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snacked on oranges, pistachios, and rice cakes. Soon they built a bonfire. As night fell, Ross and
Kristal talked and gazed up at the stars, the smell of smoke disappearing toward heaven.
The rest of the weekend for Ross was like a dream. He swam in Kent Lake at the head of Peter’s
Dam—even though the water was freezing. He rolled down a bright green hill and giggled like a
child. He played cards; they hiked, joked, threw Frisbees, and skipped, literally, as they explored the
wilderness.
But most important, Ross and Kristal fell for each other like two teenagers at a high school
dance.
• • •
The Sunmoon Resort hotel in Perth, Australia, was the perfect place for an after party for the dozen
young teenagers who had just left the Year 12 Ball. The hotel had inexpensive rooms with balconies
that overlooked the esplanade and the green, jagged ocean along Scarborough Beach. The smell of
chlorine wafted gently up from the pool below as Preston and his friends made their way to the top
floor of the resort and into the suite they had rented together.
As the night drew on, friends and acquaintances came and went. Yet at around 4:30 a.m., as the
boys contemplated calling it a night, one young teenager showed up at the hotel with a surprise. He
wasn’t one of Preston’s close friends, but he wanted to be, and he had brought a gift.
“What is this?”
“It’s N-bomb,” the kid explained to Preston. “It’s like LSD.” They make it in China, he said. It
was synthetic, a drug made in an unregulated lab, and while it was sixty times stronger than acid, it
was perfectly safe. The boy said he had purchased a “party pack”—buy ten, get one free. He had
gotten it from a Web site he had learned about called the Silk Road. The drugs had simply arrived in
the mail.
Of the eight boys who were in the hotel room that night, five decided to take a hit of N-bomb.
The boy who had brought the drugs offered Preston two blotters. Of those five boys who took the
drug, only one had an almost immediate adverse reaction to it: Preston Bridges.
He immediately began acting erratically. The world around him started to become surreal. He
panicked. What the fuck was going on? The hallucinations were taking over and there was nothing he
could do about it. Make it stop! He didn’t know where he was, what he was doing. His friends tried
to calm him, but to no avail. Everyone was in a panic, most of all Preston.
The room seemed to spin on its axis. Help! Help! Around and around. Preston started to run. He
was still in the hotel room. Still on the second floor. But he ran anyway. He ran off the balcony and
into the air, falling thirty feet, headfirst, into the parking lot below.
Sirens began wailing in the distance.
The heart monitor made a slow, repetitive beeping noise as Preston lay on the gurney in the
hospital. His thick, fluffy eyebrows and flopped-over blond hair sat motionless as tubes snaked
around him. His tuxedo was gone; now he was shirtless, with sensors glued to his chest to monitor his
vitals. His black bow tie had been replaced by a neck brace. And that classic Preston Bridges smile
was no longer there; instead a plastic hose had been placed in his throat to ensure that he could
breathe.
His mother, Vicky, collapsed on the floor when she saw him. His father wept into Preston’s
sister’s arms. As the day drew on, hundreds of kids from school arrived, streaming in groups of eight