Like now, sick of listening to Katy and the other girls, Catherine allowed herself to drift off.  Not to sleep, but to someplace else, quiet and blue and green, it was like a grassy sea, sky folding into earth.  This floating feeling, it was something she’d learned to activate to make the time pass more quickly, easily, numbing out the rest.  She’d learned this trick as a child, first following her asthma attacks, and again when her parents fought.  The first time she remembered actively disappearing, it occurred the night her father found his bottles gone.  Catherine’s mom had thrown his remaining bottles of chianti, merlot, and a case of shiraz over the balcony into the cliffs below their house.  

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