When I gave him the ten dollars in my wallet, he showed it to Zach, who made a face. The girl tapped her foot impatiently and gazed off, dragging hard on her cigarette. Her brown hair hung limp and unkempt. Her cheeks were hollow. Our eyes met for an instant.

“Adriana?” I said.

Adriana Fox may have been two grades ahead of me, but she was someone every guy in school was aware of. Pretty, sexy, haughty, loud, she hung out with the jocks and was at the red-hot center of the social solar system. She’d probably weighed twenty pounds more back then, but not an ounce had been superfluous. Now she was a walking skeleton.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

“You were two years ahead of me.”

She looked away as if she didn’t want to be reminded of the person she’d once been. Meanwhile, Barry’s forced attempt at cheerfulness had devolved into groveling. “You couldn’t spare some more money? Maybe a twenty?”

It had to kill him to beg. He’d always been the cooler, stronger, more dominant one. But by then I’d completed junior year, a grade further than he’d managed to go. I was at the tail end of the Semi-Miraculous Transformation — taller, probably stronger, surely in a better place mentally.

I went to my room and came back with a twenty. It was a given that the money was for drugs, but I was naive. The suburban scene was dominated by grass, hash, acid, sometimes pills. Now and then someone might score some opium or speed, but there was never enough around to imagine that anyone could get hooked on either.

And heroin? Forget it. That was strictly a ghetto drug.

Last night I managed to track down Adriana Fox and get Zach’s number in Canada. On the phone he sounded distraught as he told me that on Sunday night at the festival, after I left the woods to see Ten Years After, Karl came back, and he and Barry went off together. It started to rain again and Eva was cold. She and Zach talked their way into one of the hippie school buses to crash. That’s why they weren’t under the tarp when I came back. They spent most of Monday searching for Barry, and when they couldn’t find him, they left a message for him with the festival organizers that they’d gone back to the farm in Ontario.

Late in the day, my aunt got a call from a hospital in Monticello, New York. Two men had brought Barry into the emergency room and left before anyone could question them. An hour later, Barry was dead of a heroin overdose.

“I’m so fuckin’ sorry, man.” Zach sounded close to tears. “We didn’t know what happened to him. We figured he and Karl must’ve taken off or something. And we had to get back to the farm.”