Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “There’s a freedom to knowing how strong you are. Knowing you can catch yourself.”

  “Fledging the nest?”

  He snorts. “I wasn’t going to go there.”

  She leans against him, head against his collarbone. He puts his arm around her. She should say something, a condolence or an apology or some other tortured syntax that might convey a quarter of what she’s feeling.

  Instead, she falls asleep. “I can only sleep when you’re around,” she might have said in that long corridor between drowsiness and dream.

  And he might have kissed the top of her head, a diffuse pressure through kinky hair, and she might have dreamed of him until Aaron finds her alone on her side, her head pillowed on a blue blazer several sizes too large.

  * * *

  Nicky comes to visit the day after their school arrest. He and Aaron take a walk together while Bird and Marella sit on the bench by the rose bridge in puffy winter coats.

  “What exactly happens to you if you try to leave?” Marella asks without looking up from some lumpy object she’s attempting to knit with green yarn.

  “Someone drags me back?” Bird yawns and watches the soldiers watching Nicky and Aaron. “Either that or they shoot me.”

  “Some of that infamous Coffee paranoia rubbing off, huh?”

  “Like all this wouldn’t make anyone paranoid. I mean, look at you.”

  “Look at what?”

  “Marella, you’re knitting. Not doing homework, not hanging out with a hot girl —”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, honey. Coffee thinks you’re pretty fine.”

  Bird buries her hands in her coat sleeves. “Coffee thinks …” I can’t tell you what I feel for you. She shakes her head. “Whatever, the point is that you are doing a deliberately mindless activity. Not very well.”

  Marella squints at the lumpy green square. “I just started! And with all the time we’ve been spending in the shelter, I’ll get plenty of practice.”

  “Exactly. You are changing your activities in response to repeated stress. Tell me you don’t feel a little worried around these soldiers every day.”

  They fall silent as a soldier speaks into a walkie-talkie and slings one of those black automatics over her shoulder. A pair of helicopters make a low pass overhead.

  “Not like they’re going to shoot me,” she says, but without much conviction.

  “I take it you haven’t met Roosevelt.”

  “Bird, you make this guy sound like Dr. Evil. I’m the last person to tell you people can’t be real douches, but this is Devonshire, not Afghanistan. What’s the worst he can do?”

  “He gave my boyfriend a date rape drug to mix with my drink and I ended up in the hospital. I still don’t remember what happened to me. And I’m telling you, he’s capable of more. So yeah, let’s call it justified paranoia.”

  Marella puts down her knitting and rubs Bird’s arm. “Right. Pure evil. Bird, what does he want with you?”

  Bird lifts her feet onto the bench and presses her face against her knees. “That’s the worst part. I don’t really know. I think it has something to do with my parents. Or that he thinks I know something. I mean, in full paranoia mode I think I must know some major state secret that could bring down the government, I just have to figure out what it is. Though that doesn’t explain why he’s gunning for Coffee too.” It’s been a relief to let Marella in on her private nightmare; the perspective of someone not directly involved makes her feel a little more human.

  “So, he’s watching you. And he’s working with Paul or using him or whatever, and that’s why you and Aaron are under school arrest. But has he done anything since? I mean, let’s say that you did forget some huge state secret. Well, as long as you don’t do anything, then he’s happy and you’re safe, right?”

  Bird opens her mouth to argue — the words “Roosevelt” and “safe” do not belong together in any positive statement — but then she considers. Marella’s reasoning echoes that of her parents, and though she’s felt like struggling every moment since she woke up in the hospital, isn’t it possible that they’re right? Is she a fly, banging against the walls of a room with an open window?

  Marella wraps an arm around Bird’s shoulders. “There’s nothing wrong with taking care of yourself, you know. What’s the point of being brave if it destroys you?”

  “Marella,” she says, exasperated and touched, “you could have made your life so much easier these last few years and you didn’t. I dreamed of being you.”

  “And believe me, honey, there were a hella lot of days I wished I’d taken my advice. But being true to who I am is the rest of my life. We’d better hope that Roosevelt is just passing through yours.”

  Marella resumes her knitting and Bird sits, not thinking about much, but feeling something bubble from that same space where Coffee and her mother hide.

  “But,” she hears herself saying, and Marella’s needles pause. “But, I want to know. I wanted myself to know. That’s why I wrote the email. So he wouldn’t win.”

  “Bird, this isn’t a fair fight. His people wrote the rules, they judge the game. I’m scared for you. Can’t you let it go?”

  But she can’t. There’s a girl she doesn’t remember, a terrified Bird who had learned something she shouldn’t have. A girl who begged her future self to do what she couldn’t.

  “It doesn’t always have to be like this. We don’t always have to work around, let by, give up. Do we? They always have the power. But I have a little bit, now. I have something he doesn’t want me to know.”

  Marella bunches her knitting between her hands and takes a deep breath.

  “Okay,” she says softly. “Okay. So where do we start?”

  “Really?”

  Marella shakes her head. “It kills me. All this time, I thought you were drowning in friends. I mean, one of them was Felice, but still.” She stuffs her knitting into her backpack and pulls out her pencil case. “Girl, I got your back. Promise.”

  * * *

  “The first thing,” Marella says that evening as they sit in their pajamas on the floor of an empty senior room, “is to imagine.”

  She’s holding a pen they stole from the school store (all the students have been stealing from the school store, which no one has bothered to lock or staff) and a fancy college-ruled notebook from the back of Bird’s locker. The notebook has been labeled Application Essay Notes and Drafts (Marella wanted to call it The Secret Sex Lives of the Senior Class: A Tragicomedy, but Bird reminded her that it needed to look inconspicuous), and Marella’s new pen bleeds a purple dot onto its white pages, awaiting inspiration.

  “Imagine what?” Bird asks.

  “Imagine Roosevelt David, as you want him to be.”

  “As I — what does that mean?”

  “We need something to work toward. My mom reads about this stuff all the time. There can be no success without a clearly defined goal.”

  Bird wraps her fleece more tightly around her shoulders. “What if I told you I imagined him run over by a car?”

  Marella’s expression doesn’t flicker. “Should I write that down?”

  “You would not help me run him over with a car.”

  “We’re just planning. The next stage is when I talk you out of fool ideas.”

  Bird snorts. “All right, I imagine him the hell away from my life. And Coffee’s. And I imagine him wishing he’d never met me. I want him to know that doing … whatever he did to me was the biggest mistake of his life. He can live to be a hundred for all I care.”

  Marella starts to write. “Well, that’s better. I wasn’t looking forward to talking you out of murder.”

  “But just think of the killer college essay you could have gotten out of it.”

  “You are just a little too good at being a Devonshire girl, you know that?”

  Bird sighs, Marella glances up. “Have you thought of just … walking back through that night at the party? Trying to remember whatever happened?”
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  “I’ve tried and tried. But I’ve asked Coffee … well.”

  “Asked him — oh, I see. And in case his, ah, psychedelic depth charges don’t work, you want to find some other way to make Roosevelt regret ever meeting you?”

  Bird lets her shrug speak. Marella’s look is equal parts respect and worry, which Bird can handle. Whatever she was before, she isn’t playing the perfect Devonshire girl now.

  “And I have a place to start,” Bird says.

  “Should I be scared?”

  “Probably. But you won’t have to drive the car.”

  Marella snorts and flaps the notebook in Bird’s direction. “All right, all right. What are we starting?”

  “I mean, I don’t know, and Coffee says I’m nuts —”

  “Very reasonable and glass-housey of him.”

  “That’s what I thought! Anyway, remember that doctor who had a heart attack during the terror attacks? I think Roosevelt might have killed her.”

  Marella drops the notebook. “No. Oh no, killed her? Bird, are you —”

  Bird tells her about Roosevelt’s veiled threat that one morning, his description of the way he could kill without anyone knowing and the Homeland Security pin he made a point of handing her.

  “It’s not much,” Marella says. “I’m not saying it’s nothing, and it’s weird that she had the pin weeks before anyone else. But killing her? They said it was a heart attack. And what reason would he have?”

  “Maybe she knew something she shouldn’t? Why is he here all the time? Why’s he so tight with Mrs. Early? He’s CIA. Something secret has to be happening.”

  Marella stays silent for a long minute. Then she picks up the notebook and starts to write, paragraphs of carefully looping cursive that Bird can’t quite read upside down.

  “So you think I’m onto something?”

  “I think there’s a small chance. But it’s a chance, and I trust your gut, so here’s what we can do. If something strange was going on between that doctor and Roosevelt, the other doctors and nurses had to have gotten a whiff of it. So we need their story.”

  “What are you going to do, go up and ask? That one nurse practically shoved me out of the room when I tried.”

  Marella grins. “We won’t have to ask them. You know that recorder I sometimes use in history? It’ll fit in my pencil case. I’ll visit the doctor in the morning and forget it under a table.”

  “Genius. But how do you know they’ll talk about her at all? What if they find it?”

  “They give it back to me and we try something else. No harm, no foul.”

  “No harm,” Bird echoes.

  * * *

  Bird dreams of closed rooms, of long syringes filled with mercury, of romantic pop hits from the eighties and nineties, of questions she can’t answer, of questions she can. She dreams of Roosevelt and she dreams of Paul and she dreams of wanting Coffee, wanting and never having, all the dark dream long until she wakes and doesn’t remember.

  This isn’t just about you anymore. The world is falling down, Bird, and anyone can forget. Anyone can give in. But if you want your power?

  Remember it.

  Fifty years ago, half of the students at Devonshire were boarders, but that number dwindled until the eighties, when it officially became a day school. The attic dorms were converted into a dance studio and study hall, but the room seems more at home jammed with narrow cots and dressers than it ever did with a ballet barre and stereo system. It remembers its old shape. A television is on at the far end of the room, beside porthole windows that overlook the rose garden and middle school. A reporter in a bulletproof vest and headphones is breathlessly explaining to the furrow-browed news anchor that he’s embedded with the marines, amassed on the Colombian–Venezuelan border, and engaged in a heavy firefight. The bombs have been going off for months, but Bird’s tried hard not to hear them, or think about what they might mean. Bombs don’t mean war anymore, not war war, they’re just tough foreign policy (she knows this means shit to the people blown up by them, but she carefully bifurcates her mind on this point). But a land invasion? That’s like when she was in fourth grade and her mother sat glued to the television, cheering when the sky lit up over Baghdad. It’s like her granddad, who always limped from the shrapnel he caught in his hip during Vietnam. First plague, then war. She swallows and tries to focus on her notebook, where she’s writing down theories about the email her past ghost sent her present self.

  A trick of Roosevelt’s? A drug-induced delusion? One half of a clue, but I didn’t have time to leave myself the other?

  Something thumps on the floor behind her. She spins around. It’s Charlotte, surprisingly, with a silk bandanna tied around her braids and flower-print pajamas.

  “Mrs. Cunningham said this bed is free,” she says, kicking her duffel bag beneath it. “But I can find another if you want.”

  “You’re welcome to it,” Bird says, intending sarcasm but achieving flat exhaustion. “But I’m surprised your parents are letting you bunk.” Charlotte’s mother is the smothering type, and hardly lets Charlotte out of the house for sleepovers.

  Charlotte sits abruptly; the cot creaks beneath her sudden weight. She darts a glance at Bird’s face and then looks down again.

  “Mom has a cough,” she says softly. “And a fever. They say it started this afternoon. The nurses here checked me out and I’m fine, but my parents have to stay under quarantine for now. I know it’s just a cold. I mean, the District’s practically a prison camp these days, how the hell could anyone catch the v-flu? But the house is locked up, so here I am.”

  Bird puts down her notebook. The sight of Charlotte struggling back tears reminds her of the times they actually enjoyed each other’s company, of the friendship she was sad to lose when Felice finally grew tired of her.

  “That sucks, Charlotte. I’m sure they’ll be okay.”

  Charlotte nods jerkily and forces a smile. “Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

  For a moment Bird thinks she might throw a rope across the chasm; that they might be friends without Felice between them. But then Charlotte hunches her shoulders and turns away.

  Bird closes her notebook, then her eyes.

  On the television, the news anchor brings up the new draft bill, which the reporter says the “boots on the ground” aren’t happy about, but is gaining momentum in Congress. They discuss the terror threat, and recent suspicious events in Phoenix and San Jose. The flight ban, martial law, the president’s deferment of the next election until the “terrorist plague has run its course” — current disasters drift over her in wave after icy wave. Eventually, Mrs. Cunningham turns off the television and the lights. Bird stares at the play of blue and yellow behind her eyelids, until Marella crouches beside her and taps her shoulder.

  “You okay?” she whispers.

  “I could have been sleeping,” Bird says.

  “You never sleep.”

  Now Bird opens her eyes and rolls them suspiciously to her left. Marella crouches by the bed in mismatched flannel pajamas covered by a tattered red cardigan and matching fingerless gloves. Two long braids swing on either side of her head, the kind of glossy, walnut-colored ropes that would have won some storybook adventurer wisdom or eternal life or the hand of a princess if he could have brought them back to the king. Bird sighs. She longed for Marella’s hair when they were younger. Part of her still does.

  “Well,” Marella says, sitting back on her heels, “at night, anyway. You do it pretty well in class.”

  Bird yawns. “I absorb information better during my REM cycle. What’s up?”

  Mrs. Cunningham taps her pen against the radiator beside her bed and their heads snap up. “Ladies, it was lights-out ten minutes ago. Please wrap up your conversations before eleven, or take them outside.”

  “Pay dirt,” Marella whispers.

  Bird gasps. “Seriously? You just left it there and they didn’t notice?”

  “Oh,” she says, and clutches her heart with artful de
speration, “my chest is hurting. I’m so afraid, do you think I could be having a heart attack like that doctor? Maybe that gas caused her heart attack? Maybe they’re contagious?”

  “Really? They believed you?”

  “They rolled their eyes the whole time they gave me the EKG, I left my pencil case in the corner, and no one noticed a thing. They don’t have a very high opinion of us private school brats, those doctors. It’s called playing to their prejudices.”

  Mrs. Cunningham claps her hands. “All right, ladies, quiet time starts now.”

  Marella puts the stick on Bird’s pillow and leans forward. “There’s about six hours,” she whispers. “You want to go through it?”

  “Since I don’t sleep anyway?”

  Marella shrugs. “Reasonable divisions of labor.”

  “Ladies, right now, or do I need to give out detentions?”

  Marella shakes her head and gives Bird a cheesy thumbs-up before heading to the other side of the room, where she’s been sleeping for the last two weeks.

  Bird takes out her phone and texts Aaron a quick good night. She means to put it away before Mrs. Cunningham can make good on detention threats, but the unopened message at the top of her inbox snags her attention. It doesn’t have a subject line, but that hardly matters. The return address is enough to send her pulse into a heavy jazz snare that jumps in her neck and armpits and groin. Her breath is a dog-whistle whine that delivers hardly any oxygen. It’s the email address that told her about the writing on the wall. The email she sent herself.

  Bird’s finger clicks the message before her brain can tell it no.

  That is a very fascinating letter in the sent messages box. I would leave this alone, Bird. Say hi to your mother for me.

  FDR

  Bird starts Marella’s recording full of hope and fire, and finishes, many hours later, in the cooling ashes of another disappointment. After that message from Roosevelt, she can’t walk across campus without flinching at the fat squirrels barking in piles of composting leaves. She wanted so badly for this to be the leverage she needed. But instead, it’s nothing.

  “Not quite nothing,” Marella says while they wait for Aaron to finish his music lesson in the hallway outside the pit. “Play me that bit again, about the quarantine?”