I touch my face, and she’s right. There are tears rolling down my cheeks. And now my whole body is convulsing—deep, guttural sounds escape my mouth. It sort of feels like I’m having an out-of-body experience. There’s a girl in a tub sobbing and another disillusioned girl watching the whole thing go down, wishing the first girl would just get it together.

“I’m scared I’m gonna die.”

Gabriela quickly pulls me into a hug.

“Shhhh,” she says. “You’re just too high. Don’t fight it. I’ve heard the more you panic, the worse you’ll feel.”

I want to believe her, but how would she know whether or not my heart is about to give out? She’s not in her right mind either, and she probably won’t take me seriously after “the shrimp taco incident” of yore. It really sucks to feel your life slipping away. I want to stick around for so much. I don’t want to bid adieu to this world when I’m still a super virgin. (Yes, that means I’ve never even been kissed before. Spin the bottle with Andrew in sixth grade does not count. He missed my mouth entirely.) We keep hearing words like “novel ademavirus” and “quarantine” in the news, and I want to be by my best friend’s side if it gets as bad as everyone is saying it will. I want to live long enough to publish my first book. I want to be in my thirties, drinking wine with my fellow career-driven girlfriends, lamenting the fact that there are no good men left in the world. I want to help reverse climate change and travel to Tehran and upload a video of myself screaming like a maniac when I get into Harvard. I stop crying. I grab Gabriela by the shoulders and look into her eyes.

“Get my parents,” I say. “I’m really about to die.”

GABRIELA

Real talk? Even in my current state of mind, I know that Parisa isn’t going to die. How can I be so sure she’s fine when my brain is currently lubricated with top-shelf vodka and, as it turns out, a far-too-high edible dose? Well, because Parisa always thinks she’s going to die. It’s kind of her thing. There was the time she came over for dinner with Wes and Andrew for my sixteenth birthday, and she swore her throat was itchy and was going to close up after she ate my mom’s shrimp tacos. We gave her some Benadryl, but she kept scratching her neck and taking short breaths till she finally asked us to take her to the ER. After a three-hour stint in the waiting room, the doctor confirmed she was not having an allergic reaction and asked her if she regularly had panic attacks.

“For sure,” I answered for her.

“Never,” she said.