Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  The doctor jerks her head to the door and bites the inside of her cheek. “Immune support. Just a precaution. We’ll be rolling it out for the upper grades in a week or two.”

  “So what do you want with me?”

  “You were in the hospital recently,” she explains, pressing Bird firmly onto a cot. “It’s a frequent vector of infection. We need to run extra tests.”

  Bird looks at her watch just as the five-minute bell rings. She’s going to be late.

  “We’ll write you a note,” the doctor says. “Now raise your left arm.”

  She draws three vials of blood and tests them in a large machine crammed into the corner. To her surprise Bird falls asleep on the cot while she waits for the results, a reprieve that feels like five minutes but turns out to be an hour when the doctor shakes her awake.

  “Your tests are clear.” The doctor removes her mask, lets it dangle from one ear. “Emily … how are you doing?”

  “Doing?” Bird glances at the machine and wonders if they tested for anything besides the v-flu. Like designer drugs. “I’m fine,” she says.

  “You seem tired,” the doctor tries.

  Bird feels a breath of panic. She feels as though if she says or does something wrong, they’ll put her back in the chair, and this time she’ll never get away.

  Back in the chair?

  “I’m just having a little trouble sleeping,” Bird says, smashing her voice flat with an effort that leaves her feeling bloody.

  The doctor nods. “You were in a coma?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did the hospital run tests before you left? Insomnia can definitely be a consequence of stress, but you might need a more thorough checkup.”

  “They did an MRI and some other stuff,” Bird says. “They said I looked fine. Do you think you could give me some sleeping pills?”

  The doctor sits on the cot beside her. “Tell you what,” she says, “I’m going to give you a brochure on ways to change your sleeping habits. It might take a while, but it will help. And if you’re still having trouble after a week, it should be okay to take some melatonin. But sleeping pills just aren’t safe after a head injury.”

  The doctor climbs off the cot and riffles through a stack of brochures piled on the corner of her desk.

  “Here,” she says, handing Bird a brochure with a picture of a white woman sleeping soundly beneath the words Sleeping & Your Health. “It’s a stressful time for all of us, Emily. Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it.”

  She looks as exhausted as Bird feels, which makes her advice seem a little absurd.

  “You should too,” Bird says, surprising herself.

  “What, ask for help?” She shakes her head. “I’m venezolana, Emily, and I’m working with very paranoid security officials. Either I’m perfect, or I’m a —”

  Dr. Granger’s laugh is so bleak that Bird winces. “It’s not easy here, is it?” Bird says.

  “No, not really. But we both have to stay. Especially you, Emily. This school will keep you safe. Whatever else it does.”

  Bird wonders about this as she puts on her coat and heads for the door. Dr. Granger doesn’t even say good-bye — she stares into space at the side of her desk, lost in some private, adult drama that gives Bird an uncomfortable feeling of half familiarity.

  Bird opens the door and runs outside, across the lower field, and only stops at Woodley Bridge, in sight of the pale brick and limestone upper school building. She drops her bag on the wet wood and bends over the railing until all she can see are the bare trees and rocks lining the bottom of the ravine.

  Her breath laces her lips white and the misting rain beads her hair — it’ll take an hour in the shower to comb it out at this rate — and she wonders what Coffee is doing now. Huddled away from the rain? On a plane to São Paulo? Will she ever see him again? For you, Bird, I’ll try.

  She cries for the first time since the hospital, fat tears that for a moment comfort her with their warmth.

  * * *

  The Bradley athletic center received a world-class addition and a new name three years ago, much to the satisfaction of the trustees and distinguished alumni who funded it to a fifteen-million-dollar tune. The old wing, still determinedly called Nagler by most students, has become a tide pool for the anti-varsity sport, the requirement fillers, the Stage Fighting III, Fitness Yoga, and After-School Pilates that Bird has carefully avoided after a ninth-grade brush with Adventure Club nearly destroyed her nascent social credibility. In a typically perverse twist, the older building, while social death as a location for athletic activity, is a destination hangout for the cool and not quite, and Felice loves to go there and flirt while pretending to do her homework.

  The location of this activity, which has a smell as distinct, if not quite as unpleasant, as the Devonshire senior room, is called “the pit,” and was once some kind of varsity lounge down the hall from the old locker rooms. Why the elite of two elite schools would prefer to gather on couches with leather so worn Gina likes to draw animal faces onto the patterns with silver Sharpie, Bird does not understand. The inexpungible smell of a century of teenage male sweat and foot powder follows her for hours afterward, and yet she still dutifully accompanies Felice and Charlotte across campus on the days they make the trek. Felice made perfectly clear that her attendance in the pit today was expected. And so Bird sits on the arm of the couch closest to the varsity wrestling trophies of ’64–’67 and watches Carter Crumb juggle Gina’s pencil case just over her head while Gina shrieks and jumps half as high as Bird, her teammate during a winning season of JV basketball two years ago, knows she can.

  Beside her, Trevor reads a battered copy of The Secret History with every appearance of complete absorption, while beside him Felice works on AP Calculus and glances at him every third problem, like a little reward to keep her focused. On the floor beneath Felice, Charlotte looks wistful and sad, but then pulls out a copy of Martha Stewart Weddings from her bag and circles the floral arrangements she likes best with a purple ink pen.

  “How are you feeling, Emily?” she asks, more to her magazine than Bird’s battered face.

  Bird plays with the zipper of her hoodie. The steam heat is on, but she can’t get warm. “All right,” she lies, like everyone.

  Charlotte nods. “What do you think of this necklace? It’s more a mother-of-the-bride design. When Valerie got married last summer her mother wore something like this, do you remember?”

  Valerie graduated Devonshire three years before them, another Jack and Jill kid, a future young African American leader. She was one of the first people Bird met when she began attending gatherings of that select African American community organization. And Valerie actually married the boy who escorted her at her debutante ball. A little early, sure there were some looks, but a National Cathedral wedding was enough to turn most of them to shrugs.

  “Damn that was a boring wedding,” Trevor says without looking from his book. “How long did that service last? An hour?”

  “Don’t even, Trevor!” When Charlotte’s armor of placidity cracks, something interesting leaks out. “It was beautiful. You’d be lucky to have a wedding half as beautiful.”

  Now Trevor looks up from his book. “That’s a fascinating argument, Charlotte Andrews.”

  Felice straightens and then cants her head so her hair brushes Trevor’s shoulder. “What argument?” she says, as though she hasn’t monitored every syllable and gesture of his conversation.

  Trevor does not appear to have heard her. “Speaking of fascinating arguments, have you seen Paul yet, Emily?”

  Bird nearly falls into his lap. “I — not yet. I need to talk to him.” Bird has texted Paul to meet her, but he said he was busy until eight. Doing what, he did not explain. “We’re not arguing,” Bird says.

  Felice reaches behind Trevor’s back to give Bird’s arm a friendly pat. “Emily and Paul are the perfect couple.”

  Trevor glances at Felice now, his eyes twin las
ers of critical examination submerged in a laugh that just touches his lips. Felice pulls her hand back and squirms a few inches.

  Bird considers Felice. “Were you still there when he took me … I mean, when I got in his car?”

  Charlotte grimaces around the back of her pen. “My dad picked up me and Felice right after the toast, Emily. They said you didn’t remember everything. I’m sorry we can’t help you.”

  Felice glowers at the mutineer at her feet. “Well, Paul told us, Char. Right, Trevor?”

  “And Coffee told me something a little different.”

  Gina, gasping on the floor after an apparently taxing wrestling match with Carter, claps her hands. “Oh my God, you did not hear from him? Trevor, like, there’s a manhunt on. Denise thinks he’s patient zero. You’d better tell someone before you get arrested.”

  Trevor carefully creases the corner of his current page and closes his book. “I’ll take that under advisement, Gina. But he told me this at the party, not after he went on the lam.”

  Carter laughs. “On the lam? Dude, that sounds so gay.”

  “Do you think Marella would do it with a lamb? What’s a female lamb? A ewe?”

  Trevor stands, upsetting the delicate balance on the couch; Felice, who had been in the process of casually resting her arm on Trevor’s thigh, falls to the side, knocking into Bird, who actually does tumble off the edge.

  Trevor catches her. His hand on her elbow hauls her upright just as she braces herself for the fall. He doesn’t even look down as he does it, and that confidence and unconsidered strength is what lets him get away with saying things like, “A lamb, Gina, is a baby sheep of either gender. A ewe, though, I bet that could refer to a lot of things. I’m getting a Coke. Want one, Emily?”

  Everyone stares as Bird follows him into the hall.

  “Thanks,” Bird says when the noise of middle school band practice drowns the conversation from the pit.

  “Anytime.” Trevor punches a code into the Coke machine. Only the janitor and the principal are supposed to use it, but being Trevor Robinson has many privileges, some more obvious than others. “Diet?” he asks.

  It’s a simple question that hides a declaration of loyalty. Bird hates the taste of aspartame, but never drinks anything with sugar at school. Felice and Charlotte are always on some diet, and it’s easier to avoid any pointed comments about her thunder thighs if she pretends to be too. But now she feels disgusted by that scene in the pit, by its familiarity. Now she feels the hanging sword of Roosevelt’s threats and the awful moment she’ll have to snitch on Coffee —

  “Regular,” she says, and Trevor knows. His smile is a thin crescent of approval.

  “Coffee told me Paul took that curve like Bruce Willis. Paul says …”

  He shakes his head and hands her the soda. Trevor and Paul have been friends since kindergarten. She doesn’t know what kind of relationship he has with Coffee, but they’ve been talking after school more and more often. That hint of burgeoning friendship has helped Coffee’s reputation maintain its razorlike balance between cryptic-freak and weird-but-cool.

  “Talk to Paul,” Trevor says, and walks away before she can ask him anything else.

  Back in the pit, a bunch of guys from varsity soccer are playing Street Fighter on their iPads, hair still damp from quick after-practice showers. More Devonshire girls have come too, including some socially forward freshmen, and so she doesn’t see Paul until she nearly bumps into him.

  He’s sitting on the couch in Trevor’s spot, holding a smartphone with a blue case and a picture of the Lincoln Theatre on the back.

  “Emily!” He stands up and hugs her.

  “What are you doing with my phone?”

  “Giving you some new numbers. Here, let’s talk outside.”

  She notices Felice’s hard look as she packs her stuff. “You can’t have them both, you know,” Felice whispers, barely audible in the din of the pit after practice.

  Bird swallows. She thinks of Marella, one of the coolest people she knows, who has never had any time for Felice. “Maybe I don’t want either,” Bird whispers back. She nods at Charlotte’s sympathetic astonishment.

  Outside, Paul pulls her against the band lockers and kisses her while his fingers find her stitches. She can’t think of a way to refuse quickly enough, so she submits for a minute and tries to feel the way a girl should feel being kissed by her boyfriend. But her heart won’t stop pounding, and finally she pulls away.

  “We need to talk,” she says.

  Paul kisses her nose. “I know, babe, but I’m so glad to see you —”

  She takes a step to the side. “Please.”

  “Emily … you’re okay, right?”

  Bird finds within herself a reservoir of anger, unexpected and welcome. “Do I look okay?”

  Whatever he sees in her expression makes him take a step back, and she is stabbed with joy and then regret, because once she almost loved him. Once her breath caught to see him loping across the rose bridge. The sight of the muscled veins in his forearms, revealed when he so-casually rolled up the sleeves of the blue Bradley blazer was enough to make her drag him into the rose garden, desperate for the beautiful boy taste of him.

  Paul cracks his knuckles, what he does when he’s nervous. She normally hates the sound, but now a thrill pricks through for each pop. This is her power, doing this to him. This is her revenge.

  For what, Bird? Revenge for what? She doesn’t know.

  “Roosevelt said he already told you what happened with the accident.”

  Her stomach lurches. “You’re chatting with Roosevelt now?”

  “That’s what I was going to tell you. I got that internship. I’ve been working with Roosevelt since all that shit went down. I’m supposed to be your contact in case you hear anything from Alonso. You just let me know, and I’ll take it from there.”

  “You? Roosevelt? You want me to turn in Coffee?”

  Paul models his perfect grin. “Pretty slick, huh? Anyway, don’t worry about that junkie, he’s safer with my people than he is out there.” He shakes his head.

  I talked to him last night. She could say that. She tries, “Last night, Coffee —”

  “He’s contacted you?”

  He looks so eager. His fingers hover like water bugs over the screen of his phone. Even if it is for Coffee’s own good, it will also ruin his life, and she hates the thought of Paul using that just to get a good college rec.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t know why you guys are so convinced he will either.”

  He shrugs. “Like you said that night, he’s a freak with a thing for you. Not that I blame him.”

  He brushes her hair back from the scar and winces. “If this doesn’t fade, my sister knows a really great doctor who helped her after her C-section —”

  “Tell me what happened at the party,” Bird says, because otherwise she’s afraid of what she’ll say to him. “Your version, not Roosevelt’s.”

  The hand withdraws. He fiddles with his phone to stall, but she waits. He clears his throat. “You got drunk. They all … we went to the woods. To drink, you know, so Trevor’s parents wouldn’t catch us. And you drank too much and it got a little crazy and I took you home, but then you … I mean, that asshole, Alonso, maybe he gave you something, because he was chasing after us and, I don’t know, I turned and you grabbed the wheel and …”

  “I hit my head?” she asked.

  “We nearly crashed.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “In the shop.”

  But she is sure of it: his panicked flooring of the gas, the turn on two wheels, her head smacking hard against the window. She never took the wheel of the car. How could she have hit her head if she wasn’t close to the passenger window?

  If she trusts Roosevelt, she should trust Paul. If she trusts Coffee, she shouldn’t trust Roosevelt. If she trusts Paul …

  “So how’s it going with Lukas Group?” she asks.

  He doesn’t eve
n catch the sarcasm, just purses his lips while his eyes go wide in excitement. “I can’t really talk about it, but … well, damn, Emily, you’ve always understood. This is my break! I get this right and I could be doing reconnaissance work before I’m out of college.”

  “You’ll be like the LeBron James of national security,” she says, and it isn’t as though she’s never had these thoughts before, but she’s never said them out loud. The Bird of her thoughts has never escaped into the Emily of her words. It’s like a wall cracked when she hit her head against that window, and bits of herself have been leaking ever since, a phosphorescent trail leading back to Paul’s Land Rover.

  Paul has finally realized she might not be overcome with happiness for him. “Emily, I didn’t do anything. If you want to be mad at someone, try that druggie.”

  He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out a pink silk jewelry bag, drawstring pulled tight. “I got this for you. Listen, I get if you’re upset, I really do. What happened to you was shitty. I’d be confused too. But don’t blame the good guys. I’ve heard some things from Roosevelt that, well, let’s just say this shit is going to get worse before it gets better. Don’t push me away now. Not when you need me.”

  He drops the bag into Bird’s palm. His hands are warm, and she’s surprised at the comfort she derives from his familiar, dry touch. He catches her eyes with a lift of his curly lashes.

  “I love you, Emily,” he says. “I’ll take care of you. I promise.”

  Big guns, she thinks, even as she closes her eyes against a shiver that pops right against the seam of her True Religion jeans. She doesn’t believe him, but it feels nice anyway to hear someone say it.

  He doesn’t kiss her. By the time she opens her eyes again, he’s heading down the hall to the exit.

  She opens the bag. It’s a bracelet of braided silver with leaves of rose gold, studded with tiny rubies. He removed the price, but left the store tag of a boutique in Georgetown she knows of only because Charlotte is obsessed with fancy wedding rings.

  Charlotte would love this bracelet.

  Bird stuffs it in her pocket. At the end of the hall, Paul’s phone rings.