I willed Brett to get a phone call, run into someone else he knew. He meant well, but we were circling questions I wasn’t ready for. All I knew was that I wanted to forget what had happened in New York, sock away enough cash to boomerang out of town at the end of the summer, and start over as someone new.

“You know, I’m trying to think of the last time I saw you,” he said.

I knew right away. Steffanie’s funeral. He remembered a second too late.

“Oh, shit. Yeah. Man. I’m sorry. You guys had been so close.”

“Nothing to be sorry for.”

“She was one of the first. I think there’s something like ten kids from our class who have died from that shit?”

“Yeah, that sounds right.”

“Ten, in a class of three hundred kids. Fucking heroin. I look at my eighth graders and I just worry about them so much—you never know what growing up is going to do to you, especially around here. AC, man, it gets into the way you think. You live somewhere where people come to get wasted and blow all their cash—you start to think that’s how the rest of the world is, that that’s what life is.”

Try being a girl here, I wanted to say, that will really fuck you up. But of course I didn’t. Mostly I was touched. His earnestness, that slow, surfery cadence to his voice. Brett took a long, thoughtful sip of his beer, and this time we both looked away.

“Well, I’ve got to run and meet some people, but hey, hope I see you around.” He slapped me on the back, and as he left I felt a twist of guilt and relief. I was so self-pitying, and yet, look at all of the people who Brett and I knew who had sunk into depths I couldn’t even imagine. When I blinked, I saw Steffanie’s gaunt cheeks. I signaled the bartender for a third drink and willed the room to go hazy, for all the din and clatter to get reduced to one low hum, waited for my mind to go blank. The less I noticed about what was around me, the less I felt.

When I paid my bill, I found Clara’s card in my wallet and stared at it as though it would help explain what she had said that afternoon. It was one of the last things I remembered before I blacked out—you are recovering from a broken heart, those crooked little crescent moons.

LUIS