Both their faces lit up. Vicki clasped her hands and practically squawked. “Well, you’re in luck! We’re just about to eat, and there’s enough falafel to feed a marching band!”

When I finally did get to bed that night, I could barely sleep, despite my exhaustion. I couldn’t stop thinking about Shanti, yes, but I had to admit I was trying to get my head around the evening with Priam and Vicki. I’d never paid much attention to their friends. In fact, I’d mostly avoided their gatherings. Echoes of my father’s voice kept me from participating in their “nonsense.”

But tonight, huddled to one end of the couch with my plate of falafel and tabbouleh in my lap, I’d been able to see a bit of what my mum must have seen. Priam and Vicki and their friends didn’t seem to care less what they looked like, or how their absurd collection of instruments sounded together. They just tried whatever seemed right in the moment and laughed every chance they got.

More baffling to me, they seemed completely comfortable laughing at themselves. Like they expected to laugh at themselves. Like they were intentionally trying to create moments to laugh at themselves. It was so weird, but I’d almost choked on my food more than once laughing along with them.

And to their credit, Priam and Vicki never once tried to get me to join in the music making. The woman sitting next to me—decked out in a colorful parka and plastic crown for no apparent reason at all—leaned over and offered her tambourine to me at one point. But when I shook my head, mouth full of pita, she just nodded dreamily and kept swaying along to the music.

When I’d finished eating, I just continued to sit there, listening to the most confusing set list ever, wondering how anyone got to the point where they could be this at ease with themselves. When one guy started crooning some kind of love ballad to his boyfriend, my eyes started to droop and I excused myself, but now I just found myself lying in bed, staring at my bumpy ceiling. So much of the past twenty-four hours had pushed me way beyond what I was used to, and with my headboard just inches away from the top of my head, I realized I hadn’t resorted to bruising once to manage the confusing mix of discomfort and exhilaration I was feeling.

After rolling around for an hour, I got up and putzed around—went to the bathroom, stretched, did some push-ups, collected my dirty clothes. When I gathered a couple of wrinkled T-shirts from my desk, the notebook Dr. Hoang had given me appeared, still pristine as ever. I picked it up and opened to the first blank page.