It is each afternoon’s solace. I come home from school after I’ve dawdled as long as I can; some days I have to literally step over my mother; her mock fainting’s become a regular ritual, and you can’t always tell if she’s pretending to have passed out or has just chosen an unlikely place to rest. Sometimes she waits to see if someone will come to her rescue; sometimes she gets upset and cries out, “I fainted, and you’re not even going to come and pick me up!” but other times she just drifts away, a little respite. Her tries at cooking grow stranger. One day she’s trying to fry some chicken, putting the cut-up parts of the bird in a bag and shaking them in Shake ’n Bake. But she’s forgotten to close the bag and there’s floury stuff and chicken everywhere, pieces of chicken in the drawers, in the corners of the kitchen, where they’ll stay for days. She painted the avocado cabinets herself, with little flowers and flourishes of scrollwork, when we first moved here, but those seem like ancient days now, and the painted flourishes look tired and tentative.

Every afternoon’s after-school joint makes the tension in me spread out into a sort of glimmery horizontal. I go to my room and pull out my stash, and from the first good deep hit I begin giving myself over to it entirely. I like to go for a walk then, in the heat, and feel the parallel between the inside of my head and those heat-mirages coming up off the pavement. Nothing’s too clearly outlined, nothing too sharply delineated.

Or I like to stay in, sinking down into my body, looking at my envelope of pictures, or the dirty book I’ve found at the drugstore. But sometimes, afterward, or even instead of touching myself, I’d rather just do my meditation exercise, trying to slip out of my skin and float away, a little boat moored on a long rope, loose enough to go free, awhile, on the tide.