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and solidity of hard boiled eggs, squeezed themselves out of my eyes and rolled slowly down my face, and when they dropped off the edge of my jaw and crashed to the floor, I felt relieved and terrified in equal measures. Moments later I began to confuse my tears with my eyes, as if it were my eyeballs which were coming out.
    I’d recently heard a story about an old schoolfriend who had a severely overactive thyroid, and as a result her eyes bulged so much that they did actually pop out onto her cheeks (twice, once when she was making love, and once when somebody unexpectedly clapped her on the back). It wasn’t a major drama, allegedly, since the doctors had taught her how to stuff them back in again; although how that could be anything other than a major drama was beyond me.
    I cupped my palms over my eyes and leaned my head forwards so nobody would see my eyes falling out.
    ‘Are you all right?’ said a curious voice somewhere miles above me. I peered through my fingers and saw two very long and very hairy legs. They went on and on, up to a pair of brief shorts, and on, up to the face of the man I’d fallen in love with about half an hour earlier. It was a lovely face, but it was looming down at me in a way which made me feel even more nauseous.
    ‘I don’t feel very well,’ I confessed, as the fence in Raylene’s yard undulated and receded. I heard Ivan’s knees snapping like gunshots as he sat down beside me on the porch step. His legs were so long that I imagined them having to fold in several places, not just once in the middle.
    ‘Have you smoked Kansas grass before?’ he asked. I shook my head.
    ‘Never smoked any grass before,’ I said, proud that I had managed a whole sentence through all the cotton wool that had mysteriously appeared in my mouth. It tasted horrible.
    ‘It’s supposed to be very strong. I wouldn’t know, myself, since I believe that only morons do drugs.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said in a small voice, sensing that I ought to be devastated by this indictment. I wrapped my arms around my knees and rested my forehead on them. ‘I want to go home.’
    I meant that I wanted to go home home, back to England. People there did occasionally smoke pot, but as far as I’d ever been able to make out before, all it did was to make them laugh like hyenas and then eat lots of biscuits. Why did I have to be in this awful place where two puffs of a joint made things move and wobble and stopped time dead in its tracks?
    ‘I’ve been sitting here for hours,’ I announced in a muffled, aggrieved voice, my head still on my knees.
    ‘No you haven’t,’ Ivan said. ‘I saw you come out here just now.’
    ‘Must have been someone else,’ I insisted. ‘It was lunchtime when I sat down.’
    ‘It’s still lunchtime,’ he said.
    ‘Where’s Corinna?’
    ‘She left with Calvin.’
    I started crying again, enough boiled egg tears for a Boy Scout picnic. I put my hands back over my eyes, just in case.
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Ivan. ‘You’re in a bit of a state, aren’t you?’ He sighed with what appeared to be deep irritation, and extracted a car key from his shorts pocket. ‘I suppose I’d better take you home then. Come on.’ He stood up, held out his hand and hauled me to my feet. Not that I could feel them.
    The car journey seemed to take several hours, which was odd, considering Corinna and I had walked to Raylene’s house in only ten minutes: a few blocks north and halfway up Mount Oread.
    ‘This is not a mountain,’ I said, trying to make conversation. ‘Why do they call it a mountain? It’s a little hill, that’s all.’
    Ivan, behind the wheel of a battered Subaru, looked bored again. ‘In Kansas, this counts as a mountain,’ he said. ‘This is 1044 Connecticut. Is this your house?’
    ‘I think so,’ I said doubtfully, squinting at it. It looked identical to all the other houses on the block.
    ‘Let’s go and find out, shall we?’ he said. Even in my less than compos mentis