Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  The black line on the speedometer creeps to the right, steady as a clock. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “Why did he run away? How did he know we were coming for him?”

  Because I called him. That’s what Coffee said, though she doesn’t remember that or anything else that Roosevelt wants. And she wouldn’t tell him even if she did.

  “Slow down.”

  “You’re holding something back, and you need to tell me what it is. Now. Did you contact him that night? Did you tell him something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The line creeps past seventy; the car’s engine grumbles and Roosevelt presses the clutch.

  “Did he see you after you took the drug? What did he say?”

  “Slow the fuck down!”

  He releases it. The line falls left; she breathes and swallows. “I don’t know anything about Coffee,” she whispers.

  “Paul is a good guy, you know. You shouldn’t be so hard on him. He cares about you, and he’s trying. You’re better off with him than Alonso.”

  “Maybe I can take care of myself,” she says, though lately she’s started to wonder.

  “Okay,” he says. He signals, though they’re alone on the road, and turns onto Sixteenth Street. “But think about what I’m saying. I trust you, Emily. I know Carol Bird’s daughter will see things the right way, but maybe not all of my associates have the same, ah, faith. If you’re with Paul, I might be able to ditch you more often.”

  “Why do you care so much, anyway? Do you think I could hurt you? That Coffee could?” Her heart races from the drive. She feels carsick.

  “This isn’t about a threat. It’s about a precaution. Your parents have very important roles in the current crisis.” He pauses, and turns down a side street. “What you call ‘black sites’ we call ‘special operations.’ But there’s a reason some secrets need to stay secret. Nobody wants another WikiLeaks. US interests — the good that we can do around the world — depend on secrecy sometimes.”

  “Are you saying that my parents are going to leak something?”

  “Of course not. I told you, this is a precaution.”

  “So I’m just insurance? So they keep quiet?”

  “And you have a connection to a fugitive.”

  “But what does he have to do with my parents?”

  “Because he’s a criminal connected with you, and you are a person of interest.”

  Maybe, Bird thinks, but why ask her so much about that one night? As if they’re terrified of what she might have told Coffee during her lost hours? As if it’s her they’re worried about leaking secrets, not her parents?

  He parks. “So how about it, Emily? The more you hide from me, the more you hurt your parents.”

  The car reeks of his expensive cologne and cedar air freshener and leather and she’s going to puke. She throws open the car door — unlocked, all this time? — and falls to her knees on the front lawn. Her front lawn. Only now, clutching her stomach and coughing up vomit, does she recognize where Roosevelt has taken her. The yellow quarantine tape swims in her vision, disguising and changing the stucco house where she’s lived most of her life. There’s something hidden there, there’s something terrible, she thinks, but she doesn’t know what.

  Roosevelt squats beside her. She ought to vomit on him, but the threat has passed. He offers her a bottle of water, and she takes it after checking to make sure the seal is intact.

  “Are you always so distrustful of authority?”

  Not according to Carol Bird, but she doesn’t tell him that. She just spits a swish of water onto the lawn, close enough to his pants that he flinches back, and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Distrustful of assholes,” she says, and hauls herself to her feet on the pure, brass-balled faith that they will hold her up. They do.

  She squints up at the house, but it makes her stomach lurch again, and so she looks down the block instead. No other quarantine signs in this upper-middle-class neighborhood, not like Nicky’s stricken Northeast streets.

  “Is that maid okay?” she asks. “The one with the flu?”

  He just shrugs, a simple gesture that dissolves, finally and completely, any lingering hope that he might not be so bad after all.

  “This is some flu we’ve got,” she says. “It only kills poor people.”

  “I wouldn’t believe everything he tells you.”

  She keeps her eyes on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t believe he tells me anything.”

  “We know you’ve talked to him.”

  She shrugs, an elaborate mimicry that wins her a frown and a restless toe tap. Somewhere in the distance horns blast a single high-pitched pulse. The all clear, she guesses.

  “If you knew something, you’d have arrested him by now,” she says. She takes a step back — an involuntary twitch to put distance between them. He reacts with unexpected speed, grabs her upper arm in a firm grip that would hurt if she pulled away.

  “So I take it you don’t remember anything.”

  Her blood pounds beneath his fingers; the cigarette stench of his breath would make her puke again if she weren’t so afraid. She’s pushed him too far. By the time Nicky calls her mother, it’ll be too late.

  “I told you I didn’t.”

  He holds her for a moment longer, then lets her go.

  “I’ll take you to your uncle’s,” he says.

  “I’m not getting in that car again.”

  He hesitates. “The bus is pretty slow these days.”

  “I’ll do my homework.”

  He nods and gets back in his car. She waits until he’s pulled from the curb and turned the corner to Sixteenth Street before she takes a full breath. Then she picks up her backpack, feels every one of its thirty pounds, and walks to the bus shelter. The yellow bottle they gave her at the hospital has never been far from her reach since she returned to school. The last three pills rattle like a toy maraca, and the woman on the other end of the bench looks away pointedly as Bird dumps all three in her mouth and swallows.

  * * *

  Coffee dubbed her Bird the first time they met, a presumption that she didn’t much remark on at the time, but in the end, changed her life. We can’t know who’s going to change us — least of all me, this lonely crier in her mind’s dusty corners. I only know that the sight of him struck us like a supernova, with the violence of beauty. Forever changed, though that chemical reaction still has yet to fully balance. I keep trying, but it takes more than a spell to change lead to gold.

  It takes chemistry. And who would know more about that than Alonso Oliveira?

  Witness our moment of reaction: Emily Bird has escaped a lecture from her mother to attend the party of a Landon boy Felice has been crushing on for the last two months. It’s the start of junior year, and while Felice has landed the boy in a lip-lock beside the refrigerator, Emily has taken herself into the balmy early-September air on the back porch of yet another Bethesda mansion. A boy leaning against the railing has handed a bag to a pair of girls and taken some money in exchange. Alone now, he pulls a straight battered metal pipe from his pocket and flicks shaky fingers over the wheel of a lighter.

  Catalyst: I see you standing there. I don’t bite.

  Reagent: You’re a dealer.

  C: I know, a dealer at a Landon party? [He lights up, takes a drag.]

  R: You go to Landon?

  C: Nah. Bradley. And you’re at Devonshire.

  R: How do you —

  C: Seen you around. [Breathes out] Want some?

  R: [Steps closer] Is that crack?

  C: [Coughs, laughs] Foda-se! It’s sweet opium, straight from a den in Chinatown. I’ll be Greene if you’ll be Hemingway.

  R: [Looks down] Oh, it’s pot. Weird pipe.

  [Smiling, he offers her some. She takes it after glancing over her shoulder.]

  C: It’s a heavy Indica, mixed with a bit of hash. A fine, mellow high.

  R: [Sucks on the pipe, coughs] You sound li
ke a sommelier.

  C: Nothing like prep school girls for SAT words.

  R: It’s a —

  C: I know what it means. And English isn’t even my first language.

  R: What is? [Takes a second toke]

  C: Organic chemistry.

  R: Teach that along with the alphabet in … Portugal, do they?

  C: Close. Brazil.

  R: Wow. What did you say this stuff was?

  C: You like it?

  R: I think the last pot I tried was actually oregano.

  C: I can see why I got invited to this party. Should I sell your boyfriend some?

  R: How do you —

  C: I told you. I’ve seen you around. You’re Bird, right?

  R: Em — Emily.

  C: Emily Bird. I’m Alonso Oliveira.

  R: Alonso the dealer.

  C: But Betty, if you call me, you can call me Coffee.

  Bird: What kind of a name is that?

  Coffee: The one that fits, Bird.

  Nicky is hysterical when she finally calls him, saying he’s been trying to get through to her mother for the last ten minutes and what the hell is going on, anyway? Bird tells him the truth, as far as it goes —

  “This asshole cop keeps harassing me,” she says. “I’m trying to handle it.”

  He pauses. Then, “Well, shit, kid.”

  “I know.”

  Another pause, and then a distant voice shouting on his end. “I’ve gotta get back to work. You okay? You sure?”

  “Sure,” she says, slouching against the bus window and bunching her feet above the heater. The shivering has almost stopped. She jumps every time she sees one of those black cars zip past the bus, but she knows intellectually that Roosevelt wouldn’t bother following her.

  Which doesn’t mean somebody else isn’t. She looks around the street when she gets back to Nicky’s, but if someone has staked her out, she can’t see them. She hunches her shoulders against the memory of Roosevelt’s greedy eyes and unlocks the door. She knows Aaron’s home from the strains of Muddy Waters pulsing through the basement. Last year, Aaron uncovered their grandfather’s album collection and dusted off the record player to go with it. He was just eight when their grandparents died, but they’d helped raise him since he was a baby and she figures that this is his way of reconnecting.

  “Aaron,” she hollers down the stairs, “did you eat?”

  Muddy moans his way through another verse of “Trouble No More,” and Lord, but today is the sort of day she can use the blues.

  “Not yet,” Aaron calls back. “Could we have pizza?”

  In this neighborhood, “pizza” means Domino’s or Papa John’s. She sighs; she has complicated feelings about Northwest, but it sure as hell has better food.

  “Okay, but I’m making a salad first.”

  She ignores his groan and heads to the kitchen. The music is soothing, a sound track of afternoons cooking with her grandmother and gossiping about the latest family scandals. The fridge is bare compared to those days, but the hunk of romaine lettuce is just good enough to use. She clucks her tongue; if she’s going to keep living with Nicky, she might have to take over grocery shopping. She brings the salad and silverware down to the basement with her, where blues chord progressions and that rich, careworn voice surround them both like a blanket. She sits with Aaron on the floor and sets the salad bowl between them.

  “Do I have to?” he says, taking the fork.

  “I got you stuffed crust, and my mom would kill me if I let you get scurvy.”

  “What’s scurvy?”

  “A vitamin deficiency from too much pizza. Eat. It’s got ranch dressing.”

  This seems to ameliorate his horror of lettuce. The needle hits the end of the record a few minutes later, and Aaron hurries to change it.

  “I’m starting to like Lead Belly,” he says. “But Robert Johnson is the best.” He puts the latter on the turntable, a record that looks old enough to have belonged to her great-grandfather.

  She shakes her head. “You are awesome, you know that?”

  He grins at her and turns the volume up so loud she couldn’t hear his response if she wanted to. Then he scoots beside her and puts his arm around her shoulder.

  “That guy, that one from before,” he says into her ear, still barely audible. “I think he gave me this for you.”

  He slides a piece of paper into her hand. Bird stares at his uncharacteristically solemn face. He knew this was dangerous. He knew people might be listening.

  That guy from before. Coffee, slouching in a gray hoodie in front of the hospital bus stop. Coffee, who said he would try. For you, Bird.

  She looks down at the grenade in her hands.

  CANAL LOCK 7. I MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING. DON’T CALL, JUST COME IF YOU CAN. TOMORROW, MIDNIGHT. THEY’RE WATCHING.

  She chokes on her saliva when she finally remembers to take a breath, and coughs painfully while Aaron frowns at her.

  “You okay, Em?” he asks.

  God, when did Aaron get so smart and wise and musically precocious? And with Nicky as a father? But then, look at how well Monique turned out too. Maybe it isn’t as much of a fluke as her mother likes to imagine.

  “Fine, Aaron,” she says when she has her breath back. “I’m great. Thanks for showing me this. Where did you get it?”

  “I found it in my locker.”

  Coffee hasn’t skipped town. Her heart pounds, like it knows what she doesn’t want to admit: He stayed for her.

  And if Roosevelt is right? If he was the one who gave her the drug that so thoroughly screwed up her life?

  “You going, Em?” Aaron asks, low against the plaintive high timbre of a man who sold his soul at the crossroads.

  The idea of sneaking out under Roosevelt’s nose terrifies her. But she wants to see Coffee. Because she wants to know what happened. Because she wants him to say to her face that he gave her that drug. She wants to be brave. Be brave, Emily Bird!

  “Don’t know, Aaron,” she says, and he wipes her cheek with his beloved, dirty sleeve.

  * * *

  Her mother calls just after Bird has swallowed two of the over-the-counter sleeping pills that are definitely against Dr. Granger’s recommended sleep hygiene program. She prays for merciful unconsciousness throughout the five-minute conversation, the duration of which she is painfully, prickingly awake. Her mother’s words fall like water on her forehead:

  “Your uncle called me today. He was very concerned.”

  Plop.

  “Didn’t I tell you to follow all the instructions your school gave you? That includes speaking with Mr. David. He’ll have told you that we know each other.”

  Plop.

  “I’ll admit he can be a bit … trying at times, interpersonally. But the man is quite competent and good at his job. There was no reason to panic.”

  Bird looks down at the bruises blooming on her upper arm, four long, livid smears of purple.

  “Your uncle’s reflexive distrust of authority is the sign of a less evolved, childlike consciousness, and I understand that. But you, Emily, I expect you to know better.”

  Plop. Bird presses a finger against a bruise.

  “I thought you said I always need to be told what to do. That I couldn’t think independently.”

  “Don’t talk back, Emily.” Her mother’s cool voice is an efficiently delivered slap. “I know perfectly well what I said, but now is not the time for you to stage some belated teenage rebellion. Employ your situational intelligence —”

  “My situation —”

  “Girl! Do not cross me. This is a phase six pandemic. There’s a war about to start. There’s rumors flying around about a draft! I thank Jesus every day that you’re safe at Devonshire inside the quarantine, and I have paid my dues to keep you there. Do not do anything to jeopardize that. Cooperate with Mr. David. If you hear anything from that drug dealer, tell him immediately —”

  “Mom, what does Coffee have to do with any of this? Why do th
ey care so much?”

  She braces herself for an explosion; her mother does not tolerate unfinished paragraphs, let alone interrupted sentences. But all she hears on the other end is a strange, high-pitched wheeze, like an overfull balloon grudgingly releasing air.

  “They say he’s a drug dealer.”

  “So are a lot of people.”

  A pause. Then, very carefully: “You’ve always known when to stop asking questions, Emily.”

  Bird closes her eyes. It’s not about the drugs at all. Of course it isn’t, why would Roosevelt, why would Lukas Group, why would Synergy Labs bother with some prep school pill pusher? Because they’re afraid he knows something. Because of that night.

  “I guess so,” Bird finally says, and she could swear that her mother sounds grateful.

  She falls asleep within minutes of hanging up the phone, dreams dragging her under like lazy sharks. She doesn’t even have time to change into her pajamas, just slumps against the pillows in her underwear and bra.

  She wakes up an hour later, panicked and shivering with cooling sweat. But the sleeping pills want her back, the dreams she can’t remember demand her attention, and so she only manages to claw some covers on top of her before falling back inside the well of her own mind.

  Remember, Bird, she tells herself, even as another part of her, an Emily part, flinches at the prospect of palpating those seeping wounds.

  She dreams of Coffee without ever seeing him. He’s on the other end of the telephone, or just around the corner, or calling her name in the dark. She repeats his telephone number to herself while she tries to dial it with shaking fingers. She presses the wrong buttons, endlessly. She won’t get in touch with him in time. She will be too late.

  In her dream, his phone rings.

  Bird wakes up.

  * * *

  The shrine to Lara Swan in the senior room has acquired new flowers — plastic roses, in this case, after the Crenshaw twins complained about fresh flowers aggravating their allergies. Bird hardly remembers Lara, though they were classmates for all of lower and middle school, before the Swan family moved to San Francisco.

  The picture above the plastic flowers looks recent, but a little fuzzy, as though someone swiped it from her Facebook page. Lara had been a petite, round-faced white girl everyone thought looked ten at thirteen, and would probably be carded until she got gray hair.