“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna pass. You can’t sleep on that stuff, right? The blanket inside is like, calling my name.”
“Okay whatever you want.” She lowers her nose to the tiny mirror, a sawed-off straw in one hand, held as delicately as if it’s made of spun glass.
I stare. I’ve never actually witnessed this before, and I feel like I’m seeing some hidden underworld. A knot forms in my stomach and my hands leap together like nervous birds flitting.
She passes it to him, and he vaccuums the powder up more quickly, greedily inhaling the mirror’s contents ‘till it’s clean.
The knot in my stomach gets tighter.
She turns to face me. “Are you sure? Want to just do a key bump?”
The knot unties itself.
“Sure.”
She digs the key’s tip into the fine white powder inside the pink baggie. It comes up looking like a shovel, holding a small scoop of snow, fresh from the driveway.
She smiles at me, plugs one of my nostrils, and tells me to breathe in.
I do.
The strongest sense to me, oddly enough, is my hearing. I can hear my breath taking it into my nasal passage, burning every fiber along the way, ragged and sharp.
“Oh!” I sit up, rub my nose frantically, anything to dim the shock of that feeling.
“Yeah, it burns.” She looks at me understandingly and nudges her own nose. “Wipe, you’ve got white.”
I do.
We walk down to the house, secretive about our little excursion. The group doesn’t ask where we were. I wonder if they know. I worry that they know. I hope they know.
My heart is picking up; it feels like a butterfly desperately looking for escape.
I don’t know how I feel. I’m panicking, I feel great, my mind is racing, but most of all,

I want more.