At seventeen Kai had already been stealing prescriptions for two years from the pharmacy where he worked. He had friends come in and claim to be Mrs. Jones or Mr. Jenkins, and pick up a refill of OxyContin for their mother dying of breast cancer, Valium for their social anxiety, a bottle of Percocet for their brother’s broken wrist, still hurting him after the first 20 pills were gone. He filled his pockets with Xanax and Vicodin, and popped Klonopins and Codeines into his mouth behind the counter. But then the manager installed a security camera and he got caught. The cops dragged him to Juvenile Hall, screaming that he was going to kill himself, so they took away his shoelaces and watched him for the two nights he spent there. His lawyer got the charges reduced to a misdemeanor, and then the court lost his records altogether, so he never had to go back after that.

That’s the story everyone tells about Kai; how he got off easy, again, how he’s the luckiest guy they know. That’s the story I tell now when I’m having some beers with my college friends in New York, or in Oregon, talking about people we know who’ve gotten arrested, kids who’ve gotten off easy. Seven years ago, back when we were still in high school, Kai also used to slur his words into the phone when he’d call and wake me from my “Friends” or “Seinfeld” evening nap, and tell me about all the Unisom he’d just taken, and the vodka he’d just drank, and about how bad he missed Oahu since he’d moved here to California, especially the sleepy North Shore slang, the way that the words fell softly out of their mouths and hung above the sand like heat waves.

I’d hang up and take the #23 to San Anselmo, and we’d sit on his tucked-in blue comforter in his bedroom on the second floor of his aunt’s house, and listen to punk music, and look out the windows at the tree branches, rustling against the glass. We’d pass a handle of Wolfschmidt and a liter of Mountain Dew back and forth until we were drunk enough to have sex without being embarrassed. He wanted to be a journalist, and to learn Japanese, and he liked to play the piano. And afterwards he’d steal his aunt’s car, and drive me back across town so I could make it home before curfew.

Kai was my first real boyfriend, and then my best friend after that didn’t work out. But when I’m bullshitting with my friends at college, and I tell the story of how he got arrested and got off easy, I don’t usually mention that part. If I do, then all of a sudden it’s a sad story instead of a funny one.

We went to junior prom together, but we didn’t dance. Kai got seasick on the boat and had to sit down the whole time. I took Ecstasy for my first time that night, half a blue unicorn that kicked in and melted the empty glass liquor bottles and sparkly white tube lights in the limo on our way to the after-party at Stinson Beach. And I laughed and rubbed my face on the velveteen sleeve of my friend Claire’s dress while she sang along with Alice Deejay, “do you think you’re better off alone? Do you think you’re better off alone?” to pulsing trance beats on Kai’s mix tape. At the beach we changed out of suits and dresses and into jeans and hoodies. We made a bonfire and passed around champagne and rum, played music on the boom box and let the sand run through our fingers until the sun rose. Kai’s mom still keeps our prom portrait on display in her house, on the “family shelf,” next to pictures of their grandparents, and gold-framed photos of Kai and his little brother making sandcastles in Hawaii.

I left for New York after high school, but Kai stayed in Marin. He said he wanted to be a pharmacy technician, to go to one of those schools where you’re certified after a year, and then you’re making twenty bucks an hour. We all wondered who would ever hire him to work in a pharmacy again, after his arrest—but Kai got away with everything. Instead he got a job at a tuxedo shop, and then a health food store, and then a liquor store.

When I came home to visit the first few times we smoked meth in the cab of Kai’s dad’s red Toyota pickup, listening to Andre Nikitina rapping “A-yo for ya-yo…” and speeding around the cool, winding residential back roads. We never talked much, but we always laughed a lot, and at the same things, our mouths wide, tight and smiling. With Kai I felt like I was taking the deepest breaths of the cleanest air, until I got dropped off at home, and twitched alone in my room, wondering what I’d done with the day. One time I wiped the charred bottom of the glass pipe clean on my corduroys and the gray stain haunted me for months until I gave them away. Then I got a boyfriend and I took Kai to a party at his mom’s house in El Cerrito, and we smoked crystal in the bathroom and got caught, and later that night the new boyfriend told me he couldn’t be with someone that did “those kinds of drugs.” We were both drunk, and we screamed at each other, and I decided that it wasn’t worth it to be rejected, and I think that was one of the last times I did crystal.

Later on when I’d visit we’d sit in Kai’s first-floor room at his dad’s house where he moved after his parents divorced, and I’d watch him take bong hits and we’d talk about who was still in town, and what they were up to until I flew back across the country, or later on, drove back up to Oregon.

Last summer I was watching “Oprah” after work when I got a call from Kai.

“I OD’d on heroin last week,” Kai called and told me, “they had to stick a needle in my chest like in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ and use paddles on my heart.” He laughed, “I died for a few minutes.”

I was in Texas for the summer when he called; working at the Austin Stress Clinic, registering people for domestic violence prevention classes they claimed they didn’t need.

“Kai…” I said, sighing, “please don’t die.”

“I’m never doing drugs again,” he assured me.

“Maybe you should go to rehab,” I suggested, “A residential one; I think you really need to get help.”

“I know, I know, you’re right; I want to, I’m going to this time, really,” he said.

He had made this promise before, after the pharmies, after the coke, after the meth, after the GHB bender. He’d said no more sleeping pills, they were making him depressed, no more drinking on school nights because he was failing out. He said no more mushrooms, no more acid, no more E, it was all making him crazy. I told him every time to check into rehab or to get some therapy, to go to NA and get a sponsor, to move into The City or up to Portland, to get a better job or try going to college, to write about his feelings in a journal, to write his memoir.

A month later I got another call from Kai.

“My apartment burned down to the ground,” he told me in a flat voice.

The words rang in my ears.

“I don’t know what happened,” he claimed, “I was doing so much dope for like, three weeks, and one day I went to the ghetto to score and I took a cab back and we pulled into the parking lot and I looked up, and…my apartment was on fire; I just started crying, I could see the flames shooting out my bedroom window. I knew everything was gone.”

“Kai,” I said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

“All my stuff is gone!” he said, “all my clothes, my furniture, my CD’s, all my photo albums…”

“I’m so sorry…I just don’t even know what to say…”

“Oh, and I also wrecked my car, did I tell you that?” he added.

“The Jetta?” I asked, “how did that happen?” This was not the first time he had crashed his car. He’d scraped off the side of his dad’s truck trying to park next to a cement pillar while drunk off his ass in Santa Cruz, and ran the Jetta into a stop sign earlier this year.

“Well, I think I took too much Valium, and I hit the median as I was merging onto 580 in the East Bay. I flipped the car.”

“Kai, this is just so much stuff, all at once…” I trailed off.

“It’s so shitty,” he said. “But this is it, I’m going to rehab, this is my chance to start over and get my life back together.”

“Please just take better care of yourself,” I begged him. “I think you really need to get some professional help.”

“I will, now,” he said, “this fire is a sign that it’s time for me to change my life… you’re my best friend, you know that?”

“I know.”

“I love you!”

“I love you too, Kai, so please, please don’t do drugs anymore.”

After I hung up the phone, I thought about my last visit home to California, how when I saw him he promised me that he’d been clean since the overdose. He’d told me he went to meetings every day, and I’d tried to believe him, but now I wondered how long he’d actually been sober for. He called me every day when I was home, and I’d tried to spend a lot of time with him; I drove him and his boyfriend to the mall to buy expensive sunglasses and eat cheap Thai food, and took him to see the late show of “Dukes of Hazzard.” I tried to remember if his pupils looked like pinpoints, or if he ever snuck into the bathroom while we were all watching TV at his house. I remembered his hugs, how his hands gripped me like talons, how he rubbed my back like he was scouring it clean.

After the fire I expected him to show up on my doorstep in Oregon, Ralph Lauren sunglasses hanging off his face, his black hair matted down on top. I wondered if I let him stay in my apartment, if he would steal from me. I wondered if he’d cook for us like he used to, rich hangover breakfasts he’d concoct from whatever so-and-so’s parents had left over in the fridge before they went out of town for the weekend; fried eggs rolled into thin warm crepes with cream sauce drizzled over the top and a sprig of parsley, warm chocolate éclairs from the freezer arranged beautifully on the plate. I wondered if he’d take his three showers a day at my place, like he used to. I wondered if the “showers” had just been excuses for him to get into the bathroom to do drugs without telling us. I talked to one of our other friends on the phone after the fire, and she told me about the check for twenty grand that he’d written to himself from his dad’s bank account, and about how when he’d flipped the car on 580 it hadn’t even been his anymore, how he’d sold it on Craig’s List then stolen it back a week later using the spare key. But he didn’t show up. He called instead.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” I asked again, used to this game.

“Do you know who this is?” he asked.

“Kai, of course I know it’s you.” I said, “I’ve known you for seven years…where are you, anyways?”

“Wow, it’s really that long, isn’t it?” he said wistfully, “Well, I just got out of detox, just this morning, and then I walked right over to Tim and Jenny’s apartment, and I called you!”

I thought he sounded happy.

“So, how was…detox?”

“Terrible,” he said, “they watch you all the time, even when you’re pissing, that’s why I left early.”

“How long were you supposed to stay for?”

“Six months,” he told me.

“And you’re going to be clean now forever, so you never have to go through that again, right?” I said.

“Oh, definitely,” he said, “I’m never doing drugs again. It’s time for me to get my life back together.”

That was the last I heard from him.

When we were in high school Kai told me that one time in Oahu a whale had washed up on the beach near his house. It was a massive blue whale, ancient, covered in white barnacles, with long, ropy scars running along its gray, leathery body from shark attacks, and ships. Everyone from his neighborhood went down to the beach with tow trucks and thick chains to try and drag him back into the water. The fire department came, pulled up to the edge of the sand with red lights slowly rotating, but the firemen in their blue tee shirts and suspenders just scratched their heads at the sight of the beast. The news vans came with colorful station call letters painted on the sides, and tall antennas on top, and the plastic-haired reporters clutched their microphones in front of the expanse of flesh. After a couple days the whale died, just like he’d planned to, on the broad, white sands. By this time the reporters and the firemen had left, so the neighbors went home to get their machetes and their barbeques. They all worked together to cut up the whale’s body, and then they grilled him right there on the beach. They brought sweet, tangy sauce and coolers full of Miller High Life, and paper plates and napkins; a real feast that went on for over a week until just the towering skeleton was left to bleach in the sun. I repeated the story to many people many times over the years, straining my voice over loud bass and drunken shouting at parties until one day Kai overheard me, laughed, and told me he’d made the whole thing up.

After Kai left detox I called my parents and asked them if they’d read anything in the paper about a fire at Vista Village. They said they hadn’t. I thought about Kai’s third floor apartment, about the picture windows and the big wooden deck facing westward; out towards the cream-colored bell tower of the San Rafael Mission and the rolling green-and-brown hillsides, and beyond to the sparkling blue-gray waters of the Bay, and I imagined the smell of campfires hanging in the air.