by Erica Boyce
The doctor glanced between her and her mom.
“It’s just, you hear all these stories,” she faltered. The beetle took that as its cue and started rattling off all the things that could go wrong and probably would one day. Lacey pushed her fingers into her closed eyes and wished for the bat.
The doctor shrugged. “Suit yourself. You can try something over-the-counter, but you should let us know if that’s not working for you. These things can be pretty painful. Don’t suffer in silence, okay?”
A week later, she was suffering all right. But it wasn’t entirely her knee’s fault. She sat on the couch in Amanda’s basement, her crutches propped up against the coffee table. She was wedged between Amanda and her other best friend, Chloe. Their boyfriends, Derek and Mike, bookended the couch. There was some sort of superhero movie on TV. Though the volume was cranked all the way up, the crashing cars and tumbling buildings did little to drown out the sucking of Amanda’s and Derek’s mouths and Chloe’s laughter as Mike reached one arm over her shoulders and whispered something in her ear.
Amanda’s elbow jabbed into her arm like Lacey wasn’t even there, and Lacey bit back tears. What had happened to the days when they would share bags of gummy bears and potato chips and walk to the playground after midnight? In a few short months, they’d be off to different colleges and might never hang out anymore. Even after everything they’d been through together. The people who loved her by choice and not because they had to, gone. Hell, they were gone already. The beetle told her so. She suddenly felt impossibly old.
The crutches didn’t help. She stood gingerly, finding places to push off against the couch that weren’t already occupied by various limbs and hands. She picked up the crutches and stuck them in her armpits where they dug into the bruises that had bloomed there over the past week. She turned to say she was going to get a soda, but nobody looked up.
By the time she’d climbed the stairs, putting more weight on the bannister than it was ever intended to bear, she was out of breath and her knee was twinging. The Advil she’d taken that morning had worn off. Soda excuse forgotten, she collapsed into the living room couch. Spikes of pain drove their way up her thigh. She was about to prop her foot on a side table when Amanda’s mom appeared.
“Lacey!” she said. “How’s it going down there? Does my daughter still have all her clothes on?” She cackled and sat down in an armchair.
Lacey felt her cheeks warm, and she lowered her foot back down and slid forward to the edge of the cushion.
“Hi, Mrs. Warner,” she said. “I was just going to grab a drink.”
“Oh, no, sit, honey. And please, for the millionth time, it’s Nicole.” Mrs. Warner stood, grunting, and walked toward the kitchen. “You getting excited for graduation? I hear you got into Brown, Miss Smarty-Pants.”
Lacey picked at a hangnail until it stung. “Yeah, thanks. Not sure how I snuck under their radar.” She wanted it to sound casual and jokey, but it came out pathetic.
“Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Warner said, handing her a can of Coke.
Lacey hated Coke, but the can was a relief, cool against her sweaty palms.
“With your grades, I’m sure they couldn’t send the acceptance fast enough.”
Lacey pressed the can to her knee and held back a wince. Ice packs worked better, but this would do.
Mrs. Warner glanced down at it and frowned. “How’s that injury doing? ACL, right?”
“Right.” She took the can away. “It hurts,” she said, too tired to lie. “Four weeks of PT left. Hopefully I’ll be able to walk without crutches soon.”
Mrs. Warner tapped her chin, a pantomime of thought. “I might have something that could help you with that.” She reached for the overstuffed pocketbook on the table behind her, her sweater lifting to reveal a band of flesh. “Yup, here we go. Strong stuff right here.” She shook a prescription bottle and handed it over.
Lacey eyed the pills.
“Don’t worry. It’s perfectly safe,” Mrs. Warner said. “Brian got them for his wisdom tooth removal, and I took them from him so he wouldn’t try to sell ’em. But I know I can trust you. Just don’t take them all at once.” She cackled again.
Lacey held the bottle between her fingertips. She thought of Officer MacArthur and of her mother’s face, more serious than she’d ever seen it. Downstairs, Amanda and Chloe shrieked with laughter. She didn’t need the beetle to tell her they hadn’t noticed she was gone. She shifted in her seat just a little, and it was like someone had taken her leg above and below her knee and wrung it out.
Fuck it. She wrenched the bottle open, shook a single pill into her palm, and flung it into her mouth.
“You can keep the whole bottle,” Mrs. Warner said. She stood and dropped her pocketbook back on the table. “Have fun down there.” She grinned and walked toward the kitchen, tapping Lacey’s shoulder as she passed.
Lacey did her best not to shrink away.
She walked down to the basement, hoisting herself against the bannister again, and sat in the exact same spot as before.
“Hey, why didn’t you tell me you were getting that? I’m so fuckin’ thirsty,” Derek said, grinning mischievously at Amanda, who giggled and buried her head in his neck.
“Oh. Sorry.” Lacey pulled the Coke can out of her sweatshirt pocket, where it’d been poking out. She’d completely forgotten about it. “Here.” She handed it to Derek.
“Thanks. You’re the best.” He cracked the can and gulped it down, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down beneath the raw, stubbled skin of his throat.
Lacey looked away and heaved her foot up onto the coffee table.
Within an hour, the superhero on the TV had saved the world and her knee no longer hurt. She felt she could get up and dance on it when she realized the beetle was silent. In fact, when she prodded at the back of her mind, she realized it was gone. She no longer cared what the others thought or did or what they thought of her. It no longer mattered to her that Amanda and Chloe were being assholes, that she hadn’t started studying for finals yet, or that who-knows-what chemicals were being pumped through her body that very minute. It wasn’t like she always thought it would be: a sharp hit to her system and she was somebody else. Her body slipped into it easily, naturally, like this was how she was always supposed to be. She felt curiously warm and safer than she’d ever been. She felt gloriously, sparklingly fine.
Later that night, after Chloe had dropped her back home, she had looked it up online and learned the drug she had taken was specifically built to match up with a receptor in her brain and cook up euphoria. The website was written in an ominous tone, but for once in her life, Lacey was not afraid. She saw it so clearly. This was the puzzle piece she’d been missing. This was the manhole cover she could slide neatly into place and keep the beetle out forever.
* * *
A few weeks later, she left class to go to the bathroom and instead found herself shoving through the big doors to the back of the building. She leaned against the sun-warmed brick and closed her eyes, pulling in the cool, clean air. Seagulls wheeled and screeched overhead.
Her knee was throbbing. She’d gone without her pill that morning to show herself she could. She’d tucked the bottle into her backpack, just in case.
She pulled the bottle from her pocket and unscrewed the lid. She could see the bottom of the bottle now—only a few pills left. Her hands rattled like she was starving. She tried not to worry about it, shaking one out into her palm.
“You know you’re doing that wrong.” The voice came from her right, in the shadow cast by a basketball hoop.
She swallowed hard around the pill, a dry lump in her throat, and shoved the bottle back into her pocket, coughing. “Doing what—I mean—what?” It was impossible to tell who it was or what he’d seen until he finally stepped into the light.
Matt Duvry. He held a cigarette pinched
between his thumb and his middle finger, casually, as though it’d always been there. Lacey knew better. She remembered digging holes on the beach with him when they were kids, the sand achingly cold beneath their fingers. When they were in fifth grade, their teacher had set up big sheets of paper around the room, each one labeled with a classmate’s name, and told them all to go around and write a compliment for each person. “I like your laugh,” he had written on Lacey’s in his small, distinctive handwriting. For weeks afterward, she would study each giggle, muffling it in the dip of her palm until it no longer sounded like her own.
“You’re supposed to smoke it,” he said. His light-blond hair fell over his forehead as he nodded at the bottle that wasn’t there anymore. “That’ll give you a better high. Or you could shoot it up if you’re really hardcore.” One side of his mouth hitched up a little.
“I’m not. It’s not. No.” Lacey frowned, frustrated, and focused on stringing a sentence together. Stupid Matt. Since when did he leave her tongue-tied? And who did he think he was? Hadn’t he heard about her injury? “They’re for my knee,” she managed and pointed at the offending joint. She’d been holding it out at an unwieldy angle to avoid putting any weight on it.
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and flicked his cigarette away.
Was he trying to look cool? It was hard to tell, but she held her breath as he walked back to the building.
If her life had been a movie, he would’ve met her eye every time she and Amanda walked by after that. He would’ve smiled slightly from over his friends’ shoulders, and she would look away quickly, a little thrilled and a little terrified by what she’d seen there. Maybe she would’ve tossed her hair over her shoulder, and Amanda would’ve asked her what she was grinning about. Maybe he would’ve called her by a nickname, like “Hardcore” or “Knee,” something unoriginal and exciting.
But what really happened was Matt more or less went back to ignoring her. He was busy with his buddies when she walked by after school.
“Come on. Hurry up. I want to finish my homework before Derek comes over,” Amanda whined, and Lacey ducked her head down until they reached Amanda’s car.
What really happened was she ran out of pills.
And she was fine, she was. But by the following morning, she could barely hear her mom’s coffee-fueled chatter over the buzzing in her bones. In her English class, she stared down at a question about Macbeth on the AP practice exam until the letters swirled together. She asked to go to the bathroom, where she locked the door behind her and vomited in the toilet until her face was covered in clammy sweat. By the time she got home, every part of her ached. And the beetle was back and bigger than before.
She dropped her backpack at the base of the stairs. “Mom, I forgot one of my books in my locker. I’m gonna go get it.”
“Okay, sweetie,” her mom called from the dining room. “Want me to drive you? I don’t want you to mess up your knee again. It’s doing so well.” Her voice grew closer as she walked toward Lacey.
“No, it’s fine.” Lacey spun back toward the door. “It’s a short walk, and I need the fresh air.” Her chest twinged with the lie, but she could barely feel it over everything else.
As she expected, Matt and his friends were still in their spot near the school. The others were sprawled out over boulders and laughing noisily. He was perched on a log, scowling as he scrolled through his phone. He didn’t look up when she stood over him.
“Hi, Matt,” she whispered. She kicked the log next to his leg, dislodging chunks of bark. “Hey,” she said again, louder.
He glanced up, then scrambled to his feet in a way that almost made her smile. “Oh, hi, Lacey.” He put his phone away.
She braced herself for the taunts from his friends, asking what he was doing talking to the nerd, but they were largely oblivious.
“Um, listen,” she said, her gaze sliding away from him. “Do you have any…any painkillers?”
He didn’t pretend not to know what she was talking about, and she was grateful for that. He peered into her face. “Are you sure about this?”
“Please,” she whispered. As if on cue, her arms began to shake a little bit.
He reached out to grab her shoulder. The bald intimacy of it made her shake harder. “Hey, hey, okay,” he said. “Follow me.”
And she did.
* * *
It happened quickly after that. He taught her how to break the pills into chunks on the center console of his car, cradle the chunks with small pieces of foil, and brush the flame of a lighter under it. He kept a stash of McDonald’s straws in his car to inhale the smoke. She hesitated, and he touched her back lightly, gently. “It’ll help you feel better,” he said.
He was right. After the initial coughing pain, the medicine swept through her brain and cleared it out, filling the holes like it always did, but in seconds, not hours, and her muscles finally unclenched and her bones felt whole again and her head fell back against the headrest.
She knew, vaguely, that there were places she could get the pills for herself. She heard rumors over the years about this parent or that senior-year dropout. But she was afraid to do it alone, afraid of the swiftness with which it took her. This was no slow slide. This was a quicker mercy. So the next morning, she woke before her alarm and left a note for her mom on the kitchen table saying she had to go work on a group project. And she walked to school and waited for Matt. This time, she slipped a couple of curled-up bills she still had left from her babysitting across the center console. He pocketed them without a word.
She spent the rest of the day drifting above it all. At lunchtime, when she saw Derek and Mike sitting with Amanda and Chloe, she kept walking, straight through the doors and outside. She ate on the curb of the parking lot with her plastic tray balanced on her knees and fingers of sunlight combing through her hair. When she and Amanda walked by Matt’s group on their way to Amanda’s car, Lacey stopped and told Amanda she’d see her later.
“Wait, what?” Amanda said to her back. “What are you doing with them? The fuck?”
It had been a few hours, and the beetle was starting to break through. Lacey quickened her steps.
He was waiting for her this time, spinning the tie of his hoodie between his fingers.
On the fifth day, after he’d taken the money but before he’d brought out the pills, she leaned over and kissed him. It was a quick, dry kiss, almost in passing. She wasn’t even sure why she’d done it. The beetle, which had been silent for days, woke up as Matt’s eyes widened.
But then he smiled. “Let’s try that again,” he said and took her face in his hands, and they did.
She spent as much time with him as she could. Even when he was with his friends, she was there, too, high or not. Unlike Chloe and Amanda, they never asked her questions she couldn’t answer that made the beetle’s legs twitch. They just let her be. They might’ve even thought of her as one of their own. At the senior bonfire, they cheered when she found them lounging at the outskirts of the party. One of them, Nick, lent her his jacket when she shivered. His whole head blushed when she thanked him. She tried not to stare at the ugly, knobby sores in the soft creases of his elbows that showed when he pulled the jacket off. He hurried to roll down the sleeves of his T-shirt. He shot heroin sometimes. No needles, she thought to herself. Never needles.
Her mom took her prom dress shopping at the local thrift store. “Diane told me there are deals here you wouldn’t believe,” Maureen said as she held the store door open for her. “Girls buy the most beautiful dresses and wear them once, then sell them for college spending money.”
Lacey nodded. Her mom’s face fell. She was starting to worry, Lacey could tell. Lacey had been losing weight, and it was getting too warm to hide it under baggy clothes. She tried to start conversations over dinner and breakfast, scrambling for warm, innocuous topics to assure her mom that everything was fine
. But her mind was empty, a hollow whoosh.
Her mom pulled her over to the dresses and began pulling length after length of jewel-toned fabric from the racks. Her smile was so hopeful that Lacey’s chest hurt, and all she could do was smile in return. This was where her mom belonged: in colors and laughter.
The dressing room was dusty and empty. The harsh yellow light hurt Lacey’s head. The first dress she tried on was a red halter top in shiny, garish fabric. It bagged around her hips and breasts, but her mom’s eyes lit up when she walked out in it.
“Oh, I can’t believe you’re trying on prom dresses. It seems like yesterday I was elbow-deep in poopy diapers.”
Lacey mustered an eye roll.
Her mom stepped toward the mirror with her and laid one hand on the triangle of her shoulder blade. “Lacey,” she said, and Lacey felt herself squirm. “Are you okay? You seem so sad lately. Do you want to see a doctor or something?”
Lacey took a half step away and adjusted the strap of her dress. “I’m fine. I’ve been thinking about getting a job, actually. At Dunkin Donuts. Just to distract me from the stress of college starting soon, you know?” She met her mom’s eye in the mirror. She needed more money and an excuse to get out of the house, especially once she graduated and summer started. A few months ago, the beetle would’ve screeched at her ingratitude for lying to the one person who always loved her. Now, the beetle was silent. The pills kept it muffled. Lacey raised her chin.
“I’m so proud of you,” her mom whispered, and Lacey felt it like a punch.
They ended up picking a deep-green, glitter-dusted number that ended at her knees. “It looks so lovely with your skin tone,” her mom said.
Before the pills, Lacey would’ve followed up with something like “Yeah, it’s hard to find colors that go well with a shade shy of marshmallow,” but now, she just nodded.
She had to admit her mom was right, though, as she studied herself in the rearview mirror of the limo Chloe had rented. The color made her alive. Chloe and Amanda pulled their boyfriends to the dance floor as soon as they got to the gym. Lacey poured herself a cup of punch from a table half-assedly decorated with purple streamers and sat at their assigned dinner table.