Peter and I returned from Ortega one Friday night at the end of March to find a message from R.J. on the machine. My roommate tossed his jacket on the bed and, with a perceptive nod, took off for Alex’s room to begin the weekend idiocy we’d anticipated for days. I slumped on my bed and dialed the number that, until I’d moved out, had been my private line all through high school, when Nadia and I would talk until 3 a.m. while R.J. was trying to sleep. He answered the phone after three rings.

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UPDATE: Revised a little bit on re-read.

Three hours after Frankie left our room, Peter and I were cruising through campus to Isla Vista, followed by Alex and a girl named Anna, who turned out to be Frankie’s Filipina neighbor. The night was bubbling with languid contentment all around us, and every once in a while we’d acknowledge this phenomenon with sleepy grins and stupid giggling. We soon ambled into the Isla Vista Brewing Company as calmly and cooly as we could despite being hand-stamped, underage, and debilitatingly stoned. The venue was a big pool hall, but crowded, stuffy, and hot inside. The Screaming Mimes were already well into their set when we began to weave through the crowd of frat guys, their sorority dates, and other scattered neo-hippies and nerdy indie-rock types.

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Peter and I both woke up too late to make it to our 10 a.m. classes the next day- his sole obligation and, after I decided to ditch my only lecture of the day, mine too- and blearily needled each other over our behavior the previous night. I mostly played along to humor him, because I’d decided to act on an impulse I’d suppressed all week. My roommate had just started in about my hapless exchange with Francesca (who’d just passed by with an eye-roll for me) when I cut him off.

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I could hear waves crashing against the cliff as I walked slowly along the paved lagoon path. Peter and Alex were pulling away ahead of me, trying to keep warm against the moist, chilly breeze coming off the ocean. My clothes were already collecting the air’s wet weight, and I tried weakly to catch up.

We’d been over to Peter’s car in a big dirt lot next to I.V. and above the beach, but were now almost back to the dorms. The round trip was taking longer than we’d expected, but after hotboxing my roommate’s beat-up, salt-encrusted Prelude, we were stoned enough to not care. That was fine with me; I’d been at rock bottom for four days now, ever since Nadia dumped me on the wrong side of Valentine’s Day.

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I spent the first few minutes of 1996 trying not to come. I had Nadia up against a smooth section of an otherwise roughly stuccoed wall, and the soft, wordless rhythm of her voice brushed past my left ear as I tried to postpone the inevitable. The surrounding air’s dry, cool bite was more than tempered by the warmth of her breath, combined with everything else radiating off us, and my self-control melted a little more. I tried to focus, but the night had been so long and debilitating already that I was ready to accept the careening rush into oblivion.

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UPDATE: Edited a bit per helpful suggestions…

We had a wild time at New Year’s. Olivia’s parents had made the glaringly obvious mistake of leaving their seventeen-year-old daughter home alone while they rang it in from Tahoe. When Nadia and I arrived at around ten, we discovered exactly how much she had taken advantage of the situation. Something like sixty people, most underage and many half-naked in swimsuits, had jammed themselves inside, behind fake crime scene tape and multi-hued streamers.

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The library was too close to bike, so I made my way over on foot and tried to cram for two hours, but I couldn’t focus and periodically fell into sporadic catnaps. I jerked awake after one of them, feeling bulldozed, with just a hint of the nightmare still flickering across my mind. I could almost smell the smoke in my dream, but I pulled free before the calaveras arrived, and I had no chance to give in to the small shiver of fear rippling across my skin as I got up and hurried to class.

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UPDATE: Edited a bit per helpful suggestions…

I woke up outside the window of my first floor dorm room feeling like a salted slug, at the center of all  the pain in the universe. My mouth was a sewer and my skull throbbed mercilessly. Couldn’t keep my  eyelids open at first, cause they were crusted with blood and dirt and sweat, but when I finally wrenched  them apart the first thing I saw was my right hand, a mash of red, swollen flesh.

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UPDATE: Edited a bit per helpful suggestions…

When I was younger I was still insane. I know that now, but didn’t realize it then because I was afraid of everything and couldn’t think straight. The bad dreams began when I was ten, and within days became full-blown terrors that left me hopelessly overwhelmed by fear whenever I slept.