Maya, on her knees in the backyard, gasps for breath, overcome by hilarity. The sky screams blue. The air tastes like grass. She can’t recall what is funny, which is, in itself, uproarious, and she can’t stop, and it’s terrifying, but when Aubrey says the word—the one that has them rolling in the grass—the fear goes away.
“Cha—cha—” Aubrey can’t get it out. Tears river her face.
Laughter flares from Maya’s throat. “Oh my god,” she says, “oh my god, oh my—”
“Chort—”
“Stop!” Maya shrieks. “Stop!” She slaps the hard earth.
“Chortle!!”
And they collapse.
How long have they been laughing? A minute? An hour? A year? “Chortle!” Maya shrieks. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe . . .” She can’t believe what? “I can’t believe that’s a word.”
“Me neither,” Aubrey says. “I can’t believe . . .” She trails off, not laughing anymore, and Maya raises her damp head from her forearm, peers out from the unkempt curtain of her hair to see Aubrey petting the grass. Stroking it like a fine fur coat. “It’s so soft,” she says.
Maya rolls onto her back and snuggles in. She sweeps her limbs in a slow-motion snow angel and feels every blade of grass that brushes her skin. “I can’t believe any of it,” she says. She wears her usual cutoffs and an oversized zebra-print button-down from Goodwill that she’d thought would be fun for today. “The sky,” she says. “The sky!” Her sunglasses, oversized and rhinestone-studded, are also from Goodwill, and it’s a good thing she’s wearing them, because her pupils are enormous and the sun is sending out waves. She sees them rippling across the sky, and it reminds her of a long-ago science lesson. “Do you remember,” she asks, “what Mr. Murphy said about the sun and electromagnetic waves?”
“Not really.”
“Me neither,” Maya says, even though she does. “But now . . . I feel like I get it. You know?” She turns her head to look at Aubrey, and Aubrey stares back from behind her own shades, aviators with dark green lenses. They often shop at Goodwill together.
“You do?”
“Yeah,” Maya says. “It’s like space is made of water, just one big ocean, and the sun is a pebble tossed onto its surface . . . It sends out ripples in the water.” She raises her arms, wriggles her fingers, and feels the ripples.
“Wow . . .” Aubrey says. “Sage really came through this time, huh?”
Maya giggles, recalling the last time they got acid from the aging hippie cashier who works at Big Y, where Aubrey works as a bagger. Sage, with his graying, patchouli-scented ponytail, is in love with Aubrey, so the acid’s always free, but the last batch had been so weak, they’d wondered if it was as fake as his name. “This shit,” Maya says, “is definitely real.”
“What shit?” her mom asks.
Maya’s fingers freeze mid-wriggle. She squeezes her eyes shut as if this will make her invisible.
“You want to tell me what’s going on here?”
Her mom’s going to kill her for this. But only if she knows. Maya lowers her hands, straightens her zebra shirt, and sits up, pieces of grass in her hair. She smiles as casually as possible. “Hi, Mom!”
Her mom stands two feet away, at the edge of the garden. No telling how long she’s been there.
Brenda isn’t usually so imposing—even though she is large, almost a foot taller than her petite daughter, and brawny—but right now she looks like an angry sun-god, arms crossed at her chest, the flyaway curls around her face like golden flames. She’s in her EMT uniform: a white shirt, navy pants, black sneakers. Her penciled eyebrows highlight the displeasure on her face, the narrowing of her blue eyes.
“I . . . thought you were at work,” Maya says.
“I was. But now I’m home—and this is what I find? A mess in the kitchen? TV so loud I can hear it from outside? And is that The Dark Crystal you’re watching?” Her mom knows them both so well.
“Hi, Brenda,” Aubrey says in a too-high voice.
“Hi, Aubrey.”
Aubrey wilts at the tone.
“What did you two take? Hm?” Brenda looks from one to the other, then back again.
Maya feels her trip tanking and tries not to panic. “LSD,” she says, knowing it is useless to hide.
Brenda shakes her head. “Get inside, both of you.”
The walk through the yard, past the garden, and up three steps to the kitchen is its own ordeal. The ground feels spongy and quicksand-like. “Wait!” her mom says as she and Aubrey track dirt through the kitchen. She hands them each a damp dish towel, glaring at their feet.
They bumble their way to the floor. They’d been watching The Dark Crystal when Aubrey had a yen to be in nature, so they’d crawled around the garden awhile before coming undone because she said chortle.
Maya wipes the dirt from her toes, her heels, the hollows of her ankles.
“Are you going to tell my stepdad?” Aubrey asks.
Brenda sits down at the table. “I don’t know,” she says. She sounds tired.
That’s when Maya notices the bandage on her mother’s hand. “What happened?”
“Just a few stitches,” her mom says. “Don’t worry about it.”
But Maya worries. Her mom’s job is scary—the flashing lights, screaming sirens, and screaming people. It scares Maya even when she’s not tripping—now she stares at the white bandage.
“Please don’t tell Darren,” Aubrey says, crying.
Maya cries too. She loves her mom, doesn’t want her to be in pain.
“Okay, you two, settle down,” Brenda says. She says it kindly, holding up her hand to prove it’s okay, and not freaking out the way other parents might, because she can handle this. She sees all kinds of things at work—bad trips, actual overdoses, stab wounds. “How long ago did you take it?” she asks calmly.
Maya and Aubrey share a look. How long ago indeed? Six hours? Seven?
Brenda sighs. “What time did you take it?”
“This morning?” Aubrey says. “Like, maybe at eleven?”
Brenda glances at the clock on the microwave. 1:32 p.m. “Looks like we’ve got a ways to go . . .”
They watch The Dark Crystal from the beginning, all three of them, Maya and her mom on the couch, Aubrey draped across the love seat. A fan in the corner circulates a cool breeze through the living room that is also the wind through the jungles of Thra. Maya understands that she’s in trouble, that her mom is only waiting for her to come down before delivering whatever stern talk and punishment she has in store, but for now, everything is perfect. Maya is here, but she is also in the movie, feeling the kind of wonder she’d felt watching it as a young child, before there was a difference between reality and magic.
Like how people at church must feel when contemplating Eden—a longing for a time before anyone knew they were naked, when conversations with God were the norm. Maya yearns for that time in her own life, not out of some need to escape reality—reality is fine—but simply because she was born that way. Born to yearn, as some people are, for more magical times. This is her fourth acid trip, so she knows about the sadness of coming down, the sense of God having vacated the garden. And Aubrey takes it even harder than she does.
Aubrey looks glum as Maya’s mom drives her home that evening, even though Brenda had agreed not to say anything about the acid. No one says anything as they pull up in front of Aubrey’s duplex.
Silver Lake glitters just beyond, obsidian in the dusk. Aubrey lives even closer to the lake. If she’s being honest, this is why Maya had wanted to take the acid at her own house rather than at Aubrey’s. The truth is that Maya is slightly afraid of the lake. She’d never admit this to anyone because to do so would be to sound like Aunt Lisa.
(Though if she could speak freely, Maya would point to local legends about the lake changing colors at night and steam rising from its surface in winter. She would say that the lake really is polluted, and who knows the extent of what PCBs can do to a person?)
“Thanks for the ride,” Aubrey says as she gets out of the car.
“This ever happens again, I’m telling your parents.”
On the drive home, Maya asks how long she is grounded for.
Her mom doesn’t answer for a while. She’s changed from her EMT uniform into a T-shirt, cotton shorts, and sandals, but still wears the white bandage on her hand. Now Maya knows that she cut herself on shredded metal while extracting a young man from a car wreck.
Maya expects her mom to be angry, but instead she just seems sad. “I don’t want to ground you,” she says. “You’ll be out of here in less than three months anyway, doing whatever you want. I just wish . . . I wish you could see what I see. On the ambulance, I mean. You’d understand how easily, how quickly, everything can go wrong.”
“I know, Mom. I’ll be careful. It’s not like we were driving.”
Her mom pulls into the driveway, cuts the engine, and turns to her. “You know there’s more to it than that. You could end up like—”
“Let me guess. Aunt Lisa?”
“It’s in your genes. You’re susceptible—why can’t you see that? A drug like LSD could trigger something—an episode.”
Maya sighs theatrically. Why can’t her mom see that a single acid trip is nothing compared to Lisa’s heavy meth use and obvious drinking problem? Maya will be attending BU on a full scholarship. She is smart enough to understand two things at once—both that her aunt suffered from delusions and that Silver Lake is, to some extent, toxic. But her mother seems intent on seeing the world in black and white, so all Maya says is, “Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful from now on.”