Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Emily. What’s up?”

  Trevor looks great, as usual, with his sleeves rolled up and tie draped like a scarf around his neck. He’s not as big as Paul, not so obviously a gym bunny, but his solid, lean body goes well with his chiseled good looks. He keeps his head shaved, which only heightens the uncanny symmetry of his features. Smart, rich, hot as hell — but he’s never felt anything much for the girls at school. She wonders if Marella is right about why.

  “I …” She swallows. “I prefer Bird.”

  “Okay.” He draws this out, and looks pointedly at the idling car.

  “I need to speak with your mother.”

  He raises a perfect eyebrow. “Not sure that’s a good idea. She wanted to skin me alive after that party, and anyway, it’s old news. If you apologize now, it’ll just dredge shit up.”

  She crosses her arms. “It’s important.”

  “Call her office, then.”

  “You know that will never work.”

  “Yeah. I do. Em — Bird, I’m sorry about what happened that night, but seriously, this is not my problem.”

  His nonchalance lights the spark that burns away her fear. “Would it kill you to help me a little? Your party landed me in the hospital. I was in a coma for eight days. Just ask her for me. Tell her my mother thinks it’s important to apologize. Tell her I won’t take long.”

  Trevor lets out a long whistle. “I liked you better as Emily. Poor Paul.” He shakes his head and jams his hands in his pockets. “Wait here.”

  He opens the back door of the car and climbs inside. At first she thinks he’s ditched her, but the car doesn’t move. After a few minutes, he gets out again.

  “Okay, she’ll talk. I wouldn’t take too long, if I were you.”

  Bird stares at him. He gestures at the door. “Well? Hurry up.”

  She gulps. She didn’t expect her request to have such speedy results. She hasn’t prepared her arguments properly, but it’s too late now. Years of school presentations had better be good for something.

  Pam Robinson is a stocky woman with a politician bob going gray at the roots. Trevor’s narrow and sculpted features take after his father, but he has his mother’s intimidating, appraising stare. She nods when Bird settles into the tan leather seat beside her, but keeps speaking into her headset.

  “Yes, I’m aware that the senator needs to attend the summit, but that doesn’t mean that we can violate quarantine protocols. Can’t he do it remotely, if it comes to that? No, it’s not ‘just one week,’ not when we’re talking about the v-flu. No, no, he left when we were under attack, he doesn’t just get to waltz back in here…. Yes, I know the outer municipalities have different quarantine protocols, but if he wants to get past the Beltway he needs to wait his fifteen days —” She pauses and sighs. “Fine, Billy, let’s table this for now. We’ll bring it up again at tomorrow’s meeting. Can I ring you back in, oh, twenty minutes? I’m picking my son up. Yes, thank you.”

  Bird stares back calmly when Pam Robinson levels that gaze in her direction. Pam Robinson’s got nothing on Carol Bird.

  “Now, what can I do for you, Emily? I’m glad to see you looking so well.”

  Bird is pretty sure that she doesn’t look well — but she looks alive, and not actively sick, which is about as good as anyone can hope for these days. She nods. “I want to talk to you about your party,” Bird says.

  The corner of Pam Robinson’s mouth quirks up a fraction of a centimeter, and then falls back to pleasant impassivity. “Ah, yes. I’m afraid that did not go as well as I had hoped.”

  “I’m sorry for my part in what happened,” Bird says, hoping that this is enough. “But I couldn’t help but wonder … your scholarship, have you picked the recipients yet?”

  The dry smile emerges again, and Bird realizes that this odd sense of humor is probably her strongest resemblance with her son. “I’m afraid I haven’t quite found the time, dear. Why, did you have someone in mind?”

  “My cousin Aaron. He’s eleven, a great kid. His school … their evacuation procedures are terrible, and he inhaled some of that gas. He’s supposed to go back on Monday, and I just can’t … I’d beg my uncle to keep him home before sending him back there. And then I remembered your scholarship, and …”

  Senator Robinson nods slowly, while Bird’s skin burns from the exposure of her request. She knows what’s coming.

  “But the scholarship is supposed to be for underprivileged students. Your family is, well …”

  “My mother doesn’t support her brother. Financially, I mean. They don’t have much money. He’s the doorman of an office building. My aunt died a long time ago. I can’t tell you how much it would mean to him. And I’m living with them right now. Because of my parents, you know. So getting Aaron here wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  Pam Robinson keeps her silence; Bird presses her nails until her upper arm feels like fire. Up front, the driver flips the page of a magazine, indifferent or discreet. Pam rolls her shoulders back and turns to the window, looking at the wind-whipped trees and milky-yellow lamps in sconces of greening iron.

  “It’s a curious situation, Emily,” she says finally. She keeps her head turned away, but their eyes meet in the window’s blurred reflection.

  “Yes.”

  “I admire your sense of responsibility and action. Your cousin is lucky to have you.”

  Bird blinks very fast. “But,” she says.

  Senator Robinson smiles at her own reflection, an expression that makes her resemble Trevor Robinson, inviting a drug dealer and a DEA agent to a party.

  “But nothing, dear. Shouldn’t some good come from all this? Why not you? Bring your cousin to the Bradley lower school on Monday. I’ll work it out. Who knows, if certain bloggers are to be believed, it might help me sleep at night.”

  * * *

  Bird stays up until midnight, checking the tech geek message boards where she’s posted a few questions. She wants to know how her old email account managed to send her that strange message. It’s of course possible to schedule messages to send out days, even weeks, after you write them. She could even check, if she could manage to log in to her old account, but the password has been changed. Is there a way to tell the location of the sender? No response to that question yet — at least, none that sound vaguely plausible. There aren’t many people bothering with newbie tech questions. On the other hand, Draft rumors getting scary real has over three thousand responses.

  Another thread discusses Bloody Thursday — who really dropped the phosgene? She clicks on that, she can’t help herself, it seems so much like the kind of conspiracy theories Coffee loves. They sequestered the terrorists responsible for releasing the flu immediately. The official story is that the attacks were a counterstrike by Venezuela in retaliation for the drone campaign. And she’s heard allegations of continued ties to FARC and Iran, which she had thought were credible. These anonymous message board commenters, though, seem to believe everything but that — the US government orchestrated the 8/16 terror attack as a “false flag” to provide the final pretext for instituting regime change in Venezuela. Or it’s actually al-Qaeda, operating through contacts in Cuba. They claimed the attack, apparently, along with a half dozen other groups with varying degrees of plausibility. Someone makes a surprisingly strong case for a secret FARC operation, which has been increasingly radicalized by the collateral of the drone and now ground war.

  This doesn’t make any sense — if they are technologically advanced enough to make a flu that’s paralyzing the world, then why resort to phosgene in crop dusters? That’s as low tech as it gets.

  Why go high tech when low tech causes just as much damage?

  I’m with RonJon84. The MO of these attacks is totally different from the v-flu. Something is weird here.

  She scrolls past that particular argumentative eddy, which gets vicious and deep with nested replies, and looks for other, saner viewpoints. She finds instead rumors and wild conjecture, supposed inside inform
ation and an occasional death notice — here, as everywhere, people are dying. She finds it at first touching, then horrifying that someone’s most lasting contribution could have been on the politics sub-forum of a tech message board. But once she’s started looking, she can’t seem to stop. Even this fevered speculation is better than feeling mired in her own ignorance. She hasn’t seen Roosevelt in a week, but she still watches for him. She doesn’t know whom to believe, but she agrees with the tinfoil hatters about one thing: Something is weird here.

  She clicks around to other threads: about the crop dusters, about the president and abuses of martial law, about the arrests of war protestors in New York and Seattle. It’s all horrible, but nothing kicks her belly like the discussion of quarantine zones.

  Some people are more equal than others, I guess. Turns out you can buy your way past the municipal quarantines if you have enough money. A friend of mine’s father-in-law got past the Potomac quarantine for a cool ten grand.

  Wow. I’d heard that about Detroit and Indianapolis, but figured they’d be more hard core about that shit so close to Washington.

  Well, no one’s saying you can get past the Beltway.

  I can’t say anything more than this, but trust me: You can get past any quarantine line with enough money and power. Yes, I mean even that one.

  Bird stares at that for a long time, then closes her computer. This quarantine is miserable, but she’s seen the footage from California, she knows how much worse it can get. She ought to check the tech help sub-forums again, but doesn’t bother. It’s clear the techies have more important things to worry about than some noob’s lost email password.

  If her life were a heist movie, she would know a genius computer geek with a slight crush on her who could type a few lines of code into a computer and tell her everything she’d ever want to know about the strange email. But the only person she can think of who might vaguely match that description is the technology teacher, and Ms. Berger hasn’t shown her face in school for the last week and a half. The rumor is v-flu, but Bird thinks she’s just too scared to leave the house.

  So Bird instead worries about quarantine breaches and impending world war as she crawls under her covers. She takes some melatonin and hopes that she might at least get three uninterrupted hours.

  She would have said she was still awake, except that her phone wakes her up.

  The glowing light sears her retinas and the ringtone sounds loud enough to wake up Aaron. She answers it without thinking, just to make it quiet.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. She squints at the screen and sees the number listed as unavailable.

  “Roosevelt?” Her voice cracks, but it’s a victory that she even managed to speak.

  “No, no, Emily, it’s me.” The half-whispered voice sounds familiar, but it’s so faint and tentative she’s not sure.

  “Who?”

  He sighs. “Your dad, Emmie.”

  “Dad? Why are you calling so late? Has something happened?”

  She can’t remember the last time her dad started a conversation with her. His approach to parenthood has always been that of distant, delegated authority.

  “Not exactly. Not on our end, at least. I just want you to know that we’re doing everything we can to get back into the city. I know your mother doesn’t like emotional subjects —”

  Bird snorts.

  “Okay, Emily, we’re not an emotional family. But … it’s been hard, being away from you when you’ve been in such trouble. I understand you’ve been having difficulties with your mother’s old colleague. Have you done anything to rouse his suspicion?”

  “Like get drugged at a party?”

  Her father sucks in a breath. “You took those drugs,” he says, but there’s a discordant note in his flat assurance.

  “You know I didn’t. You knew it from the beginning. Why wouldn’t you —”

  “Emily!”

  She cuts herself off, breathless. Greg Bird’s mild manners have always had a threat behind them. Even on the other end of a phone call, she shies away from triggering the explosion.

  “There are things you don’t need to know. I had thought we made this clear to you a long time ago. I had thought you understood. And if you were a little too curious, then I blame myself for not noticing. But this isn’t any kind of joke. It’s not a game. You don’t get to reset this if you make a mistake, and believe me, giving Roosevelt David any further reason to suspect you is a mistake.”

  The hand holding the phone is a bloodless claw, each joint a locus of unnoticed pain. “You’ve heard something.”

  “You don’t know anything, Emily. And that’s good. That’s going to save you. We’ll be able to protect you better once we get back to the city, but until then, for heaven’s sake, use the good sense we gave you and don’t antagonize him.”

  A siren wails into the earpiece, too loud for a building in an undisclosed location. “Dad, why are you calling from an unlisted number?”

  “Don’t you think we would have been at the hospital if we could have? Don’t you believe that we love you?”

  Bird scrunches her eyes closed, as though he can see her cry. “Your work,” she croaks.

  “They watch us too. Emily,” he says, and hesitates. “Emmie, try not to let your things out of your sight, all right? Be careful.”

  “Daddy, what is this? What’s happening? What is he going to do?”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  The melatonin doesn’t work that night. Or maybe it does, and she dreams herself awake and hurting, the telephone silent in her hands.

  * * *

  Aaron tugs awkwardly at his blue blazer and turns the volume on his headphones loud enough that she can hear Chuck Berry like a soulful bee meandering through the frosted morning air.

  Nicky took the morning off work to ride the Metro with them. With all the new regulations in place, the Metro ride takes an hour each way. The silver lining of insomnia: There’s nothing particularly difficult about early mornings. She wades through a world hazed with familiar exhaustion, but Aaron and Nicky yawn and scowl at the sun.

  “This will be good for you, Aaron,” Nicky says, adjusting Aaron’s red tie.

  Aaron scrunches his nose. “I didn’t mind my old school, you know. The kids were cool. Now they’re gonna call me an Oreo, aren’t they?”

  Bird winces. “Don’t say that, Aaron.”

  “It’s a good education,” Nicky says, his voice as firm and dadlike as it ever gets. “You’ll appreciate it when it’s time to go to college like Mo.”

  “I don’t want to go to college. I want to be a music producer, like Russell Simmons. And he didn’t ever have to go to a school with some dumb tie and jacket. Why doesn’t Em have to wear a jacket?”

  “Life’s unfair, kid,” she says. “If it’s any consolation, they won’t let us wear T-shirts.”

  “This look like a T-shirt to you?” he says, pointing to his white button-down. They had to buy it, along with the blazer and tie, that weekend.

  “Hey,” she says, and squats awkwardly so that she’s at his eye level. “Aaron, I know this isn’t exactly the most fun thing that’s ever happened to you. But they have a music studio and music teachers and I bet someone will teach you how to play something if you ask politely, okay?”

  He gives her a sidelong glance, but turns down the music volume. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You can learn guitar like Robert Johnson.”

  He grins. “Aw, shit!”

  One of the lower school teachers gives him a startled glance and Bird stifles a laugh. “Don’t say that at school either. We’ll just get through this, right? Once all this war and quarantine bullshit is through …”

  Her throat tightens. Aaron looks up at Nicky and then reaches out to pat her shoulder. “Right, Em. It’ll be okay.”

  Bird knows she wasn’t half as smart or mature at Aaron’s age. She wants to cry with the relief of having him here, where the self-interest of the people Coff
ee would call rich assholes will cover him in a protective halo.

  A halo she wishes she could believe still extends over her, but she’s had a whole weekend to think about her father’s phone call. He used an unlisted number, but he called her cell. If Roosevelt and his bosses really are watching him — and they’re certainly watching her — then he must know that her cell is probably tapped. Which means he wasn’t trying to avoid them. He was trying to avoid her mother. Because her mother didn’t want Bird warned?

  She says good-bye to Nicky and Aaron, and heads back to the Devonshire side of campus. She isn’t particularly surprised to see Coffee waiting for her in the wooded part of the path between the schools. He’s wearing jeans against uniform code, red tie slung over his neck, and blue blazer bunched around his elbows. He fiddles with a lighter in his right hand, though there’s no cigarette in his left; even he wouldn’t dare smoke on campus. She sees, because she looks, the bulge of his ankle monitor beneath his worn jeans.

  “Trevor tells me you got him to do something for another human being without an immediate benefit to himself. If you’re planning another miracle, you might try doing something about this v-flu.”

  “I think he decided it would be funny.”

  Coffee nods thoughtfully. “The Robinson Achilles, a sadistic sense of humor. Probably why he keeps me around. Good for you. I’m glad Aaron will be safe.”

  “Safe as money, anyway.”

  “Now you sound like me.”

  “Maybe I’m coming around to your point of view.”

  “Oh, Bird,” he says, like she’s told him she has six months to live.

  “Didn’t you tell me that I should know better? Maybe I do, now.” Emmie, try not to let your things out of your sight. Every ridiculous conspiracy Coffee ever told her sounds more plausible after that phone call. She packed her own lunch this morning.

  He winces and drops his lighter back in his pocket. “Did I ever tell you that I’m an asshole?”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “So why did you always talk to me?”

  She finds herself smiling even though her heart feels like a piece of pounded citrus, peeled apart by clumsy hands.