WHEN I WOKE BEFORE MY first day at the spa, my throat felt strained, as though I’d been trying to scream in my sleep. My heart zinged, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I tried to focus on the details of my bedroom, the inventory of familiar things: my old bookcases along the wall, lined with paperbacks. The watercolors I’d done in high school hung over the desk. The red ladder-backed chair that had once belonged to my great aunt. I could hear my mother moving through the kitchen below me, the whistle of the teakettle and the creak of her opening cabinets. I rose and sipped a glass of water. After a few minutes my breathing slowed to normal, but heat lingered in the tips of my ears, my cheeks.

I got in the shower and lowered myself to the floor, rested my head on my knees. I didn’t have much time to spare—it was a twenty-minute drive from Margate through Ventnor to Atlantic City—but I closed my eyes and let the water hit the back of my neck. I had been the same way after my dad died: anxious and jumpy during the day, grinding my teeth in my sleep. It took all my strength to stand up and lather shampoo in my hair.

After the shower I washed my face, brushed mascara on my eyelashes, and a memory surged up: the last time Steffanie and I got ready together to get into the club at the Taj Mahal. Sixteen years old, taking swigs from a Poland Spring bottle filled with Stoli while her parents packed for a weekend trip to Cape May. I shook my head. Over the past few weeks my brain had gone vulnerable, all of my worst memories coming to the surface. I hadn’t thought of that night in years. As I swished blush over my cheeks in a lazy arc, I remembered how painstaking we had been with our makeup and clothes that night. Then Steffanie’s face a few hours later, bloodless, with black makeup smeared around her eyes. Her legs sticking out from underneath the bathroom stall, and how I knew they were hers because it had been field hockey preseason and I could make out the tan lines from our shin guards, pale shins and browned knees. I pushed the image away and pulled a brush through my hair.