Other People We Married by Emma Straub Read Free Book Online Page B

to, and didn’t just throw it away in the can on the corner like I did.
    The park seemed, at first glance, to look like more of the same—knobby trees with prickly hands sticking out at odd angles, dry and dusty earth. Justin had told me what to expect. He’d said, “It’s the desert. It’s only exciting if you’ve never been there before.” I tried to see everything out the window of the car through Justin’s eyes: boring birds makingnoises at each other, boring lizards zipping across the cracked ground, boring boulders stacked on top of each other like an ogre’s abandoned game of Jenga.
    The map from the ranger station wasn’t encouraging.
People have died here from preventable accidents
, it said. Abigail dug a dirty tissue out of her purse and blew her nose. “I think I need to go back to the allergist,” she said. “Do you have allergies, Dumbo? It’s all genetic, you know.”
    “Nope,” I said, though I hadn’t been to a doctor since I graduated from college, and had a runny nose every year from April through July. “All clear.”
    “Oh, that’s lucky,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t mean it.
    After a few miles, Abigail pulled into the first small parking area, which was empty. “Wait,” she said, turning around in her seat to look behind her, out the back window. “Let’s take the mushrooms.”
    “Right now?” I wasn’t sure if I’d been planning on taking them at all, and certainly not in the middle of the desert in the middle of the day, when one of us would have to drive the car back into Palm Springs while staying on the correct side of the highway. “Won’t they make us hallucinate?”
    “Oh, come on, Dumbo. It is
really
not that big of a deal. Just eat half if you’re scared. John and I used to take mushrooms all the time. In a lot of cultures, it’s really spiritual.” Abigail held out her open palm.
    It was hard for me to think of Abigail ever having been a child, despite the fact that there was massive photographic evidence to the contrary. There she was in overalls, smilingthrough her missing teeth! There she was in a two-piece swimsuit, careening down a Slip ’n Slide! There she was, arms raised over her head on a balance beam! To me, Abigail had always been an adult. She did everything I did so many years earlier—preschool, summer camp, menstruating—that by the time I got around to it, it seemed like ancient, boring news, like something mimeographed and yellow at the bottom of a forgotten drawer. For my entire life, I had always deferred to Abigail’s judgment, because it seemed impossible that a situation would exist where I would be right and she would be wrong, where she would come up short. And yet here she was, flapping her fingers back and forth, impatiently waiting.
    “Okay,” I said. “Fine.” The little bag with the mushrooms was somewhere at the bottom of my purse, and I leaned down and probed around blindly until I felt it. They were small, brown shriveled-looking things, not at all like the mushrooms you would see on a pizza, which were the only mushrooms I ever ate. I pulled out two, and placed one in Abigail’s twitchy fingers. She popped it in her mouth immediately, rolling her head back to wash it down with a gulp of water. I held mine up to my nose and sniffed. It smelled like something rotten and poisonous. Abigail opened her eyes and looked back at me.
    “You take it?” she said. She hadn’t seen me tuck it back into my palm.
    “Yup,” I said. “Gross.” I scrunched up my face in imagined disgust.
    “Ha!” I’d never made Abigail laugh so much, and wondered if the drug’s effects were instantaneous. “Okay,”she said, opening the driver’s-side door. “Let’s go interact with some nature.”
    Neither of us had hiking boots of any kind, but I was wearing sneakers, which at least had rubber bottoms. Abigail had on a pair of strappy leather sandals that wound around her ankles and tied in a bow at her calves. When I’d