Stephanie shook her head. “I can’t. You have to stop it. How do we stop it?”
“It’s supposed to feel good. It doesn’t feel good?”
“You’re repeating yourself,” Stephanie said. A horrible clarity was coming over her, mixed with overbearing anxiety, anxiety whose cause was at first obscured but then became plain. There was something, she realized now, that she had worked hard to avoid, but now that the drug had rapidly cleared all the stupid shit that had distracted her up to this point, that thing had come forward, it had center stage, it had the microphone, it was asking her, what did Robbie see? And it kept asking her and asking her, what did Robbie see, what did Robbie see, what did Robbie see? And she was forced to imagine that thing that Robbie must have seen: her mother’s neck in a noose, her mother’s body stretching toward the floor, her mother possibly struggling at the last minute, possibly changing her mind, as so many suicide victims—she had read—were known to do. And what the funeral home had done to fix her mother’s neck and face was a kind of dark sorcery she didn’t want to think about. And what poor Robbie had witnessed, she didn’t want to think about, and why he had gone to the barn in the first place, she didn’t want to think about, and how close he had gotten, she didn’t want to think about, and if he had looked at her face, she didn’t want to think about.
“Please, please, you have to stop this drug.” Stephanie took Raquel’s hands, as if to keep her on the sofa. “You must know a way. What if I throw up?”
“You can’t, it’s in your blood,” Raquel said. “Come on, let’s dance, you’ll feel better.”
“You don’t understand. It’s not affecting me in the right way. I’m having a bad reaction. Maybe I’m overdosing. Maybe I’m getting brain damage. Have you ever heard of anyone having this reaction?”
Raquel shook her head. Her expression reminded Stephanie of a babysitter she’d once had, who’d watched the boys when Robbie was potty-training and didn’t know what to do when Robbie couldn’t make it to the bathroom. She almost began to tell Raquel about this babysitter, but the clear part of her mind told her to stay focused on the task at hand, which was to get the drug out of her system.
“I think I need to go to a doctor,” Stephanie said. “Or I need to talk to a psychiatrist. Do you know any psychiatrists?”
“Stephanie, chill out, you’re not supposed to be this anxious.”
“I know. That’s why something is obviously wrong, I’m having the wrong reaction. I feel like I’m falling inside, like I’m losing my mind. Why did you think this would be a good idea? Why did you think this would be fun? This is the worst night of my life. It’s worse than the night my mother died.”
Raquel stood up. “I’m getting Gabe. He’ll calm you down, okay? He has a good vibe.”
“Did you just say vibe? You never say things like vibe. You’re nervous, I can tell you’re nervous. Just be honest with me, am I going to die of this? Oh my God, what a stupid way to die.”
“Stay there!” Raquel commanded. “I’m getting Gabe.”
Stephanie obeyed. She stared at the dancers in front of her, who shook their bodies happily, ironically, self-consciously, and occasionally gracefully, oblivious to her agony. The music, a hazy melody with an unsteady beat (they were a sloppy band), could not distract her. Her thoughts were so loud, so unquiet, so insistent. She sipped her drink, and it tasted like her life ten minutes ago, a faraway place that she’d lost forever, a place where she was in control of her mood, where her fears didn’t have a death grip on her thoughts.
She had to get out of this basement. She was so tired of parties in basements.
She found the back stairs, and it bothered her that they were carpeted. They felt soggy, somehow. Upstairs was the ballroom, or what passed for a ballroom in a reclaimed fraternity house. The large room was shoddily grand with scuffed parquet floors, high ceilings, tall windows, a large defunct fireplace, and a bar. Stephanie felt a breeze coming through one of the windows. The music was now a vague hum beneath her. She settled down a little. She watched the people at the bar, lining up to receive red plastic cups of beer and cheap liquor. She remembered Mitchell saying that alcohol is a known poison. Why hadn’t her mother taken poison? Why not pills? Wasn’t that the nicer way? The feminine way? The way that could be perceived as an accident?
Gabe and Raquel had followed her upstairs. They looked like cartoons of themselves, Gabe with his sproingy blond curls and Raquel with her big eyes exaggerated into place by heavy eyeliner.
“Hey, Stephanie, what’s going on?” Gabe rubbed her arms and shoulders. “Calm down, girl.”
“Why did she have to do it that way? It was like she wanted everyone to know. But I knew. I knew!” Stephanie pointed to herself.
“Knew what?” Gabe asked.
“I knew how bad she was feeling and I didn’t do anything!” Stephanie felt like crying but she couldn’t.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Gabe said.
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“I know, but I know you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Of course you didn’t, you’re a good person,” Raquel said.
“Good people can do bad things!” Stephanie was struck by Gabe’s sweetness and Raquel’s callowness. They weren’t going to be able to help her tonight. She felt no resentment toward either of them. She couldn’t; it would be like resenting Robbie and Bryan for not writing back to her postcards.
The sadness was coming back, overwhelming her. It was thinking about her brothers that did it. She thought of Bryan, praying to some made-up father in the sky. And then she thought of Robbie wandering around town, going from pay phone to pay phone, calling her when who he really wanted to call was their mother. This drug was too much, it brought on too much, and that was why people like Gabe and Raquel liked it, because they loved this feeling of too much, because they didn’t know what too much was really like. She had to get away from them. She had to get away from these too-much people.
She took off running, exiting the ballroom through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and jumping out onto the front lawn. Some people heading into the party cheered on her apparently high spirits and she thought of the cross-country meet she had gone to after waking up in Laird Kemp’s empty house. She had been wearing the same cloth Mary Jane shoes. She could feel the evening dew seeping through to her bare feet the same way it had that morning. Thinking of Laird brought a glimmer of happier feelings. Not sexual feelings, though. The drug made her detached from that part of herself, which was strange because she thought ecstasy meant wanting to touch soft objects and dance and stare into other people’s eyes and be romantic. She didn’t want to touch anything. That was why running was good; your feet barely touched the ground when you ran, you got to be airborne.
She remembered her mother showing her how horses ran. The leaps they took. All four legs off the ground.
Her mother had died with her feet off the ground. Not airborne. Not floating. Hanging. Suspended by the neck. That was the proper definition. Stephanie had caught Robbie looking it up. She knew he knew anyway. That he had just wanted to put words on what he’d seen.
She was running downhill. Down a winding sidewalk broken up by steps. When the steps came in twos and threes, she leaped them, not wanting to slow down. She didn’t care if she fell. If she fell, then people would see that she was hurt.
Her mother had wanted people to see that she was hurt.
Her mother had done an amazing thing: she had taken invisible, inarticulate, unnamable suffering and made it visible.
Suicide as transubstantiation.
The plastic soles of Stephanie’s flimsy shoes slapped the paving stones as she followed the sidewalk toward her dormitory. She felt like she was going fast, she felt like she was outrunning something and at the same time tunneling deeper. A memory bloomed: Confirmation class. Twelve years old. Asking Pastor John if you had to take Communion literally, like the Catholics did. The answ
er was no, it was a metaphor.
What else is a metaphor?
Nothing, Pastor John said.
But Stephanie knew he was lying.
She had gotten confirmed anyway, for her mother’s sake. Her mother who thought you had to do it. As if God would kick you out of heaven if your papers weren’t in order.
Heaven was obviously a metaphor.
As was the Resurrection.
Probably the divine birth, too.
But what about the Crucifixion?
That was supposed to be real. That was a kind of bodily suffering you were supposed to imagine. You were supposed to think of that pain, all that pain, and behave better. It didn’t make sense. Jesus could have done more good by staying alive. Maybe he had gotten tired. Maybe he had said, Enough, God! Just let me die! Maybe he wanted to inflict his misery onto the world. Maybe Jesus was just another fucked-up suicide case.
Stephanie had reached the freshman quad. Her lungs burned, and the bottoms of her feet felt almost bruised. Her dorm was on the north end of the quad. She looked up at the tall building with its gray stone exterior.
She hurried to the front door, punching in her key code mindlessly, the numbers already more of a physical memory than a mental one. She ran up the back stairs and found her room empty and unlocked.
The overhead lights were dimmed, but Theresa’s lamps were on. Her computer monitor glowed in the corner, the screen white with the blank space of a just-started document. “Man on the Moon” played softly from Theresa’s stereo, the dreamy lyrics so familiar to Stephanie it was like pulling on an old sweater. She sat down on the rug in the middle of the floor and began to cry.
“Stephanie?” Theresa stood in the doorway. She was wearing plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a thermal top with little roses on it. Her long hair was wet from the shower. “Where’s Raquel?”
“She gave me ecstasy,” Stephanie said. “I’m having a bad time. I think I need to see a doctor, maybe I’m allergic? I don’t know.”
“How many did you take? Is it a pill? I thought it was a rave drug?” Theresa looked disoriented. “I can call my parents.”
“No. Don’t call your parents. What can your parents do? I need to see someone in person.”
“Okay, okay, calm down. We could go to the health center?”
“No, I need a hospital where they can check my blood.”
“A hospital? You mean, like, the ER?”
“Yes! Let’s go there!” The thought of a waiting room, the thought of an orderly with a clipboard, of uncomfortable vinyl seating, of beige linoleum, of old magazines with wrinkled, torn covers, of benign watercolors cheaply framed, of all the banalities and conventions of hospital care, which existed to disguise death and disease, comforted her deeply.
Stephanie got her keys from her desk drawer and handed them to Theresa. “I have a car, you can drive it. Just drive me to the hospital, please, just do it.”
“What about your parents?” Theresa said. “I know you don’t get along with your dad, but maybe we could call your mother?”
“My mother’s dead,” Stephanie said. “She killed herself in June.”
DEAN AND LAURA sat on Laura’s sofa eating Ritz crackers with peanut butter and drinking Jack Daniel’s. He thought he’d never eaten anything better—the salty peanut butter mixed with the faintly sweet crackers mixed with the sweetish liquor. His appetite was good, his body relaxed from a long hour upstairs in Laura’s pale green room.
“I’m sorry I don’t have anything better to eat,” Laura said. “I usually go shopping on Saturday, but I didn’t want to run into anyone from Tim’s family. I almost drove to Frederick to go to that fancy grocery store—Shank’s? Have you been there?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling, realizing he didn’t have to explain his connection to Shank’s—to the Shanks—if he didn’t want to, that everything with Laura could be reframed.
“I wish I would have gone,” Laura said. “There’s nothing for breakfast here.”
“We can go out,” Dean said. “We can go to the Red Byrd.”
“Won’t people see us?”
“So what if they do?”
She studied his face. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t want to sneak around anymore. I’ve been sneaking around, hiding things for years. I’m tired of it. What do we have to hide? There’s no reason we can’t be together.”
“What about Robbie?”
“We can figure it out. This can’t be the first time something like this has happened.”
“No, I guess not,” Laura said. There was something measured about her expression, as if she was trying to hide her enthusiasm. He wanted to tell her not to worry, that there was nothing she could say that could frighten him. She could start talking about having kids and he’d start listing names. He was just happy to be with someone who could accept his love—of life, of the future.
“You know I love you,” he said, kissing the inside of her wrist. He kept his lips there for an extra beat, wanting to feel her pulse.
THE HOSPITAL STAFF was treating Stephanie like she was another idiot kid, but that was fine with Stephanie; she wanted to be something that simple. She sat on an examining table in a very small room. She was alone; Theresa had gone to get snacks, and the nurses had pretty much stopped checking on her. It had taken hours to get to this examining table; college kids high on illicit drugs were not a priority in a busy city hospital.
She was hooked to an IV, an apparatus she had at first rejected, but the first nurse told her to relax, that it was water, and that it would make her feel better while she waited for the doctor. She didn’t feel better. She didn’t feel worse, though. The drug’s power was possibly waning. She had figured out that she wasn’t drowning. It was more like she was on a raft in dangerous currents and if she didn’t hold on, she would go under. But she thought she could hold on. And it was easier in the hospital, surrounded by officious uniformed people who had seen every variety of agony.
Theresa returned with a bag of M&Ms, a bag of potato chips, and a Diet Coke.
“Sweet or salty?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry yet.”
Theresa sat down on a plastic chair next to the examining table. She opened her Diet Coke and the pop-and-fizz sound it made was briefly pleasing to Stephanie. For a split second she got a glimpse of what ecstasy would be like if she were a happier person, deep down.
“You feeling any different?” Theresa asked.
“A little,” Stephanie said.
“Well, it has to wear off soon, right?” Theresa’s long hair had dried completely but was uncombed, with flyaways and random curly pieces. She looked exhausted.
“I’m sorry I ruined your night,” Stephanie said.
“You didn’t ruin anything. I was just writing some boring paper. This is way more interesting.” Theresa smiled tentatively. “You know I’m kidding, right?”
“I know you are,” Stephanie said. “You’re so nice. I’ve been . . . not nice.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t realize what was going on with you.”
“I didn’t, either.”
“I wish I’d known,” Theresa said. “I feel bad.”
“Why do you feel bad?”
“Because I thought you were mean. I was really judgmental. I thought your dad seemed nice. It never occurred to me that there was another side to things. I feel like I should have guessed.”
“I’m the one who should feel bad,” Stephanie said.
“Look at us: two girls competing over who should feel worse about herself.”
“We’re a triumph of feminism.”
Theresa held up her Diet Coke ironically.
Stephanie smiled. She felt like she might start crying again. “Thank you,” she said. “I really mean that.”
“It’s no big deal,” Theresa said. She took a sip of her soda. “I hope you don’t mind, but I called your dad. I wasn’t going to tell you except that I ended up leaving a message. I cal
led a bunch of times. I thought maybe he was screening.”
“What did you say?”
“Just to call you at school. That’s it.”
Stephanie’s thoughts began to ramp up again. Her father always answered the phone. She felt her mind reaching for reason, clinging to the raft. “How did you even know his number?”
“I’ve written it down enough times. Sorry, I felt like I should call him, in case something happened.”
“It’s okay,” Stephanie said. “I just don’t want to involve him if I don’t have to.”
There was a knock at the door and a doctor came in. Theresa excused herself for the examination. The doctor was young, with a goatee and a sort of unformed look about his mouth, as if he’d heard an off-color joke and couldn’t decide whether or not it was okay to laugh. He worked quickly, chatting as he checked her vitals. He explained he was a resident and that it was a busy night. He asked her what she’d taken and how she was feeling, giving no indication of his opinion of her behavior. His breath smelled like coffee and licorice gum. When he was finished examining her, he put his clipboard down and took a step back.
“Okay, here’s the deal. You have a slight temperature, but that’s normal with this drug. Your blood pressure is good. Physically, you’re fine. But you did a really dumb thing.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because this is not a soft drug. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. First of all, I don’t know where you got it, but unless you made it yourself, you really have no idea what’s actually in it. I am not exaggerating when I say you could have poisoned yourself to death. Second, even if you assume it’s pure MDMA, you basically flooded your brain with serotonin and dopamine. You know what those are, right? They’re the feel-good chemicals, okay? But they’re supposed to be regulated. Your brain keeps them in check—behind doors, let’s say. But MDMA, it comes in and it beats down those doors and rips them off the hinges. So now your brain has to repair all those doorways.”
“I already feel bad.”
“Well, you’re going to feel worse.” He detached her IV. “You’re going to be down, really down, depressed. There’s nothing you can do; it’s the hangover of this drug. So be aware.”
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