Page 31 of The Staircase in the Woods

End of story, game over, fuck it.

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They pressed on deeper and deeper until a break in the darkness of trees gave way to the bright indigo nothing of open sky. A half-moon looked down. A wind stirred, restive. He said, “The cliff’s edge is just over here—”

But she didn’t want to get that close, and by now, her impatience was burning her up like a bad case of the flu. She planted her feet and pulled him toward her—heoofed and chuckled as she kissed him long and hard. So hard their teeth clacked. So hard she knew they might each have brush burn around their lips afterward, skin reddened like smeared lipstick. So hard that for a half second, she was able to convince herself that they had actually, literally, honest-to-fucking-god become one person. But then she pulled away, gasping as if she’d just resurfaced from beneath the surface of a churning sea.

“Hey, I wanna tell you something,” she said, wiping her mouth.

“Okayyyy,” he said, expectant.

“First, though—”

She dug a little tin case out of her pocket. An Altoids tin. She held it out for him gently. Not for him to take, but instead, she rested the tin on her palm—an invitation for him to open it. Like a little treasure chest.

“Go on,” she said.

“Is this a ring?” he asked, playfully. In a higher register, he asked, “Gosh, am I the luckiest girl in town?”

“Just open it, you goon.”

So he did. Inside, two white cubes awaited—the size and shape of six-sided dice, but without the black dots. “What am I looking—” he started to ask.

“Sugar cubes,” she answered, by way of interruption.

“Am I a horse? Is this my treat?”

“It’s a treat, all right. These were hard to get.”

“Okay, now I really don’t follow you.”

“Sugar cubes, yes, but dosed with acid.”

“Acid.”

She shrugged and offered a Cheshire cat grin. “LSD, dude.”

Matty laughed, but in a hollow, awkward way. “Are you serious?”

“Serious as the star.”

“You don’t mean—Laur, I can’t drop acid.”

“Sure you can. It’s easy. Just pop the sugar cube in your mouth. Yum.”

“No, I mean—I don’t do LSD, I can’t—”

She rubbed his arm to comfort him, but also, okay, in a condescending way.You poor sweet fool,she thought. It was so cute. He had no idea. So she explained it to him: “It’s fine. LSD doesn’t show up on a normal drug test. I know your parents make you get tested—but this only shows up in the hair, and someone’s only going to testthatif you want, like, some classified job in government. Besides, I want us both…to be open for this. Wide open, all the way. Like, a commitment of sorts.”

The moon behind him drew a bright line around him. Painting his edges, like he’d become a doorway, a portal, through which he wanted to escape.Man, you’d think I was already on acid,she thought.

“It’s not just that, Laur. You hear stories, you know? Like that guy who did acid and then believed he was a glass of orange juice and if you moved him, he’d tip and spill himself and die. He ended up in an insane asylum—”

“That’s a bullshit story.”

“And they say if you take acid X number of times, you can be declared legally insane, even if you don’t think you’re a glass of OJ.”

“Dude. Matty. C’mon. Those are—that’s just propaganda. Government propaganda, CIA nonsense, to get people to not take this stuff, to not open their minds, because when they do, it changes them. And that’s what I want for us tonight—this stuff is special for me, and I want us to take it together, and then you and I willbe—”

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