Molly had dough, even though she swore she didn’t. How could you travel the world to get over a guy, à la Eat Pray Love, sans cash? Still, there was something else wrong that kept her from going home, I could feel it. Britta had been traveling nonstop for a year with no idea what to do next. Anything but Vienna, she’d quip between deep inhales of her hash pipe—anything but that. Something about her father. She didn’t elaborate, but that was fine. I never did either. It didn’t matter.

I loved these girls with all the passionate intensity and conviction and delusion of my not-yet-twenty-year-old self. The damage in me honored the damage in them, and as far as I was concerned, that was the sum total of truth in the world. Ignoring the fact that we didn’t have much in common, that Britta had a mean side and Molly lied probably more than me—which was saying something—I told myself we’d be friends forever.

But my gut knew that we were all lost children pretending we were A-OK with our clove cigarettes and our fuck-everything, we’re-never-going-home attitudes. None of us had any idea what we were doing; all of us were devastated inside. There were reasons we’d ended up there, trying to sleep in noisy bunk rooms with doors that didn’t lock, a new boss every other week who leered and leched at each of us. But it was as if we were stuck there, like food caught in a drain. If anyone had asked us, What makes you tick? Where are you going? Why are you here? Why can’t you get through the day without crying? What do you want from your life? We would have been stumped for any answers at all.

As I whipped the thin sheets off rows of narrow cots, grimacing at the occasional period stain or worse, I tried to feel happy for Molly, but the truth was, this new fragile family of lost girls was falling apart, bit by bit. Did it matter who would be the first to leave? For all of us, it was just a matter of time. Soon, I would have to face life after the Versailles, a fate I dreaded—exhaustion, filth, and roaches be damned.

Nine years later, I wish I could wrap my arms around my younger, stupider self and tell her to hold on tight, because flying to Bolivia on a scam was the least of a series of bad decisions I was about to make.

TWO

With Molly leaving soon to travel with Mark, the three of us decided to blow out after our shifts one night. Just to smoke and drink and laugh, feel alive and be together. Arm in arm, we strolled along the Eastern Promenade, a bright string of nightlife packed with markets, where every imaginable fruit seemed blown up to two, three, five times its normal size: huge, creamy Brazil nuts; tart guavas; bittersweet maracujas, or passionfruit. Baby toucans sold as pets squawked in their bamboo cages under shelves groaning with wallets and purses made of anaconda hide. Two-foot-tall, stuffed baby black caiman—alligators that grew to over twenty feet long in the slow-moving waters of the Amazon, what I wouldn’t have given to see them in real life!—had been posed on their hind feet dressed in pink tutus and carrying matching parasols. A sign propped under them said in Spanish: PERFECT TO FIT IN YOUR LUGGAGE!