‘Okay wait there. We’re coming to get you.’

They came and got me. We went into a dark, cavernous space streaked with remains of melty-faced amputees and asylum escapees, where plastic pop-ups shaped like the rising undead used to give chase to screaming kids who made a run for it, only to be greeted by a pointy Nosferatu at the next turn.

I handed the pills to Jane and she said, ‘We should snort these. It’ll hit us faster.’

Asher pulled out his phone and I crushed the pill with the butt of mine and on to its smooth mirror back. It was easy, no different from crushing up the Adderall we snorted on nights before a big exam or a big party. We sat in the haunted house, and we had an iPhone covered in Halloween goodies.

Darya used her credit card to slice up the small mound of white powder into even lines. It took a lot more time than we expected. She wanted them to be perfect. Other people stumbled into the privacy of the hollowed-out haunted house, but they didn’t care about us and we didn’t care about them. They threw up and passed out and made out, and Darya cut the lines, evened out the lines.

‘Who has a dollar?’

‘Mm, I have a fifty.’

‘Excellent, we do this in style.’

‘Roll it tight, Tara.’

‘This good?’

‘Just tighten it up a bit more. Yeah, that’s good.’

I held up the fifty-dollar tube. ‘Who wants to go first?’

It might as well have been baby powder, those lines. So finely ground, so soft to the touch, acquiescing, melting, yours if only you’ll have it. All the good it needed to promise was really just anything else, any escape, anything different from the banality, from the sheer nothingness of being given this life. This life with nothing but pre-ordered restraints and suffocating little cubes for us to live in. We are born into jails, jailed in by heavens and hells, by right and wrong, black and white, grey-isn’t-really-a-colour, we have no control, no say,

can’t you see? And everything we do to get away from it, every visit to the bottom of every bottle, every joint and blunt and pipe eventually dulls away back into reality. Unacceptable, untenable, limited, hopeless reality.

‘My neurons are so happy . . .’

And Asher said, ‘I check the missed connections personals on Craigslist every day, but no one ever looks for me.’