Harry drove with one hand on the steering wheel, and her head leaned against the driver’s-side window. She looked like some kind of desert animal, short, big-eyed, arranged out of angles. Like a pocket mouse, tiny and staring, with quick knobby knees. Her hair was a ragged twist of sandy curls. All of it made her look younger than she was. The car wove minutely side to side with her steering. She was a crappy driver, but she loved to do it. “Did they ever cancel school for the smoke, when you were a kid?”

“Oh sure.”

“I won’t miss that,” she said. “Or waiting for the big one.”

I leaned over and knocked her on the shoulder. “Don’t be so sure yet.” I loved Harry’s shoulders, which fit perfectly in my cupped palm. “We’re driving right over the San Andreas.”

When Harry laughed, she tipped her head back, and I could see the tips of her teeth. It was beautiful, and also something I think she did because she saw women do it in movies. Sometimes, even when trying very hard, Harry didn’t manage to seem original. “You’re such a dick,” she said. “You’re gonna be out there for another year. If either of us is gonna get eaten by an earthquake.”

“Guess I’ll die, then.”

“Ugh.” Harry held her free hand out. I dropped a handful of shelled pistachios in it, from the bag I was holding between my knees, and she shoved them into her mouth. “Don’t die, I’d miss you.”

“Sure you would.”

“Sure, I would. I’d miss your sweet temper.”

From the speakers, Joan Baez sang her last, mournful note. “Dylan wrote this for the woman he was with after Joan,” Harry told me. Harry talked about artists she liked like they were her friends, with first names. “The woman he married.”

When we finally came down out of the hills, to the long straight highway that would smell like cows for the next hundred miles, Harry whooped and slammed the accelerator. On these empty roads, she drove like a teenager who wanted to die. The car lurched so quickly toward ninety that I could feel the world narrow.

* * *

I met Harry in my second semester of college, on the steep staircase that went from the cement island of our campus downhill to the boxy white dorms. In the spring, the one stunted cherry tree that grew on that hillside flowered pale pink, and the concrete steps filled with hundreds of black caterpillars.

At their largest, they were about the size of my thumb, and covered in a layer of bushy black spines, so that each looked like a bit of wool dropped on the ground. I didn’t know where they came from, or why there were so many of them, but they showed up every year. For days I couldn’t walk down the steps without seeing ten or fifteen, and more of their crushed bodies underfoot, smeared like roadkill on the sidewalk. Hardly anyone even looked to avoid stepping on them. It’s amazing what college students can ignore, especially by the middle of the semester.