Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers into her hair, and Bird could cry because for once he has nothing to be sorry for.

  * * *

  Coffee drives. Bird writes.

  We pretend we don’t know.

  She shows him, her handwriting a trembled scrawl that she tries to blame on the traffic.

  He cocks his head, a question: Know what?

  That they’re listening, she writes. We pretend we’re looking and no matter what, we pretend that we can’t find it. I get upset that I’ve lost my last chance to get my memory. You comfort me. Then we get the hell out.

  “It’s okay, Bird,” he says after reading this. “We’ll find it, whatever it is.”

  She smiles. “They might have gotten to it before us.”

  “But how could they know where you hid the clue, anyway?” His voice sounds normal, but his cheeks pucker on the last word, his heavy eyebrows tilt down, like he’s been forced to swallow sour milk.

  “They would have looked, since I went back home after Roosevelt released me.”

  Coffee shakes his head, the lines of his frown deepening, but he still plays along. “Guess so.”

  She reaches across the gear console and traces one finger down the valley of his bicep. Traffic on Military Road is stop-and-go. He turns to stare at her, the black holes of his pupils devouring his swampy irises, his neck red as a dusty sunset. She snatches her hand back, regrets it immediately, watches him watching her, remembers to breathe.

  “This is complete bullshit,” he whispers.

  The car behind them honks twice, loud and angry. He ignores it.

  The anger is for her sake, frustration and exhaustion painfully contrasted with his ironic enthusiasm for the game six weeks ago, when they played at making out in the chem lab.

  She leans forward and brushes her lips against the ridge of his ear. “I trust her,” Bird says. “She wouldn’t do this if it wouldn’t stop them.”

  The honking rises into a chorus, competing Morse codes of Washingtonian road rage, months of frustration sublimated and redirected at the human-scale target of her mother’s white Mercedes.

  Coffee whips his head around and gasses the car. The traffic hasn’t moved very far, but a few of those drivers sounded willing to kill for six feet of forward motion. He taps his free foot against the door and drums the dash until she laces her fingers between his. His hand is warm, and she wonders what their eavesdroppers might think if she told him to turn down a side street into Rock Creek Park so he could crawl with her into the backseat of her mother’s car. She almost asks him, but then he turns to her and smiles and says, “Then it will work, Bird.”

  She loses her nerve. The morning after she had sex with Paul, he told her he loved her. It felt momentous at the time, but she knows even the most cramped and awkward intimacy with Coffee will change her life forever. She has to know he wants it too. No, she corrects herself, as the road carries them away from DC’s most traditional spot for teenage liaisons — she has to know that it will matter just as much to him.

  The two-story yellow stucco house she has called home for most of her life looks alien when Coffee pulls the car into the driveway. She remembers Roosevelt dragging her here soon after she got out of the hospital, for no reason she could fathom at the time. She knelt there on the sidewalk and puked on the grass — ambiguous evidence, at best, but he must have taken that as some oblique confirmation that she remembered the night after Trevor’s party.

  The quarantine tape is a fresh and shiny yellow; someone has been back to visit recently. Probably a whole team of operatives, scouring her house for evidence that she prays they never found. Her mother’s shadow has never let Bird feel particularly intelligent, but she has to trust that she’s smarter than Roosevelt or Donovan or anyone else who works in the hell of government security contracting. Because if they did find whatever clue she left for herself, then why follow her around? Why spy on her? Their focus hints of desperation, and that gives her hope. All she has to do is make them believe she doesn’t know.

  And when she does learn whatever this earth-shaking secret might be? She will hurt them with it.

  “It might be better if you can’t find it, you know,” Coffee says as she ducks under the quarantine tape and unlocks the door. He has this look, like he knows this fits well with their charade but he still means it. She shakes her head and turns the knob.

  The foyer reeks from antimicrobial foggers, a throat-searing stink of burning tires doused in cat piss and Pine-Sol that makes Coffee stumble back against the doorjamb.

  “Smells like someone’s been cooking crystal. Badly.”

  Bird, contemplating her mother’s fury when she realizes that her house smells like a meth lab because of nonexistent v-flu exposure, smiles. “You would know.”

  He coughs. “I would not. I haven’t cooked crystal in years.”

  “And I used to think you didn’t have any ambition.”

  “I don’t.” He smiles, or he bares his teeth; he’s all irony today, too tired for even passing joy.

  She tries again, teasing. “Not even in chemistry?”

  “Not ambition. Obsession. You said it often enough.”

  “Coffee …”

  He shakes his head and squeezes her hand. “Where are you going to look first?”

  “The writing on the wall,” she says. It’s strange that she would have even needed Coffee’s psychedelic intervention to find the piece of her soul that she stared at every day for five years. And when she understood her mother’s plan to make the men of Lukas Group believe, once and for all, that Bird is ignorant and harmless, she knew exactly how to do it. The path of her deliverance seemed to reveal itself, so clearly illuminated she knew someone had been there before her. She had been smart, the Bird of that forgotten night.

  He follows her up the stairs. The door to her room is closed, but the wood by the lock is shiny with a recent heavy coat. Someone tore this apart, she thinks, feeling the lock. Someone angry, someone looking for something. She leaves her hand there long enough for Coffee to notice, then turns the knob. Inside the changes are more obvious: her sheets and comforter stripped from the bed, her desk drawers opened, her books stacked in loose piles beside the bookcase. They cleaned it up, but they didn’t bother hiding their presence. They wanted her to know that someone had searched her things while she lay in a coma. They wanted her to be afraid. Of course they did.

  “They’ve been through here,” she says, hoping the tremor in her voice sounds more like fear than anger.

  Coffee barks a laugh, and the harshness comforts her. She’s not alone in her anger anymore: a gift almost as great as his love. “I’d say so. The assholes couldn’t even put away your underwear.”

  “Oh God,” she says. The thought of Roosevelt pawing through her mismatched collection of lingerie thongs and granny briefs revolts her enough, but not as much as the sight of the wall behind her bed.

  She expects to see her collection of photographs and illustrations of buildings, the one she’s kept since she was ten years old. She stole her very first — a black-and-white photograph of two gorgeous Black girls in ankle-length skirts smoking and laughing on the sidewalk in front of the Lincoln Theatre on U Street in the sixties. She tore the glossy, aging paper from the tight library binding and then returned the book. For weeks she avoided the school librarian, terrified that someone would notice the skip between pages 24 and 27. But Mrs. Walker never did, and Bird never had the nerve for further criminality — when she saw a picture she liked in a book, she looked for it on the Internet and used her parents’ color printer. Over the years, the Lincoln Theatre joined a bustling, piebald town, where Hungarian bathhouses were down the street from Norwegian coffee shops and Siberian yurts. She spent evenings huddled with her X-Acto knife over stacks of National Geographics bought for fifty cents a copy from Hakim, the possibly homeless guy who had a table of used books and incense by the Columbia Heights station. Her glance skipped over the most astonishing natur
al landscapes — glaciers in red sunsets, beaches white as whalebones being licked by crayon-blue water — in favor of crowded cement houses and colorful boats in Elmina harbor and the grass-covered procession of homes along Teotihuacán’s Avenue of the Dead. To a stranger, the photographs would look random, haphazard, but that layered architecture traced the path of her life — tree rings growing out from the heart of two laughing, smoking beautiful Black girls Bird would have given anything to be.

  They did not steal them. They didn’t rip them apart in a fit of rage and throw the confetti around the room. It would have been better if they had.

  Someone took her pictures down, checked every bit of sticky tack, every scrawled note, and replaced them, very carefully, on the wall. In neat rows, ten across, seven down, Bird sees her whole life disarranged like a denatured protein, the chains of amino acids unfolded from their proper shape, useless. They did not have to do this.

  He did not have to do this.

  He could have put them back in the same order, the same unrepeatable pattern, and checked each picture just as thoroughly. He did this because he wanted her to know what he’d seen. He wanted her to be scared. He wanted to disrespect her because he could, and he was glad that she knew it.

  “I hate him.”

  She’s surprised to hear her thought out loud, so cold and steady. Coffee’s surprised too — he looks away from the marching rows of pictures and flinches at what he sees in her face.

  “Bird?”

  She glowers at him, though she shouldn’t: He’s the man in her sights, enough like the white man who’s done this to her that for a terrible moment that’s all of him that matters — not his sharp swamp eyes or his chemistry obsession or his loyalty or his honesty. Nothing of that miraculous arrangement of neurons and hormones and spirit that makes him Coffee signifies beside the overpowering awfulness of his apparent membership in that tribe of self-entitled assholes known as Caucasian male.

  Her glare bleeds murderous; his eyes widen and he steps back — hurt, vulnerable, afraid — but this is Coffee and he doesn’t turn from her.

  The fever passes. Shaking, she stumbles to the bed. “I’m sorry,” she says. He watches her, frozen. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “It’s not you. Won’t you come here?”

  He does. “I thought you were going to kill me,” he whispers.

  She rubs her cheek along his collarbone, hard and smooth. “I did too.”

  He laughs, of course.

  Eventually she makes herself find the one picture that matters. The U Street shops from the fifties, Black couples strolling past. He placed it near the center of the anti-collage. A point or a coincidence?

  She doesn’t know who you are, then-Emily wrote nearly five years ago, in a pen that blotted at the start of each stroke. She fingers it for Coffee, because he won’t need more explanation. She will tell him the story of those words one day, of the humiliation and shame and why she never dared to not be friends with Felice.

  But not now. Not for them to hear.

  “They found it,” she says instead.

  Coffee takes a deep breath, and plays the game. “Are you sure?”

  “They must have,” she says, going for the Oscar. “Or else I only dreamed writing another note. But when we, you know, when I took that thing, I had a really clear vision of my hand writing something and hiding it behind this picture. But now they’ve moved everything. He must have found it.” She pauses, and repeats, just to drive the point: “Roosevelt must have taken it.”

  The old metal frame of her twin bed rattles with Coffee’s jitters, but he runs the ball. “Then you don’t remember what you wrote? Are you sure, Bird? Nothing at all?”

  She shakes her head, warning Coffee not to overdo the emphasis. “Nothing,” she says, truthfully. “I have no clue what Roosevelt thinks I know. And I wish I did.”

  Coffee gives a blustery sigh that tickles her ear. She smiles up at him and takes his hands. “Let’s go. I can’t stand to see this anymore.”

  She gives her closet a once-over on her way out. The shoes she’s after are in a dusty back corner, but the knee-high brown leather will shine. She can’t wait to see what they look like with her leaf dress.

  “I can’t believe that I still care about that go-go after all this,” she says, walking slowly down the stairs. This part will be the trickiest.

  “No one can be miserable all the time.”

  “Not even you?”

  He lowers his head and she waits for him, for the kiss that makes her drop the boots down the rest of the stairs and fall hard against the banister and cling to him so she doesn’t tip over. A minute later he pulls away.

  “I’ve kicked the habit,” he says, joyous, smiling that rarest of Coffee smiles. She can do nothing but stare at him. Her skin prickles with rolling heat, her breath comes short, she shakes with incipient fireworks. Whatever he sees in her face makes him drop her arms and look away.

  Her stomach flips with embarrassment. When it comes to desire, she isn’t used to ambiguity in her relationships. But with Coffee even that is complicated. She steps down, using the shoes at the bottom of the stairs as an excuse to glance through the open door of her father’s office. From this side of the living room she can’t see the desk clearly enough. She pauses, frantic for a reason to get closer without giving away the game.

  Coffee taps the bannister behind her.

  She closes her eyes. She had fuck me written all over her face and he looked away. There’s so much she doesn’t know about him, but she knows this: He’ll play along.

  Bird is brave; she puts her arms around his neck and pulls him down and kisses him so hard he grunts before kissing her back. She forgets, for long minutes, why she did this in the first place, until he tries to come up for air and she sticks her fingers against the hot flesh beneath his waistband and pulls him over to the living room couch.

  She feels, somehow, with her lips and tongue and hands, when he understands what she needs him to do. He sits on the arm of the couch, she sprawls on his lap, then falls over onto the plush gray carpet. He laughs and picks her clear off her feet, and she giggles and shrieks even as she stares at the freakishly neat mahogany desk in her father’s office. For the last five years, her father’s desk has been an unchangeable, bedrock feature of her landscape. A large calendar blotter covering most of the surface, a telephone on the right side, and a service medal case on the left. And above that, always, the gold pen her father tried to give her that night he spanked her in front of her best friend. He always kept his atonement in the open, as if he hoped she might take it one day.

  The real meaning of the writing on the wall, not the one she tried to pawn off on Roosevelt and Donovan and whoever else. But the corner of the desk is empty. The pen is gone. Which means they found it. Which means she wasn’t lying, anyway.

  Coffee feels her freeze. He lowers her carefully, searching her face for what she can’t say. She shakes her head.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says roughly, which they will interpret in the way anyone would interpret a horny teenage boy making out with his girlfriend. “I feel like your mother’s watching us.”

  Bird laughs, and if the sound is high and thready and a little panicked, she knows how they’ll interpret that too.

  * * *

  Bird learned a long time ago that almost everyone lies about sex. To her grandmother, it was the most important gift a woman could give to a man, to be hoarded like a pirate’s treasure until the proper moment. Carol Bird was cagey on the subject of the propriety of sex before marriage, but unequivocal that she expected her daughter to avoid it until well after high school. Stacey Goodrow, the senior-class slut, became notorious for claiming that sex was just a biological function that the patriarchy used to control women. Bird doesn’t have any moral problems with free love — never mind what her grandmother said — but she discovered after her first time with an exchange student who wasn’t even her boyfriend that she has trouble with the details.
Sex makes her feel. Maybe not lasting love, and certainly not true love, but it has never been something she could do one night and forget the next morning. The vulnerability of it, the nudity and the touching and the profoundly beautiful awkwardness of two bodies fitting together — they tangle her in deep-woven threads.

  Which is why she’s so surprised when — one hand on the clasp of her bra and the other gripping her hip — Coffee lets her go abruptly and says, “Wait, hold on.”

  She trembles, the chill air in Nicky’s basement more noticeable without Coffee’s body against hers. Their shirts are colored puddles at the edge of the carpet, his pants are unzipped and halfway down his ass. The foil of two wrapped condoms reflects the light between them. His eyes are so bright she thinks he might cry.

  “What is it?” she manages, panting. She made her decision in the car ride here, and prayed that she was imagining his reticence. She wants him to touch her so badly she aches.

  Those long fingers twitch, but they find purchase in the tangled mass of his curls instead of her kinky fro. He smiles, bitter and fierce, and for the first time since he led her from her parents’ house, she feels true fear.

  “You don’t want to?” she says, before he can. The shivering gets worse; Nicky never did bother to winterize the windows down here.

  “I … Bird, this is … foda-se.” He shakes his head and puts his hands down, fingers splayed, on the carpet between them. He closes those bright eyes, and when he speaks again, his voice is deeper, his accent stronger than normal. “My first time. Though difficult to believe, I’m sure, given my overpowering sexiness.”

  Bird laughs, and his eyes spring open. But she leans forward and kisses his lips, nose, eyebrows, curls plastered to the sweat on his forehead.

  “God,” she says, still laughing though she knows this isn’t her most sensitive reaction, “oh Jesus, I thought it was something terrible. I thought you didn’t … I mean, what you said before, that it wasn’t actually true.”

  “Love you?”

  Her giggles feel like champagne. She hugs him just because she can. “Yes, that.”