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what is it?”
    She was gone. On the floor beneath me lay someone else, someone I knew, a model named Maddy who was a sometime girl of Simon’s. Eyes blue not green, hennaed hair, breath a bitter exhalation of meth and gin. She stared at me, then smiled crookedly, wriggling to pull down her dress.
    â€œIt’s okay, sweetie,” she said. “You’re just young, that happens. . . .”
    I pulled away, staggering to my feet and yanking my pants up, bashing against the wall as I rushed to leave. There was no sign of my woolen jacket. Something fell to the floor, not a mirror but a drawing, its frame shattering and a spray of glass momentarily igniting the air.
    â€œAww,” said Maddy. “Look, it broke.”
    I fled down the steps and through the crowd gathered in the kitchen, heedless of who I ran into, and out into the garden. The last thing I remember of that night is Red staring at me from the kitchen window, his hands blue-white against the panes, and, from somewhere in the woods nearby, the four high, swooping notes of a barred owl’s call.
    * * *
    Next summer my brother found the drawings. He was back at Goldengrove with his usual cohort of cocaine lawyers and stockbrokers and junkie models. Maddy was there, too. I did everything I could to avoid her, but she only smiled and treated me the same sweet, clueless way she treated everyone else. It was Maddy who discovered the stash of books in my bedroom.
    â€œWhat the fuck is this?” my brother demanded as I walked into the living room.
    I’d been gone all day. Simon and his friends were sitting around blank-eyed, surrounded by drifts of cigarette butts and glassine envelopes. Empty bottles were everywhere. Someone had been cutting lines atop one of Radborne’s glass-framed drawings. A halfhearted renovation was in progress, with stacks of two-by-fours and plywood piled by the door. Scattered among the building materials were my sketchbooks.
    â€œWhat?” I stared at the room like it was an accident site. One of my maps lay on the floor, its corners weighted down with champagne bottles. Another was resting on the fireplace mantel. “Simon ... ?”
    I turned to him helplessly. I felt as though someone had drilled a hole in my head and all the blood was leaking out.
    â€œThis shit—you’re really crazy, you know that, Val?”
    My brother held up an open sketchbook. There was Vernoraxia, her hands pulling her knees apart so that you could see the army issuing from between her legs, women riding greyhounds, men whose heads were on backward. A tiny woman brandished a pair of old-fashioned scissors like a sword.
    â€œLeave him alone, Simon.” Maddy sat on the floor, her head bent over another of my sketchbooks. “I think these are so cool. . . .”
    Simon started to laugh. “I think he’s a fucking fruitcake.”
    I attacked him with a two-by-four, smashing him on the head, then turning blindly on his friends. It took four of them to subdue me. Someone ran for the constable; someone else raced down to the boathouse and got Red. My brother was medevacked to Rockland, where he was treated for a concussion and released the next day.
    Somehow Red arranged for me not to be arrested. Instead I was shipped off to the adolescent unit at McLean in Boston. The new generation of psychotropic drugs weren’t yet in use; I was put on a regimen of MAO inhibitors and lithium and released in time to return to Andover in the fall. The medication seemed to cure me of wanting to kill my brother. It also killed my obsessive need to draw. Without ever stating it out loud, I knew that I had lost the one genuine gift I had, the thing that made me feel that I deserved to be alive.
    I was kept under a psychiatrist’s care for years after that. As new drugs were developed, more sophisticated diagnostic tools, the exact nature of my illness was determined—a seasonal bipolar disorder, spiking in early