Love & Other Carnivorous Plants

by Florence Gonsalves

  I blink at her. “Well, does she know you were at St. John’s?”

  Bugg shuffles her keys from one hand to the other.

  “No, but we’re acquaintances, not best friends for life.”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “Is that what you call someone you sell drugs to?”

  “I do not sell drugs! I give a couple of people weed, and if they feel so inclined they give me money for it.”

  “Exactly.”

  Bugg’s watch starts beeping, and she looks down at it. “Twenty-two hundred hours,” she says, then looks up at me as if I’m supposed to know what that means. “You coming?”

  “I’d kind of planned on lying down upstairs and letting these nachos work their way through my digestive system for the next eight to ten hours.”

  Bugg gives me a look and I go a little unconscious.

  “Danny, it’s twenty-two hundred hours on a summer night in your nineteenth year.” She opens the door into all the possibilities of the night. “You can’t squander your youth digesting.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “All you have to do is deliver the package,” Bugg says. “Do you think you can do that?”

  We’re in her car, a Volkswagen convertible from when cars were really old. My legs start sticking to the seats and I feel a serious case of swass (formally known as sweaty-ass) coming on. I put my seat belt on for ultimate safety. “Uh, what kind of package? This isn’t some drug thing, is it? ’Cause I’m cool and all but the kind of cool that doesn’t do drugs.”

  “I’m starting to think it was a bad idea to let you in on my side business,” Bugg says, playing with the radio tuner, but it all comes in as static.

  “It’s not a bad idea, just a felony.” I look out the window. Either because we’re driving fast or I’m drunk, the streetlights blend into the house lights, making it hard to say what’s what. Luckily sometimes you can find comfort in the blur.

  “So are you in or not?” she asks indifferently.

  It’s not like I dream of spending the next few years in juvie, but for no apparent reason, I say, “I’m in.”

  We cross the town line and stop at a pizza place. She leaves the car running and hops out. “Stay here. This’ll only take a minute.” Sure enough she comes back in about sixty seconds with a pizza box and a pack of M&M’s. “Take this.”

  “Uh…” The pizza is hot in my lap, and the smell, despite how full I am, is one that makes me believe in a cheesy God.

  “Open the M&M’s and use them to spell out the word ‘thanks’ on top of the pizza,” she says, and I do as I’m told, even though I haven’t washed my hands since I can’t remember when. “And don’t use any yellow ones. She hates the yellow ones.”

  “Can I ask—”

  “No.” She laughs and turns down a street, parking between two houses. She reaches into the back seat and hands me a Papa John’s polo. “Here, put this on.”

  “Where did you get that?” I ask, licking my finger after I put the last M&M in place. I’m no artist, but it looks pretty good, if I do say so myself.

  She ignores me entirely and puts her finger against the window. “See that house up there? I need you to ring the doorbell, make small talk with the girl with short blue hair for as long as possible, then walk up to the top of the street and I’ll pick you up. Any questions?” I’m about to open my mouth when she says, “Good. Ready. Set. Break.”

  We open the car doors and get out quickly. The Papa John’s polo is almost as long as my smock, and I think it’s fair to say I look ridiculous. I walk up to the doorbell with my heart racing and pizza in hand, wondering what it is that I’ve gotten myself into. My anxiety is exacerbated when from the corner of my eye, I see Bugg run through the side of the yard and disappear around the house. I ring the doorbell once, then a second time. Finally, I hear footsteps and the girl with short blue hair appears.

  “I didn’t order a pizza.” She’s opened the door enough to fit her face through, and I try not to look like a deer in the headlights. Bugg in no way prepared me for this.

  “It’s complimentary,” I say, the lie coming out surprisingly easy, or maybe not so surprising, considering my propensity for the nontruth. “Every month we choose someone at random from our list of delivery contacts.”

  “I’m a vegan now,” she says and the porch light above me is so bright I wonder how long it will take my forehead to start perspiring.

  “Oh really? Me too!” Except for the nachos I just ate. “Well, I’ve been trying for, like, eight months, ever since I took this class about nutrition and animal rights, but it’s harder than it seems.” She must sense that my excitement is genuine because she opens the door fully. “But I’m sure that starting tomorrow my willpower will be stronger than cheese power, which honestly rivals solar power.”

  She gives me a half smile. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. You have a shit job for trying to go vegan.” She reaches into her pocket to hand me a few dollars, which makes me feel like a pile of dog doo.

  “No, no, I get paid plenty by the hour. Thanks, though.” I hand her the pizza and avoid her tip. I’m about to sprint off when I remember that Bugg said to stall. “We’re, uh, trying to rally to join the union, raise the minimum wage, have equal pay for women, and stuff, so it’d be a break in values to accept tips.”

  “Well, good luck with that.” She has as much hopefulness in her voice as I have for my personal future. “The patriarchy’s a bitch.”

  As the door slams I walk away quickly, hoping that she doesn’t open it again before I’ve disappeared. When I see Bugg’s headlights up ahead, I start running.

  “Woooooooo!” she hoots as I open the door and get in, sweaty and panting. “Mission accomplished!” She smacks my knee a little too hard and I try to steady my hands.

  “What exactly did we accomplish?” I ask, taking the stiff shirt off and throwing it into the back seat.

  “This is good shit, Danny. GOOD SHIT,” she yells out the window, then reaches into the console and pulls out a small pipe shaped like a dragon.

  “But what is it?”

  “Um, only my good luck charm, which my ex-girlfriend stole from me, then refused to give back when I was released from St. John’s. I’ve been destitute without it.”

  My heart hops to the right at the word “girlfriend” and I let all of that sink in. “Wait, am I enabling you?”

  She snorts. “Danny, relax. Weed is basically better for you than Tylenol. But I wasn’t in treatment for smoking weed. You helped out a friend is all.” She looks over at me with a smile on her face that makes the magnetism in the car nearly sickening. That, or the tequila has finally caught up with me.

  We get back to Sara’s and Bugg thanks me for my help. By the sound of it, the party got on fine without me and Bugg doesn’t seem to need me anymore, so I start walking toward the house, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

  “Hey, Danny,” she calls.

  Calm down, I tell my heart because it can’t be healthy for a pulse to accelerate so quickly. (On the plus side, I might get my cardio in every time she says my name.) When I’m ready to turn around I’m really not ready to turn around. Her chin is leaning against the car window and she looks beautiful, in an objective way.

  “Do you want to come to the poetry thing Sara mentioned on Thursday?”

  I tug at my smock and try not to look too much at her. Even though I haven’t agreed to anything, she scribbles something on a piece of rolling paper and holds it out to me. “Meet me at this address at one o’clock on Thursday.” It dances a little in the wind, slips from her fingers, and starts to blow away.

  I chase it down the driveway and step on it. “What should I—” I start, because obviously I’m incapable of saying no, not to her or to Sara or to anybody, but she’s already backing out of the driveway. She sticks her hand out the window, I guess as a sort of good-bye.

  The second her car disappears I feel the dullness of the regular world and count the hours lef
t in the four days before I see her next.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “You can touch it,” she says.

  “Okay.” My heart is beating fast because I’m kind of into it, and not like I’m into peanut butter Twix bars. I’m into it. I reach my hand out and touch her long red hair. It slips like silk through my fingers and I get the chills. I’m about to lean in and smell it, which is probably creepy, when she starts yelling, “Danny! What the hell are you doing? I need you to hold my hair back, not scalp me.”

  I blink my eyes open and try to figure out where I am. Then it all comes into focus—the pink walls, the death grip I have on Sara’s ponytail.

  “Oh, it’s you.” I’m too sleepy to be embarrassed, though I’m sure that’ll come soon enough.

  “Well, yeah, who did you think it was?”

  I rub my eyes. The tequila is definitely to blame, but it’s still not a good look to wake up stroking your best friend’s head. I manufacture a lie.

  “My mom. I dreamed that, uh, she was sick. And I was taking care of her.”

  “I’m the one who’s sick.” She holds up her trash can full of pink and orange vomit. “I thought you heard me puking and were consoling me. God, I’m hungover.”

  I sit up, feeling the solid brick of guilt and dairy in my stomach, which is reason number a million why finally committing to veganism today is imperative. At the rate I’m digesting, I’ll be lucky to poop before I’m twenty.

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure the pool people will be able to clean the puke out of it.”

  “I threw up in the pool?” Sara props herself up on one of her twenty useless decorative pillows.

  “Oops. I thought you remembered.” I pull the sheet over my head to avoid the smell of vomit and try to wish the hangover away.

  “I don’t remember much past seeing you in the kitchen.” She sounds totally unfazed by this, which is good, because I have enough anxiety about it for the two of us.

  I’ve only blacked out once, and once was enough for me: I seemed totally functional, albeit louder and stupider, but then I started broadcasting my secrets to anyone who would listen—including my college roommates, who then told my dean, and then, well, the rest is history.

  “So you met Bugg through yoga class?” I ask casually, my voice slightly muffled by the sheet.

  “Mhm. My coach recommended it. She’s a cool girl. Definitely a little weird, like one time she asked me seriously if I believe in fairies, but something about her reminds me of you. I’m glad you got to meet because we’re totally going to hang out all the time now.”

  I’d rather feed on live mice for the next few months than hang out with the two of them together, but it’s impossible to dissuade Sara once she has an idea. And I do want to hang out with Bugg, not because the dream meant anything, but because maybe it would be good to talk—not necessarily about treatment, but about something.

  “Are you okay?” I ask Sara, and I almost add, because it seems like you’re drinking a lot, and since when do you smoke weed? but then I remind myself that everyone in college drinks this much and also probably smokes weed. I was the only one who seemed to hate both things, which then got me dubbed Fun Suck on Campus. Not that anyone ever called me that, but sometimes I can read minds.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Sara says, and I wish I could see her face, but that would require me to emerge from the safety of the covers. “My sorority sisters taught me a great hangover cure.”

  “Cool.”

  I hope I don’t sound jealous because I’m not jealous. I am lying in bed with the sheet over my head because that’s what my highest self would do.

  When my mom gets home from work that night she’s very concerned about whether I’m readjusting to civilian life okay. I wondered the same thing about her when she realized that being an aging hippie wasn’t going to sustain her emotionally or monetarily so she went back to school to be a real-estate agent. It’s still funny to see her in slacks and blazers when she used to wear ripped overalls and two long braids, but I guess at some point we all have to grow up.

  “How are you, sweetie? How was your party?” she asks, adjusting her watch on her wrist. I hate that she looks so concerned. It’s definitely the worst part about all this. It was easy to say college was dandy via text, but I lost a lot of credibility when I could only use the hospital phone.

  “Fine and fine,” I say, with semiforced chipperness. Even though it’s nearly dinnertime, I’m still a little woozy, either from last night’s tequila or the Bugg interaction or both.

  “Glad to hear it. Also, this came for you in the mail.”

  She hands me a thick envelope and I roll my eyes. It’s from You-Know-Where.

  “What did they do, put this together and send it before I even left? What bastards,” I say, throwing it down on the counter.

  “They’re dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s, sweetie. Honestly, we paid too much money for them not to.”

  I grip the counter for support, but still the guilt seems to pulse from the marble. I feel lousy enough for spending the last half of spring semester at the equivalent of a well-decorated loony bin, far from the Ivy League college where my parents dropped me off. Is it also necessary to know that my subpar coping mechanisms cost them their next three vacations?

  “I’ll deal with it tomorrow. Right now I have to start looking for med-school-worthy internships. I’m going to apply to at least fifteen between today and tomorrow, and also I’m going to a poetry class later this week.” The last thing I need is for my parents to think I’m becoming a blob in addition to a screwup.

  “Oh, how wonderful! I didn’t know you like poetry.” She starts getting stuff out of the refrigerator for dinner, a meal I hope she doesn’t think I’m partaking in.

  “I don’t like poetry.”

  “Then why are you going?”

  Unfortunately I can’t give her a good answer, at least not one I’d want to admit to her or myself. The only time I’ve been interested in artsy-fartsy stuff was when Bugg passed me poems on a series of dirty napkins during our riveting time in treatment. Not that that says anything about poetry. It was so boring in there that I often painted my nails just to watch them dry.

  I give my mother a knowing look. “Life begins outside your comfort zone,” I tell her, which is something they loved to say in treatment.

  My poor mother, though, never realizes when I’m being an asshole, so she takes her blazer off, freeing her arms to hug me harder. “It’ll keep your brain well greased for when you go back to Harvard in the fall,” she says, pulling away to peer into a Styrofoam container of leftover grossness. “Do you know how lucky you are to be there? Thousands of kids would kill for your experience.”

  “No kidding.” I almost add that I feel like I’m killing myself to have it too, but that seems like an unnecessary contribution to an otherwise sunny conversation.

  As I’m about to excuse myself on account of needing to chew my fingernails down to stubs, a carpenter ant comes out of the woodwork and my mom slams her palm down on it. “I’m so proud of you,” she says, flicking it into the trash.

  I smile, even though my insides are recoiling. It’s not that she could’ve used a paper towel to do her murdering, it’s that “proud” isn’t remotely close to the adjective I’d use to describe myself.

  Later that night I start half-heartedly filling out an application to volunteer at the local hospital. I can answer my age and education fine, but I feel like a fraud saying I’m capable of having someone else’s life in my hands; I can hardly keep my own life in my hands.

  I give up a few minutes later and lie in bed with my journal out. Technically my journal is a diary, but I can’t call it that because it’s bad for my image. Journaling was one of the activities You-Know-Where mandated I do to glue my soul back together, but I’ve come to find out I like it a lot, mostly because of the unlined pages. As a recovering Goody Two-shoes, it feels so deliciously wrong to write anywhere I want on the page
that I often consider becoming a full-time badass instead of a full-time life saver or however doctors refer to themselves. I have the journal divided into two sections: other people’s poetry and personal entries. The poetry section is labeled with sticky notes that say things like “Look here if your soul is as empty as Walmart the night before Christmas,” or “Read me if you’re feeling as worthwhile as a recyclable bag of flaming dog shit.” Then below the sticky note is some work of sheer poetic brilliance (passed along to me by Bugg because I hate poetry) that I’ve hand-copied, word for word. I don’t type any of the poems or print them off the Internet because that’s cheating. I don’t know why it’s cheating, but I’m certain it is.

  Today I flip to my personal entries mostly because I want to see what I wrote about Bugg. I tighten my ponytail and prepare to be thoroughly embarrassed as I read the section labeled “The Dark Ages”:

  4/23(In the Bathroom by the Dining Hall):

  You’d think that upon damning me to eating disorder rehab my dean would mention something about the social hierarchy in places like this—like, say, I don’t know, THAT THERE IS ONE. The cliques here are worse than middle school, high school, and college combined. If you don’t fall into the right one by day ten, you’re screwed out of the good activities. And if you don’t fall into one at all, you can flush away your chances of a normal, healthy life altogether (pun not intended). Whatever. If Sara were here, she’d stage a rebellion and become Queen Bee herself, then I could be her faithful sidekick. If I learned anything in college, it’s that a sidekick is pretty useless without its mainkick. Hypothesis: If we’d stayed true to The Plan, I wouldn’t be in this predicament. Also, do you know that every meal tastes like it was meant for somebody’s cat? No vegan options (I’ll have to resume veganism when I’m out) and I have to eat it all in a certain amount of time and then they watch me after. Like I’m going to vom in a public bathroom. Please.