“What? What is it?” Who are my parents, really? Bioterrorism sounded heavy. It sounded like hazmat suits and contamination procedures and deadly viruses that caused zombie plagues.
“They might be involved with the new flu.”
“Involved?”
His breath stuttered like a machine gun in his chest. “No one believes any of those terrorist groups could have done this on their own. They had help.”
“Yeah, and the secretary of state said that the help came from Iran.”
“You really think they have that kind of expertise in biological warfare?”
Her eyes snapped open. She hadn’t even realized she had closed them. She was angry enough to spit. “Oh, you almost had me, you know that? You’re telling me a CIA contractor, working for the government of the US-of-A, helped terrorists deliver a virus that’s killed fifty thousand people? Really? What else? Roosevelt personally sent the rockets into the Twin Towers?”
Coffee’s fists clenched and unclenched. He looked away from her. Though his voice was just as low as before, it trembled and cracked with strain.
“I don’t believe that shit about 9/11, Bird, but please tell me you’re not such a conservative, conformist, privileged US —”
“Oh, hells no. Some preppy Bradley boy telling me about privilege? Dude, you’re bathing in it.”
He ran a trembling hand across his forehead. It came away slick with sweat. Some of Bird’s anger twisted, and turned to fear. “Bad choice of words,” he said. “But there’s good reason to believe that someone other than terrorists are involved in this flu.”
“The president —”
He rolled his eyes and cut the edge of his hand through the air beside her. “Screw the president,” he said, and for a moment Bird nearly crumbled in laughter at the thought of anyone saying something like that in a place like this. Only Coffee. “He says the evidence is classified. His officials leak unsupported accusations in the press and then the administration uses the leaks as evidence for their war. It’s bullshit, Bird. We have no idea how this happened. Hell, maybe it’s natural. Mother Nature screwing us over.”
“But you don’t think so. You think the government, my parents, helped spread this flu that’s killing its own citizens. That’s mind-control drugs in the water nuts, Coffee. Serious tinfoil hat time.”
She knew she was telling the truth, and yet the bleakness of his expression as he regarded her made her shift uncomfortably. She had upset him, so effectively penetrated his wall of disaffected cool that she felt exhilarated and humbled by it. But until now she hadn’t realized how thoroughly disconnected Coffee was. She felt untethered, almost sick with the knowledge of him.
“Ever heard of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Bird?”
“You mean that case from the seventies? Some kind of medical discrimination against Black people?”
“The government of the US-of-A watched four hundred Black men die slowly of syphilis for decades after they’d developed a treatment. For an experiment. History, no tinfoil hats required. Look it up if you don’t believe me.”
She remembered the offhand mention of the case in her history textbook. She didn’t say, But that was probably a long time ago, because she knew better. The government continued its excellent record in selling Black folk down the river, as her grandfather would have said.
But Coffee wasn’t done. “And for good measure, the US also sent some infected prostitutes into a Guatemalan prison to give syphilis to around a thousand inmates so they could study them for a couple more years.”
She shook her head, as if that would make the things he was telling her less believable, more comprehensible. But still — “Fifty thousand, Coffee.”
His honey eyebrows drew together sharply, like he’d been burned. “Two hundred fifty thousand. At least. You don’t have to forget the rest of the world, you know. It’s not a test of US citizenship.”
Her cheeks surged with warmth, and he was close enough to see her blush. She couldn’t deal with this. She couldn’t stand to be around Coffee and his conspiracy theories for another second.
“Do you have a point? Because otherwise I should find Paul.”
“My point is that Roosevelt is dangerous. He moves like he’s packing, though he isn’t, which should tell you something. He tells you about your parents like he knows all about you, and you’ve obviously never met the guy before. You can argue with me all you want about Synergy Labs, but you said that name like you knew it was bad news and wanted to know what it meant to someone else. Well, here’s what it means: You just told Roosevelt that you knew something that you shouldn’t. So I strongly suggest you stay away from him.”
Bird’s feet ached in her stupid heels, but it felt too vulnerable to take them off here. Coffee stared at her with an air-sucking, chest-heaving intensity. She looked away. “He’s giving Paul an internship.”
“So?”
“Paul is my boyfriend.”
He flicked his fingers against his palm. “The obvious and unavoidable. But I understand. How could you have resisted his scintillating wit, his insightful political observations, his clear respect for your intellect? Or, wait, did I mean his finely toned abs? I get confused sometimes.”
Bird took off her shoes in two jerky, furious movements and waved one of the stiletto heels in front of Coffee’s nose.
“You are no prince either. You’re a crazy, lazy, nicotine- and pot- and God-knows-what-else-addicted freak. You’re a diplomat’s son, for God’s sake, you could do anything you wanted, but you’re just a dealer. And a conspiracy nut.”
He knocked her shoe away. It smacked against the wall beside them, loud enough to make a few of their classmates stare. She had to stop this. This would be all over Facebook in a second. With video, if she wasn’t careful.
“So he’s the suck-up and I’m the druggie. But you, Emily Bird. You’re the worst of us all.”
He looked so sad as he said it, though his tone was angry enough. She had every intention of turning away, but the open end of that sentence called for completion, for the terrible verdict to be elucidated and explained. Is this what Coffee thinks of me?
“The worst?”
He closed his eyes, and did not open them even when he started to speak. “You’re an iconoclast whose highest aspiration is K Street. You’re a Black DC girl determined to run away to a California suburb with barely any Black people. You have a heart, Bird, but you only use your head. You try as hard as you can to be conventional and unoriginal and unthreatening, but somehow you always fail. Just a little bit. Because you know better.”
She picked up the shoe with one trembling hand and wiped her eyes with the other.
“Fuck you, Coffee,” she said, feeling like she was cracking in half, riven by a fissure spreading from somewhere north of her belly button. “I never want to see you again.”
He nodded, as though to acknowledge the fairness of this, but then she saw that his own eyes were too bright and he had sagged against the wall. She took some pleasure in this, but not much. She must have imagined whatever she felt with him.
Or perhaps he was just the first person who cared enough to see her clearly.
She climbed the steps in her stockings. Nearly at the door, his voice stopped her.
“Bird.”
He sounded hoarse, desperate. She didn’t turn around. He pressed something into her palm. A piece of paper with a phone number scrawled across in a nearly illegible hand.
“In case something happens. I’ve never … you’re the most … sometimes it kills me, what you could be.”
“If you don’t like me for what I am, what good is it?”
He fell silent. She balled the paper into her fist, shoved it in her pocket, and pasted a pleasant smile on her face. Then she went to find Paul.
* * *
This part is hazy, broken, half-intelligible. Strange, with the rest of the party indelibly burned into her memory — Somehow you always fail. Just a little bit. Becau
se you know better — that the end would fuzz out like a radio station out of range. Bird lies in the dark, alone in a hospital, and forces the pieces into something like a shape —
Her saying, “I want to go home, Paul,” while keeping her voice pleasant with an effort that felt like lifting a car.
Paul giving her a panicked shake of his head and hurrying off to confer with Roosevelt. Her feeling Coffee’s number in her pocket, nearly throwing it away, and finally smoothing it out and tucking it back. What if something did happen? Who else would believe her?
Trevor talked to her then, she thinks, something about the track team, which they did together in the spring, but she can’t remember more than that. Then a disjointed wash of noise and color and shape: Pam Robinson standing by the door to thank people for coming, Paul waving her over to the leftovers on the dessert table (painted marzipan and chocolate ganache, and the sweet, fizzy smell of spilled champagne), Roosevelt making some comment … some comment …
Her head throbs.
“Emily,” he said. “Emily, we need to talk, I think, but somewhere more private. Paul, could you drive …”
And then she’s in the car. Paul is strapping her in, she doesn’t understand why.
“She’s drunk?” someone said — not then, in the car, but earlier. Outside. Her mouth tastes of peach schnapps and vomit. The wind kicks up clouds of orange and red and brown leaves. She raises her hands unsteadily to catch them. She recognizes the voice — Trevor, sounding worried and bemused. Trevor, whom she used to crush on like anything back in ninth grade, before Paul. Trevor, who has never seemed very interested in Devonshire girls.
Paul’s arms around her. She squirms to get free, but he holds her close. “Had a bit too much, I guess,” he says. “I’ll get her home.”
Paul half carries her to the car. The Robinsons’ house looms over his shoulder, pale bricks and amber wood and glowing glass, a tasteful fortress nestled in the enclave of Rock Creek Park.
“Paul,” she says. “Paul, Paul, Paul!” Each time more insistent. He fastens the seat belt. He doesn’t look at her.
“Emily, honey,” he says to the dashboard. “Emily, we’re just going to talk to him for a few minutes. I don’t … you don’t have to worry. I’ll take care of you.”
I should have broken up with you, she thinks, then and now, a clear peal of regret. She can hardly feel her limbs. She is sinking, melting into the leather interior of Paul’s new Land Rover.
Then the car starting, then the house receding, then her heart in her throat as a shape falls down the driveway, a boy in an uncoordinated, headlong, screaming fit of a run. She can’t hear him. She feels the peach in her throat again, pushed up by the sudden pressure of her desire, her happiness, her sharp and fractured panic. He will not make it. He can’t possibly. But he still tries.
Paul curses. “Not that asshole! Emily, what did you tell him?”
He guns the car and takes the driveway corner on two wheels. Bird knocks her head, hard, into the window. When she can lift her head again, there’s blood on her face and Coffee is gone, gone, gone.
Beyoncé starts to sing, and Bird realizes it’s Paul’s phone. He stares at the caller ID. Unavailable, it says, which means Roosevelt.
She’s going to be sick again. She’s going to pass out. She has to say this first. It is important, more important than anything that she say this first.
Clearly, articulately, as though she isn’t holding her head together with her fingers, she says, “Tell him what? He’s just a freak with a thing for me, Paul.”
And then Paul takes the call, and she closes her eyes and imagines Coffee’s footsteps, unsteady and quick, following her into darkness.
Subject:
Bird, née Emily, seventeen years old.
Appearance:
Dark brown skin, wide nose, medium lips. Her hair is shoulder-length and brittle from years of drug-store relaxers. There’s a revolution at the roots, though, where it grows thick and nappy. Small breasts, small hips, big thighs. An athletic build, if I were being generous. Fairly tall at five foot nine, though far from the tallest girl in her class. Still a head shorter than Coffee.
Disposition:
Narrowly ambitious. In possession of a serious Mommy complex. Probably a Daddy complex too, but Mommy takes enough energy as it is. Secretly longs to own her own shop in a friendly, not-too-gentrified DC neighborhood and feel embedded in her community in the sort of small, holistic way her mother would never understand. So she compromises by aiming for the farthest mother-approved school she can find: Stanford. In her snarly subconscious, Bird understands that this is a final gambit, a desperation tactic designed to prevent her outright suffocation, her mother’s ambiguously intentioned asphyxiation of her daughter’s spirit.
In her pocked and abraded conscious, she thinks this is because she wants to attend a top-tier university in a well-cultivated suburban setting.
In the liminal space between the two, she imagines the shapes her shop might take: bookstore, lending library, soul food restaurant, natural hair salon. Hell, a few months after meeting Coffee, it occurred to her she could even run a head shop. The thought of what her mother would say about that sent the notion fleeing deep into her overstuffed subconscious, but it hasn’t left her.
Verdict:
Capable of an astonishing degree of self-deceit. Prior to the disaster of the Robinsons’ party, would have described herself as “happy” with her home and school life. Prior to the revelation of that last ride in his car, would have indicated she was “mostly satisfied” with her relationship with Paul.
How stupid can a girl get? She’s in love and she doesn’t even know it.
You’re in deep, now, Bird. Wake up!
A nurse comes in an hour after dark. She’s an older Black woman with short, natural hair and purple scrubs. Her eyes seem tired but kind above a baby-blue surgical mask.
“You’re awake, hon?” she says, startled, when she leans over the bed to check Bird’s IV.
Bird swallows, but it doesn’t give her much moisture. “What happened?” Her voice is a hoarse whisper. The nurse looks worried, though it’s hard to tell from just her eyes.
“You hit your head pretty hard. And you took some stuff you shouldn’t have. You’ve been out of it for eight days.”
Eight days. The tank in the street, the nurse’s surgical mask, the hushed silence of the hallways all seem to indicate that something has happened. Something more than the strangeness with Roosevelt and Paul and Coffee — her chest tightens in sudden panic. Something beeps. The nurse straightens.
“Take it easy, okay? Deep breaths. I’ll get you some water. There’s someone waiting for you. I’m sure he’ll explain everything.”
“My parents?” she asks. Though she knows, somehow, that the answer is no. Whatever that tank means, her mother and father will be at the heart of it. Not at home. Not caring about her. “Uncle Nicky?” she asks, desperate and hopeful.
“Honey, I’ll give your uncle a call and let him know you’re awake. But there’s an … official. He said to make sure he talked to you as soon as you woke up. It’s about the — well, you know, why don’t I just get you that water.”
She hurries out, but flips the light on her way. Bird squints and pushes herself up against the pillows. The room has an empty bed on the other side. The sight of its clean-tucked white sheets fills her with disquiet. She wishes she weren’t alone. Alone means vulnerable. As if she weren’t vulnerable enough with stitches in her head and a needle in her arm.
She forces herself to turn back to the side table. Behind the withered lilies is a small teddy bear holding a box of dollar-store chocolates. There’s a card attached to a cord around its neck. The prefab message reads: Get Beary Better Soon! and beneath it, in her uncle’s careful, blocky hand: I luv you like crazy, Em! She bites her cheek and opens the box. One of the chocolates is missing — her cousin Aaron probably got into them. Or maybe Nicky did.
“You’re so
damn tacky,” she says, smiling at the bear. It has a faint musk of bleach and hazardous chemicals from some unregulated factory. She wonders if she should throw out the chocolates before Nicky gets here. He didn’t grow up in a world where boxed chocolates had distinctions like “decent” and “complete shit.” He buys Aaron and Monique all their toys at the dollar store, that land of mysterious provenance and distinct olfactory delights. And yet, she can recall her excitement at seeing the yellow glow of Lin’s Everything Five Dollars spilling across the sidewalk on Benning Road late at night. When she was five, a visit with Uncle Nicky was an adventure better than going through a looking glass, an entire world called Northeast, with narrow houses and laughing people on doorsteps and strange men who nodded hello at Nicky as he herded her along the sidewalk. He would take Monique and Bird to the dollar store as a treat some summer nights, after getting three-colored popsicles from the off-brand ice cream truck. Once, she remembered insisting on buying a pink colander for a whole three fifty. Monique had gotten a plunger, and they played knights and armor while running through the heavy spray of a jacked hydrant. Nothing is like DC in the summer. The rich smell of humidity and baking asphalt, the sharp-sweet of cut grass and the sulfurous fumes of spent fireworks, all swept away in the ferocity of an evening storm that pounds the city, rich and poor, white and Black, Northwest and Northeast, with its harsh equality.
Bird’s mom helped Monique get into college, a small place in New York, but Bird can’t help but think that her cousin feels lost up there, with the wrong accent and the wrong skin color and the wrong high school. Bird should do fine at Stanford, God knows her mom and dad made sure she could play in the white sandbox as well as anyone, but sometimes she feels as lost at school now as Monique does when they talk on the phone.
A Black DC girl determined to run away to a California suburb with barely any Black people.
Love is the Drug Page 3
