I blinked. “Ten.”

“You’re not dying,” she said. “But the answer was four.”

“Should I barf?” I folded my arms into my stomach and leaned forward. I wanted to rest my cheek on the cement—it looked so refreshing.

“It won’t come out. If you don’t listen, you’ll feel worse.” I looked up, and there was my oldest friend, speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. She waited for my eyes to settle on hers.

“How’d you know I was down here?”

“I was in the living room. Working. I don’t sleep well.”

“It’s summer.”

“My new school sent over summer homework, so I can ‘catch up.’ They don’t think much of OHS.”

I nodded, unable to respond verbally. The cement floor smelled damp; even basements sweated in the Georgia summer. I spoke to the floor: “Is this what’s made you… so weird?”

Anita snorted, an unseemly sound she would never have made in front of someone like Melanie. She knelt. Her hand hovered above my head as though she were going to stroke my hair.

“I had too much once,” she said. She didn’t touch me. “I know how it feels, all acidy, your heart is racing, you’ll be sick and jittery for weeks if you don’t—”

“Weeks?”

“Get up.”

Still dizzy, seeking support, I stood, stepped over the shards of broken glass by the door, and settled myself on the staircase landing. I lifted my forearm to show Anita the blood.

“That’s not too deep,” she said. “I’ll get some Neosporin in a second. But listen to me. Just—just do what I say. Otherwise it’ll be a total waste.”

My head was drooping between my legs as I heaved like a spent athlete at the end of a trying sprint. Anita’s hand rested on the nape of my neck. At any other point in my adolescence, that touch would have been miraculous.

“I think I can do this,” she said. That furtive glance back toward the ceiling, like she was taking permission from her mother’s sleeping form. “Okay. You should, um, close your eyes.” I did, and watched strange neon fractals form behind my lids. “So, uh—focus on something you want.” The first thing I thought of was her hand on my neck, how it was a continuation of her hand shaking my shoulder all those weekends of our childhood: You’re supposed to make it up! You’re supposed to imagine! She amended: “Something you want to achieve.”

A series of those fractals passed before me, and then something settled. I was in the car with my father, holding a golden trophy, which kept me rooted to the car seat, to the earth. My father, next to me, radiated not his usual stoicism, but rather something I can only describe as supreme understanding. I was known. The world stilled, turned briefly safe.