The best tequila comes from agave cultivated in Mexico’s Jaliscan Highlands. Jimadores, the harvesters, know precisely when to trim the stalks to keep the plant from flowering so the core can grow fat and sweet.

She warned me not to go, Blue Willow. Owner of dishes I smashed to smithereens. I didn’t listen. I had a crush on one of the sons in that house of boys. Still life with wolves. I was reeling from a break-up, my confidence a loose muffler sparking the road. Blue Willow confessed her own wolf bite from one of those boys. She hadn’t yet recovered, maybe never would. Still, I went, alone. Several kids I’d gone to high school with sat in a ring on the living room floor. A boy I’d once gone hiking with and had to rescue when he almost fell off a cliff. A bottle of tequila sat on the coffee table, salt and limes. A sharp knife, not a coa used for agave trimming, but a paring knife to wedge the limes. I’d never done shots before.

The agave’s core, the piña, weighs over two-hundred pounds, much heavier than an average-sized young woman. Once harvested, jimadores cut away the spiky leaves, laying bare the succulent piña.

I followed the instructions too well: Licked my arm and sprinkled on salt. Licked the salt, downed the shot, bit the lime. The sour burn seeped down my throat, my sternum, into my belly. Radiated into my arms and legs, my spiky leaves that would soon go numb. There was a second shot, a third. Maybe a fourth. Then I lost space and time. That boy I’d once rescued from falling off a cliff tried to rescue me. “Don’t go with him,” he mouthed as I was led upstairs, gait wobbly, by the wolf boy I crushed on. I wish I’d heeded the caution. I would hear those exact words a few years later at the Indy 500. That time, I would obey.

Once stripped, Piñas are baked at a low temperature to break down their fructose polymers into a simple fruit sugar. They are then mashed under a tahona, a weighty stone wheel, which reduces them to a mushy pulp.

It was the only time I ever blacked out from alcohol. I awoke mid-coitus. I’m pretty sure I was a willing. May have even initiated it. Who knows? I can’t blame wolf boy, though I want to. Maybe he lost place and time, too. Or maybe I was just another drunk girl behind a dumpster. Another thing I really don’t know. What I do know is the burning shame I lived with. For years. Because I once liked that boy who never contacted me afterward. Not a word. Not a peep. Though I wrote him a letter confessing my humiliation: “That girl was not me.” Why the fuck did I care what he thought? A nun’s chant, or maybe my mother’s: Good girls protect their prize.

Agave juice is dumped into airless vats so yeast and bacteria can thrive. The slower the fermentation process, the better.

How horrid I felt on the ride back to college the next morning. A pile of mushy pulp. I was quieter than usual and the driver I’d bummed a ride with noticed. “You okay?” My forehead was pressed against the cool window. “I’m hungover.” He laughed as if he understood everything. But I was sick from much more than tequila, a disgrace that bored a hole in me that let other wolves pour in for a spell. And pour in they most certainly did.

Marie Manilla’s nonfiction has appeared in Word Riot, Cossack Review, Under the Sun, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. Her novel, The Patron Saint of Ugly, won the Weatherford Award. Shrapnel received the Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel. Stories in her collection, Still Life with Plums, first appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, and other journals.