“Okay, look, could I … could I have some?” She held out her hands like Oliver Twist.

“You shouldn’t,” I said.

“I know, I know,” she said. “But I’d love to have just a little. It’s Christmas, you know?”

She was so sweet about it, her voice gravelly and poignant. This wasn’t the old junkie sis, chugging vodka out of a water bottle before dinner; this was Tricia when we were kids, asking if she could come up into the tree house. No, it was not my finest moment.

“Will you drive me to the bar?” I said.

“Definitely.”

I let her in, cut the line in half, handed over the loosely rolled ten-dollar bill. She tightened it up like a pro and bent down over the desk. “Oh man, it’s been a while,” she said.

“Savor it,” I said. “Because you aren’t getting any more.”

She sprawled back onto the bed. “This is all’s I need.”

I did mine—one more hit of cool damp cave—and put my hands on her shoulders.

“To Tucker’s,” I said.

“Can I have just a little tiny bit more?” she said. “Since I can’t drink?”

Well, we’d gone this far. I cut her a line from the bad stuff.

“That one burned,” she said. “Yuck.”

When I was fourteen, I was sent off to the boarding school my father went to and found myself scared and lonely twenty-four hours a day. I was a good student but my friends were the bad kids, the ones who were smart enough not to get expelled but still spent most of their time stoned. At a school like that, where everyone was training to die of a heart attack on a yacht in the Bahamas, there was something noble about the opt-outers. I cried at night from homesickness even in my third year. I was the favorite of my first housemaster and a scourge upon my second for the same reason: I wouldn’t leave him and his family alone. I could never fall asleep.