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6 Summer of Stationary road Trips You and your pal are pinned around a ceramic plate that holds a forty-dollar rock of crystal meth shaped like a dirty snow–colored tooth pried from the mouth of a beggar. Your brain is a swarm of asteroids orbiting the small, chemical sun. It’s late August, midafternoon air thick and pungent, like you’re trapped inside the armpit of a construction worker. You’re in the bedroom of your friend’s older sister, the first living girl you ever saw naked: four years ago, peering through the slats of the wooden shower outside her father’s beach house. You lean over, snort one of her limbs into your head, where it shreds into confetti. A blue fan flings a thimble of stickiness in your direction. You squeeze your lids, try to visualize her under the shower: a lavender bar of soap smearing a streak of bubbles over her abdomen. You clench your jaw, wish for a mental brake pedal. You go to the bathroom, fetch your penis from your underpants. It feels so not-yours in your hand, seems to squint at you, tries to inch its way back into your pelvis. The yellow trickles out. 7 You return to the bed, where your friend licks his lips like a perpetual envelope. A rusty pipe leaks in your throat. In three days, you will start tenth grade, for the second time. Put on your seatbelt—it will be a forty-hour night. ...

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