Excerpt: The Passenger

“Good. Do you also remember how blind drunk you got?”
“Well, kind of. Everything up to the third bottle of champagne. Most of what happened after is kind of …shredded.”
“Let me recap for you. You vomited on a parked car and then shouted at it for blocking your way. Next you tried to steal a bicycle that was very proficiently chained to a fence, outside the police station, while singing the theme from Beethoven’s Ninth. As you were chased by the cop-receptionist, you managed vomiting and running at the same time. Then, after we’d somehow gotten you into this club, you hit on this one girl who was extremely good-looking, and then told her best friend she needed to lose weight. Inside one sentence. And as you were urinating against the front door of the church, you somehow decided that you are fluent in french, and spent the rest of the evening speaking in this bizarre noise that I’m still convinced is impossible to produce without excess saliva. Or whatever.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you also remember what you were like the morning after?”
“…I do.”
“How would you feel if somebody then started to shout at you while you had taken the trouble to show up at class?”
“I’d probably throw up onto them."