On the street walking back to her dorm, a girl from her postmodernism class, Lisa, bumped into Ayanna. Lisa was swaying, she was dressed as a beer bottle, her makeup was running down her face. She turned to Ayanna and mumbled something, then turned and vomited on the street. Some hit the sidewalk, some hit people’s shoes, and a guy yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with you.”

Lisa said the world felt like it was choppy, and she had drank only two mixed drinks. No, drunk, she said. No drank, she corrected herself. Then Lisa sagged down on the street next to her vomit, and Ayanna had to squat quickly to pull Lisa back up and helped her lean against the brick building.

She asked Lisa where her friends were, who had given her the drinks, where she lived. The girl kept sagging, her face making an expression that Ayanna could describe only as melting. Her words were slurred. And Ayanna couldn’t believe no one else seemed to notice her or the situation. A few people from that same class even walked by, including one of the boys who had argued with Lisa just four days ago in class when she had said she thought The Crying of Lot 49 had to have a woman protagonist to highlight how distorted reality truly felt. They had spent what felt like an eternity arguing about gender essentialism while the teacher watched with half-closed eyes. Jane had doodled what looked like a cat riding a motorcycle with a speech bubble coming out of its mouth: but you had to go to college.

“I think you’ve been roofied,” Ayanna said.

She weighed whether to call 911, wished they were back at the dorms, wanted to at least get away from the terrible smell of Lisa’s vomit, wished she had retained any of the information from the campus flyers about date rape drugs, and for the first time in days, did not think about how much she fucking hated herself. Ayanna guessed maybe Lisa was lying, maybe she had just drunk too much, but this didn’t feel like that.

Ayanna had Lisa wrap her arm over Ayanna’s shoulder and she wrapped her own dominant arm around Lisa’s waist. They walked first into the store, because the one thing she remembered was you should have the person drink water if they are able to do that safely. She bought two liters of water, Lisa knocked over the gum display on the counter, tried to clean it up, and was waved off by the cashier. It was hard to maneuver Lisa in her beer-bottle outfit. It would have been a little funny, this usually petite girl in such an onerous bottle costume crashing into everything and creating chaos, if it hadn’t been so discomfiting for Ayanna. Closer to Lisa. She smelled like she had maybe pissed herself as well.