South on Highland: A Novel

by Liana Maeby

  Lulu’s and my little game of pharmaceutical fencing came to a head one night at a party held on the last night of Thanksgiving break. Mari bailed at the last minute to go drop acid at Disneyland with her new boyfriend, so I arrived at the grand Spanish colonial house all by my lonesome. I was halfway across the dining room when my eyes landed on Lulu—once again, she had beaten me there. She appeared to be somewhat integrated into the crowd, but I could tell she still had a bit of mingling to do before she could make her way up to the bathroom without drawing suspicion.

  “Leila, hey!”

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and spun around to see a beblazered guy named Carter, looking bloated from his first few months of college.

  “Wow, it’s good to see you.” I gave him a hug, and we walked over to the beverage table. “How’s Brown?”

  “Brown’s okay,” Carter said, sucking a Sam Adams. “I was kind of expecting a little more stimulation, you know? But everyone’s more into beer than Baudrillard.”

  “Maybe you just haven’t found your crowd. Look for a guy in a black turtleneck and crack a joke—if he laughs, run in the other direction.”

  “Don’t mock me, Massey. This is going to be you in just one short year. Unless you’ve already landed yourself an honorary PhD. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Is a PhD that thing that gets you out of living in dorms? If so, sign me up.”

  Lulu had slowly edged her way to the bottom of the stairs. She was getting pretty close to the point where she’d be able to casually turn and float up them, undeterred by her pointy-toed lace-up boots. But she wasn’t quite there yet. She still had to sufficiently bore a skinny twerp in a popped collar into fumbling for an excuse and bailing on their conversation.

  As for me, I was going to have to pull a move a bit more drastic from my arsenal of shithead tactics.

  I’d never had much of a taste for vodka, but this wasn’t the time to turn all liquor connoisseur. While Carter rambled on about the intricacies of Ivy League dining halls, I poured myself a splash of Absolut topped off with a full helping of cranberry juice. I slowly spread my stance wider so as to make myself more in the way, nodding at Carter’s culinary pontifications all the while. “Nothing but french fries for lunch does sound brutal,” I said.

  When a girl in a Guns N’ Roses tee squeezed herself in half to get by me, I made my move. I turned hard into Carter and tilted my cup, splashing the drink down my own dress.

  “Shit,” I yelled, making sure to call all of the room’s attention to myself.

  “Oh my God. Did I do that to you?” Carter interrupted his speech on Rhode Island’s paucity of fake meat products to worry over his role in my brand-new stain.

  “No—it’s okay,” I said, yanking a paper towel and gesturing upstairs. “I’m just gonna clean up . . .”

  Before I darted off, my eyes locked with Carter’s for just a second, and I saw how genuinely awful he felt—which in turn did a number on my own conscience. But it wasn’t the time for such concerns.

  I wasted no time sweeping right past Lulu—whose mouth dropped open when she saw me—and dashing up the stairs. I heard a snippet of her conversation with the human popped collar as I passed: “My uncle set up a meeting with Russell Simmons’s personal assistant. So I’ve just got to impress that guy with my beats and—”

  A click, like entry into heaven. I locked the bathroom door and ran both faucets, creating a little symphony of splashes. Then I wiggled open the medicine cabinet and took inventory: toothpaste; dental picks; unopened Bayer aspirin; hemorrhoid cream; a bottle of Percocet, fairly recent; and one of Vicodin, expired. I emptied all but two of the Vics into an old Advil bottle I’d brought along, figuring that if they were expired, no one would miss them. I stole only half the Percocets, because my application for sainthood was still pending.

  I closed the medicine cabinet and caught sight of my reflection in its mirrored door. The cranberry juice had seeped into the fibers of my gray shirtdress, pooling into a big red stain around my heart. With a little finessing I could sell the look to a boutique on Melrose.

  I splashed some water onto my shirt and shut off the faucet. Making my way back down the stairs, I affected my best long-suffering-young-woman-surrounded-by-cavemen look. The added bonus to this little maneuver was that I didn’t even have to stay for the rest of the party. I could beg off, citing wardrobe catastrophe, and head home for some desperately needed drugged-up shut-eye. I darted through the crowd, waving quick good-byes to a few friends. Carter ran up and grabbed my hand. “I feel like such a jerk,” he said. “Let me take you to dinner to make up for it. There’s a new vegan place on Sunset.”

  My gaze somersaulted downward to spotlight the stain on my dress.

  “Here,” Carter said, shedding his blazer. “You can wear my jacket.”

  “Seriously, it’s not a big deal at all. But I am kind of sticky, so I should go bathe myself. We’ll do something while you’re in town though, yeah?”

  Carter nodded, looking mildly crushed, and I breezed out the front door and up the block. I was almost at my car when I heard a shrill, floaty voice calling out to me. “Bitch.”

  I ignored it and kept walking.

  “Hey, bitch, wait up.”

  I turned and saw Lulu walking over to me, as fast as she could muster. She was breathing heavily. “Leila, right?”

  “Hi, Lulu.”

  “That was a nice move you pulled back there,” she squeaked, and I saw desperation in her eyes. Here was a new, up-close Lulu, flesh and blood and not quite the hazy dead-flower child I encountered on verandas in the Valley. “But now you’re gonna hand over what you took.”

  I laughed. Are you serious, you little nut job? But she was, as it turned out, entirely too serious. Lulu opened her hand and revealed a small silver switchblade. She flipped it open and pointed it right at me. “Like I said, Leila. You’re going to give me what you took.”

  The situation was surreal. It was unnerving, of course, but also bizarrely hilarious to watch this tiny polka dot of a teenage rich girl threaten me with a knife that had probably belonged to one of the Stone Temple Pilots. I doubted she’d use it, but I couldn’t be sure—the panic in her irises was all too vivid. “Give. Me. What. You. Got.”

  A few kids stumbled out onto the street, drunk from the party, but they were too busy trying to stay upright to notice me and Lulu. I heard one of them slur, “Nah, we’ll have to go through the Valley. DUI checkpoints are all over the Hollywood side of Mulholland.”

  Lulu didn’t turn around; she just continued to point her little knife into the air.

  “Okay, okay,” I started, watching the tiny girl carefully, but not quite willing to abandon my goal of a good night’s rest. “Look, I understand. You really want your pills. And so do I. Put the knife down, and I’ll give you half of what I grabbed. Okay?”

  Lulu kept the knife aimed in my direction. Her whole frail-little-bird body was shaking. Then she nodded and lowered the blade. I slowly pulled the Advil bottle from my bag and emptied half the bounty into my hand. I transferred the pills into Lulu’s palm, which was ice-cold and a whiter-than-white shade of pale. She popped a couple and looked at me.

  “You, uh, want a ride or something?” I asked. Lulu shook her head and pointed to a light-pink bicycle with skull-patterned streamers on the handles and a dirty, eyeless teddy bear in the basket.

  From that point on, Lulu and I worked out an arrangement. Without ever speaking again, every time we were at the same house party, one of us would slip half her score to the other. We went on like that for the rest of the year, handshaking Percocets across a throng of clueless teenagers, until Lulu gradually faded away from the scene. I left too, but the invisible ink she’d been pumping into her veins took hold first. I heard rumors Lulu had made good at rehab, but I could have sworn I saw her with her hand inside a junkie musician’s pants in a hotel room in Vegas half a decade later, as thin as ever in that same tattered dress.

  CHAPTER
NINE

  There wasn’t anything about the idea of attending my senior prom that appealed to me—pastel gowns, group dances, smiling—but I got talked into it by Jasper, the Disney star pal of my ex-fling Griffin. He and Jessika had broken up (picnic, threesome), and Jasper started hounding me to hang out.

  Jasper had recently moved on from the late-afternoon world of Disney shows to the early-night universe of CW shows. He starred as Hunter Hunt on Hunter’s Point, a coming-of-age tale about a New York City rich kid who’s sent off to live with his grandmother in Hunter, Maine. The production was gearing up to shoot its prom episode, and Jasper was suddenly hit by a wave of remorse that he’d never been able to attend his own high-school galas, three years earlier. So he called me up. “Leila, important question: Would you like to go to your prom with me?”

  “Hell no,” I replied before asking if he had any coke.

  But Jasper persisted, and I finally broke down, telling him I’d take him to the dance on the condition that he find another handsome young television star to be Mari’s date, as she’d just been dumped midway through a bad mushroom trip at Magic Mountain. He snapped up Cullen Cuse, a blond former model who played a teen ghost on a different CW hour-long, and the four of us set off to experience an American tradition.

  Our prom was held at the Gene Autry museum in Burbank, a weird little tribute venue to the late Singing Cowboy. I’ll admit I was vaguely excited by the prospect of a Western-themed dance. However, the brilliant teenage minds of the event committee decided that the motif should be “One Night in Paris” instead. So bronze stallions were replaced with cardboard cutouts of the Eiffel Tower, American Indians were given berets, and we were served a dinner of rock-solid steak frites.

  Nevertheless, my gang arrived in style. Jasper rented a limo for the four of us, and we spread out in the back, armed with bottles of Dom Pérignon and mountains of cocaine. By the time we hit the freeway, Mari was in Cullen’s lap, playing with his blond locks and grilling him. “So, okay,” she said. “You’re a ghost, but other people can see you?”

  “Yeah, but just other teenagers. No adults. So, like, the teachers? I don’t exist for them.”

  “Then why do you go to school?”

  “Because I like it, I guess? I mean, what else would I do all day?”

  “I don’t know—live in a castle and haunt people?”

  “There’s not a lot of room for episode arcs in a castle, baby.”

  Jasper was snapping photos of us with a throwaway camera he’d picked up at Rite-Aid. Instead of the standard prom photos posed in parents’ backyards, our memories were to be of drinking and groping in the backseat of a rented vehicle. The camera’s flash went off in my eyes just as I was swilling straight from a bottle of Dom.

  Instead of parking in the lot like the yellow flyer of prom rules dictated (no alcohol, obscene attire, or using the dance as an excuse to neglect those term papers, dang it), Jasper had our rent-a-chauffeur drop us right in front of the museum. It was as if we were arriving at a ball thrown in our very honor, and Jasper was so excited he momentarily stopped complaining that I’d forgotten to get him a boutonniere. I stepped out of the car wearing a lacy black corset-top gown and a pair of three-inch heels. Mari was more demure, in a cherry-red minidress accented by the world’s most convincing push-up bra. Our fellows were suited up in designer tuxes, and their hair was perfectly coiffed around their pretty TV faces.

  “Good luck trying to play a ghost here,” Mari told Cullen as the boys were swarmed by a flock of starstruck teenage girls.

  “Will you sign my corsage?” one of them screeched. “What about my retainer?”

  After a couple of minutes spent watching our dates scramble, Mari and I rescued them, and we made our way through the doors of the museum. Fake streetlamps and paper stars transformed the room into a kindergartner’s sketch of the Rue de la Paix. Incongruous reggaeton played to a cluster of dressed-up bodies swaying on the dance floor. The pimply teens of third-period AP Biology were out en masse, transformed by silk and chiffon for one night only.

  “I need a pick-me-up,” I said to Jasper. He grabbed my hand and spun me around, transferring his vial of cocaine into my palm.

  The evening passed in a blur of trips to the bathroom, trips to sneak cigarettes with Mari, and trips to steal my date away from CW fans who wanted him to autograph various body parts. Late into the night, Jasper finally succeeded in luring me in for a slow dance. Nothing physical had ever happened between us, but with his hand on the small of my back and our feet stepping in time to Green Day’s most lethargic effort, I felt like tonight was probably our chance to take advantage of all that French romance in the air. “You having fun?” I asked, and in response, Jasper twirled me around and around.

  There was an after-party at a hotel downtown, but we had other plans. Jasper had booked the penthouse at the Roosevelt Hotel, and the four of us headed over, buzzing on the hyperreality of the night. More champagne waited inside, along with a dozen long-stemmed roses. “Planning on making this a prom to remember?” I teased Jasper, pushing him playfully.

  “Oui, oui, mademoiselle,” he replied.

  We popped open the bottle of booze, spread out what was left of our blow, and turned on the radio. Mari and Cullen were waltzing around the room in imitation of the goons who’d just sullied the dance floor of the Autry museum. I plopped down on the bed and burned eye contact into Jasper. He started toward me but was intercepted by a sky-high Cullen, who was looping around in circles and wiping white residue from his nose. “Aren’t we supposed to play, like, spin the bottle or something?” Cullen asked.

  “Dude, there are only four of us,” Jasper said.

  “What about truth or dare?”

  “I’m in,” I said, pouring a glass of champagne and sitting down on the floor next to Mari.

  “Okay then, Leila,” Jasper said as we formed a circle on the carpet. “Truth or dare?”

  “Truth, motherfucker.”

  “Have you ever made a sex tape?”

  “No idea.”

  “Come on.”

  “Seriously, I can’t remember. Probably? Maybe one time with Griffin—he was really into photography.”

  “That’s a bullshit answer.” Jasper sighed. “But it’s your turn.”

  “Cullen, pick your poison.”

  “The manly choice is obviously ‘dare.’”

  “I dare you to make out with Jasper.”

  Cullen hesitated for only a second before yanking Jasper’s head toward him and shoving his tongue down the other actor’s throat. When they pulled back a few seconds later, Mari and I treated them to a round of applause.

  “You’re a pretty good kisser, Cull,” Jasper said. “But I think that should count as my turn too.”

  I leaned over Jasper to inhale a line of blow. “Fine. Ask away.”

  “Mari,” Jasper said, turning toward the beauty in the red dress sitting to his right. “Truth . . . or dare?”

  “I know you’re totally gonna ask me and Leila to kiss, and I want to torture you,” she said, spreading cocaine along her gums. “So truth.”

  “First fuck?” Jasper asked, grinning slyly at Mari. She tensed up suddenly. She shrugged, as if to say I don’t remember.

  “What’s wrong with the memories on you chicks?” Cullen asked. “Do you both have early-onset Alzheimer’s?”

  “Come on,” Jasper prodded. “You have to know who took your virginity.”

  “I was drunk,” Mari replied.

  “Wait—I know that story,” I said. “You seriously don’t remember?”

  “You tell it then.”

  “Mari got down with this kid Hamilton who lives around the corner. She was, like, fifteen, and he was a ginger. Remember now?”

  Mari nodded and took a swill from the bottle of Dom.

  “No, no,” Jasper said, stopping her. “That’s not right, is it, Mari?”

  “Oh shit,” Cullen chimed in. “Mari has a dirty secret.”


  “Well, come on then, out with it. Rules are rules. Who was the lucky fella who got to mar Mari?”

  “My stepfather.”

  Jasper and Cullen laughed, sure she was joking.

  “When I was fourteen.”

  They shut up abruptly, realizing she wasn’t.

  “It wasn’t like, you know . . . I mean, it was consensual.”

  I looked at Mari, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. A heavy silence descended over our circle, spotlighting the Iggy Pop song playing from the stereo. Here was my best friend in the world, the person ostensibly closer to me than anyone, and it turns out I didn’t know the most basic thing about her. I’d been too concerned with pills and dusts and test scores to bother with actual human beings.

  I went out to the balcony to smoke a cigarette. A minute later Mari joined me, yanking an American Spirit from the pack in my hand.

  “Hey,” she said. “Are you mad I didn’t tell you?”

  “Nah, I just feel like a jerk. If you thought you couldn’t, or whatever.”

  “It’s just weird, you know?”

  I lit Mari’s cigarette, and she inhaled for what seemed like minutes. Then she released the smoke from her lungs, and we both watched it escape in one tight puff that slowly disseminated outward and upward toward the stars.

  I wrapped my arms around her. “Hey, Mari? Remember that day you had to pick me up at the donut shop? How come you never asked me about that?”

  “You said you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Can I talk about it now?”

  “Of course.”

  Mari and I sat down on the balcony, turning our chairs so they faced each other. I told her about Blake, about him breaking his sobriety by downing drink after drink, and then about the meth. Mari just listened. The poker face she’d been perfecting for years didn’t betray whether she was surprised by the story, and I didn’t have much to say about it other than a revelation of the stark, brutal facts. Still, I felt marginally better after putting it out there, realizing that sharing a story is one way to make the pain it bears start to disappear. It was a lesson I’d learn over and over again, as I’d amass different versions of the same agonizing experience for years to come.