“It’s freezing out!” I protested.
Tegan just shrugged. “I’m still too high to sleep.” She pulled herself through the window in my bedroom and out onto the roof of the garage. She was sneaking out to go smoke a joint with a new friend crush, Emma, who lived a forty-minute walk away. I went to the window and watched as she crab-walked across the shingles. At the edge of the house, she sat on her butt and swung her legs over the gutter. She pushed off and I watched her drop out of view. I heard her feet on the shed below and then the slap of her shoes hitting the sidewalk a few seconds after that. I kept my eyes focused on the street, waiting for her to reappear, and when she did, she turned and waved up to the window where I was standing. I imagined the headline: A fifteen-year-old girl on acid was last seen walking alone at midnight along the highway. The cold air from outside felt like an intruder. I turned the crank on the window slowly, leaving a space for Tegan to pull it open when she got home. I climbed back in bed to wait. What if she died? What if she got lost and froze somewhere in the dark next to the highway? I should have gone with her. If something happened to her it would be my fault. I brokered with the universe: If Tegan makes it home alive, I’ll never get high again.
Tori Manis sold me my first tab at an amusement park on the outskirts of the city six months earlier. I remember the drug taking effect from beyond my periphery, closing in on me from all sides. I spent the long days of summer in the blacked-out basement watching films with story lines heavily influenced by drugs: Kids, Dazed and Confused, Rush, The Doors. Some part of me wanted to be scared by these stories, but what they inspired in me was entirely the opposite. Tori had warned me that I’d end up with a “spine full of the shit” if I did acid too often, but I couldn’t stop plotting the next time. You have to try it, I told Tegan dozens of times over the summer, but she remained adamant that she had no interest, retelling our mom’s story about a friend who’d done the drug only once and had a schizophrenic break. I wouldn’t let up, and when Tegan finally gave in, we agreed that I would stay sober to ensure nothing went wrong while she took her first hit.
I watched Tegan put the paper square on her tongue in Naomi’s kitchen. A flush spread across her cheeks and neck. The moaning and chewing of her hands started quickly after that. Don’t bite, we kept telling her, pulling her knuckles from her mouth. I felt like a villain in an after-school special, guilty of peer pressuring my innocent sister. After she peaked, she stretched out on the carpet, so captivated by the sound of her own voice that she recited to us for hours the plot of The Clan of the Cave Bear.
On our next acid trip, I dropped first, and when the world around me turned to rubber, so did my defenses.
“Teegy.” My childhood nickname for her bubbled out of my mouth between giggles. “We should play Nintendo!”
She returned from the garage with the dusted box as if it were a treasure. She stuffed a game cartridge into the slot, and the familiar twinkle of the Super Mario Bros.’s theme song began to play. Tegan studied the screen, jerking her hands and the controller through the air. I was mesmerized.
“Isn’t it weird that he’s collecting mushrooms?” Tegan said, turning toward me. “Mario is stoned, too.”
I met her eyes, reveling in her genius. There was no one cooler; the rest of the world and everyone in it ceased to exist. Everything she said made me laugh as if she were tickling my actual brain. I felt tears spill from my eyes, letting out groans of laughter. When the trip went sideways, and the thoughts cycling through my brain turned dark, she steered me back toward the light.
When the grip of my high relaxed, Tegan placed a hit of acid in her mouth and my focus shifted. It was her turn and I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. The drug felt like an antidote, a magnet that pulled us back together.
When we started breaking out of the house to smoke cigarettes in grade nine, we’d stayed in the yard, or walked to the park a few blocks away. Eventually we discovered that the perimeter fence had a break in it, and the farmer’s field on the other side became our primary destination after dark. Away from the houses, we were less afraid of being spotted by neighbors, and our voices got louder and misdeeds more daring. Chasing the burn of weed smoke with stolen alcohol, we’d lie back in the field looking at the stars, spooking each other with unreliable sightings of coyotes in the distance. It didn’t feel dangerous, because we were together.
I considered all of this as I lay in bed, waiting for Tegan to return from hanging out with Emma. I thought about waking my parents up, imagining the three of us in Mom’s Jeep, searching for her in the ditch. I didn’t have to admit she was high, just stupid. A paralyzing fear scratched at the back of my skull. I wished I was telepathic, that I could feel her pain. Send me a twin signal, for fuck’s sakes. As the minutes stretched by, I prayed, an act totally foreign to me. Please let her be okay, I chanted over and over.
Just after 2:00 a.m., I heard her climb onto the roof. Then I saw a purple shoe and fingers on the window frame. Landing in a crouch on my carpet, she smiled at me and said, “Hi, I saw horses!” I was relieved that she was safe, but heavy with guilt. Seeing my own recklessness reflected back to me in Tegan’s behavior was truly terrifying, as if only when she was in danger could I realize that I was, too.