The names of David’s two friends who left the house were Collin and Mahari. The third, Tyler, told Collin and Mahari at the top of the basement stairs that he’d forgotten something downstairs and was planning to walk the four miles home anyway, and so Collin and Mahari drove off in Collin’s old maroon Taurus without him. Collin, whose sister Rachael had killed herself last year, dropped Mahari at his house due west of David’s and then drove his car forty minutes in an unwavering straight line north, into the southern Ohio countryside. He didn’t have a meeting that night—that was only twice a week—but he didn’t want to arrive home while his parents were still downstairs, and just being in proximity of HBCC calmed him down. He sat in the otherwise-empty parking lot in his car, staring into the adjacent field, the inky blue sky broken by black, smoking a bowl and practicing the technique he’d learned: he blurred his vision, separated the colors until they drifted in disparate blocks across his vision, as his eyes teared, until the world before him was neatly dismantled. The house, the empty bedroom, his mother and father, his drive to school, his favored parking lots: grooves he’d long run into the road, a network of blocks and patterns drawn over his life. He watched the colors before him break apart, and with them, his thoughts seemed to disperse, too, to lose their edges and bleed into the background. Was that the same thing as the pain dispersing? If Rachael wasn’t a presence, was not there in the world, how could she affect him? He didn’t know anymore. After half an hour he drove back the way he’d come, forty-eight minutes, the route now so familiar to him he could have done it with his eyes closed; he no longer worried about getting pulled over—he’d never seen a cop in these twenty miles. He arrived home just after eleven, and by then the house was dark. Another night passed, he thought, another night he didn’t have to sit across from her empty chair, waiting in silence to be dismissed.