Button picked up a glass. ‘Sure, let’s have some then.’ She winced at the first gulp.

Cookie shook her head. ‘Sip it, you ninny. Don’t swig it like it’s Pepsi!’

‘It’s disgusting, Cooks!’

‘Sip!’

‘No! It’s vile!’

‘You’re a wuss!’

I kept taking small sips as Button and Cookie went on in that vein. It really did taste awful.

‘Ugh, can we please just put some juice or something in this?’

Cookie insisted that we were absolute wimps, but relented when she saw that we could actually down decent quantities of it if we tempered it with a load of mango juice. I told them about meeting the green-eyed boy on the flight, showed them the Continental Airlines paper napkin with a ten-digit number scribbled boldly in the middle. We laughed and concluded that he was probably just another Asher—flattered but gay. By the time we were halfway through the bottle, Button’s head had started lolling about. Cookie nudged her awake, but she stood up, held up a finger like she was about to give a speech, said, ‘Alcohol is a waste of perfectly good juice,’ and flopped on to my bed, fast asleep within seconds.

Cookie gave me an apologetic look. ‘Will you turn her over to her side, Tars? I’m feeling too lazy to get up.’

‘Sure, but why?’ The vodka seemed to have had the exact opposite effect on me—energizing. Almost like I’d been drinking adrenaline. I liked it a lot.

‘So she doesn’t throw up in her sleep and choke on her vomit.’

‘The fuck?’

‘Yeah. Apparently it happens a lot.’

‘Cookie, why do you even know this?’

She set her glass down. ‘You know why.’

‘I know, Cooks, but—’

‘You weren’t here, Tara. I can’t explain it.’

I sat down on the bed, composed entirely of gravity. ‘Cooks.’

‘I’ve been drinking with Aditi and Vishal almost every night. It’s fun.’ She had spoken to me about them on the phone. General things: her college friends, Maggi mates, outstation students from Bangalore.

‘Does it help at all?’

She started crying then, and I walked over and hugged her. Did it help, at all?

I woke up early the next morning to clean away traces of the night before my parents came home. I picked up the vodka bottles and made a move to throw them away. But then I stared at Cookie’s sleeping form huddled under a muddle of sheets and, terrified by her pain, paralysed at the potential to feel it myself, I couldn’t throw the bottles away. I just couldn’t. Instead, I stashed it right at the back of my closet and threw an old T-shirt emblazoned with a fading Minnie Mouse over it.