She knew Steven kept his drugs in the bottom of a beautiful orange leather jewelry box she had given him two Christmases ago. It was a special place to keep his cuff links and watches when he traveled. She’d had his initials engraved into the fine leather and there was a picture on the inside lid of the two of them as children eating Mister Softee on a park bench. Under a fake leather bottom, built to hide your most valuable things, she found an assortment of pills, an eight ball of coke, and a slip of paper that had two rows of emoji stickers. When she picked up the stickers to examine them more closely, she recalled that Steven had told her he and Lolly were going to drop acid together at Coachella.

Steven had done LSD a few times at tennis camp with a friend from LA and loved it, but he said the trip lasted so long, it was impractical to indulge in it too often. Acid and shrooms were an event drug, he had said. Anna had been surprised that Lolly was willing to try a psychedelic, but as Lolly would follow her brother to the ends of the earth and back again, it made sense that she’d take a twelve-hour hallucinogenic trip with him, too.

Twelve hours sounded like forever to Anna, and when Steven asked if she wanted to join them she’d politely declined. But right now, on the first day of the rest of her shattered post-sex-tape life, it sounded like a perfect escape. She pulled off a sticker, grimacing at the stupid yellow winking smiley face, and placed it on her tongue. She was expecting it to have some sort of taste, but there was no flavor at all. She kept the sticker on her tongue until it started to dissolve and then woke her brother up to tell him what she had done.

Steven took her news calmly and motioned for Anna to bring him the leather box. He said that she needed a trip guide so he was gonna drop one now, too. Lolly woke up and when Steven told her what they were doing she yawned and then stuck out her pretty pink tongue. No way was she going to be left behind.

“What do we do now?” Lolly asked.

“We do what we came here for,” Steven replied, sitting up in bed. “We rock Coachella.”

This was Steven, Lolly, and Anna’s first time at Coachella, though like every teenager in America they had watched videos and seen pictures of the festival for years. It was hotter, dustier, and more crowded than they thought it would be, but they weren’t the most reliable narrators as all three of them were tripping hard by the time they reached the VIP security check.