes on the carpet out there and didn’t clean it up, left rings from their condensing glasses of vodka, little happy trails of Ritalin dust on the wooden table Kitty said was her grandmother’s.

Odilie went to work bleary-eyed each day, clutching a large iced coffee, black. No more sharing Danishes with Elena. “You look amazing,” the hygienist cooed as Odilie shrank, her lips ballooning from her hollowed-out face, her skin taut and pore-free. Not allowing herself to feel anything but amazing was a happy, easy existence. Any moment she felt herself dipping, she’d pop another Ritalin, crunch a cube from her iced coffee, take a smoke break. It turned out that life was so much less gray this way, on so many stimulants, like Odilie was gazing down from the sky at everything below through a mist of glee, of ecstasy.

She had never had a friend like Peri. She had never had a close friend like this, period. What did they even do? What did they even talk about? In her fleeting moments of sobriety, Odilie wasn’t sure. From the moment Odilie got off work, they spent most of their time holed up in the apartment, chain-smoking and watching TV on the laptop, their legs entangled. Peri said she slept all day, arose when Odilie clocked out. Odilie found her a few times curled up in her bed, her gorgeous, finely chiseled face so angelic in slumber that Odilie wanted to squeeze it.

At night they went to the beach and walked the shores, collapsing with their backs to it, letting unseen waves crash into them, knock them down. Sometimes they went to town and Odilie watched Peri walk into one of the touristy housewares stores, sniff the candles and come out with six different ones she didn’t need. Peri always needed to be doing something with her hands, smoking, spending, gesticulating wildly. In the moments of quiet they shared, she would grip Odilie’s own hands until the bones cracked, the pressure leaving red imprints on Odilie’s skin.

“I worry sometimes, that if I stop moving, everything else will stop, too, this world I’ve built for myself,” she would confess quietly, cigarette quivering in her fingers. Odilie began to notice that even when Peri appeared relaxed, at ease, when she was with groups of people, she would be tensing her fingers, bending them and stretching as if to check if they still worked.