Was there something wrong? Not on the ultrasound of her pituitary gland. She was taken for X-rays, where they studied her bone plates to see how much more she would grow. She was given blood tests for which she had to consume a sugar drink she described as tasting like liquefied Smarties.

This drama unfolded slowly over that winter and spring. After two ultrasounds and an MRI, it was decided that her pituitary gland was normal, and still she grew. They X-rayed her bone plates again. Her endocrinologist promised she would stop soon. She grew another inch. By the end of junior year, she was six foot three, and an even two hundred pounds. And she felt like a complete monster.

The very moment I turned sixteen and could work legally, I had gotten a job at the local Rite Aid, mostly because it was only seven blocks from our house. To have a job, to earn money, to be able to afford my own food and clothing, was essential, but it was apparent that no one was going to teach me how to drive or give me a car to learn on, and so my employment options were geographically limited. I applied to the Starbucks, to the Rite Aid, and to the North Shore Fish Company, but the Rite Aid was the only one that called me for an interview, and when they hired me, I considered myself lucky, even though the job was painfully boring and going to work without makeup on, with my septum piercing tucked up invisibly inside my nose, caused me to feel vulnerable and nude.

As it happened, I fell immediately and hopelessly in love with my manager, Terrence, a soft-spoken father of four and former high school quarterback with floppy blond hair, who was perpetually both gentle and stoned. I loved him impersonally, abstractly, like a character in a book who, by virtue of their very distance from you, their belonging to a different world that you may never yourself enter, enflames your longing all the more. I didn’t want to fuck him exactly, though I would have (quite enthusiastically) if asked, but I was borderline obsessed with him. He carried a one hitter in his pocket, and I feared that something tragic might happen to him, specifically that he might commit suicide, though there was nothing definite that led me to believe he had plans to do so. His wife was bossy and exuberant, his four children happy and demanding, and certainly loud when they visited the store, but I got the sense that, even though he was overtly grateful for his life, he could see that he was lucky to have them and to have a steady job, he was also someone who found life’s beauty inextricably mixed with sadness. He was devoutly Catholic, and it always seemed to me that this informed the development of his personality, the way he liked to clasp the hands of the staff as we said goodbye, as though the hands were the conduit through which blessings could be communicated.

Whatever it was, it made Terrence kind, so patient with his staff that it bordered on the saintly, and he would ask old women filling their prescriptions or buying stool softeners about their days and then he would listen, listen so intently that they felt pierced by him, and I got the feeling that he really did find their days interesting to hear about, and that he loved them, loved all of us, even as, at the end of the day, as he folded his long legs into the driver’s seat of his pale blue minivan, which was always covered in dust, he found it all a bit too much, too hard to take, and he would fumble with his one hitter as though the smoke were medicine, an asthma inhaler that would force his lungs open and allow him to keep sipping the air amid the pandemonium of the living.

One night in July, during the summer between junior and senior year, I was working the register when I saw Bunny and another girl come in with two boys. It was around seven at night, which was a busy time for us, even on weekdays, because we had excellent prices on liquor and wine, and the line for the register looped around the front of the store, with mostly men and some women holding cases of beer and multiple wine bottles awkwardly in their arms like cold, abstract babies. It had come as somewhat of a surprise to me how pervasive alcoholism was, even in our picture-perfect town. On the one hand, it was a relief to know that what had happened to my own family was not singularly shameful, but I was also taken aback to learn that the majority of people found their lives so dreadful as to need to enter a near stupor every night in order to continue living it. It did not give me much hope about my own adulthood.

I hadn’t been seeing Bunny lately because she was doing a volleyball intensive at Cal State Fullerton for the summer, and she often didn’t come home until eight o’clock at night, and then was so tired she just collapsed after sending me a few weird gifs and strings of heart emojis. I did my best not to resent her unavailability because I also knew this summer was a turning point for her. She had finally stopped growing, maybe, possibly, at least it was thought by her doctor and repeated frequently by Ray Lampert that she had stopped growing (Ray was always strangely gleeful about Bunny’s size, like she was a 4-H project or an Amazonian orphan he had adopted from Themyscira; he told anyone who would listen that his daughter, his baby girl, was taller than him now), and whether this was true or not, her growth had at least slowed enough to allow her to regain her coordination, and she was learning her “new legs,” as she called them. She could now jump vertically twenty-nine inches in the air, which was better than most pro football players. Even as boys seemed more out of reach than ever, the Olympics had come back into view, and she seemed psychologically able to handle this exchange.

So I was surprised to see her, and I was even more surprised to see her with two boys I didn’t know well, and the girl, who I vaguely knew was named Samantha because she had been in my biology class freshman year. I disliked having to ring up people from my high school. It was a small town and a small school, and while I didn’t know everyone’s names, I always knew them by sight and they knew me, and it was awkward that they were buying things and I was selling things, that they had money to spend on items they didn’t need, and I needed money so badly that I was wearing a blue smock.

As I continued to ring people up, I watched them move through the store. I couldn’t tell if they were stoned or drunk, but I knew they were not normal, were giggling and looking around the store like it was an alien planet. Bunny had picked up a stuffed toy, a lion Beanie Boo with huge plastic eyes, and was cuddling it even as one of the boys was prying it from her hands and putting it back on the shelf. “Ooh, gum!” the dark-haired girl said. “Gum sounds amaaazing right now.”

I watched them as they got in the long line for the register, as they pawed through the items lining the display, picking up miniature-size hand sanitizers as though they had no idea what they were, examining alien writing on packages of candy. They were each buying a soda and a variety of snacks, and Bunny had picked up the toy lion again. “I can’t believe you’re buying that,” the girl said to her.

“Look at his eyes,” Bunny said, and smiled into his plastic eyes as though she could see real emotion there, some enchanting vulnerability. “I mean, I have to.”

I did not like any of this, and I was extremely anxious not to be the one who rung up their purchases, but I was relieved to see that when their turn came they each paid separately, and Bunny hung back, timing it so that she could come to my register. Terrence, my manager, was in his office, so I was relatively unobserved, and I skipped the canned lines I was supposed to say to her: “Did you find everything you were looking for?” And started with: “What the hell are you doing here—are you high?”