down other people and convinced some of them to record appointments and whatever, but this was quicker and a lot less messy.”
This conversation was turning out to be enlightening in ways I hadn’t expected. Apparently my image of Susanna—good girl, follow the rules, if anyone’s being bullied run and tell a teacher—was out of date.
“His face was good,” Susanna said, rolling over onto her stomach to pass Leon the joint. “When I said about uploading the footage. I enjoyed that a lot.”
I couldn’t figure out, through the muddle of booze and hash, just how horrified I should be. I felt like there was an excellent chance that she was exaggerating either the doctor’s villainy or his dreadful fate, or both, and a non-zero chance that she was making the whole thing up; but either way, the nonchalance got more unsettling the more I thought about it, and either way there was the question of why exactly she was telling this story. The only reason I could see was that she wanted me or Leon or both of us to hear, loud and clear: If you mess with me, I will fuck you up.
“OK,” I said. “So. If you did have something to do with him dying. Do you still figure you’re a good person?”
Susanna thought about that, chin on hands. “Maybe not,” she said, in the end. “But say I’d decided not to have kids, so I’d never needed to go to him. Or say I’d got lucky and ended up with a decent doctor. Then I wouldn’t have done it. But I’d still be the same person; the reason I hadn’t done it wouldn’t be because I was more virtuous, it would just be dumb luck. Would I be a good person then?”
This was way above my pay grade. Leon had made this joint even stronger than the first one; a weird fizzing sensation was traveling up my arms and I was suddenly very aware of my nose. I felt like there was something wrong with what she was saying, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “I have no idea,” I said, after a long pause. “What you’re talking about.”
That started Susanna giggling. Once she started, she couldn’t stop, and it set the rest of us off too. The windows of the apartment building swung to and fro, bright rectangular pendulums, tick tock tick tock, and that felt somehow irresistibly funny, a marvelous joke straight out of Alice in Wonderland. I wondered if Susanna had been joking too, if her whole story had been one great big wind-up, silly me falling for it!
“So,” she said to Leon. “Beat that.”
Leon held up a palm. “Oh hell no. I’m not playing this game. You three knock yourselves out.”
“You have to play. Or I’m not giving you any more hash and you’ll have to go back to wandering around dodgy nightclubs.” She stretched out one leg and poked him with a toe. “Go on.”
“Stop it.”
“Go. Go. Go.” I started chanting too, “Go go go,” our voices spilling out across the ravaged garden, Melissa laughing— “Go go go,” I leaned across and started jabbing Leon in the arm until he couldn’t help giggling too, half angrily, slapping my hand away, “Stop—” I got him in a headlock and we tumbled over onto Susanna, her elbow jammed into my ribs and Leon’s hair in my mouth and it took me straight back to when we were kids scrapping, they even smelled the same— “OK!” Leon yelled. “OK! Get off me!”
We disentangled ourselves, breathless and laughing, Leon making a big thing of brushing himself down, “God, you people are savages—” My head was whirling mercilessly; I flopped back onto the terrace and gazed up at the skidding stars, hoping they would settle down. I considered the possibility that we were all still sixteen and getting stoned for the first time and everything since then had been an elaborate hallucination, but this felt way too heavy to deal with and I decided I should probably ignore it. “Your hair,” Melissa said, laughing, holding out her hands, “you’re all leaves, come here—” and I rolled over to her and put my head in her lap so she could pick the leaves out.
“Fine,” Leon said, fumbling for his cigarette packet. It took me a moment to remember what we were supposed to be talking about. “The time when we were five and I bit you on the face.”
“Jesus, I actually remember that,” I said. “You drew