Toby laughed and she joined in, point/counterpoint.

“No, come on, be serious.”

“Nothing’s serious, man,” Toby said. “We’re tripping, okay? So lighten up.”

For some reason, for every reason—the way she’d turned her back on him as if what they’d experienced together was nothing, his thesis, Beacon, Joanie and Ken and Fanchon, the way she leaned into this weasel-faced kid from Bard she’d tripped alone with up on Ecstasy Hill back in October when he himself hardly knew her—this rubbed him the wrong way. Suddenly he was angry, and nobody got angry on this drug because it was a leveler and it took you outside of all that, but this time was different. He said, “Fuck you.”

And Toby, predictably, said, “Fuck you too.”

He jumped to his feet, starbursts everywhere, then reached down a hand for Lori, to lift her out of the chair, take her someplace private, talk to her, hold her, love her, but Lori didn’t give him her hand, she just gave him a quote, another quote, instead. “‘There’s a stake in your fat black heart,’” she hissed. “‘And the villagers never liked you.’” What happened next he couldn’t have said, but it was violent and it was between him and Toby, who was small and slight and didn’t stand a chance, just like that little shit in the hall at Beacon High, and then there were arms around him, Toby fading into the depths and Dick’s voice in his ear, “It’s okay, Fitz, you’re just having a bad trip,” and Lori, glaring at him out of the two black pits of her eyes, finishing the deal.“‘Daddy,’” she said, “‘Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.’”

Looking back on it, he wasn’t sure when the third-floor experiment began, but it must have been around then, because the weather was still gloomy and everybody was bored, whether they wanted to admit it or not. If Tim’s idea of pairing people at random was meant to break down the last remaining barriers to group consciousness, it wasn’t working, certainly not in Fitz’s case, but for the most part not for the others either, because it abrogated the exercise of free will. You might want to open up to someone a given session had brought you closer to, to go deep with her (or him), but you had to wait your turn, if your turn ever came, and that was the essential flaw in the exercise. Of course, they were all free to do what they wanted by mutual consent, but this wasn’t about individuals, it was about the group, and so the third-floor experiment was initiated as a way of addressing all that.