Chapter 1

"What is wrong with that guy?"

You could see it in their eyes. Nobody ever actually asked but you knew they were thinking it. Sometimes I would tell myself it was just paranoia; that people were just thinking the things they're supposed to think like: "How am I going to pay the rent?" or "Why won't he call me?" or "I should never have told her that;" but I could always tell. It was always about me. The man in the black raincoat that held the door open for me at the drugstore... He knew. The teller at the bank, the tall blonde who was always so friendly with the other customers but never with me... She definitely knew.

When I was in tenth grade, there was this day in biology class when a whisper started spreading around the room that Jennifer Hitchcock was tripping on acid and everybody should stare at her. At the time I didn't know anything more about acid than what I'd seen in movies but I had a pretty good idea that this wasn't a nice thing to do. Even so, I couldn't not look. Nobody could resist a challenge like that, at least not in high school. From the way she reacted I had no doubt that she was having a pretty ugly trip and getting uglier by the minute as forty-six of the forty-eight eyeballs in the room weighed heavier and heavier on her.

Reflecting back now, however, I'm not so sure she was high at all.

Maybe she just had a secret of her own. Maybe her secret had been slipping away from her like mine was twenty years later and maybe she just assumed that it had gotten out.