When I was seventeen, I moved to Denmark as an au pair. I lived with Louise, who was a good friend of my parents. Louise lived in a village with her family—a sailor who was often at sea, a three-year-old daughter, and a big dog. I went to a high school in town to work on my Danish and to have something to do during the day while the little girl was in preschool. It took me a long time to make friends with the kids in my class, because I refused to speak English with them.

In the end, I made friends with Anne, an unpopular girl who was obsessed with her ex and loved Linkin Park. She was fucking boring, but I had to start somewhere. Anne said we should go out together some evening. I was up for it, since the main reason I came to Demark was to drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Anne and I met at my place one evening and shotgunned a few cheap beers. There wasn’t really much of a bar scene in the village—one pub that we didn’t want to go to, and one bar where other teenagers went to party. There, we bumped into an Icelandic boy and some of his friends. They all looked like small-time criminals, with bleached hair and ripped jeans, dripping with sickly sweet aftershaves. This boy was the first Icelander I’d seen in two months. I chatted with him for a long time—I think his name was Steinn or Steinar. We didn’t have anything in common other than our language—no shared interests—but I was glad to be able to speak freely without feeling like I was stupid. His scummy companions kept buying us drinks, we did shots, and as the night wore on, Steinn Steinar asked if I wanted to do a line with him. I’d never tried anything like that, but I felt up for it in that moment, at that level of intoxication. We snorted something in the bathroom, he tried to kiss me, but I slipped out from under his arms and made a break for the dance floor. After that, there was only bass, noise, dance, touch, black, nothing.