We walked for a bit, but Claire wasn’t wearing footwear for hiking, and by the time we made it to Beanstalk she asked if we could sit down.

I sat against the trunk of the tree and she sat beside me, fidgeting and scanning the area above her head and along the ground with her flashlight, plainly uncomfortable about being outside. “Are there spiders on this tree, do you think?”

I told her there were most likely hundreds of species of bugs we couldn’t see crawling around that very moment on the tree, including spiders.

It was the truth, and I’d hoped it would send her running back to the house, but she laughed like she thought I was teasing.

“Want to smoke some pot with me?” she asked, pulling a joint and a lighter out of her purse.

“Yup,” I said. Anything to avoid the tsunami of emotions surging inside me.

She lit the joint, and we passed it back and forth without talking. Then Claire said, “You were really good back there,” although she was texting someone on her phone at the time, not even looking at me. “Do you play in Chris’s band?”

“No.”

She started scrolling through Instagram. After a while she put the phone down and said, “You don’t talk much, do you?” Her voice was deeper and less annoying when she was high. Or maybe it just seemed that way because I was. “Gloomy. Like a lost dog.”

I took one last hit of the joint and held it in until I was dazed. As I exhaled, I coughed a little and said, “Is the stench of my misery and self-loathing that strong?”

She turned her head and looked at me. It was dark, so I couldn’t fully make out her expression, but it might have contained a modicum of fear.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a weird weekend.”

I spit on the remnants of the joint to make sure it was burned out and buried what was left of it in the dirt. When I stood up I felt lightheaded, but strangely heavy too, as if my head were a helium balloon and my body the string attached; only the string was tied to a brick.

I walked to a small redwood a few feet away and rested my forehead against its trunk.

Claire giggled and said, “What are you doing?”

“I love this tree,” I told her. I stepped back and looked around at the other trees nearby, at Beanstalk and at all the different-size redwoods, oaks, and madrones, all smaller than Beanstalk but just as beautiful. “I love all these trees.”

The whole forest was starting to come into focus as my eyes adjusted to the dark. I could pick out sword ferns and Indian paintbrush, and even some wild irises farther up the trail. But then Claire swiped her stupid flashlight back on and everything beyond a two-foot radius went black again.