“I USED TO DO THINGS,” LONNIE SAID, ONE HAND TOUCHING HER face in the bathroom mirror, the other trembling a little and pinching a joint between two fingers. “You know, I used to do a lot of things. I don’t ever do anything now. And I can’t remember what I think about so does that mean I don’t think about anything? Ever?”

She had walked in on me in the bathroom, her bathroom, and didn’t bother to leave when she saw it was occupied. The lock on the bathroom door was faulty, I’d discovered earlier that week, when William had burst in while Lonnie was showering. I apologized, grabbing him, embarrassed, but her voice from behind the semitransparent shower curtain just said, “Oh, the lock is broken. Don’t worry.”

I wadded toilet paper tighter and tighter in my fist, unable to pee in front of her. The tiny windowless room was filling up with smoke. “It’s better,” she said, “when it feels a little secret—the smoking.”

I wanted to let my dress go, to cover myself back up. Would she know I hadn’t peed? Eventually, I dropped the wad of toilet paper into the clear water and, standing up, quickly shut the lid. She was completely oblivious. She handed me the joint.

The weed made the ache in my bladder worse. I could feel my whole body more acutely; I could feel my heart pounding. It was scary to fixate on, scary to think too long about being a body—just a mess of physical needs. If this pounding were to stop that would be it.

CARLOW WAS LYING ON THE FLOOR WHEN WE CAME BACK downstairs, the selected Pablo Neruda hovering over him. The living room was clouded in smoke. “This book has a history,” Carlow said.

“Look at his smug face,” Lonnie said, pointing to the book. “What a bastard, you can tell.”

“That smug face got laid. You can tell that too,” Carlow replied.

“That smug face got us laid, you mean,” James said. “We used to carry that around, remember? We had our little journals and our Neruda.”

Carlow was laughing, his long flat belly moving up and down.

“You’re still in love with that girl in France,” James said.

His face fell a little. “She was an angel,” he said. “That girl was an angel.”

“That girl was fifteen.”

“We were basically homeless by that point. We came to Europe with all this money and blew through it so fast. Our parents gave us so much money and we just spent it all. We’d been sleeping outside for five days, and I hadn’t bathed except in the ocean.”

“When was this?” Lonnie asked. “If she was fifteen, how old were you?”

“You’re so hung up on the ages,” Carlow said. “I was nineteen, okay? I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk in the woods.”