It’s not fair, her being angry at me. It wouldn’t even be fair to be angry at the wave—even though I am—because the ocean can’t help what it does when there’s an earthquake under it, but if she’s going to be irrational, I’d prefer her to channel her anger in that direction.

“Good day?”

Nah’s wearing sunglasses, but I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. “Sure, Mae. Fantastic.”

I sit next to her on the low wall, but I’m quite short, so my feet dangle, whereas her long legs stretch onto the sidewalk. We are quiet. She doesn’t move, and so I don’t either, which is just as well because what I have to say to her isn’t really a conversation for home. It doesn’t take long for the students to clear out, and soon it’s just us.

“Nah, are you…” I never have the right words for her. I know I can’t be too exact. That will make her angry. If she’s using, she could get mean and call me professor, which really annoys me. “What I mean is, right now, are you currently—”

She knows what I’m asking, but makes me say it. “Am I what?”

My sister shoots me a truly ferocious look, as though we’re not on the same team, the same side, anymore. If she’d take off her sunglasses, I bet her pupils are tiny specks, like extremely distant stars across the galaxy. She’s taken a pill today—I don’t know what, but it contains opiates. At lunch, all she did the whole time was stare at a spot on the floor. She wouldn’t eat—of course, the pills make you nauseous. But people were around, and I couldn’t say anything. A high school cafeteria really isn’t an appropriate location for an intervention.

“Are you on something?”

There are other ways to express this—the vernacular particular to drug use is quite varied, and you really could write a linguistics paper on it—but I choose this general, less loaded term (loaded, of course, being a colloquialism favored by many). The whole situation is crass enough.

“No, I’m not, actually.” She stands, towers over me. Her jeans and sweatshirt—one of Micah’s old surfer ones—hang too loose on her tall frame. “Are you trying to make me feel like a piece of shit?”

“Excuse me?”

“I was just sitting here, waiting to walk to the train with you, and you come up and make all these accusations—”

I throw up my hands. “It’s a fair question, Nah!”

“No, it’s not. When you don’t trust me, it makes me feel like shit. And when I feel like shit, I use. So I need you to trust me, Mae.”