"So, it just makes you wonder," Chip said, concluding a long, rambling gripe about his job at the vet school's crematorium. "Am I like, the Hitler of cats?"

Cool Guy and I were too busy making out on the banquette to answer. Out of politeness, I opened one eye. Chip sat across from us, his beer-glazed expression melancholy in the light from a neon sign.

"It's gettin' late," he sighed, after watching us for ten more minutes. "Y'all mind finishing up back at the lab? I gotta go give my mom her interferon shot."

Upon our bleary return to the lab, Cool Guy and I stumbled smack into Scarlett Kerrit. A hardy Bow Head, she had weathered Dr. Rheinhardt's withering put-downs and stayed in the class.

"Y'all smell lahk a beer gahden!" she said to Cool Guy, slapping his arm.

"What?" Cool Guy said.

"It'sh a very old-fashioned shaying," I said, pulling test tubes of spun blood out of the centrifuge.

"I can't believe y'all!' Scarlett went on, still addressing only Cool Guy. "Y'all're all . . . drawnk!"

"Duh," Cool Guy said, putting a rack of dirty beakers in the autoclave. He grabbed me, bent me over the lab bench and licked the full stretch of my throat.

Eat shit, Scarlett!

Cool Guy and I left the lab, heading straight to his place, a cute little one-bedroom cottage. Its dominant decorative feature was a

I sat upright. I was in a strange bed, between unfamiliar, hunter-green sheets.

twenty-foot albino python coiled inside a cage the size of a British telephone booth. He put on the twelve-inch extended version of Bob Marley's "Exodus."

"Fire this up for me, will ya?" Cool Guy said, packing marijuana into one end of an elaborate network of glass tubing and Pyrex vessels.

"So this is where all our lab equipment went," I said, trying to focus my eyes in the room's only light source, a flashing traffic signal.

"I carved this part myself out of an old toy boat from my childhood," Cool Guy said, wrapping his lips around a wooden mouthpiece five feet away.

As I lit the pot, he sucked the smoke through the series of tubes and flasks.

"Thanks, babe," he grinned, reclining into a mattress leaning against the wall, the only furniture in the room.

"Why do you hang out with Scarlett and them?" I asked.

"I don't hang out with them. I just sat there on the first day of class so I kept sitting there," Cool Guy said. "See that field out back? Ag-school pasture. Tomorrow morning we can go pick psilocybin mushrooms right off the cow patties. Trip our balls off all weekend long."

"I'll save you some money on pot because I don't smoke," I said, my voice sounding like a schoolmarm's.

"What?!" Cool Guy said.

"It doesn't get me high," I said. "So I don't bother."

In truth, it rendered me less articulate than I liked to fancy myself.

"Trust me, this'll get you high," Cool Guy assured me, leading me over to the wooden mouthpiece.

The next thing I knew it was morning, or almost. Somewhere, a foreign-sounding doorbell was ringing.

I sat upright. I was in a strange bed, between unfamiliar, hunter-green sheets. The doorbell rang. And rang. And rang. The doorbell sounded foreign because it was the opening notes of "La Cucaracha."

In the dawn's early light I could make out Cool Guy next to me, snoring heavily. Oh, right. Him. I looked closer. His beard had crumbs in it.

An hysterical voice seeped in through the walls. "Matt! Matty! Matthew!" it mewled.

After a few minutes, the doorbell stopped ringing. An insistent rapping began on the small window above our heads. The rapping stopped, and seconds later, the doorbell started up again. Then, more rappity-tap-tap-TAP-RAP-RAP-RAP-SLAP-bedippy-DAP on the window.

Finally, Cool Guy stirred.

"Shit," he mumbled, rolling over.

"What's going on?" I whispered.

"Probably just my old girlfriend," he said.

He seemed content to ignore what now sounded like pounding on every window and door of the apartment. A hysterical voice seeped in through the walls.

"Matt! Matty! Matthew!" it mewled.

"Who's Matty?" I whispered.

Cool Guy looked at me, disgusted.

"That's not funny," he said.

You're telling me, I thought.

"Let me in, Matty," whined the voice. "I know you're in there!"

The banging, now back at the front door, crescendoed in a shattering crash.

"Fuck!" Cool Guy yelled, leaping out of bed.

Something told me it was best to stay put.

"What are you, crazy?" his voice came from the living room. "You broke the fuckin' window!"

"Is she in there? Lemme see 'er!"

"No! Gina — don't!"

"I'maw fight her!"