Her room, and Hal's first bongs

pivotal · ~2 years before YDAU

• When: Hal at "fifteen, more like nearly sixteen" — roughly two years before the YDAU present; recounted in Hal's first-person history.
• What: Hal, who "having taken certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences" had stayed clear of Substances, is brought to marijuana in her room: "Bridget Boone, in whose room a lot of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out, invited me to consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep, perhaps, finally, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly" — the nightmare of the gargantuan tennis court whose lines are "as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string," which had been grinding down his sleep and his rank. The medicine took: "Low-grade synthetic Bob or not, the bongs worked like a charm." The secret, solitary, escalating habit that shadows Hal's entire arc — the Pump Room, the thirty-day panic, the urologist — begins, on the page, with Boone's invitation, offered as a kindness and framed as a sleep aid.