“Dec . . .” said Zadie. “Dec, Dec, Dec. I’m so glad Kiki married you after all.” Ignoring my kick under the table, she swatted a thick sheath of honey-colored hair from her face and reached for his chin, which she turned from side to side to inspect. She’d been laughing at something Compton was saying and her breath was still coming in snorty gulps, making it hard to understand her. “Dec, have I ever told you . . . that you look a lot like Rolfe from our med school?” and then she let him go and fell into a near-hysterical recounting of a few of our most memorable escapades from those days: the time she paged the head of the neurosurgery department and read him a dirty limerick, thinking he was our friend Rolfe; the time Emma won a contest she didn’t realize she’d entered for the worst dancer at a gay bar she didn’t realize was a gay bar; the time one of the attendings on our psych rotation challenged Hannah to undergo analysis and she agreed, only to discover after two weeks the “attending” was actually one of the psychiatric patients; these could have been any one of a hundred other such stories. Have you ever seen a grown person suddenly morph into a teenager when they’re around their parents? It’s a universal phenomenon: human beings slip into familiar behavior patterns when they come in contact with certain people, regressing to the personality and mannerisms and responses they associate with that relationship. That’s how it is for us when we get together on these trips, except instead of transforming into surly hormone-ridden adolescents, we become twenty-six-year-olds again: animated, loquacious, aflame with verve. Everything revs up and everything’s funny.

Well: not everything.