The drive up the mountain was uneventful. When they’d started the climb up the mountain pass, it hadn’t even begun snowing yet. But by the time they were crawling to the top, searching out the marker for Lila’s parents’
driveway, the sky ahead was shrouded in a thick white sheet.
Since the guy who’d invited her was driving—this was his old ’65 Mustang coupe, oily and black in the night—she’d sat in the front and could ignore the looks from his friends. They were townies like her, and they’d all heard the stories of her mother.
But Paul, who was driving, wasn’t from around there, so he had no idea.
There wasn’t a reason for a party, except that Lila’s father was letting them use his finished basement. That’s why everyone drove up to the highest heights of Plateau Road when a snowstorm was expected. Lila’s house was at the tiptop of the mountain, down a squirrelly dirt driveway that fractured from the main road, so that cars had to be parked out on the road itself, making those who came in sneakers have to ice-skate their way to the front door. But her father had a fully stocked bar and a billiards table in the carpeted lower level of the house.
And the soundproof door at the top of the stairs locked from the inside, so her parents couldn’t check the booze supply till morning.
It was Tim, the hippie, who brought the pills. And it was Tim the hippie who insisted on the orange juice, saying you could enhance the roll on vitamin C. It was Jeannette who said there was a store close by, halfway down the road. It was Paul who volunteered to drive.
And that’s how Paul and Tim and Jeannette and Natalie had all gone back out for the car. And this was also how Natalie slipped on the ice that was now falling from the sky and grabbed for the first solid object, the hood of the car, and that’s how the zipper of her coat caused a nick in the paint.
Paul let her in the car, but he made her sit in back this time.
They were on the road when the drug kicked in, on a narrow lane skirting the edge of the mountain, blinded by shooting snow. The white battering the hood was the same white flitting into the sky and the same white slapping the windshield. All was white.
You can’t know how long it’ll take to trickle into your system, Tim had told them, but it’s not instantaneous, and they probably had a good half hour, so it’ll be a smooth ride in, so gentle you won’t know until— Jeannette smiled and said she felt it right now. Shit, man—she felt it.
Paul, the one driving, slowed to a crawl. He spoke over his shoulder to Natalie, who was in the backseat behind him, forgetting that she’d nicked the paint job on his car now, saying, “Whoa, you feel that?” like they shared the same body and were feeling the same things.
She told him she did. She told everyone in the car that she felt it. In fact, she felt other sensations instead.
Like how cold it was, so cold since Paul hadn’t let the car warm up before shifting it into drive, and colder still because Paul had the window cracked.
Also she felt a climbing ache in her head, probably from the overpowering scent of gasoline. Was the car’s gas tank leaking?
None of this was an effect of the drug.
She was completely sober.
What no one knew was that Natalie had pocketed the pill Tim had given her.
She didn’t know, and never would get to, what it felt like to “roll,” as Tim called it, on a white winter’s night while driving.
They didn’t know she was faking. The snow seemed funny to Jeannette, so Natalie pretended it was funny to her, too. Tim was mesmerized by the seat vinyl, how soft it was, how beautiful, so Natalie
spent
a
long
moment
contemplating its perfectly smooth skin.
Paul kept watching her instead of the road, and she wanted to tell him to keep a lookout for other cars and for patches of ice and swift turns that would veer them off the side of the mountain.
Also, she wanted to ask, haven’t they driven far enough? Wasn’t the store supposed to be just down the road?