OK, she said kindly, wiping the tears from my eyes. Here’s my advice. I don’t want you to go to the logging camp because you deserve better than that. As for your latest plan for this evening, I think you should abandon it because at the moment you’re in a vulnerable state of shock and in no shape to make such a fatal decision.

Actually, we never had this conversation because as soon as I turned to her, she lifted her palm toward the sky and held out her long white arm like an offering. Then she put the needle in herself and I looked away but saw her white fist punch hard her red vein. Dear Abby: I finally met someone who looked like a role model and she turned out to be a fucking junkie! What should I do?

I passed some passed-out girls with their skirts up past their knees, and if they could pass out here, I could too. Maybe. Maybe not. Do or die. Now or never.

It’s funny. As soon as you even consider offing yourself, options appear. They’re everywhere. Passing out seemed dull compared to slitting my wrists with a silver blade or swallowing the pile of gleaming black capsules. I wondered how Heather did it. I wanted to do it not in a girly way. Like maybe do something truly original and macabre. Hang myself from an oak tree so I’d dangle off the bedsheet tied around my neck; my body was so skinny now I’d be a white sliver waving from the boughs. Pistol to the head; shotgun to the brain. I bet no girl in Victoria’s ever done that. I knew I wasn’t going the head-in-the-oven route because they’d blame it on Sylvia Plath. Though I’d never read anything by Sylvia Plath, Ivy Mercer had given a paper on her life story in English class. Now that I was alone in the Blue House understanding the urge to off yourself, I realized I should have befriended Ivy when I had the chance. I just used to think girls like that would be disgusted by the marijuana plants in my house and the rumors of my sordid family history. It never occurred to me that I could lie, tell her I was from the Norwegian hinterlands or some such bullshit.