“You mean shirt off his front.”

“I was tweaking,” he said.

“No, that’s not right, either. Back off his shirt? How does that go?” I immediately became consumed with how it went. I mouthed the words silently: shirt, front, back, shirt. “Front is the bad one! Front shouldn’t be in there! He’d give you … the shirt … off his back!”

Big Frank was studying my face. He said, “Yikes.”

“What?”

“I’m not the only person who’s given you a piece of candy tonight, am I?”

With that, I began to trip. And speed. And slide. I couldn’t tell who was drunk, who was sober, who’d taken the same drug I had and might be riding the same heady waves. I wandered into the bedroom, found the fragments of the shattered Hummel, and thought they were teeth.

Frankie was in front of me at one point, speaking directly into my face. Then he was across the room, four swimming pools away, and it looked as if he was putting something up his nose. I lurched toward him. Big Frank caught me. We danced in each other’s arms.

Someone screamed.

The music stopped, and we all froze like a field of possums caught in a flashlight beam. A guy’s head was bleeding. He had his hand up to his brow and was shouting “Damn!” when a beer bottle in the hand of another guy exploded. There were several pings and pops, and I looked down and saw marbles collecting on the floor.

The girl from Luray curled her hands up against her ribs and cried at the ceiling, “They’re shooting at us!”

Across the way, the trio of drunken guys was playing target practice with slingshots. The host ran forward, using a couch cushion as a shield, and slammed the front door shut.

Eventually, our attackers got bored—or passed out—and marbles stopped pelting the door. Thereafter, I experienced a moment that came close to lucidity, and decided to make a run for it.

I was crossing the parking lot when a deep voice came out of the darkness from above: “Good evening, Jack.”

I spun around—which I shouldn’t have done, because it turned the parked cars into carousel horses that kept moving after I’d stopped.

“Up here,” the voice said.

On a small balcony above me, a shirtless man in white sweat shorts leaned forward and planted a pair of enormous hands far apart on a wrought iron railing. He had a head of wiry hair and a barrel chest that seemed to glow.

“I’m not Jack,” I said.

“I don’t care what your name is,” he replied calmly. “I’m a deputy sheriff. That car is my cruiser.”

The carousel horses were slowing down. I followed his pointing finger and saw a squad car parked several feet away.