Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Bird picks pile two, and they sit together silently, reading the remainders of a life. Pile two mostly consists of emails between Dr. Granger, the medical staff, and government representatives (most commonly Roosevelt David) about quarantine procedures and the vitamin treatments. There’s nothing about any of the emails in particular that seems incriminating or revelatory, and yet as she goes through dozens of them she starts to get a strange feeling. Like they’re not talking about what they say they’re talking about.

  Bird looks up from an email chain between one of the doctors and Roosevelt, expressing concern that the shipments of vitamin treatments will be delayed for another week, “in light of quarantine concerns, these have to be a priority.”

  “I think this is a record,” Bird says. “I think she picked these emails because they’re all about something. I mean, there’s nothing personal here. Didn’t her husband die? Wouldn’t she have had family in Venezuela? But there’s nothing, not even a bill. Are all of yours about the vitamin treatments?”

  Marella puts down her pile, gives her a funny look, and slides it over. “This is a draft of a letter she sent to Roosevelt.”

  The first few lines are enough.

  I believe the true nature of the “vitamin treatment” program is a blight on our democracy, and a disaster for the District’s larger pandemic prevention efforts. We cannot vaccinate a small percentage of residents at the expense of everyone else, no matter how important they (or their parents) are.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Marella … those shots aren’t vitamin treatments.”

  “They told us it’s also a regular flu vaccine.”

  “A blight on our democracy? Pandemic prevention?”

  Marella looks at her hands. “Okay, yeah. What you’re thinking? That’s what I’m thinking. But I can’t believe it. If there’s a vaccine for the v-flu, why haven’t we heard anything about it? Why are they giving it to us in secret?”

  “So the rich girls can stay alive.”

  “And he killed the doctor because she didn’t like the program? This is ridiculous. We sound like conspiracy freaks.”

  “But are we wrong?”

  Marella groans and buries her head between her knees. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.”

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  She leaves the message on Coffee’s desk during AP Chem the next day:

  I need all conceivable dirt on a certain private security contractor dirtbag you can find. Bring to designated rendezvous point tomorrow after classes. Smoke after reading.

  Coffee laughs out loud in the middle of Mrs. Cunningham’s explanation of net ionic equations, but she pretends not to hear. There’s only half the normal roster of students in class anyway. Coffee swivels in his seat and mouths: Designated rendezvous point?

  The library, Bird mouths back.

  He grins again and even their dazed classmates stir themselves to look between the two of them. Bird blushes and slouches back over her notebook. She can only imagine what they made of that flashing joy in his eyes, that happiness with no business on Coffee’s habitually dour face. Coaxing a genuine smile from him has always felt like winning the ringtoss at a street fair. In the back of the classroom, Charlotte pulls out her phone and starts texting. It could be about anything, but basic narcissism convinces Bird it must be her. Charlotte hasn’t so much as met her eyes since she returned from the hospital. Does Charlotte hate her enough to tell the school that Bird is macking on its resident fugitive?

  And how can it matter, anyway? What possible hold could gossip have over her in a world where Charlotte’s parents might be dying, where NATO troops are laying siege to Caracas, and the school might be secretly giving their students a vaccine for the v-flu that no one else in the world knows exists? And she’s afraid Coffee might ruin her reputation? It’s not her reputation anymore. It’s Emily’s, and the more they tear her down, the more they build Bird up.

  But still, Bird feels his eyes follow her when she leaves to go to the bathroom a minute later. She wants to make him laugh again. She wants his smile to light just because she’s walked into the room, just because she exists. She wants this right now and for a very long time, and so she leans against the chipped pink bathroom stall and presses her fists against her eyes.

  Don’t love him, don’t love him, don’t love him, she thinks, too afraid to even say it out loud.

  When her heartbeat slows, she splashes water on her face and runs a helpless hand through her hair. She needs to get back to Nicky’s for a supply run. She’s run out of his hair sheen, which, despite a distinct eau de middle-aged uncle, at least works. Marella’s fancy leave-in conditioner runs in terror at the sight of Bird’s short kinks.

  Thanksgiving is just two days away. She has to convince Roosevelt to let her and Aaron go back to Nicky’s for the holiday. And permanently, with any luck. Since she can’t expect him to agree out of compassion, she needs a credible threat. With Dr. Granger’s cache, she could probably try it now, but Bird retains enough innate cautiousness to wait. Better to over prepare than run in stupid.

  She jumps at the sound of laughter when she steps out of the bathroom. The laugh is confident and loud enough to shoot through the hall. Six months ago, he might have gotten in trouble for making noise during class hours, but no one will touch him now. He’s gotten what he always wanted, her perfect ex: the good favor of powerful men. He’s walking with Trevor, punching him on the arm, the two of them so picture-perfect they could pose for the cover of Ebony, headlining an article about the new generation of Black leaders.

  They both freeze when they catch sight of her. Trevor sticks his hands in his pockets and leans back with the barest lift of his lips, an expression that she has learned to recognize as amused anticipation. Paul crosses his arms, but he looks more nervous than disapproving. They stare at each other for a moment. Bird considers just pushing past, but her subconscious must feel reckless because she speaks with particular relish.

  “Slow day at spy school, Paul? Are you happy I’m still trapped here? Or have you come up with some even better way to punish me for breaking up with you?”

  Trevor slouches against the lockers, his proto-smile blossoming into a grin full of teeth and cruel humor. Paul just glowers.

  “You didn’t give me a choice,” he says. “Honestly, you should thank me for heading off something worse. You know what he’s like.”

  “Which is why I’m not his errand boy. But then, you’ve always been precocious. Most people wait at least a couple more years before selling their souls.”

  “My God, you’re a bitch.”

  “Thank you,” she bites back, feeling like she could fly.

  She brushes past him, close enough to touch his forearm with the back of her hand. The familiarity of his skin is an aching regret, one she digs at until the pain flares true and unmistakable. Like a dreamer pinching herself to wake up, she touches him to remind herself that he isn’t hers anymore, that she has changed her world.

  “Emily …”

  She wouldn’t stop, except that the confidence has leaked from his voice. She turns.

  “Things are getting bad out there. You should be careful.”

  “I’ve taken my vitamin treatment,” she says, wondering if he knows, but he only looks baffled. Roosevelt isn’t telling him everything.

  Trevor stirs himself from the lockers. “See ya, Bird,” he says.

  Bird shakes her head and goes back to class. Mrs. Cunningham doesn’t say anything about her prolonged absence, but Coffee stares like he’s beaming thoughts across the room. Bird makes herself recall the heat of Paul’s skin against hers, that painful familiarity, until he looks away and she can breathe again.

  * * *

  At seven o’clock on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Bird meets her two unexpected allies in the AV room of the Bradley library. At Bird’s suggestion, Marella cranks up some death metal on the school’s giant headphones and pu
ts them directly on top of Coffee’s ankle monitor. Coffee leans back carefully against a shelf of dusty VHS tapes and regards them both with wary bemusement.

  “You’re really getting into this,” he says.

  Bird shrugs. “If a girl finds herself unexpectedly at the heart of a globe-spanning government conspiracy …”

  His lips twitch. “The girl defeats the bad guys and wins a medal for service to her country?”

  “It might get her mother off her back.”

  “I’ve heard of less ambitious bids for parental approval.”

  “I am my mother’s daughter.”

  And there, the smile she longed for breaks from the storm clouds of his eyes and he shakes his head. She squats to keep from shivering. Marella looks between them.

  “We want you to tell us what you make of this,” she says, and hands him Dr. Granger’s letter.

  He reads both pages, then starts again. Marella puckers her lips and massages a lumpy stitch in her newly completed scarf.

  “And you are very sure this letter is real.” His voice is so uninflected that Bird can’t tell if he thinks they’re brilliant or delusional.

  “I stole it from her effects,” Bird says.

  “She let something like this sit in the open?”

  “Hidden USB drive,” Marella says, handing it to him. “I guess they didn’t notice.”

  Coffee shakes his head. “So you think he killed her over this?”

  “If he thought she was going to pull a Snowden —”

  “This is an internal memo, not a press leak.”

  Bird rolls her eyes. “Oh for God’s —”

  “Just listen. If you’re right and this is some secret vaccine, the implications are … intense.”

  “We figured,” she says, tonguing the sarcasm-sharpened consonants.

  Coffee arches his eyebrows and leans forward — argument engaged, bow drawn, target sighted. She steadies and waits, wondering how she could love something so dizzying and uncontrollable. How she could love him.

  “If there is a vaccine and we’re getting it, that means that other people aren’t. That’s what she’s arguing against in the letter, right? They developed a secret cure that only rich, connected people can get. And not the other billion people who could use it.”

  “Maybe they have to test it secretly. It might start a war otherwise.”

  “A bit too late to worry about that, Bird.”

  “A bigger war.”

  “Right. Because if there’s something other countries hate the US doing, it’s saving their lives with a cutting-edge vaccine for pandemic flu. And not, you know, bombing them.”

  “Maybe they’ll find out later. Maybe they know now and the diplomats are hammering out the details.”

  They glower at each other, and Marella sighs and waves her scarf in the air over their heads. “Hackles down, you two. Coffee, I think Bird has a point. A vaccine doesn’t have to mean we’re hoarding it. What if they’re testing it?”

  Coffee jiggles his ankle so Marella’s headphones tap staccato against his monitor. “Bird, who got the vitamin treatments first?”

  “The lower school, I think? Hold on, it should be in her emails.”

  She flips through the stack, which she and Marella have arranged by date, until she finds the ones she remembers. “Yeah, they started with the fourth graders.”

  Coffee takes the paper, but he keeps his eyes on her, waiting. She gets it.

  “Holy shit,” she says.

  “What?” Marella says.

  “They started on the fourth graders. The vice president’s daughter, Marella.”

  Coffee leans forward and shakes his hair out of his suddenly bright eyes. “Bingo,” he whispers.

  Marella nods slowly. “Of course. If they’re giving it to the VP’s daughter, then it’s real. And safe.”

  “And tested on someone else,” Coffee says.

  Marella swallows. “Not necessarily?”

  Coffee draws himself up, a pen in his right hand blurring in beautiful hummingbird flight between and above his fingers. “There’s a reason drug trials take years. Let’s say someone developed a potential vaccine. Let’s say that they needed to test it, fast, to make sure it was safe for the most powerful people in the world and their sons and daughters. So let’s say that instead of going about it the safe, legal way with stage I and II trials and animal prototypes and all that, they test it on a group no one will really care about or notice. Prisoners. The kind no one knows exist because the government has secretly renditioned them. I bet Guantánamo has been a real treat for the last few months. But of course you can’t admit that in public. So you find out it’s safe and it works and you give it to the people in power and then the people those in power care about —”

  “Wait,” Marella says, and to Bird’s surprise, Coffee does, his blue pen pausing mid-flight between his middle and index fingers. “I can see that applying to you and Bird, but me? I’m a scholarship student. My mom is an executive assistant at a real estate firm. I’m not saying I’m poor, but I sure as hell ain’t the daughter of one of the most powerful people in the world.”

  “Epidemiology,” Coffee says.

  “What?”

  “You’re lucky, like Bird’s cousin. You’re breathing the air of the children of the most important people in the world, so you get vaccinated to protect them. Us.”

  “At least you admit you’re one of them,” Marella says.

  Coffee shrugs. “I’d be dead if I weren’t. And I’m at least marginally self-aware.”

  He catches Bird’s eye with this last, and she snorts before she can help herself. He moves his leg so it grazes her calf. If they were alone, she might touch his thigh or even catch one of those ever-moving hands, she might walk that tightwire with need yawning on one side and a rocky acceptance on the other. But they are three instead of two, and so she just stares at their single point of contact like an unexploded ordnance.

  “But,” Marella says, “even if there’s a secret vaccine, that doesn’t mean anyone killed Dr. Granger.”

  Bird can’t look away from the sinuous glyph written in the contrast between her navy-blue tights and his faded gray corduroys. She reaches out a hand to finger the fraying edge that sweeps out from their intersection, but freezes an inch away.

  “She told him that she thought his operation was illegal and dangerous to public health and Roosevelt David said, sure, that’s cool?”

  Coffee shakes his head. “Asshole doesn’t equal murderer.”

  “And a lot of people saw her die of that heart attack,” Marella says.

  Coffee and Marella are staring; she wills her hand to move. The effort frightens her. Is this another side effect of her accident? Along with the headaches and the insomnia and the anxiety, will she now lose control over her own body? But then Coffee takes her trembling hand in his and guides it to the ground with casual, undemanding generosity. His touch breaks the spell, or transmutes it. Without even meaning to, she is walking the tightwire again, she is about to plunge to the rocks.

  She meets his eyes, so gentle and concerned they nearly break her, and asks, “So did you find any dirt on Roosevelt?”

  He nods. “Not much. According to the Internet, he doesn’t exist. No photos, no Facebook page, no LinkedIn, nothing. And believe me, I was looking before you asked. The only hint I got was a few mentions on national security message boards of an operative who might meet his description. But the most distinctive thing about him is that ripe aroma of sociopathy, so who knows.”

  Marella laughs. “Coffee, you’re a poet.”

  “A lost beatnik,” Bird says, deadpan and pinning down a smile. “Did you find anything else?”

  “I looked up Lukas Group too. They didn’t exist until around ten years ago. It was founded by some former CIA operatives as an, ah, ‘adjunct security service and optics firm,’ whatever that means. They’re listed on a couple dozen national security contracts, mostly to do with counterterrorism and co
mmunications in the Middle East and South America. Given what they do, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re on a dozen more contracts that aren’t posted publicly. They’re basically a private arm of the government, which means they get even less oversight than the CIA. Ever read about Blackwater mercenaries during Iraq? There were cases of them massacring whole families and getting away with it. This is like that, but for spies.”

  “But if they’re spies,” Marella says, “what is Roosevelt doing at Devonshire? The closest thing to a scandal we have around here is Tory Silver’s dad buying a sports facility at Duke so she can get in.”

  Bird grimaces. “Well, who wouldn’t be interested in Tory Silver’s rich daddy?”

  “It turns out,” Coffee says, “that a few Lukas Group contracts were specifically related to bioterrorism and disaster planning. A month ago someone leaked slides from some classified CIA business meeting. I didn’t catch it at the time, and the site got taken down. But it popped up again yesterday when I asked about Lukas Group.” Coffee reaches for his bag and pulls out a handful of trash — receipts with food stains, torn notebook pages covered in intricate abstract doodles and molecular diagrams, singed rolling paper, half-smoked cigarettes, multicolored gel pens with their middles worn smooth. Coffee sifts calmly through this alarming mess while Bird and Marella exchange glances.

  “Did Lukas Group bomb your bag?” Bird asks.

  “It’s not that bad,” Coffee says, pulling out another handful of detritus. A few liberated tobacco leaves ride air currents to land on Bird’s shoulders; one lands on her eyelash. She pulls it off and makes a wish.

  Marella scoots a few inches closer to Bird and brushes her skirt for invisible crumbs. “Not that bad?”

  Coffee just pokes his tongue between his teeth and excavates the papers. Bird has never seen so many chemical equations in her life. Some are photocopies of academic journals, but mostly they’re written in Coffee’s precise hand, a periodic table deconstructed and scattered and double bonded in thick, primary colors. They remind her, in a way she can’t articulate, of her wish to own a shop.