Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  At least, she would have been. But Mrs. Early announced her death, along with that of her younger brother and father, at assembly that morning. Charlotte cried right until the start of second period. Bird stayed with her before the first-period bell, but then Felice came and texted Gina, and Bird’s presence became subtly, emphatically redundant. Bird thumbed the clasp of Paul’s bracelet, wondered if this was the sound of the wind rushing past her ears, and retreated. Charlotte has always been nicer, but Charlotte has never cared about Bird enough to stand up to Felice.

  Bird doesn’t look up from her history homework when Felice and five of her friends burst into the senior room, even though something about that bright, warming laugh sets her ears back like a dog’s. Rupa Patel and Cindy de la Vega have been watching the news — reports from California, reports from Caracas and the “narco-terrorist battlefront” — but Felice marches straight to the television and changes the channel. She smiles at Cindy and shrugs in Rupa’s general direction — assuming forgiveness, as though not giving a damn about anyone else were just an endearing quirk.

  Rupa snorts and rolls her eyes, but no more: She’s not high enough on the ladder to get away with it or low enough to not care about the consequences. Cindy just stands and walks over to Lara’s shrine.

  They have switched to a romantic comedy about two doctors, so cosmically inappropriate that Bird feels words rising out of her like an emetic.

  “Honestly?”

  Felice brushes down her bangs and smiles over her shoulder. “Emily, I didn’t even see you! What are you doing over there by yourself? Denise, move over so Emily can sit down.”

  Bird hesitates, but the invitation is irresistible. The inner circle has been her safe space at Devonshire for most of high school; what kind of decision would it be to give it up now, when every other part of her life is crumbling like pounded sandstone?

  So Bird sits where she has been directed. The bracelet feels heavy and cold on her wrist, but a half hour passes before she learns the real reason for Felice’s unexpected gesture.

  “So you and Paul?” she says.

  Bird presses her palms into the carpet. “The perfect couple?”

  “Sometimes even perfect has its problems.”

  “What’s it to you, Felice? Do you want him?”

  Felice laughs softly and shakes her head. “Why make this so hard? I’m just trying to help you. Paul is … important to the dynamic of the group. You know that.”

  Bird wants to rip off the bracelet and throw it at the sixty-inch flat-screen television that Gina’s parents gifted to the senior class at the start of the school year. It’s horrible to see body bags and helicopters in high definition, but it’s somehow even worse to see Owen Wilson.

  “So, what, you’ll ditch me if we break up?”

  They stare at each other, shocked by the rawness of Bird’s words, by the clarity with which they are very nearly done with each other.

  “I’d be sad, that’s all,” Felice says, recovering first.

  Bird takes a deep breath, another, and lowers her head. She and Felice can use each other amicably, they always have. She just has to get back inside the line. She just has to survive, and get into a good college, and satisfy her mother —

  “Sorry. Shitty day. It’s my cramps, I think.”

  Felice pats her hand and smiles in beneficent forgiveness. “Oh, no worries. PMS totally sucks.”

  Bird retreats, sits in a bathroom stall for fifteen minutes before forcing herself to go back. But when she does Felice and her posse have gone, leaving the two awkward costars to grimace at each other in images so sharp and saturated they make Bird feel fuzzed out and gray. The only person left is Cindy, writing a message on Lara’s shrine. Bird walks over and studies the photograph again. An arm drapes casually over Lara’s shoulder, but whoever it is has been cut from the image. An ex? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? The dead brother? All that is written beneath Lara’s name are dates, so close together they look more like a mistake than an epitaph. She was eighteen, but just barely. Three months older than Bird.

  “It’s so sad.” Cindy’s infamous peroxide hair is twisted into a messy bun that reveals roots as untended and overgrown as Bird’s.

  “Yeah.”

  “I was thinking of starting a memorial wall. Like, for parents and relatives and stuff. There’s a sophomore whose brother just died. And look at everyone who’s missing school, I bet there’s a lot more.”

  Her expression is an earnest wince, but she still focuses anywhere but Bird’s face. Just like Charlotte, never quite looking her way as she sat in a different desk during religion class. But Cindy isn’t part of Felice’s circle, so why bother freezing Bird? Did something happen between them that Bird doesn’t remember? Bird remembers her at that party. She might have stayed after Felice and Charlotte left. She might have seen something. If Bird can corroborate Paul and Roosevelt’s story, then she won’t have any choice but to trust their judgment. She’ll tell them about Coffee’s letter. They’ll meet him on the canal, at lock 7 in her place — he’ll be there, she knows it in her teeth, nothing could keep him — and he will hate her forever, for his own good. She’ll probably stay with Paul and wear his bracelet and sit with Felice in the senior room, and all the steady lines of her life will realign, unto infinity.

  And Coffee will be in jail, or deported.

  “Cindy, at Trevor’s party, did you see me and Paul …”

  She doesn’t know what to ask, but Cindy jerks and stumbles back. She meets Bird’s eyes for a searing moment, a lash of shame and horror Bird can’t quite understand, but seizes upon.

  “You did,” Bird whispers. “You know something.”

  Cindy looks around the senior room, but they’re alone with the white plastic flowers and white people endearingly misunderstanding each other and the mustard-yellow couch that reeks of hasty teenage sex.

  Cindy bites her bottom lip, smearing pink lipstick on her teeth. Her eyes are bloodshot, tired, and a little wet. Bird doesn’t flatter herself into thinking this has much to do with her, but she hopes she might be a contributing factor.

  “I’m not, I mean, listen, if you want to talk to someone about it, I get it. You have” — she takes a deep breath and wipes her eyes — “no idea how much I get it, but I’m not, like, the one. There are professionals. I’m no good at this. Why don’t you try Ms. Riley?”

  Cindy turns to leave, but Bird steps in front of her. “And tell her what, Cindy? Don’t you get it? I don’t remember! Paul told me something, but …” But it doesn’t make sense.

  Cindy’s shoulders slump, then shake with a sob. “There was something in the drink, wasn’t there? In his canteen. I wondered, you got drunk so fast. But I didn’t … I couldn’t just accuse Paul like that, what would Byron say, they go to the same church, and everyone knows you and Paul have been together for ages, I mean, they didn’t believe me when I barely knew him … what could I do? I feel sick every time I look at you, Emily, but what could I do?”

  Bird finds a breath in her throat and forces herself to suck it the rest of the way in, filling her chest with stale chips and musty carpet and the bitter stink of what she imagines must be both of their terror.

  “You think he raped me?”

  Paul strapping her into the car, telling her everything will be okay.

  “I told you, I didn’t actually see anything. If I’d seen that, believe me, I wouldn’t have given a fuck who Byron went to church with.”

  Bird’s breath rattles out of her like one of Coffee’s laughs, brittle as ossified bone. But relieved, so relieved. There’s more to this story, she knows it. She remembers that unavailable call on Paul’s phone moments before she passed out. Whatever Paul did, Roosevelt was involved. And Coffee? Well, there had to be a reason for him to chase after her like that.

  “But you saw me drinking something from a canteen?”

  “Yeah. Peach schnapps. Everyone was drinking it, but Paul poured some into this canteen he brought and you
two went off into the woods. Then you came back, I don’t know, fifteen minutes later? And you were smashed, Emily. I mean, sure, he poured a lot into that canteen, but fifteen minutes? You were falling all over yourself and crying and laughing at the same time. You could hardly string a sentence together.”

  “And Paul?”

  She crosses her arms close to her body, fierce and on guard.

  “He came for you a little while later. Said he was taking you home. You didn’t seem like you wanted to go — at least, you kept saying something about needing to call Coffee. And then I thought it was probably okay, because maybe you’d taken some crazy drug of his in the woods with Paul, like you’d meant to get like that.”

  “I didn’t.” She’s sure of it now, though there’s still so many lost hours. But she knows herself, and she knows how she left things with Coffee in the basement. She would never have gotten smashed on one of his designer drugs in the woods behind Trevor Robinson’s house.

  “I’m sorry!” Cindy shouts, loud enough to be embarrassing if they hadn’t gone far past the point where such things mattered.

  “Did something happen to you … like that?”

  Cindy reaches for the doorknob, but doesn’t turn it. “There’s drugs,” she says hoarsely. “That are supposed to … make it easy. Rohypnol. GHB. I’d say you should ask Coffee, but …”

  “Otherwise occupied.”

  “If it happened, I’m sorry. I won’t tell you Paul is a good guy. The ones they think are good guys do it too. And no one will believe you, so I hope for your sake that he didn’t. And …”

  “And?”

  “I won’t talk about this again. I can’t.”

  Bird nods, up and down, up and down, with a painful jerkiness it takes conscious effort to stop. “Okay. Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “Thanks, Cindy.”

  Cindy shakes her head and opens the door, brushing past someone in the hallway. Bird stumbles out behind her and bumps into Felice.

  “Oh, there you are!” Felice smiles her tight-lipped smile. “Where’d you ghost to?”

  “Bathroom,” Bird manages.

  “I couldn’t help but overhear. Is Cindy going on about David Upton again? You know you can’t believe anything she says about him.” David Upton graduated Bradley last year, and now Bird recalls the vague rumors about him and Cindy last summer.

  “I can’t?”

  Felice’s lips stretch like pale, rose-colored putty across her face. “She’s a slut. Everyone knows it, and I think we can safely say that Upton was way out of her league. Like she didn’t want it. It looks bad, saying things about people that everyone knows are lies. I’d be careful, Emily. Friendly advice.”

  She and Felice have learned to get along over the years, for the sake of Charlotte. But Bird is watching that door close and all she can think about is what Paul might have given her that night, what he might have done with it, and what kind of monster wouldn’t care.

  “I’ll do what I have to,” Bird says.

  “So will I. Oh, and Emily?”

  “Yes?”

  Felice reaches out and pats her head, very gently. “Is something wrong with your hair? It’s a little … puffy.”

  Bird stares at her, shamed into silence. Felice seizes her victory in her delicate, manicured hands and walks into the senior room.

  Alone, Bird slumps against the wall, buries her hands deep into her puffy, unacceptable roots, and waits for the knife in her heart to hold still.

  * * *

  Six Things Coffee Has Told Bird and She Almost Believes

  (1) A million Iraqis died in the war. If asked, she’d have said it was maybe 80,000, but he told her those lower numbers were from the US government, which only acknowledged someone dead from the war if they were reported in the newspaper. And since it’s a war, how is it possible for the newspapers to have counted every single dead person? She says that doesn’t actually mean the US Army is responsible for all those dead people, obviously the insurgency and stuff caused most of it, but Coffee just flicks his fingers and asks if there would have been an insurgency in the first damn place, without our invasion? She doesn’t know what she thinks, but whenever she sees these implausibly low numbers tossed around in newspaper articles or on television, she flinches. Eighty thousand is a lot of people, but a million is so large she can hardly wrap her heart around it.

  (2) He doesn’t sell the drugs he makes himself. They’re too dangerous, he says. If that’s true, she asks, then why make them at all? “I’m a spelunker in the caves of my own psyche,” he said one evening after school. “And a master craftsman of my tools.” She told him this was some self-aggrandizing bullshit, and he laughed and blew smoke in her hair.

  (3) She already knew that one in three Black men will go to prison in their lifetime, most of them for nonviolent drug offenses. But it was Coffee who told her that the work they did there was for private corporations. One prison in Louisiana is actually located on an old plantation, and the Black men there pick cotton and corn for pennies an hour, just like their great-grandfathers.

  In 1969, right before he launched the war on drugs, Nixon told one of his top aides: “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” Watching half of her Northeast acquaintances disappear into the maw of the system, she has to believe it. Carol Bird doesn’t, but morality is the change that falls from your pockets when you climb up the ladder.

  (4) She’s too good for Paul. He doesn’t rag on Paul all the time, but often enough, especially when Paul calls him Alonso and gives them dirty looks for hanging with each other. He thinks Paul is a controlling freak who lacks empathy. She thinks Coffee is contemptuous of ambition because he doesn’t have any himself. “So why not admit Paul and I are perfect for each other?” she asked. He just shook his head. “Don’t you want something better?” Like you? she thought, but didn’t — couldn’t — ask.

  (5) Venezuela is now an official enemy for the same reason all the rest were — opposition to US interests. He dismissed the windfall tax crisis of the summer entirely. They’re sitting on trillions of dollars in oil wealth, why shouldn’t they keep it for their own people instead of giving it to multinationals? Especially since oil caused the global warming that caused the droughts in the first place?

  Sure, their socialist government isn’t a shining example of political morality, but who is? The US supported a coup against Chávez in 2002 and only the mass popular uprising of Venezuelans put him back in office. Sadly, that isn’t true for at least nine other US-supported coups of democratically elected governments in Latin America in the last hundred years. And we wonder why “they” hate us?

  (6) Ignoring your subconscious is like neglecting the termite infestation in your basement. Sooner or later, the consequences of neglect will far outweigh the momentary unpleasantness of clearing the nests. He thinks Bird doesn’t do enough “self-examination.” He thinks her parents are “pieces of work” and she’s going to have a breakdown in college if she doesn’t slow down and smell some roses. The irony of him saying this while skipping class in the rose garden was not lost on her. She brushed him off, but his words knotted in the pit of her stomach — what if she did break down in college, what would her mother say? It would prove Carol Bird right, for her daughter to fail the modestly rigorous course laid out for her. So she told Coffee not everyone could feel satisfied reading novels and chemistry journals and occasionally handing in papers two weeks late. He shrugged and told her to ask him for some shrooms when she was ready. “You’re such a hippie,” she said, and his eyes sliced into her like lasers. “Do I look like a hippie? I’m right, Bird.”

  He was right, Bird. The foundations are nearly gone. If you don’t find me soon, I can’t tell you what’s going to come down.

  Bird is brave, she tells herself, Bird can dare. Emily is terrified to go find Coffee at the canal lock, and only Bird can help her.

  For now
, she prepares her armor. She sits in the basement bathroom, the one with her grandmother’s claw-foot tub, and unscrews the lid off the jar of Nicky’s Hawaiian Silky. He offered to help, but her hands shook when she took it from him and all she could do was tell him no, she was fine by herself.

  The smell of perfumed conditioners and relaxing chemicals is familiar to her, though she’s always had the help of her mother or her aunt or a stylist. Her mother’s preferences are old-fashioned; she’s used Hawaiian Silky for years and won’t hear of trying any of the newer brands. Let alone anything more radical: Bird has always wondered how she’d look with a more natural style. Once she asked if she could get her hair braided like Charlotte, and Carol Bird just frowned and said, “Charlotte’s more Howard than Harvard. Don’t make it easy for them to dismiss you.”

  But which “them”? Bird wonders now. White admissions officers? Or Carol Bird?

  She dips the brush into the white cream and waves it experimentally over her head. She’ll only have fifteen minutes to cover her roots once she begins. She last thing she needs right now is bald patches from an overtimed relaxer. She’s taken off Paul’s bracelet and slipped on the plastic gloves a little gritty from past use. She should probably smear more Vaseline between the careful parts in her thicket of hair, but it’s getting late, and it will take her at least two hours to walk all the way down the canal to Lock 7. If she goes.

  “I’ll go,” Bird says, holding the cream-laden brush like a sword. After what Cindy told her, how can she miss the chance to ask him what he saw? To find out what sent him sprinting down that driveway, too late to save her? She’s thought a lot about what happened to Cindy, and what Paul might have done. She feels sick with the possibilities, and though her empty memories ache each time she presses them, she isn’t sure that Cindy’s suspicions are right. Ambition is the fuel that runs Paul’s engine, and whatever happened that night had something to do with that endless, combusting need to get ahead. She can’t say it’s impossible that rape came into it — not with Roosevelt involved — but she thinks, she feels, she hopes that it didn’t.