“No,” she said. “You used big words like cathartic and amalgamation. Complained about tribes of dieters.”

Diatribes? My first reaction was to say that those weren’t big words. That, thanks to Dawson’s Creek reruns, all teenagers talked like that. But I didn’t want to admit to ever having been obsessed with the show in case she remembered the monster crush I had on Pacey’s older brother, the cop who turned out to be gay, which was so typical of my luck with guys.

My second reaction was to deny everything. I mean, I didn’t even inhale.

“No, I don’t,” I said way too indignantly for someone who didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

“Yes. You. Do. Don’t you remember you said tabula rasa, but Kieren thought you said tabula rasta and asked what it meant? And we decided it was the blanking effect really good Jamaican weed has on the brain? Remember? We even played a drinking game—whenever you used a word no one else knew the meaning of, we took a drink. We ran out of booze.”

I didn’t remember any of this. It was all an enigma (drink). But I didn’t tell her that.

She placated (drink) me by telling me that drugs are for the boring people, not for geniuses like me.

“Historically speaking, the true creative geniuses were all addicts,” I told her.

“No, kitten, they wouldn’t do this if they were true geniuses.”

I ached to tell her that she was a true genius; that she understood all of the intangibles (drink) of life, the beauty and the poetry of existence that someone like me couldn’t even fathom (drink). But I knew all she could see were her Fs next to my As.

I pulled my legs in, rocked onto my feet, and stood on the retaining wall. Just another slip down the slope to hell. A slope that had gotten progressively slicker since Kori had talked me into getting my tongue pierced. Speaking of slick slopes, I looked down from my new footing. It wasn’t but two feet off the ground from the land side, but the lake side dropped down to … Oh God … I couldn’t look. My ankles wobbled, but … okay … as long as I wasn’t looking down, right?

In addition to the fear of abandonment, self-torture is one of my “issues.” Or “subscriptions,” as my mom calls them. I get twelve a year for the low, low price of $12.95.

Mom thinks that because she is a nurse and reads all these self-help books and works at the crisis line that she’s some kind of expert on helping people. But it’s all a joke. The only person I could count on to have my back, to really be there for me, was Kori.