It was senior year, those exciting few days before the semester gets going, when everyone’s back but nothing’s started. I was supposed to meet her at a party that night, but she took the bus and came over to my place early. I’d moved off campus, to the old house with the big back porch next to the gas station. You could sit on the porch and watch, over the wall, the round sign rotating on its pole. She simply showed up. She’d been in Brazil all summer, staying with family. She’d wanted to take an ethnomusicology class but it hadn’t worked out, so instead she’d gone around on her own, meeting musicians, having adventures, every bit of which she was ready to recount for me. We talked in the kitchen for a while before she took out a bag of shriveled-up psychedelic mushrooms, which she wanted us to eat. It was the first time anyone ever offered me any drug other than pot, and I think I was a little bit flattered, just as I’d felt flattered freshmen year when someone first offered me pot. That I, Abby, could be mistaken for a person you simply offer pot to.