I’m not, and I know it. I did as Luther said, went without Oxy until I could finally take a crap. It got things moving, all right, but it’s all coming up, not out. I put my car back in gear, giving Lydia a wave as I pull away, gripping the steering wheel tightly so that I don’t have to see how much my hands are shaking.
It’s not just in my fingers though. I can feel the small movements, tiny tremors, rippling out from the center of me, every nerve I have sparking and jerking, the energy flying out into nothingness as I quake in the driver’s seat. I’m struggling to get a good grip on the doorknob once I’m home, and Mom’s face when I walk into the kitchen is enough to tell me that I look the same as I feel.
“Mickey!” Her shock is pervasive, sending pings of alarm across my brain. I can’t let her know. Cannot let her guess what is actually going on here. She’s got a hand on my arm but I’m slick with cold sweat and it slides right off.
“Sit down, honey,” she says. “You look terrible. What happened?”
Mom leads me to the kitchen table, where I can smell dinner cooking. It sends another wave of nausea through me and I have to put my head down, my own rancid breath reflected back in my face off the smooth surface of the table.
“Mickey?” Her hand is on the middle of my back, the touch painful even though it is light. Every piece of me hurts, every inch of skin feels as if it has been sliced, every bone insisting to my brain that it has been broken.
“Flu. And I can’t shit.” I’d been meaning to tell her about the constipation, after Edith’s miracle cure of prune juice did nothing other than make my pee smell funny.
“If you’ve really got the flu, that should take care of it,” she says, trying to keep her tone light, but her face changes again when I lift my head. “Are you sure it’s the flu? Honey, you look . . .”
I swear if she says like you’re going through withdrawal I will run out the front door as far as my shaky legs will carry me.
“When is the last time you had a bowel movement?” Mom asks, suddenly brisk, no longer a parent, now a doctor. “If you’re becoming toxic or have a renal tear we need to get you to the hospital.”
“It’s a stomach bug. Going around,” I tell her, finding the strength to hold my head still. “Bunch of kids went home today.”
“Okay.” Her hand is still on my back, tremulous, unsure. “But you can get really sick if you don’t use the bathroom. I can give you an enema if you need me to, and if that doesn’t work I can manually evacuate—”
I’m saved from having to react to that when my phone goes off. It’s Dad, and I answer fast, putting him on speaker.
“Hey,” he says. “What’s going on?”
“Mom just offered to stick her finger up my butt,” I tell him.
“You too?”
“Geoff!” Mom grabs the phone, her face a sudden, blazing red.
“Oh my God,” I groan, half in reaction to whatever just happened, half because I think my constipation is about to be solved in a very abrupt manner. Mom misses my dash for the stairs as she makes her own embarrassed exit, my phone to her ear.
I make it to the bathroom in time, but only just.
Shivering, I collapse onto my bed a few minutes later, burrowing under the covers like an injured animal. That’s what I feel like, a lost feral thing that got clipped by a car, dragging my hurt leg behind me while I make for my hole in the ground.
I keep my Oxy next to the bed, hidden in plain sight. The prescription bottle might have my name on it, but those are Ronald Wagner’s pills inside. I resupply my bottle out of the baggie stuffed under my mattress, tossing his empty bottles in a recycling bin outside the gas station. Even if Mom doesn’t buy my stomach flu story, the pill bottle next to my bed has pills in it, long after my prescription has run out. There’s nothing here to suggest that anything is wrong.
Except the girl on the bed going through withdrawal.
I curl into a ball, but the fetal position brings no comfort. My spine feels like it’s spiked, each curve threatening to tear through skin. I can pinpoint each screw in my hip, where they enter bone and where they end, gripping. I roll over, stifling an involuntary sound that escapes as I do. It’s like the flu, only heightened, so that even the touch of the pillow against my face is unbearable.
But the stomach flu that’s going around only lasts a day, and I have no idea how long withdrawal can hold on. Right now I can’t conceive of even getting up to turn off my light, and the idea of going to school in ten hours is laughable. After that comes practice, and there’s no way I’m letting Nikki catch for Carolina with our first game on the horizon. Besides, if I don’t show up at school after spending most of today’s practice crouched down, Coach might think I’m nursing an injury. If she suspects that at all, I’m benched.
“Shit,” I whisper to myself, the word rattling out between my teeth.
Downstairs I hear Mom laughing. I wonder if she’s still on my phone, talking to Dad, and what Devra would think of that. It’s that normal sound that does it: Mom’s laughter. I could ruin it, walk downstairs right now and tell her that I think I’ve got a problem, reduce whatever life she’s managed to rebuild for herself into rubble.
Mom would blame herself for not seeing it. Dad would feel guilty for not being here to notice. The Galarzas would no longer tell me that what two can eat, three can eat. Coach would be done with me, since our school has a zero-tolerance drug policy. I imagine the harsh cutoff of Mom’s laughter when I tell her, the collapse of each face as they flood with disappointment.
Or I can reach for the bottle, knowing that one pill can fix it, restore my balance and put my skin back in the right place and realign my bones, my feet planted firmly on the ground in the morning. Those are my choices. I can derail the lives of everyone I care about, or I can take one white pill and make it all better.
When you think about it that way, it’s easy.
Chapter Twenty-Five
friction: the resistance with which a body meets from the surface on which it moves—or—a clashing between two persons in opinion
I think of it as a maintenance drug, taking two 80s every day the same way Bella Right takes her birth control pills or Mom does for her Cymbalta. Even though upping my dosage means Ronald’s pills are almost gone, I tell myself I don’t need to be ashamed of it. My goal has always been to drop the pills as soon as possible, and right now, it’s not possible. If withdrawal is going to leave me with liquid guts that come out both ends and hands that can’t make the throw to second, there’s no question of putting myself—and my team—through that right now. When the season is over, when my leg is healed. That’s when I’ll do it.
For sure.
At school, the Bellas got the okay to set off confetti cannons in front of the locker room after school for the first game of the season. They get the JV team to make a tunnel and two girls at the end set off the cannons, streamers flying out in school colors, the band lining the hall and blaring the fight song. Carolina and I lead the charge, running under the outstretched arms of the JV players, the Bellas, Lydia, and the rest of the starters behind us. We run through the halls, slapping hands, chest-bumping some of the guys who lift with us.
Aaron sweeps Carolina up in his arms when she finds him, spinning her, and I pause, waiting for them to end whatever this is so that we can finish the circuit and get back to the locker room. Finally, he sets her down, gives me a fist bump that’s hard enough to send a jolt up to my shoulder. We take off again, yelling and slapping hands down the hall, our adrenaline spiking to exactly the right spot—slippery anticipation that makes it difficult for the butterflies in my stomach to land. By the time we’re back at the locker room I’m exactly where I belong—a hot, feverish pitch of emotion where I’m perfectly capable of slaughtering an opposing team member or dying to protect one of my own.
Lydia hooks up a speaker to her phone and the locker room is ours, school clothes stripped off, carefully folded uniforms emerging from gym bags. Some of t
he JV girls pull brand-new cleats from unopened boxes, a mistake. Their feet will be pinched and sore by the second inning, the pristine leather of the shoes ruined the second they hit the dirt. My shoes slide on easy, the same pair I had last year, nicely broken in and appropriately filthy.
There’s a wealth of skin apparent, some girls walking around without a stitch on, others strutting in sports bras and underwear. Calls for necessary things—forgotten tampons, a hair tie, deodorant—fly back and forth—as does whatever we requested. Some girls change in the showers, a few taking their turns in the one toilet stall we’ve got in here. But mostly those are the JV girls, the freshmen and sophomores, plus one or two unlucky juniors who don’t have quite what it takes to make varsity.
But those of us who have been together forever don’t care—me, Carolina, the Bellas, and Lydia, plus the rest of the infield. We were wearing diapers when we started playing, and have no secrets between us. Everyone has seen the long magenta scar that curves around my hip, hugging the edge of my underwear. We all know that Bella Right has horrible back acne and that the first baseman has a wine-colored birthmark between her shoulder blades.
The Bellas have formed a braiding line and are wrist-deep in each other’s hair when Nikki comes in. She glances around the locker room, taking in the long muscles of our naked legs, the tight forearms of the girls who are stretching out sports bras. Nikki doesn’t hesitate, simply plops her gym bag onto a bench and starts to strip down. I’m the one who tosses her deodorant when she realizes she forgot hers, and Carolina puts her hair up in a tight ponytail when her nervous hands can’t quite get the job done without bumps.
“Well, hoo—fucking—ray for you!” Bella Right says suddenly, and I look up to see her slapping Nikki on the shoulder.
Nikki’s putting on a black jersey—our home color. The JV is traveling today, wearing red, and while I knew that Nikki was good enough to earn a spot on the varsity bench, I didn’t expect her to prefer that over actually getting playing time in JV. I don’t say anything until I’m cutting across the grass of the outfield with Carolina, equipment bag slung over my shoulder.
“Why’s Nikki dressing varsity?”
“’Cause she earned it,” Carolina says.
“Yeah, totally,” I agree. “But who’s catching JV?”
Carolina shrugs. “Some other freshman, I guess.”
My best friend isn’t exactly inviting conversation right now, so I don’t think it’s a good time to dig into my words, find a way to express what I’m feeling. Which is that if Nikki is here, Coach doesn’t think I can make it a whole seven innings on my bum leg. And it’s entirely possible that Mattix asked Carolina her opinion before deciding whether Nikki got on a bus or stayed with us.
I don’t say anything else.
We warm up together, like always. The whole team pairs off wordlessly, me with Carolina, Bella Left with Center, Right with Lydia, shortstop and first rotating with third on who’s going to pair off with a bench rider each game. The other girls find someone, and I feel a tug at my heart when I see them searching faces, looking for that person they know will accept them when they say, “Wanna catch?”
I would be one of them, if it wasn’t for Carolina. Before she moved in I was always close with my team, but I never had that one person I always threw with, the person who just assumed they’d be across from me as we lined up, midafternoon sun flashing off our sunglasses.
“Can I throw with you guys?”
It’s unexpected, and I balk, bobbling the ball even as my weight shifts to release it. Nikki is standing on the edge of our two lines of girls, her words directed at Carolina. She was slow getting out to the field, and has no one to pair with. She wants to make a triangle, like we’re all back in third grade or something. I’m about to tell her to throw with Coach, which is the usual punishment for being the last one out of the locker room, but Carolina waves for her to join us.
She actually misses the first ball I throw at her, and Carolina raises an eyebrow at me as the freshman runs after it, well aware that I side-armed it with a spin, just to be a bitch.
“What?” I ask, expecting a rebuke in Spanish, something that most of our teammates won’t be able to follow. But Carolina only sighs, welcoming Nikki back into the triangle with a smile and a pop-up that a kitten could catch.
She’s been doing that a lot lately, letting some remark of mine go without responding, or only rolling her eyes. Carolina has always given me shit, it’s part of how we operate, but I’m starting to wonder if some of it is meant to stick, and if what Aaron said to me in the parking lot about the accident being my fault has anything to do with it.
I can’t ask her now, not with Nikki in our space and a game about to start. The last thing we need in between our clean line of the pitching rubber and home plate is friction. So I let it go, though some of my excitement leaves with it, the fire in my center at the commencement of our last season suddenly snuffed out, leaving only empty space behind.
Chapter Twenty-Six
forget: to lose the remembrance of; to let go from the memory; to cease to have in mind; not to think of
“Nice win.”
“Thanks,” I say to Luther, but it’s all I’ve got. Whatever confidence I carried with me last week is gone, and the ability to find that perfect space under his arm that—somehow—a very large girl fills perfectly seems only to exist after I’ve taken a shot of Oxy straight to the brain. So I do that, quick, wanting to recapture the feeling.
“Were you there?” I ask him, once I’ve wiped my upper lip to be sure it’s clean, and have turned the Precious Moments girl away so I don’t have to look at her.
“Third baseline,” he says. “Me and Derrick came in halfway through the fourth inning.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t see you.”
“There were a ton of people,” Luther says, shrugging it off. “You guys need, like, a stadium or something.”
“We might draw a Baylor Springs crowd, but we don’t have your money,” I tell him. Instead we end up with people in long lines of lawn chairs that extend to the outfield, the tail curving inward so that late arrivals can see the batter’s box.
“You get a decent seat?” I ask him.
“Guys like me stand,” he says, and I laugh, the sound catching Derrick’s attention from where he sits on the floor, trying desperately to figure out if Josie actually wants the bedspread set they’re selling on QVC or is just yanking his chain.
“Math error,” Josie yells at the screen, making us all jump.
“What the fuck, dude?” Derrick says, rubbing his elbow from where he bumped it on the coffee table.
“They’re claiming that it’s sixty percent off, but it’s not,” Josie says. “Sixty percent off 199.99 would be 80, not 79.99.”
“I think they’re rounding down for clarity, hon,” Edith says.
“But they’re wrong,” Josie says, color rising in her cheeks.
Derrick pulls out his phone and double-checks, then glances at Josie. “Seriously, how do you even do that?”
Edith’s streaming service is crap and the picture keeps pixelating. There are no definite lines between anyone or anything, which is how I feel when Luther puts his arm around me, and I slide into the warm cocoon of space beside his body.
“I thought you were gay,” Derrick says.
“Straight girls can be good at softball,” I say, turning to Luther. “I swear I need a T-shirt.”
“Or maybe not,” he says, eyeing me up and down.
In the kitchen, the scanner goes off.
7300 to 45. Go ahead 7300 . . . 45 report to a 20 at 1568 Lincoln Way.
“What’s that one?” Derrick asks Josie.
“Domestic dispute,” she says. “Probably nothing serious. You’ll know it’s bad if they call for a sixteen-f.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” Derrick asks.
“Coroner,” she says, eyes closed in relaxation as Edith starts to comb out her hair.
&nb
sp; Derrick’s attention comes back to me and Luther, since he can’t get Josie’s.
“If you two had a baby it would be, like, an Olympian.”
“I’m not getting pregnant,” I inform him. “Softball is more important than sex.”
Josie practically doubles over laughing, the long mane of her hair stretched taut between her skull and Edith’s brush.
“Softball is more important than sex,” Derrick repeats, unbelieving.
“I hear you,” Luther says, his voice reverberating by my ear. “On a day when I’m sinking threes I’d rather have my hands on a basketball than a girl. Every time. It’s a different kind of good, but damn good.”
“Damn straight,” I agree.
“You kids know what’s better than sex or sports?” Edith asks, snapping a hair tie around Josie’s slick ponytail.
“What’s that, Grandma?” Josie dutifully asks.
“Retirement.”
Josie’s laugh flares again, loud and brilliant, cut short when Edith gives her a warning tap on the crown of her head with the hairbrush. “Neighbors,” she chides.
It’s two in the morning, and Edith doesn’t exactly live in the part of town where anyone would be up to hear us, but like Mom always says, better safe than sorry. I feel a stab in my gut at the thought of Mom, a mix of guilt and fear. She’d been at my game, of course, casting worried glances at my hip every time I crouched down, assessing my gait when I got back up. But her phone had gone off when she’d met me in the parking lot with a hug, her cheek coming away wet from my freshly showered hair.
“I’ve got to go in,” she said. “The Hughes girl is in labor.”
“Go,” I said, waving her away as I spotted Aaron sweeping Carolina up in another swinging embrace. God, can’t he just hug her like a normal person?
“See you when I get home?” Mom asked, already edging toward her car.
“Um . . . I might go over to Jo—Jodie’s.” It’s the worst cover ever, changing Josie’s name to Jodie. But at least I should be able to remember it.
Heroine Page 12
