by Gayle Forman
“It’s not the same! Just because there’s Netflix doesn’t mean you can’t read books. And four thousand five hundred dollars, are you kidding me? That’s not remotely enough. Even wholesale they’re worth triple that. Four thousand five hundred dollars dishonors the records!” I shout.
“Jesus. Calm down. It’s just business.”
That’s exactly what Penny said when I accused her of holding the store hostage for ransom. It was just business.
“What do you think businesses are?” I stand to leave. “They’re not machines. Or widgets. Or bar codes. They’re people! People just trying to get by. Because what else can they do?”
Daryl looks at me like I’m speaking Latin or some other dead language, and I suddenly know the answer to Lou’s question.
Why do guys like this always win? Because that’s how the world works. Some species is always going extinct. Some other species is always waiting in the wings to emerge. We are the dinosaurs. And the Pennys, the Daryls—they’re what comes next.
The Big Book
Hannah’s meeting is at a school gymnasium outside of Bellingham. As soon as I pull into the parking lot and see the smattering of cars, some bearing peeling bumper stickers with slogans like FRIEND OF BILL W, my stomach bottoms out.
I do not want to be here. I do not want to listen to the serenity prayer or applaud people for doing something some of us have always done.
But I do want to see Hannah. I want to be with Hannah. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Sandy ruin the one good thing in my life.
I follow the trickle of latecomers inside. Hannah’s standing underneath the basketball hoop, deep in conversation with Jax and a large, muscular woman with two long braids coiling along her otherwise-shaved head.
Even though I only ever went to a couple meetings with Sandy, it all feels too familiar: the urns full of burnt coffee, the trays of stale donuts, people huddling in clumps, peeling away the rims of their Styrofoam cups. It was just like this at the last meeting I went to. When Sandy was the lead speaker.
I tap Hannah on the shoulder. She spins around, her expression unreadable. “You made it.” She introduces me to Fran, her sponsor, who grips my hand in a finger-crushing shake.
“We were taking bets on whether you’d show,” Fran says.
“Of course I’d come! Wouldn’t miss it.” My voice clangs like an out-of-tune piano. “Just ran into some traffic.”
Jax nods in sympathy. “I-5’s a parking lot.”
The crowd starts to sit in the folding metal chairs. Hannah chews on her nail.
“You okay?” Jax asks her.
“Mildly terrified,” Hannah admits.
“Just speak your truth,” Fran says. “And then nothing can go wrong.”
“I’m glad you’re here.” Hannah reaches for my hand and squeezes.
“Me too,” I lie. And I squeeze back.
* * *
“Hi, my name is Hannah and I’m an addict.”
Hi, my name is Sandy and I’m an addict.
“Hi, Hannah,” the crowd responds, already charmed.
Hi, Sandy. The crowd loved Sandy too. He was charismatic. It’s why he was got away with so much for so long.
Hannah wipes her palms on her jeans. “I’m already sweating bullets. Usually that doesn’t happen at the start of a show but I guess this isn’t a show. It’s the opposite of that.”
She takes a deep breath and scans the group, landing on me. “Three years ago, I got into a car accident and got addicted to painkillers.”
I was in ninth grade the first time I snorted oxy. I didn’t do it because I was unhappy or lonely or abused. I did it because it was there.
“That’s the official story, anyhow. Because, you know, I come from a ‘good’ family, a ‘happy’ family. The kind of family where this ‘sort of thing’ doesn’t happen.”
I didn’t know that I’d woken a sleeping monster in me. And even if someone warned me, I’m not sure it would have changed a thing.
“That’s the story we tell in my family—if we tell any story at all, because we’d rather not discuss this unpleasantness. ‘Hannah became addicted to painkillers after a car accident.’ This is true, but that doesn’t make it the truth. Here’s the truth: In seventh grade I started slipping bourbon into my morning thermos of coffee because that little bit of numb made the day more bearable. In eighth grade I learned to sneak laxative pills to keep my tummy flat. A year before the accident that turned me into an official addict, I crashed my dad’s car because I’d snorted three tablets of Adderall. The car was repaired with no further discussion. Mine was a truth happening in plain sight that no one cared to talk about. Least of all me.”
In the beginning, it’s all fun, right? It’s chasing the next high, not really thinking about how you get it, or who you hurt. I mean, sure, maybe you lift a few twenties from a cash register, steal a rare book your father treasures, but those are just things, right? And it’s all under control.
“And even after I was officially revealed as an addict, we kept up with the lie. ‘Hannah became addicted to painkillers after a car accident.’ This narrative left out the thornier story, the one that explains why a twelve-year-old wants to anesthetize herself, why a sixteen-year-old dreams of death.”
And then it stops being under control. And you see the real shit going down because of you. You see your parents go into debt. You see your brother’s life getting shanked. And you think you should stop. You think you can stop. And you try to stop. And you try again. And again. And again. And you can’t. And you don’t.
“But I was ignoring the real work of my recovery. The hard part of it, which for me is not giving up the dope—though that is hard—but letting go of that good girl my parents raised me to be. Understanding that she was making me sick.”
The Big Book tells us that addicts are not selfish. We just lack humility. We overestimate our power, which trust me, is not a new concept to me. I stand before you thinking that maybe this is the time I don’t fall back down but knowing it might not be. But I really hope it is. Because the hard part of falling down is not the falling, or the getting back up. It’s seeing what happens to the people you fall on. You get bruised; they get flattened.
“I know you’re not supposed to move to a new place when you’re newly sober, but I also knew that if I didn’t leave home, leave that lie, I would never get better, so I left. And I moved here, to find a new home, create a new family, figure out who I really am, who I want to be.” Here Hannah looks at Jax, who nods, and then, for a second, at me.
And every time they get flattened, so do I, killing me, cut by cut. And I know we’re supposed to get better for our own sake, but damn, I want to get better for theirs. And here Sandy looked directly at Ira, at Mom, and then at me. He didn’t stop looking at me for the rest of the meeting.
“So here I am,” Hannah continues, “on the cusp of my first year of sobriety, about to travel home to my family of origin for the first time. I’m terrified, but I’m oddly grateful to be terrified. It feels like that means something. Like, I’ve heard it said that in destroying ourselves, we also learn to create ourselves. So maybe that’s what’s happening. And whatever is happening, thanks for helping me get here.”
Thanks for catching me no matter how many times I fall. And here’s hoping, with all the humility in my heart, that I can learn to fall without flattening anyone else.
* * *
That meeting, Sandy got his three-month chip. Afterward, we went out for ice cream to celebrate. Mom held his hand, eyes shining. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Me too,” Ira said.
I said nothing. I wasn’t proud. I was disgusted. Because I just knew their hope was misplaced. Sandy was gonna yank the football. On all of us. Like he always did.
Later, as Mom and Ira were settling up the bill, Sandy looked at me. “Are you g
onna say anything?”
I shrugged. “You want a medal from me?” I asked. “How many times do we have to do this? How much more debt do we have to go into? How much more misery do you have to put us through?”
“Hopefully, none,” Sandy replied.
“I don’t believe it, and you know what, I don’t care. I’m so tired of this. So sick of waiting for the inevitable. If you’re gonna die, just get it over with already!”
I’d just wished my brother dead, but he barely reacted. Instead, that next morning, he went to the hardware store, the lumber yard, and built his bins. Locked away his precious albums.
“You gotta promise me you won’t let anyone sell them,” he said. And then he handed me the one and only key.
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because you’re the only one who hates me enough to keep the promise,” he replied.
I accepted the key. I sealed the promise.
Five months later, Sandy was dead.
* * *
After the meeting, people gather around Hannah, just like they do at shows, sharing their stories, or telling her how inspiring she was. I watch from the wings, trying to re-inflate myself because I don’t want Hannah to see me flattened.
“It’s always like this with Hannah,” Jax tells me. “Always has been.” They check their phone and smile, and I know it’s a text from Chad but I don’t say anything. “I’m gonna pull an Irish goodbye,” they say. “Tell Hannah I love her and I’ll call her tomorrow.”
Eventually the crowd thins, and the people start to pack up the remaining donuts, empty the coffee samovar, sweep the bits of Styrofoam that litter the floor like chemical snow. Hannah talks to Fran quietly and they hug for a long time before she comes over to me.
“I thought you might bolt,” she says.
“I’m not the bolting type.” I glance at the other addicts. “Just waiting my turn with the groupies. You’re popular.”
“It’s a good room. So, what’d you think?”
“What I always think. That you’re amazing.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“What are you asking?”
She sighs. “I want to know how you feel. About this. About me. About us.”
“I’m in love with you.”
She rocks back from side to side, as if she doesn’t believe it. But I do.
“You’ve known me like a month.”
“So what?” It was a matter of hours between the time Ira picked up Mom and dropped her off, and by then, they both knew. “Time is not a measure of love. You said that yourself,” I remind her. “Feelings aren’t facts.”
She nods, her ponytail bouncing. Then she looks at me, her face so open and vulnerable it makes my heart split open. “I haven’t done this sober. It feels terrifying. Like I’m a newborn. I have to relearn everything.”
“Well, I haven’t done it, period. So we’re in the same boat.”
“Except I’m an addict and you’re not and your brother was and he died of his addiction.”
“That has nothing to do with us.”
“But it does,” she says. “He does. It’s a part of you. And I want to know all the parts of you and for you to know all the parts of me.”
“I can think of better ways for you to know all the parts of me.”
She rolls her eyes but the smile spreading across her face gives her away. “I’m serious.”
“I am too and I promise I will tell you anything you want to know. I am an open book.” I spread my arms wide.
Hannah chuckles. “This is a lot for a first date, isn’t it?”
“So let me get this straight. This is our first date, and before you said we’re in a relationship? Slow your roll, girl.”
But I don’t want to slow anything. I want to catapult into a future with Hannah. I pull her to me and I kiss her. She’s tentative at first, but then she opens to it, opens to me, drawing me closer, running her hands through my hair, gasping. I kiss her back, trying to lose myself in it, in her, trying to banish the ghosts banging around my heart, and almost succeeding.
* * *
Hannah rents a room in a sober house. It’s a drab, ranch-style place with ugly brown siding, but her room feels like a nest. It’s small, with a queen bed, a zillion throw pillows, lights strewn along the frame. On the giant bookshelf—wood, Ike would be pleased to know—books compete for space with records, CDs, and cassette tapes.
Mind you, I don’t notice any of this until the next morning.
“See?” Hannah teases me when we wake up and I go straight to the bookcase. “Books and music can coexist.”
“I’d say last night showed they can do way more than coexist,” I tease, reaching for her again.
She smacks me with a pillow. “Not now. I have to finish a transcription project before noon,” she says. “But that will only take an hour or two.”
“A what?”
“Transcription. Typing up what people say. That’s my job these days. Until I figure out what I want to do when I grow up.”
“You don’t want to make music?”
“I already do make music,” she says. “But making a living from it . . . I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“What are your plans after the transcription?”
“I just have to pack for Arizona.” She smiles. “But other than that I’m free. What about you? Do you have things you need to do?”
A long list of them. Now that selling to Lou’s boss is out, the store is Penny’s. I’ve got to break the news to Ira. And the Lumberjacks. And Chad. Send the bulk buyers the inventory Chad is working on. Put the records in storage. Figure out where Ira and I are going to live. I’d planned to go somewhere sunny but now I’m not so sure I want to be far from Hannah. Or Chad, for that matter.
Hannah’s hair is down, fanning across her shoulders. Her silk kimono keeps slipping, revealing the star-shaped mole on her clavicle that I can’t stop kissing.
There is nowhere else I’d rather be. No one else I’d rather be with. All my problems will be there tomorrow, but for today, there’s this.
I pull at the belt of her robe, bringing her close, kissing her again. “Nothing that can’t wait.”
* * *
I text Ira that I’m going to be away for two days and where he can pick up the car if he needs it, but he tells me not to worry and have fun. And so I turn off my phone and just try to let myself have this.
Because this—Hannah and me cooking omelets side by side in her kitchen—feels like a miracle.
Because this—Hannah and me reading chapters aloud from her old copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—feels like happiness.
Because this—Hannah and me, together—feels like inevitable.
* * *
At the end of the second day, Hannah pulls down a suitcase and starts to pack.
“Stay,” I tell her.
“Trust me, I wish I could.”
“Then don’t go. We’ll make Thanksgiving dinner and eat in bed.”
She kisses me, casually, because that’s what Hannah Crew does now. “Tempting,” she says. “But I have to face the music.”
She pads to her shelf and rifles around; the zigzag scar down her hip from the accident that got her addicted to painkillers peeks out of her robe. When I saw it for the first time, and she told me the full story of the accident, I felt such tenderness, and relief. She is not Sandy. Her addiction was not her own choice.
“I have something for you,” she says. “I made it last night when you were sleeping.” She opens a desk drawer and pulls out a tape. “Old school. Seemed more your vibe.”
“What is it?”
She hands me the cassette. AARON’S PERFECT SONGS? is written in block letters across the spine of the case.
“It’s from the playlist I made you, plus
a few new additions.” She nibbles on her thumbnail. “I told you I wouldn’t rest until I found you a perfect song.”
There’s a part of me that never wants her to find the perfect song because that way Hannah will have to keep looking. And if she has to keep looking, we won’t end.
But there’s another part of me that needs to tell her—prove to her—how meant to be we are.
“You already found me a perfect song,” I say.
“I did?” She lights up. “Which one?”
“Talking Heads, ‘This Must Be the Place.’”
“Really?” Her eyebrow—the one with the scar on it that I now know she got in an ice-skating accident when she was nine—quirks up. “I almost didn’t put that one on. I’m not sure why I did.”
“I am,” I say, pulling her to me. “I knew it from the moment we met.”
“And what did you know?”
“That you and me, we are inevitable.”
The 2010 Rand McNally Road Atlas
Since I’ve never been drunk, I’ve never been hungover, but Chad has explained how it all works. Not just the headaches, or feeling simultaneously ravenously hungry and needing to puke, but the correlation between pleasure and pain.
According to Chad, there’s a direct link between how much you overindulge and how shitty you feel. “It’s like bricks,” he explained to me. “Drink a brick, get hit with two. Drink a dozen bricks, and it’s like a house fell on you.”
The first brick hits as I drop Hannah off at the airport shuttle bus. I won’t see her for five days. Rationally, I know five days is nothing. We’ve known each other barely a month. Have spent all of five days together in that month. But it’s a brick just the same.
The second brick smashes down when I pass the sign at the edge of our town. In one week, we lose the store. And I haven’t told Ira.
