It was easy; all I had to do was say, “No, I’m not.” But I couldn’t get the words out. I sat there for a moment, unmoving, still holding his dick. I was too high. Time was folding itself up around me.

I remembered waking up on my dad’s living room floor as a kid, my shoulder aching from sleeping on nothing but a blanket and hard wood, my mouth tasting like stale popcorn. The house was quiet and dark except for the light of the television. The VCR had clicked off and the screen was bright blue.

I felt like I was waking up alone again, my father gone, the TV screen blue. How long had I been holding his dick? It was starting to go soft in my hand, melting.

“Listen,” he said.

“I’m too high,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

13

IT WAS JULY WHEN I TRAVELED WITH LONNIE AND WILLIAM UPSTATE so she could attend an artists’ retreat. We were to stay in a cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks. I remember the amazed happiness of our arrival. Yes, it was perfect—everything—the knobby Jenny Lind bed frames, the red wool blankets, the fruit pattern on the fabric skirt under the big farmer’s sink. Here we could live the life we were made to live, exploring the fern-covered land, sitting around the fire together at night and reading.

Lonnie and I kept looking at each other, opening drawers. The kitchen was stocked with food already—part of the arts colony experience, I guessed. The old spice cabinet smelled so beautiful—wood and mold and cinnamon and paprika. “It’s amazing,” Lonnie said. “There has to be something wrong. Someone is going to rape us.”

Our cabin could only be called such due to its lack of insulation—it was large, two stories, with three bedrooms, two baths, a big living room and kitchen, a washer and dryer, and a small detached garage, where we found a beautiful green canoe. The owner, who rented the house out to the artists’ colony, was a sculptor, and menacing wooden animals and partially melted bottles, stretched into strange shapes, covered the walls. Past the porch, a small patch of grass led to a dock on the lake surrounded by pines.

I had been excited to travel so close to where Lonnie had spent her adolescent summers, but I hadn’t anticipated how much the Adirondacks would remind me of Oregon and the Mount Hood National Forest. Tiny ribbon garter snakes slithered past us in the lawn. I remembered the texture of moss and lichen on a tree trunk, the crunch of pine cones under my shoes, the creaking sound of wind in trees, the damp cold that hardly ever went away, even in summer.