That night, as we lay on Holly’s twin beds, facing each other, Holly helped me work out my plan. That weekend I would visit my sister at the Total Care Center, alone. The Talbots’ gardener, Dave, who sold Holly weed and owed her some favors, would drive me there early in the morning, before her parents were conscious. That way the staff at the Center would remember me when I came back, and think it was normal for my sister to walk around the grounds with me.

“My parents leave for the winter on December first. We can come here if we get E on a weekend. But we have to be out by Sunday night, because Mrs. Stone comes in Monday morning, and she calls the ’rents about absolutely everything.” I knew Holly’s parents had had more than one alarming call from Mrs. Stone while they were on that yacht, though I had not been at the house for the epic party that really sealed the deal, when Mrs. Stone let herself in one Sunday morning, having forgotten to close the upstairs windows, only to find a raft of beautiful naked kids draped unconscious all over the chintz-upholstered furniture. She started screaming, convinced she’d walked in on some sort of Manson Family situation and that they were all dead. Her hysteria revived the teenagers and they peered at her, universally high, until one of them, the son of a prominent judge on the D.C. circuit, attempted to initiate a conversation about the weather with a pillow clamped modestly over his lap. Furious, Mrs. Stone called Holly’s parents, who promptly forbade their treasured daughter to ever use the house again when they were away.

Dave the gardener drove the small truck with jerky, impatient maneuvers, as though he were pissed off at the steering wheel and gearshift. Each time he moved his skinny arms, a waft of tobacco and stale sweat emanated from his side of the car. His fingernails were rimmed with green. I wondered about the sequence of events that had led Dave to become the Talbots’ gardener, and whether he and Holly had rolled around together yet. He had a grimy appeal.

“You’re quiet, huh?” said Dave.

“It’s just early,” I said. A fringe of meager beard edged Dave’s jaw and climbed up his drawn cheek.

“I’m up this early every day,” he said.

“Me, too,” I said. “For school.”

“Were you and Holly up late?” His loose-knit brown sweater had a hole in the chest, as though someone had taken a bite out of it.

“I guess,” I said.

“Holly’s funny,” he said.

When I walked up to the desk in the front lobby of the Total Care Center, the receptionist looked up at me curiously. Behind her, the visitors’ center was hung with shiny cardboard turkeys and decorations with Native American motifs.

“Can I help you?”