Ruthie was uninterested at first, which tempered my own excitement. “Isn’t it just a haunted house?” she asked. “What’s the big deal?” I tried to tell her Hell Houses were different, they were... Christian, but I didn’t know how to say that without molding her disinterest into disgust. Then we’d never go. It didn’t take long for her to hear through the gossip channels I had an apparent inability to connect to that there was always an after-party. A post–Hell House Hell House, for students, by students, where they hand out drinks and mandate costumes, instead of telling you you’ll go to hell for both.

Until this point, Ruthie and I found any excuse in the book to meander behind the stadium to the steps where I had made new midjog marijuana friends. I’d drag Ruthie on my jogs—which were getting better and easier with each added mile until it became a routine. We also realized it was the perfect excuse. Should we get caught wandering in the woods all we had to do was quote Dr. Felix Chastain—“You have to look good to feel good.”—and we’d be golden. Once a day, sometimes twice, we’d jog up the hill and around the stadium until we found the steps. We’d stand at the top, exactly where I was when I saw them last, and wait, listening for movement in the forest, occasionally faking a cough or a sneeze to make sure, if they were deep in the trees, they’d know we were waiting for them. Ruthie even went so far once as to bring a tiny bottle of Smirnoff she’d snuck from her parents’ liquor cabinet and hid in her underwear drawer waiting for the perfect moment to use it. I’d figured that would be at our first party but, no, it was while we stood in the woods pretending to sneeze.

But we never saw them. We came home disappointed every time. I was starting to think I imagined them—maybe they didn’t exist, maybe I never smoked weed, maybe I was in such a state of jogging exhaustion that I was hallucinating. And Ruthie started thinking that, too. So, to compensate, she started focusing on this alleged post–Hell House Hell House party.

“You found our first party group, now I’ll find our second,” she said generously, placating me and my seemingly imaginary friends.