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letters. How was it that letters turned into sounds? And sounds formed words and the words could mean absolutely anything and everything, even body fluids—and what exactly let her brain know how to decipher meaning from marks on a page?
    Weird.
    Writing was the most abstract art ever. She wrote in the back of her book, rough lines, making the letters as awkward and cryptic as possible. She wrote, “gOd.” Then she turned the page to Alpha Nerd. “What do you see?”
    He said, “God?”
    She nodded. There it was, the collective delusion. She’d made him see God in a few lines.
    Alpha Nerd, Son-of-Joe-Strummer, who probably didn’t even know who Joe Strummer was, said, “Want a pick-me-up?”
    She put a hand to her shirt, over the muscle that ran from her chest to her shoulder. A pink and white scar ripped through her skin there. She held her eyes open and steady. To let Alpha Nerd’s eyes meet hers was an exercise in connecting, like hands over her body. He said, “First one’s free.”
    She said, “You’re that kid we learned about in seventh grade. In that peer pressure video?”
    He grinned. “Everybody does it.” It was a line from the film.
    She reached out a hand. He put a packet in it. She tried not to blink. His damp hand brushed her skin. She could smell the earth below where they sat, the dirt and dust. She could smell oil on the ground, as though a leaking car had idled there. She closed her fingers around the package. This was new terrain. She’d stepped into the video of their seventh-grade cautionary tale. The paper of the packet was solid, like a promise, crisp as the page of a magazine.

S arah’s cell phone sang in her pocket. Her hands were numb with cold. When she answered, Nyla said, her voice a susurrant whisper, “I don’t think Georgie’s doing too well.”
    The zoo’s air was filled with the scent of cinnamon and grease—the “elephant ears” cart workers had started making their daily sweet fry bread—and Sarah felt that disconnect of being close and far away at the same time, a friend’s voice in her ear, the news crew blocking her view. She had the pacifier laced around her index finger. Absentmindedly, she tapped its rubber nipple against her cheek.
    “You saw Georgie? I can’t get her to call me back.” Yes, it was a selfish hand that tightened down against her heart, but she, Sarah, was meant to be first in line to see the baby. She would know how Georgie was adjusting—her oldest friend, her friend from Lincoln High! Her friend who’d never moved away.
    Portland had, for a while twenty years earlier, been low on young people. Portland, Oregon, you had to say, because somehow even the tiny spot of Portland, Maine, loomed larger.
    When they were right out of high school there was a small crew of downtown club kids, so small it was easy to think you knew themall. It was a tiny scene with a big, weird social pressure to say,
Yeah, I’m heading to LA soon
. Or you could say SF, or maybe San Fran. You might say,
A friend invited me down
. Maybe you’d really go. Sarah and Georgie didn’t even pretend.
    Georgie’s own mom had left back then, moved out of town like some kind of runaway—a runaway mother nobody went looking for.
    Those years mattered! Sarah and Georgie rode clunker Goodwill bikes on streets that emptied out after dark and drank in dive bars where nobody asked their age. They colonized the old-man bars, laid the foundation for generations of hipsters who’d come along since. They drank at Satyricon, and saw Poison Idea and even Nirvana before Cobain really made it.
    Portland’s last bastion of the permissive West died when they closed Satyricon’s punk rock doors. The club reopened for a while, under the same name, but it was thin and watered-down. It was in the original version where Sarah and Georgie saw Courtney Love in the bathroom, where they dodged a flying bottle when someone—Courtney?—flung it. It was definitely Courtney’s hand in the