“We don’t normally prescribe that strong of a painkiller for long after surgery. And it looks like the prescription you already have shouldn’t run out for another two weeks,” Dr. Ferriman says.
“Oh wow,” I say. “That’s . . . weird.”
Softball doesn’t require a lot of lying. I don’t have the skills for this.
Dr. Ferriman makes the same face I saw when I came in with a cracked tailbone—again. It’s concern. And because I’ve spent so much time breaking myself and coming here to be healed, there’s a personal edge to it that I doubt all his patients get.
While that makes him a good person and a great doctor, it’s not what I need right now. I don’t need him caring, worrying, or overthinking this. What I need is for him to act like what he is—an overworked man with a lobby full of sick kids and irritated parents waiting on him. I need him to be in a hurry to move me along, to give me what I want in order to make it happen. But of course Mom would have never chosen a pediatrician like that. Instead I’ve got one of the best, most conscientious people on earth.
And I’m sure as shit not getting any more Oxy.
I reach past him, opening the door myself and pushing Helen W. out into the hallway. “A bottle probably rolled off my dresser,” I say. “I’m always bumping into things. Not so good with a walker, you know.”
I laugh, a loud, forced sound that makes a baby being weighed on a scale start crying. The mom gives me a dirty look as I hobble past the scale, and I mutter a quick apology as I squeeze around the woman who overheard me asking for more Oxy, her hand now protectively cupped under the elbow of an even older woman who is inching down the hallway with a cane. I’m moving Helen W. as fast as I can, building up a static charge from the cheap carpet that’s going to give me a zing next time I touch metal.
“Mickey,” Dr. Ferriman calls after me, but I’m in public now. He can’t say anything about Oxy, or even the prescription for crutches that I’ve got crushed in one hand, without infringing on my patient rights. And I doubt he’s going to chase me down and pull me into a side room for a private talk.
I white-knuckle Helen W. all the way into the waiting room to find Devra nowhere in sight. My phone vibrates in my hoodie pocket with a text, telling me she went next door to grab us both coffees and that she’ll meet me in the car. I feel oddly abandoned, left alone waiting for the elevator. I jab the down button, bringing with it a static zap that I can actually see, an explosion at the tip of my finger to match the one in my leg.
“Goddammit, Helen,” I say.
And to my embarrassment, I start to cry.
I’m good at a few things.
Softball. Spanish. And I can eat a whole pizza by myself.
Up until the accident that was about it. Now I can add that I’m really good at pretending everything is okay while I balance on one leg, fold up a walker, shove it into a car, and get into the passenger seat. I’m usually capable of going through the process without crying or dropping anything. But today I do both, my phone slipping from my pocket to land in melting slush. I’m mopping the last tears away with my sleeve—why am I crying so much?—when another hand grabs my phone before I do.
“You okay, darlin’?”
Even people who care about me don’t call me by anything other than my name, and darlin’ isn’t exactly a word that’s used to describe me, anyway. But she says it just right, with a little twang that comes from south of the river and isn’t affected at all, like she’s not just asking to be polite, but because she actually cares what my answer is.
It is the woman from the hallway, the one who overheard me asking if I could get something for the pain. I blush, feeling my cheeks turn even redder under the tears they’re so unaccustomed to. I’m about to tell her that I’m fine, the word half formed and my lips ready to deliver them out of habit more than truthfulness, when she stops me cold.
“When was your last one?” she asks.
“Excuse me?”
“Oxy? I heard you ask the doc for something, and I’m guessing you didn’t get it. But that’s not the only reason you’re crying. You’ve got the shakes. And . . .” She puts her palm on my forehead, her skin cool and paper-thin against my sweaty brow. “You’re running a low-grade fever. You’re going through withdrawal, hon.”
She takes her hand away, the smell of old-lady perfume lingering near my nose.
“You’re going through withdrawal,” I shoot back, which isn’t clever or accurate, but I’ve never been good at conversation with strangers.
“No, because I got my prescription,” she says, holding it up. “Or Betsy’s, really. But you don’t care where it comes from, do you?”
It’s just the right thing to say to make me shut up and listen. And she knows it.
“Here,” she says, unzipping her massive purse, which has three photographs of what I assume are her grandkids slipped into plastic pockets on the side. Her arm disappears inside the purse up to her elbow, reemerging with a little white pill, which she puts into my hand, folding my fingers around it.
“First one’s free because you’re breaking my heart,” she says. “After that it’s a dollar a milligram. Dosages start at ten, but I’m betting you already knew that.”
She’s kept my phone, and now her fingers tap over the screen way faster than I expected as she adds her number.
“Call me when you need more,” she says, handing my phone over. I accept it numbly, but not with the hand holding the pill. That I pulled back reflexively, like a dog that’s had too many treats taken away before they got to eat them.
She picks her way through the slush of the parking lot to get behind the wheel of a white van with the name of the county’s senior citizen program on the side. I can see the outline of a few bald heads inside, and one with a healthy poof of hair, probably the lady with the cane. I’m not quick enough to stop the driver with my questions, anything I had to say lost in a cloud of exhaust as she starts the van up and pulls away.
I scroll through my phone to look for the new contact, jumping in surprise when Devra opens the driver’s door, steam rising from two cups of coffee.
“Good news?” she asks.
I close my fist tight around the little white pill, sweaty in my palm.
“Real good,” I confirm, showing her my prescription for crutches. She squeals and tries to high-five me, but misses.
Right now, I know a few things for sure.
I’m going to slip this Oxy, throwing it back as soon as Devra’s not looking. I’m going to call this woman—Edith—who is apparently now my pill supplier.
Also, Bella Left definitely watches NCIS.
Chapter Eight
punishment: any pain, suffering, or loss inflicted on a person because of a crime or offense
I can feel the screws. Both ends.
The threaded tips are growing into my bones, which is what they are supposed to do. This was explained to me by the PA, who snapped a Barbie’s leg off after talking me through my X-rays, the tip of an expensive pen from his coat pocket tracing the path of titanium under my skin. I knew about that, was told that bone and screw would meld together, creating a new version of Mickey Catalan that may not be better, but would—hopefully—be serviceable.
It’s the heads of the screws that I’m stuck on now. Literally.
I’m soaking in a hot bath, the water scalding my body a bright pink the moment I step in, gingerly lowering myself. My right hand keeps dropping to my hip, probing the point of pain, fingers digging down between what’s left of my muscle and tendon to find those alien parts that now keep me in one piece. Mickey Catalan, the most unlikely doll in the world.
I hear Dad’s voice in my head the second I press my thumb against the first screw, a terse reminder—“don’t pick.” Adolescence isn’t nice to anyone, but my preteen years were vicious, rendering me taller and broader than the boys, and granting me the bulge of breasts at a time when everyone found them embarrassing instead of interesting. I also inherited from
somewhere in my DNA zits that were more like mountain ranges than pimples.
Dad always insisted I was a force. He knew better than to call me cute, and rather than telling me that I would grow into my looks, he found ways to compliment me that weren’t lies. “You’ve got great teeth,” or, “Some girls would kill for that hair.” And yeah, both of those things were true, but then a never-ending vat of oil opened somewhere deep inside me.
“Don’t pick” became the words he said to me the most, whenever he caught me leaning over the bathroom counter, inspecting yet another eruption. Or when I flipped down the passenger’s seat visor right after practice to get a better idea of what it was that had begun to make its way into my peripheral vision an hour earlier. He’d turn off the bathroom light or flick the visor back up, warning me that acne goes away eventually but scars last forever.
Like I didn’t already know about scars.
We don’t talk about my birth parents. I don’t remember much from before the age of three, but there are some marks on my body that I don’t have stories for, and no memory of who put them there. Someone, at some point, taught me that punishment was how bad things were corrected. Mom told me once that not long after they got me she found me smacking a bloody scrape on my knee, telling it to go away.
I know better now. But it still makes its own kind of sense.
I hate these screws in my leg, the same way I hated those swelling pimples. And even though the rational part of me knows perfectly well that the reasons why I don’t get them anymore are because of some visits to a dermatologist and expensive treatments, there’s a small part that thinks maybe they’re gone because I beat them. Because I pinched and popped and dug and made them hurt so bad they decided not to come back.
So, yeah, I know it’s not helping, but there’s a weird satisfaction in feeling around deep inside my leg, past the bruises left behind from the last exploration, to find the head of each screw and give it a little pinch.
No one tells you that crutches hurt.
Hidden in the bodily alcove of the armpit lies a large bundle of nerves, and they do not appreciate having rubber and wood jammed into them. Leaving Helen W. at my bedside had felt great in the morning, and the simple act of driving had been liberating, the first few hours of school flying by as everyone congratulated me on my return.
People also kept asking if I was okay.
Even on my best days I’m not a talkative person, and by lunch there are no words that can come out of my mouth without me having to clamp down on the shriek that wants to follow them.
Everything hurts, and no, nothing is okay.
My upper back is sore from leaning forward on the crutches, my left knee hurts from all the weight I’m putting on that leg, and my right knee is stiff from having to be bent constantly. My upper arms are a holy mess from having to do more work than has been asked of them in a month of Sundays, and I’m very aware that the muscles that used to be defined can now only be seen if the light is falling just right.
At some point in time, I fell out of shape.
I am never out of shape. I lift with the other sports teams during the off-season, just to keep that from happening. I run with the cross-country team even though I’m not on it.
“Eat your vegetables,” Carolina says, pushing my tray back toward me.
“You eat my vegetables,” I say back. She shrugs and does exactly that, eyeing me over a plastic spoonful of lima beans. Carolina knows better than to ask if I’m okay, so instead she’s doing her best to acknowledge that I’m not, without saying it.
“You lifting tomorrow after school?” I ask Carolina, who carries both our trays in her one good hand, gracefully weaving through the crowd to return them. I follow in her wake, a lumbering beast.
“Leg day, yeah,” she says, pausing to check her phone even though I know it didn’t go off. She’s giving me a chance to catch my breath, and I realize that her little moments of kindness are what’s going to get me through today. That, and if Edith ever texts me back.
“Every day is leg day for now,” she says, lifting the arm that still sports a brace.
“I’ll be there,” I say, and Carolina shoots me a side-eye.
“That smart?”
“It’s not about being smart,” I tell her, as I feel my phone vibrate in my hoodie pocket. “It’s about being better.”
Chapter Nine
need: to be in want of; to lack; to require, as supply or relief
Edith lives in a part of town where all the houses look the same: like someone with no imagination was given some boards and a box of nails and they went for it. Everything is squares and right angles, even the yards, perfectly segmented with a hedgerow or a picket fence running down the property line to ensure no one is confused about which blades of grass belong to who. I spot a tan Buick in the driveway, parked under a maple, one of its dangling, naked winter branches almost scraping the hood.
I find myself in the odd situation of not knowing whether to go to the front or the side door of my dealer’s house. Edith saves me by coming out the front door and waving me in, a steaming cup of something in her hand losing its warmth into the gray sky, which has just begun to spit tiny, perfectly formed snowflakes.
I don’t know how to buy drugs, don’t know what I’m supposed to say to her, or if there is bargaining involved. Carolina says that Americans in Puerto Rico are easy game because they don’t haggle, and she remembers her grandma telling stories about the tourists she just relieved of their chavos, parting with her goods as if it were an emotional moment, but actually garnering five or six times their worth.
I’m a tourist here.
But I don’t feel like Edith is taking advantage of me when she pops two cookies in my hands, still warm and gooey from the oven, and invites me to sit down at her kitchen table.
“How you feeling, darlin’?” she asks me, patting my shoulder as I lower myself into a chair, wincing, and lean my crutches against the table.
People have been asking me all day how I’m feeling, teammates and teachers, counselors and coaches. For them, I gave the expected answer. I am strong. I am a survivor. But I’m here for a reason, and Edith knows what it is.
“I hurt.”
“I know it, hon. I know it,” she says, putting a glass of milk in front of me. She tells me she’ll be right back and disappears down the hallway. I break apart one of the cookies, melted chocolate forming delicious bridges between the two pieces. I haven’t had an after-school snack since Mom went back to full time when I was in sixth grade. On the kitchen counter, a police scanner spews out codes and static, reporting as people get hurt, go to the hospital, die. God, why do old people love those things?
“How many you need?” Edith’s voice calls from the back of the house.
I like how she says need, not want.
“Um . . .” I think about it, while chocolate drips onto my fingers.
“Right now I’ve only got ten 30s, five 60s, and a handful of 80s.”
I try to do the math. I was prescribed two doses of 20 milligrams per day—one for the morning, one at night—and I stuck to it pretty good until physical therapy started kicking my ass.
“Hon?” Edith’s voice, high-pitched and inquisitive.
“Give me all the 30s,” I say real fast, before I can crunch the numbers. I don’t want her to walk out of the back and find me doing math on my phone like . . . well, like a tourist. She doesn’t answer me, but I hear the familiar noise of a bottle cap being popped, then the sound of pills sliding across a surface as she counts them under her breath.
I’m about to be out of pain, out of the private hell of pretending that I limped through all day. Sitting here with my bad leg propped up, in an overheated kitchen with a gooey cookie in my hand, I realize that for the first time all day I feel . . . comfortable.
That’s when the side door crashes open, and a girl my age walks in. “Edie?” She calls, flipping a glossy mane of hair over her shoulder. “Edes? Jesus Christ,
it’s ninety degrees in here, woman. I know you have bad circulation but—”
She stops when she spots me, perfectly painted nails pulling her hair back to where it had been.
“Oh, hey,” she says. “That your car in the drive?”
These are the kinds of girls I can’t talk to, never have been able. We’re the same sex of the same species, but I always feel like an orca flopping around on dry land while gazelles like her hover around me, unsure of the large awkwardness that has claimed space among them. It doesn’t help that I just took my first bite of cookie and my jaws are stuck together. I go with nodding.
She tosses her purse—a Coach, I notice—onto Edith’s table and flops onto the chair opposite me. “Josie,” she says, holding out a hand. Both of mine are greasy, but one has less crumbs than the other, so I shake with that one.
“Mickey,” I finally manage to say, when I unstick my jaws, then wonder if I’m supposed to give a fake name or something, since I’m here buying drugs.
“Jos? That you?” Edith’s voice interrupts us.
“Yeah,” she calls back, glancing down at her phone when it buzzes.
“Mickey wiped me out of my 30s, hon, so if you want something you’ll have to go with 60s or 80s for now.”
So much for secrecy.
“How many 60s you got?” Josie asks, while answering a text.
There’s a pause. “Four.” Funny, I could swear Edith told me she had five.
“I’ll take ’em,” Josie says, reaching into her purse and pulling out a wad of cash.
Shit.
I was so busy trying to figure out how many pills I needed until the next appointment with Dr. Ferriman that I didn’t even think about if I had enough money to buy them. I asked Edith for ten 30s, so at a dollar a milligram . . . I just bought three hundred dollars’ worth of pills and I only have two hundred in my pocket.
What I have is birthday money, and it was going to go toward a tougher phone case and new workout playlists. Now, I’m recounting it in front of a stranger, as if I think the twenty-dollar bills in my pocket might have multiplied since I put them there.
Heroine Page 4
