by Liana Maeby
“Wheeeeeere are you taking that?” Mari asked, swaying a little.
“Me and Kristin are gonna go upstairs. Tell us when pizza’s here.”
“You better not steal it all. Leila and I are getting drunk tonight.”
Devon’s eyes darted to the couch, where I was staring with great interest at a melting ice cube in my glass. I looked up from my drink, he nodded at me, and I smiled widely. He laughed a little and turned back to his girl and her smacking Trident. “Whatever. There’s another bottle in the pantry.”
I was quiet for a minute as I replayed Devon’s laugh in my head. I downed the rest of my drink and hobbled over to the counter for more.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You’re so mad. Are you, like, in love with my brother or something?”
“No. Shut up. I’m just drunk.”
“I wonder if he’s gonna do it with that girl. He has before, you know.”
“You’re lying. Devon has had sex?”
“Uh-huh. My stepdad’s niece stayed with us for a little bit, because her mom had some sort of breakdown. And she, like, zoned in on my brother and straight-up stole his virginity. You’re prettier than her, though, so don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I don’t even care.”
“You’re just such a prude, though. How many guys have you even kissed—like three?”
“Yeah.” The answer was two.
“Lemme see your technique.” Mari plopped down next to me on the couch and turned her face toward mine. I giggled but didn’t protest when she leaned forward and stuck her tongue in my mouth. After a few seconds, she pulled away.
“Not bad, but you need to slow down. Relax.”
She kissed me again and swirled her tongue around in my mouth. I concentrated on slowing myself down, letting the alcohol in my body dictate a rhythm. Mari bit my lip with her front teeth, and then I did the same back to her.
“Okay, that was pretty dope,” she said, leaning back onto the couch. “Do the lip thing. Guys love that, because they never expect it.”
I nodded, ready for another lesson, but Mari was done. She turned on the TV and ordered a pizza. We watched shitty reality shows, clapping whenever a hot guy came on the screen and yelling “That’s your boyfriend!” when an unfortunate-looking one appeared. We were both asleep by 10 p.m., drunk baby lambs surrounded by empty glasses and dropped pieces of pepperoni.
The next morning was a catastrophe of pounding headaches and dry mouth. Mari and I downed Advil and swished mouthwash before we ran out the door, already late. But it didn’t matter how hungover I felt—there was a spring in my step and a secret smile on my lips all day. I was a good kisser now, and someone who knew what it felt like to be intoxicated.
I went up to Mari at lunch with an extra can of Diet Coke, and we sat down on the grass. “Okay, I think I’m still drunk,” I said.
“Yeah, me too. Makes History kind of tolerable, at least.”
I nodded. We both felt so over it as we watched all the normal, boring, sober people do all their normal, boring, sober lunchtime activities.
“Hey,” I said, pointing to a guy who was walking swiftly toward the main building. “I bet he would like the lip thing.”
Mari’s mouth dropped open, and she smacked me on the arm, delighted. It was our English teacher, Mr. Shelling, and neither of us would ever get through his class again without looking at each other, biting down on our lips, and cracking up.
FANTASY SEQUENCE:
INT. MARI’S HOUSE – DAY
The room is a mess, with pizza boxes strewn everywhere. LEILA (14, think a young Katharine Hepburn) sits on the couch in a velvet camisole. She sips from a screwdriver.
Across the room, MARI (14, think a young Veronica Lake) mixes herself a drink.
MARI
We could do some shots. That’s what my brother does. He’ll be here soon.
LEILA
Cool. Whatever. I’m up for anything.
The door swings open. DEVON (15, think a young James Dean, or actually, just James Dean) walks in. Behind him is GUM GIRL (15, think a young hippopotamus).
MARI
Hey, bro. We were just about to do some shots.
DEVON
Who’s we? Oh--
Devon swivels his head and catches sight of Leila on the couch. He’s speechless for a moment, but he quickly pulls it together.
DEVON
Great. I could be up for shots.
GUM GIRL
Um, I thought you wanted to play me that record.
DEVON
Yeah. The Velvet Underground and Nico. It’s my favorite.
LEILA
(in a throaty purr)
No way. That’s my favorite record too.
DEVON
Are you serious? It’s got some of the best songs ever, right?
LEILA
Totally. And I just love Nico’s voice.
DEVON
You know what? You kind of sound like Nico. Seriously. Sort of a throaty purr.
Leila laughs. Takes a sip of her screwdriver. Gum girl chews angrily.
MARI
Okay, dweebs. Let’s do shots and then we can all go listen to it.
Mari pours the vodka out into four glasses. Devon and Leila look at each other, and they both smile.
CHAPTER FOUR
My amphetamine habit was a fully formed organism by the time I entered my junior year of high school. It was my main indulgence, and substances like booze and pot were simply things I consumed on weekends to keep up appearances. I pledged daily allegiance to Adderall, thanking the heavens above for inventing this legal kiddy-speed that came in beautiful discs of bright-orange and blue.
A steady supply of pills was shockingly easy to come by—half the kids I went to school with had been diagnosed with ADHD, and they’d sell off their leftovers at the end of the month. I considered faking a concentration problem and scoring a prescription of my own, but that would have involved bringing my parents into things, and I figured out early on that keeping my folks in the dark about every aspect of my life was the best way to ensure I could do whatever I wanted.
I subsidized my habit by stealing my own lunch money. The drug took my appetite right out from under me—a fine problem for a budding teenage girl to have—so I’d forgo sloppy joes from the cafeteria and hand over the cash my folks doled out, receiving a pile of twenty-milligram tablets in exchange. Within months, I was scarfing one pill in the morning to get through the school day, another in the afternoon to bang out my homework, and one more in the evening, just because I’d earned it. School became a breeze for me—my very good academic record soon became spectacular, which made it very easy for me to rationalize my pill consumption. There was no reason to stop, because everything was going so well. Sure, I was lying and stealing to keep my habit subsidized, but such a marvelous and inquisitive student as myself couldn’t possibly have a problem.
The first time I understood that I was an addict, through and through, was the first time I tried to go three days without drugs. I was somewhere around fifty hours sans stimulants when I became convinced my head was actually about to explode, splattering a mixture of Civil War dates and algebra equations and Bob Dylan lyrics onto the wall.
“Leila, did you get the difference between diffusion and osmosis?” A high voice penetrated my skull and echoed back and forth inside my brain. “Something about, like, a membrane barrier?”
It took a minute before I could make sense of the words, but at least I was pretty sure the voice belonged to Chessa. Yes, Chessa was her name, and we were in her bedroom, sitting on overstuffed pink beanbag chairs, surrounded by dozens of ceramic ducks. I forced myself to focus, first zooming in on the venti coffee cup in my hand and then absorbing the nervous look on Chessa’s freckled face. I had the sudden urge to play connect-the-dots across her skin, and was pretty sure I could even find a duck.
“Leila?” Chessa flipped a page in the biology textbook that sat in her lap, and that
’s when things clicked into place. Chessa was my lab partner, and we were inside her cotton-candy bedroom working on our cell membrane project.
“The difference. Right,” I said. “I think it has to do with, like, the angle of refraction. No, wait, that’s a physics word.”
“Hey, are you okay?” Chessa asked. “I mean, you look kind of sick.”
“Can I use your bathroom?”
“For sure,” Chessa said, and pointed to the door at the end of a periwinkle hall.
Inside the Glade-fresh bathroom, I gulped down the rest of my coffee and tossed the cup into the trash. I looked in the mirror and examined the pair of dark circles that had begun to spread aggressively outward from beneath my eyes like they were determined to claim my entire face, turning me into a human bruise. Holy shit, did I feel like death.
With the Grim Reaper hacking at my bones and breathing through my pores, I officially regretted the decision to give my body a break from drugs. My organs felt like barbells, and my brain, a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal. I sat down on the toilet to pee.
“Leila? Leila? Oh my God, are you okay?” It was Chessa’s shrill, electrified voice again, but it came to me through a barrier of fog. “I thought you might be . . . like, dead.”
Chessa was standing over me. I focused on her round face and her plaid headband. I started to count freckles.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “When you didn’t come back, I called your name for a while and then I knocked. But you weren’t answering, so I came in.”
The words washed over me as I grasped at pieces of my brain and tried to organize them into something resembling a concrete thought. Seventeen freckles on her left cheek. Three on the tip of her nose. A sparkling-clean bathroom, the smell of chemical flowers, and me, with my pants down around my ankles. Because I’d fallen asleep on my lab partner’s toilet in the middle of the afternoon.
“It’s okay,” I said to Chessa, who appeared very much like she was about to cry. “I’m just gonna, you know, finish up.”
Chessa left the room. I flushed the toilet and washed my hands and face, letting the cool water diffuse and osmosis into my toxic pores.
“Well, that was weird,” I said, walking back into Chessa’s bedroom. “I guess I must be coming down with something.”
Chessa handed me a glass of ice water, still appearing quite terrified. “The flu’s totally going around,” she said, “so maybe it’s that?”
I nodded, and she pointed to her fluffy pink bed. The sheets were patterned with cartoon ducks. “Do you want to take a nap or something?”
I climbed into Chessa’s bed without even answering, managing to kick off my boots but still wearing a pair of stiff denim pants and a jacket. I fell back to sleep instantly, a deep, dreamless black hole that felt like a magnet wiping out my internal hard drive.
When I woke up hours later, it was dark outside, and Chessa and her mother were standing over me. Chessa’s mom held out a bowl of chicken noodle soup. “You poor thing,” the mother said in a voice even higher than her daughter’s. “We thought you might want some dinner.”
I inhaled a whiff of soup, and something grabbed me from the inside of my stomach. It squeezed and squeezed, and I panicked until I realized: This is hunger. This is what it feels like to be hungry. I took the soup and drained it like I was a wild animal annihilating a fresh kill. “Uh, thanks,” I said.
Chessa’s mom put her hand up to my head. “You feel warm, sweetheart. It’s that darn flu, I bet.”
“Leila, you can totally sleep over if you want,” Chessa said. “Should I call your parents or something?”
“It’s okay. I’ll text them,” I said. I started to type out a message but fell asleep before I pressed “Send.”
In the morning, I felt rested. I checked my phone, and there were ten missed calls from home. I climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom, where I ran into Chessa exiting another room in her pajamas. “Hey, you’re up,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“A little better, I think.” My jacket clung to me, and I must have smelled like roadkill. I wondered if my parents had called the cops, like they did the last time I just forgot to go home. “I guess I should go shower and change before school.”
“Yeah, cool. Well, I’ll see you in class.”
“Shit.” I suddenly remembered. “What about our bio project?”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Chessa said, tugging at her flannel ducks. “I finished it last night. And I called your mom, just in case. She says hi.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Instead of looking at the night with Chessa as a cautionary tale, I came away from the experience fully convinced that it was absolutely necessary to my academic survival for me to be on Adderall all the time. So I redoubled my efforts to make sure that I was high pretty much constantly, which became even easier after I met Griffin—my pseudo-boyfriend for most of junior year, the taker of my virginity, and, most importantly, my introduction to cocaine.
He was a private-school senior with a pair of wily blue eyes, who lived in a huge glassy house in Laurel Canyon, the prize jewel of Los Angeles. The neighborhood is a haven of amber sunshine that melts slowly over the hills, fossilizing the palm trees and million-dollar homes. Sometimes a wind will disrupt the stillness, or a hawk or a Porsche 911, but for the most part it truly is beautiful and serene. What goes on inside those houses is another story altogether.
I practically lived at Griffin’s house during my spring break, drinking lemonade, ashing cigarettes into the infinity pool, and turning down the music whenever Grif’s parents called to check in from the Maldives. One day, he invited some of his private-school buddies over for a barbecue. I walked inside and heard him on the phone, placing an order. “A pack of hamburger buns, a thing of blue cheese. Throw in an onion. And two six-packs of Modelo.”
I shot him a look at the mention of beer.
He smiled. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “And see you soon.”
“Two questions,” I said. “Uno: did you just order beer? And dos: do you actually expect that to work?”
“Oh yeah, it’ll work. I’ve been doing this since I was twelve. Dude at the store isn’t going to drive all the way up here, on these crazy-ass roads, just to bail once he sees I’m underage. Especially if I toss him a nice tip.”
He was completely right, and pretty soon I was floating in the pool with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. When I heard Griffin’s friends drive up, I hopped out, throwing a threadbare Lou Reed T-shirt on over my red bikini top. One of the kids was a Disney Channel heartthrob named Jasper, who pretended to be an orphaned rock star for preteen girls every Monday at 5 p.m. If spiral notebooks and pencil pouches bearing one’s image were a sign a person has made it, then Jasper was a bona fide Hollywood legend. In tow was Jasper’s girlfriend, Jessika, who wore knee-high boots over studded jeans and was a good five years older than her beau.
Jasper ditched more beer and a bottle of champagne on the table. A scrappy half-goateed guy named Toby slimed up behind them, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans.
“I’m so hungry I could eat, like, a meal!” Jessika yelled, bouncing up and down.
Grif came out with a plate of caprese and set it on the table. He jerked his head in my direction, and I folded my legs under me. “Guys, this is Leila.”
“Oh my God, she’s a baby!” Jessika sat down behind me and began braiding my hair. She took the cigarette from my mouth and placed it in her own. “Griffin, she’s adorable.”
I made eye contact with Griffin, and he winked, something I’d seen him practice in front of the mirror like a proper future grown-up asshole. Jasper popped open the bottle of champagne and gulped straight from the lip. “Gift from a Disney exec,” he explained before passing it around.
We ate our hamburgers with arugula, and Griffin’s friends told stories about him—like the time he took his dad’s Emmy in for show-and-tell and lost it (his pop never noticed) and the time he hit
a baseball through the window of Michael Bay’s Hummer (he was grounded for a week). After dinner, we stayed at the table finishing the beer. Toby was curating a playlist on Griffin’s laptop and complaining about the lack of quality hip-hop. Jasper cleared his throat and nodded to Jessika.
“Yo, Grif,” Jasper said. “You got a mirror or a platter or something?”
“Uh, probably. What for?”
“Or just, like, something flat and clean?”
My heart leapt, because I knew what was coming.
“I’ll get it.” Jessika walked into the house and returned with a silver serving tray. She set it on the table and pulled a small bag of powder from her purse.
“Wait,” Griffin said. “Is that—?”
“It’s cocaine, you twat.” Jasper snickered.
“Gift from Mickey Mouse?” I asked, and everyone laughed.
Jasper pulled out his SAG card and cut lines. When the platter was passed to me, I leaned over and snorted the coke in one deft inhalation. The truth was, although my bloodstream had not yet experienced the anarchic flurry of a line of cocaine, I had already become something of an expert at chopping up my Adderall and siphoning the orange powder. It had become my preferred method of ingestion, much to the chagrin of my delicate nasal cavities.
But this stuff was different. Stronger, of course, but also somehow lighter and more joyful. I felt immediately like I was a goddamn god, if we’re being perfectly honest. I was Kate Moss and Tiny Fey all at once, and, well, I fucking so totally loved these friends of Griffin’s. With all my shaky little heart.
We stayed out there snorting for what must have been hours, but felt like seconds and centuries all at once. At some point, one of us wanted more booze, so we all piled into Jasper’s Escalade and went soaring down Mulholland. I was sitting on Griffin’s lap, and I stuck my head out the window to watch the city glitter aggressively down below.
