“I know you have not yet had your AP Biology and all,” my father said, fingering the paper’s laminated edge. “But just see, there are these distal factors, these family histories, these genes, all brain issues—you do not have to understand it all, Neeraj; I only want you to see how much is going on when something like this happens.”

“Dad.” I pushed the papers to the side, and with it, his hand. He slipped and caught himself on my chair. He placed one palm on my shoulder and I instinctively shrugged it off. “I have to pack. I’m leaving for Michigan soon.” I hadn’t brought down my laundry; the whole room smelled of oversprayed Old Spice and other, less pleasant odors.

“Neeraj, we are worried about you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“These things, Neeraj, they occur sometimes, but—”

“Dad.” I stood so violently that he took a few steps back, tripping on the clothes strewn about. I was taller than he was now, and unaccustomed to my new size. I could see the brightness of his bald spot anew; it beamed beneath my bedroom light. His mustache quivered. He smoothed the lapels of his coat. He stood there, breathing hard, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowing. I looked on his anger as a curiosity. There was so much he didn’t know—about me, about the world.

“You want me to treat you like an adult, you behave like an adult,” he finally said. He looked around my bedroom. “Clean up this damned filthy place.”

Guilt, grief, yes, but also the worst crash, the endless jonesing, the withdrawal that my pharmacist father never suspected as such. I shivered and sweated as my body ached for lemonade. On Kartik’s advice, I approached Lowell Jenkins, who had an ADHD diagnosis, and used my leftover allowance for debate tournament meals to buy some of his Ritalin. I would find ways to acquire the stuff readily over the following years. Pharmaceutical methylphenidates could instill focus, and they kept some of the worst awareness of what had happened at bay. But they offered none of the comfort of the lemonade, none of the assuredness of identity, none of the implicit promise that tomorrow would contain in it a home.