Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “My fault?” Coffee says. His normally resonant voice is thin and pressed with anger; her hand tightens around the receiver. Shouldn’t she be the angry one? The girl who woke up in a hospital with a ghoul by her side? “Maybe so, Bird. Maybe in the end.” He sounds more sad than angry, she realizes. “But do not deny that I warned you. And I’d say I’m in enough trouble without you punishing me.”

  “I never told you to deal, Coffee,” she says, and worries too late about using his name.

  That aborted hiccup could be a laugh or a sob. “If you think that’s what this is about, we should stop talking.”

  “What it’s about? What the hell is this? Because no one is telling me anything. What happened to me? What drugs did I take? What did you give me? What did Paul do? Why was Roosevelt waiting in the hospital for me to wake up? Please, Co — tell me. If you know, tell me.”

  He’s silent for a long time, nearly a minute, but she knows that he’s there by his breathing on the other end. She doesn’t mind waiting for his answer. If anything, his labored breaths, an echo from somewhere else in the city, are a comforting mirror of her own. She always did feel safer with Coffee than anywhere else. From the first moment that she saw him, alone and contemplative at that Landon party a year and a half ago, she had known she would find him again. She hears the faint click of a lighter and the relieved breath of carcinogens delivering their payload deep into alveoli.

  “You don’t remember,” he says finally. His voice is flat, soft, uninflected. Even Bird, an adept in the mystical art of Coffee, can’t read anything into it. Another deep breath, another exhale.

  “Tell me,” she says softly. “I can’t stand this. Everyone knows something but me.”

  “How do I know you’re not working with him?”

  For a nonsensical moment she thinks he means Paul and his endless texts. But of course he means Roosevelt. He’s asking if he should trust her. Which he shouldn’t.

  “No way,” she says. “With Roosevelt?” She’s almost sure she avoided any obvious tells, and yet in her head her voice fluoresces with the lie.

  “You asked me if he was telling the truth. It’s even a question? If he’s got to you … Bird, the precise last thing I want to do in my life is rot away in a US prison. This country is not a very good place at the moment for Latinos.”

  “But you’re Brazilian. And your mother —”

  “Do I want to risk her too? Bird, Roosevelt is … I’d say he’s inhuman, but he’s too human in all the wrong ways. I wouldn’t blame you for working with him, but you can’t believe him either.”

  “Then give me something else to believe! He knows my parents. He works for the government. If he’s so evil, I need something else to go on than your word.”

  “Where will you be tomorrow?”

  “School,” she says.

  “Of course. I bet your mother made sure you’d be safe there.”

  “My mother? What does she —”

  “I’ll try. For you, Bird, I’ll try.”

  And his sudden absence is a busy signal and a frozen gust of wind, bringing with it the musk of garbage and cigarettes — organic tobacco, she imagines, hand-rolled by fingers that shake with need.

  * * *

  The summer before Bird’s senior year, three very important events dominated the news. The first — though US newspapers managed to focus on this far less than papers based elsewhere — was an unprecedented global heat wave that had caused droughts all over the world. Climate change became part of daily conversation, even while Congress debated anemic emissions targets with dates decades away. There were food riots in Hawaii, the Philippines, Singapore, and Venezuela, the latter of which lasted the longest and caused the greatest crisis. This lead to the second, far bigger news story: the sudden hike of the Venezuelan oil windfall tax to eighty percent on all oil sales over fifty-five dollars a barrel. A temporary move, according to its socialist government, to raise money, “to help alleviate poverty caused by the CO2 emissions from other countries.”

  France, Germany, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Colombia joined in condemnation of their “unprecedented destabilization of global markets.” The irony of this coalition of the willing at the same time discussing their great concern for the impacts of global warming went largely unnoticed.

  Venezuela soon eclipsed Iran as a country subject to focused, open US hostility. Two weeks before Bird would tour the Stanford campus with her mother, the third story began to bubble from the bottom of the first two. It began with calls from certain senators for a “tougher foreign policy.” It included some speculation about the size of Venezuelan oil fields (potentially the largest in the world). Stocks went so low that Wall Street froze trading two days in a row. Congress fast-tracked a sanctions regime against Venezuela. They promised stronger action if the windfall tax wasn’t immediately cut to a quarter of its current rate. Venezuela refused.

  Two weeks later, a pair of disaffected FARC generals, allegedly paid and supplied by the Venezuelan government, deployed a deadly virus on a private jet leaving from the San Francisco airport.

  The same day, Bird toured the Stanford campus with her mother. That this tour occurred in early August, nearly two months before students returned to campus, had been a bone of resentment between Bird’s teeth since the moment her mother had conceded to the trip. Carol Bird had tried everything but outright disapproval to steer her daughter away from her first choice: pamphlets for Harvard and Yale helpfully placed on her bed, Jack and Jill alumni currently attending East Coast Ivies casually invited for dinner, promised meals at expensive Providence and Cambridge restaurants. And then this Pyrrhic victory: a visit to her top-choice school during the depopulated summer intersession, because otherwise Carol Bird had “absolutely no time” to accompany her.

  That morning Bird forgot her wallet at the house; they had to turn back on the highway to get it and nearly missed their flight. Her mother did not speak to her for the first half of the trip, a supposed punishment that perhaps came as a relief for both of them. And yet, by the time they landed, something had changed. Perhaps it was the weather, air that smelled of dry ocean and rosemary after weeks of suffering through the heat wave, that made Carol turn to her daughter at the taxi stand, start to speak, and then just smile.

  They arrived on campus an hour early for the second of the day’s two tours. To Bird’s astonishment, her mother suggested they go exploring. “It’s gorgeous here,” she said. “Very different from the District. And yet … did I ever tell you I did my freshman year at Spelman?”

  Bird stared at her mother. “But, didn’t you graduate from Georgetown? Isn’t that where you met Dad?”

  “I met him in Georgia, actually,” Carol Bird said quietly. She was watching two students sunbathing topless in the grass. “We transferred together. It was the right decision, but that year at Spelman …” She sighed. “I felt like I belonged. Do you think you’ll be happy here, Emily?”

  Bird glanced again at the pair of unself-consciously topless girls, a game of Ultimate Frisbee on the lawn, a group of students speaking in rapid Japanese and taking a few puffs on a cigarette that smelled, as they passed, pleasantly of pot. Carol Bird sniffed, then shook her head and smiled.

  Later, after a tour led by a student who gave every impression of recovering from a hangover (“Thank goodness the campus speaks for itself,” said Carol Bird, and her daughter could not help but agree), they stopped by the library. They walked the stacks, through the main reading rooms and smaller areas with couches and carrels and students crouched inside them in ignorance or defiance of the beautiful weather. They stopped at a desk beneath a tall window, where one of the few Black students they’d seen that day was sleeping on an open chemistry textbook.

  “Orgo,” Bird’s mother said, something strange in her voice. “Nothing quite like it to teach you what you want —”

  And just like that, she was crying. Bird stared, frozen. She didn’t offer her mother comfort; perhaps she co
uldn’t, and perhaps, this once, she was as selfish as Carol claimed.

  “God, Georgetown,” her mother whispered over the gentle snores of the sleeping chemistry student. “The things they called me. My accent. In the middle of the District, and I felt like I’d landed on Mars. I never wanted that for you, Emily. I wanted you to have what I didn’t. I wanted you to belong in those places I could only visit. And you do, don’t you?”

  And Bird realized what she could do: “I’ll be happy here,” she said.

  The next day, the president announced to the world that the FBI had prevented a devastating act of bioterrorism, and that they would no longer allow a state supporter of terrorism to strangle global oil markets. The target had been a private jet carrying the Bahraini and Saudi Arabian ambassadors. Bird and her mother had been in the same airport at the same time, though she didn’t know it then. No one knew those details until the second, far more somber presidential announcement nearly two months later: The terrorists had not hit their targets, but they had deployed the virus anyway. A deadly flu was even now spreading across the West Coast and other parts of the world. “Incubation time” became the byword on the cable news channels, to explain the impotence of the CDC and other health agencies around the world at stopping its spread. Other phrases circled like prayers: ten to fifteen days before symptoms appeared, five to ten percent death rate, worse than the Spanish flu.

  Her mother disappeared back down the black hole of work. We were left alone to remember that last normal summer day, that glimpse of her mother’s humanity that has made some things better, and some things worse.

  Nicky apologizes that he can’t drive her to school, but she understands. Between the checkpoints and the driving restrictions, he couldn’t get her there and make it to his doorman job on time. Bird’s mom calls Nicky a deadbeat, but it isn’t really a fair word for a guy who’s worked shit jobs most of his life. It’s just that he can’t manage to keep anything for very long, and what he does get is soul-killing. So she takes Aaron to the school bus, all the kids inside alien and wide-eyed with face masks and gloves. She checks Aaron’s value-sized bottle of hand sanitizer and reminds him not to touch his face. If the v-flu spreads to his school, she honestly doesn’t know if even that will save him. Right now, the Beltway quarantine is holding the disease at bay, but she wonders how long the White House can keep the rest of the world out of its sacred bubble.

  She takes the Metro to school, and it’s more of the same: adults with face masks and gloves and poison glares for anyone who so much as clears their throat. She keeps her hands from her face and feels as if she’s dreaming every time she blinks. She’s exhausted by the time she arrives. It turns out that eight days in a hospital bed really do a number on your muscle tone. She’s early, and surprised to see a line winding into the side lawn from the upper school entrance. A few soldiers in fatigues stand by the entrance with bulky automatic rifles. She stares; the nearest one gives her a wary nod and gestures her to the line.

  The whispers start as soon as she walks past. For this, at least, Charlotte prepared her with a text this morning:

  Felice and I are getting in early. Meet in senior room? Everyone’s really excited to have you back.

  Bird has not been a student to occasion excitement. She is solid, dependable, moderately popular: an uncontroversial extra body to warm a seat at a lunch table that might look awkward empty. But she knows what Charlotte means with that nonconfrontational sweetness: Everyone’s talking about you, you need to show your face. There’s a reason why she and Felice made sure they weren’t here to meet her out front.

  Girls she hardly recognizes whip out their phones and start texting, whisper through covered mouths to their nearest neighbors. She wishes that Charlotte, at least, could have been here for her. But even the specimen-in-a-jar effect of an exclusive all-girls school doesn’t seem like much compared to the specter of Roosevelt and his shadowy Lukas Group.

  She looks past the ravine and the bridges to the other side of the campus, where she can just make out the wrought-iron spire of the great chapel at Bradley Hall, where Paul is probably already parking and checking his texts. The ones that will tell him Bird is back in school. She’s decided that she has to talk to him before making any decisions about what to tell Roosevelt.

  For now, she tries to ignore the silence, the weight of their curiosity, but her head throbs and it’s all she can do to avoid touching the long row of stitches that her hair has abundantly failed to conceal. It’s easy to avoid the squat and cloudy mirrors at Nicky’s place, but what she can see of herself reflected in the girls’ faces does not reassure her.

  There’s a group of freshmen at the back of the line. They give Bird nervous smiles and then array their backs against her; a couple hastily reaffix brightly patterned face masks. Do they think she caught the flu in the hospital? Or maybe they fear a more social sort of contagion. The line is slowly moving past the armed guards and into the sanctuary of the school. She doesn’t understand what this is for, but she imagines it has something to do with the quarantine and constant terror alerts, and the reason why her mother felt “very secure” with the idea of Bird continuing to go to school.

  Bird closes her eyes against a rush of nausea, takes deep breaths of dewy late-fall air. There’s a crispness to it that she only recognizes from Shenandoah vacations. The roads are almost empty aside from buses, police vehicles, and dark cars with tinted windows that hint at some secret official purpose.

  “Hey, Bird.”

  “Hey, Marella.”

  Bird opens her eyes. Not a difficult guess; there’s only one other person who calls her that. She and her copresident of Africa Club have been classmates since fourth grade. She knows that Marella’s father is from Guyana and her mother from PG County, that she’s managed to keep a scholarship since middle school, yet Bird can’t say that she knows her very well. They’re perfectly cordial, they work together for the club, but it’s never gone any further than that. Marella has a white girlfriend from Holton-Arms: a model-gorgeous blond with a trust fund and an occasional unplaceable accent. Bird once saw them together in the rose garden, tangled together and laughing, and she blushed and turned away though they weren’t even kissing.

  Marella is the only out lesbian in their grade, the only one with an obvious girlfriend in the entire school. The girls pretend they’re okay with it to her face, but when the gossip turns vicious in the senior room, Bird’s kept silent more times than she wants to admit. Gina isn’t even the worst of them.

  “It’s good to see you back. We were — I was worried.”

  Bird’s throat suddenly feels too warm to speak. She’s always admired Marella, wanted to be her friend since they played tennis together in summer camp. But Marella never seemed to like Bird much.

  “Thanks,” she says finally. “I didn’t realize I’d gotten so notorious.” Her smile feels as though it’s been peeled back from her teeth, and so she abandons the effort.

  Marella puts a hand on Bird’s elbow, a simple gesture of sympathy that draws astonished stares from the closest girls in line. Marella, normally so composed, so determinedly disdainful of the homophobic fog that fills the school, snatches back her arm and takes a gulping breath.

  “Yeah. Well. You know how this place is. Just when I thought I’d escape, they call in the army.”

  Bird looks at soldiers not much older than her hoisting their automatic rifles with a disturbing combination of awkwardness and flat-eyed determination. She thinks of massacred wedding parties in Afghanistan and shudders.

  “We’ll get through it, Marella,” Bird says, surprising herself by sounding so strong and sure.

  Marella smiles. “One sanctioned extracurricular activity at a time.”

  They finally reach the front of the line. Bird lets Marella go ahead. Beyond the glass doors of the upper school foyer, three sets of soldiers pat students down and go through their bags. Looking for what, Bird doesn’t know. A man and a woman in scrubs, gloves
, and full surgical masks take temperatures and inspect open mouths. When it’s her turn, Bird tries to accept the intrusion stoically, but she can’t help but flinch when a soldier who looks like he could be her cousin pats down her legs. She grits her teeth and wonders why sleeplessness makes her feel every touch like a needle. All the influence this school has, and they couldn’t bother finding a few female officers for the pat downs? Then again, the vice president’s daughter goes to the lower school. It’s probably a five-star quarantine in the building across the bridge.

  The soldier inspects the set of keys in her pocket and the pencil case in her backpack like he can actually see errant colonies of v-flu lurking on their surface. She feels a glare rising like a sneeze, and so looks down at her feet until he gives them back. At the medical station, a white man in purple scrubs searches for her name on a tablet, then pauses.

  “Emily Bird?” he says, his eyes inscrutable above the mask. He turns to an older Latina woman wearing a lab coat. “Dr. Granger, you’ll need to take her back.”

  The doctor frowns at the surly nurse and takes the tablet from him. “This won’t take very long, Emily,” she says with a tired but genuine effort at a smile. “Will you follow me?”

  Medical facilities have taken over two lower school classrooms. She follows Dr. Granger across the Woodley Bridge and down the path to the newer redbrick building quietly. The desks are gone in both rooms, but in the one on the left a line of young girls in uniform wait to receive shots from three medics in scrubs. Secret Service agents — she recognizes them by their clear earpieces and boxy suits — stand impassively behind the students. Bird stops to stare until the doctor pulls her past the open door and into the second, empty room. The tall windows are draped in white cloth. Cloth partitions hang from the ceiling, separating three empty medical cots from a wall of medical machinery.

  “What’s all that?” Bird asks, pointing to the next room.