Around four in the afternoon, we disbanded. When I got home, Mom and Musclini were waiting at the front door with stern expressions. They ordered me into the living room. Had a neighbor seen my friends and me on the tennis courts behaving strangely and called them?

My parents sat at opposite ends of the couch. I sat in a low easy chair across from them.

“We know you spent the day with Arno, Milton, and Stuart,” Mom said accusingly. “We spoke to their parents.”

While not tripping as intensely as I had been earlier, I was still having some bizarre hallucinations. Even though our living-room floor is made of slate, when I reached over and pressed my fingertip down, it created a depression about half an inch deep in the stone.

“You all left at the same time this morning,” Mom went on. Her face had started to resemble a gargoyle’s. Her skin was concrete gray, mouth beak-like. “You told us you were going to Milton’s, but you didn’t. Milton told his parents he was coming here.”

I pressed my finger deeper into the slate and wondered how screwed I was. Acid was serious stuff. It was rumored that under its influence people had tried to chew the bark off trees, committed murder, and, God forbid, indulged in orgies.

“You went to Stuart’s house, didn’t you?” Musclini’s hair was growing longer and whiter by the second. He’d begun sprouting a long white beard as well.

“We’ve told you we don’t want you hanging around with him,” said Mom. Were those red earrings or flames flickering from her pointed gargoyle ears?

Looking like a white-haired maharishi in a gray sweatshirt and blue dungarees, Musclini leaned forward, hands clasped, looking grim. In his eyes, I was already a failure. I’d quit tennis, refused to do household chores, taken up smoking, begun to grow my hair long, and didn’t care for wheat germ.

He cleared his throat. The moment of truth had arrived: the ax was about to fall. Gravely, he asked, “Did you . . . smoke pot today?”

By now a small solar system of miniature planets and lollipops was orbiting his head. His face was barely visible beneath the long white hair and beard. Only squares over thirty called it “pot” and referred to “potheads.”

“Yes,” I lied.

They grounded me for a month.

Looming up in the cityscape, buildings inhale and exhale. Like tent caterpillars and woolly mammoths, they are carbon-based life-forms that burn fuel for energy and need water to survive. As with other living creatures, they will eventually grow infirm and fall down.