Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Thank you, Paul,” she says, very sincerely. Over his shoulder Coffee grins like the man on the moon.

  * * *

  Aaron is larger than most of the other kids in the narrow beds of this makeshift hospital ward, but he still looks small to Bird. He snores a little, a high-pitched whistle through his nose, though normally he’s a quiet sleeper.

  “He was coughing,” Nicky said after he got over his surprise at seeing all of them. “One of the doctors gave him something to sleep.”

  So she sits on the scuffed linoleum beside his cot, where half a decade ago two would-be-forever lovers carved RJ luvs Cherry 2008 right beside the horns of the school mascot. She’s never been inside this high school before, and only passed it a few times on her way to Caps games in RFK. Now the gym, originally home of the Eastern Ramblers, hosts over fifty kids exposed to toxic gas.

  “No one’s claimed it yet,” Roosevelt said very confidently on the ride over. “FARC explicitly said they didn’t. The money’s on an Iranian-Venezuelan alliance. But nobody gives a damn anymore if FARC is playing or not. Those oil fields are the real prize. I say we have boots on the ground in a week. Things are about to get very interesting,” he said, and nodded at Paul. Bird could have puked.

  Now, with Roosevelt and Coffee’s lawyer gone, Paul broods on a chair beside Nicky. Coffee sits cross-legged on the floor across from her. She reaches up periodically to stroke Aaron’s hand. He’s fine, that’s what everyone said, but he’s still sleeping in a gym on a cot when he should be at home.

  “Did you tell Mo?” she asks Nicky softly.

  He rubs his eyes. “Can’t get through to anyone on my phone. Sent an email. I haven’t heard back, though.”

  “Wait … I got something weird in my inbox earlier. I didn’t recognize the address, but maybe it was Mo.”

  She fishes her phone from her pocket and scrolls through her messages. The network is down again, but the odd email downloaded to her phone when she checked earlier. The email address looks familiar, but not like any of Mo’s. The subject is blank.

  Did you remember? The writing on the wall? Did it help you? I’m trying, but it’s all fading already.

  “Is it Mo?” Nicky asks.

  She shakes her head and presses the phone screen down against her thigh. Her hands start to tremble and she braces them on the dirty floor. She remembers the email address now. A stupid throwaway account she made in middle school to prank Felice on April Fools’. She knows, though she isn’t sure how, that the email isn’t some weird joke from someone who hacked into an old account.

  That email came from her account because she wrote it.

  And she doesn’t remember a goddamn thing.

  Coffee reaches over; she flinches and he pulls back, uncommonly still.

  “Not Mo,” she says, though the words sound breathy and high-pitched and oddly distanced from her throat. “Some weird spam, that’s all.”

  “Emily …” Paul leaves his chair and squats beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder before she even has time to prepare herself. “I think you need some rest. You look terrible.”

  Nicky looks between Paul and Coffee and sighs. “I’m going to get a Coke,” he says. “You guys want anything?”

  No one does, so he walks off with his hands deep in the pockets of his low black jeans. Coffee watches Paul’s draped arm like it’s a feral hawk. Bird takes a deep breath of gym musk and steam heat and disinfectant.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Oliveira?” Paul asks as soon as Nicky’s gone.

  Coffee flares his nostrils. “Same thing you are, I guess.”

  “Emily is my girlfriend.”

  Maybe it’s the emphasis on her first name that breaks her; the final evidence of Paul’s determination never to see her how she really is, only how he wishes her to be. To him she was Emily, ideal girlfriend, and then Emily, ticket to professional success and guilty responsibility. How he might feel about her underneath all of that signifying was always an open question, but one she now feels isn’t worth answering.

  “Emily is not anyone’s girlfriend.”

  Paul freezes. She pushes his arm off of her shoulder and it falls like a log.

  Coffee looks at her very carefully. “What about Bird?”

  “She isn’t either.”

  “What is this? I’ve been helping you all night! I thought you agreed —”

  When she turns to Paul she’s assaulted by her memory of Aaron right after she cut her hair. You’re always cool, Em. She wants to be that girl, forever.

  “What was in the canteen, Paul?”

  His Adam’s apple bobs up and down, massaging words too stiff to leave his throat. She watches him realize the moment of plausible denial has passed; she watches him know what they both know.

  “So this is it,” he says finally. “A year and a half. Just like that.”

  “I think it’s past time.”

  He nods, which surprises her, even hurts a little. Strange to know that the boy desperate to stay with you doesn’t like you much at all.

  “Roosevelt isn’t going to like it. I warned you about that.”

  “He’ll never make it easy for me. What happened after I got in your car? After you drugged me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you rape me?”

  He falls back against Aaron’s bed. “Did I — Em — what the hell?”

  His shock reassures her. She doesn’t feel that he did, though given the holes in her memory, it’s impossible to be sure. “Did Roosevelt?”

  “Of course not! This is about national security! Not …” His throat works again. “Not whatever you’re thinking, and I don’t know what happened after —”

  This prompts Coffee to break his silence. “Yes you do. And you owe it to her —”

  “I don’t owe either of you anything!”

  He doesn’t quite shout this, but it’s so much louder than their previous whispered conversation that she flinches back. A nearby nurse makes a librarian shush with her finger on her lips. Paul hunches with mortification.

  “I’m leaving.” He lurches to his feet and bumps the foot of Aaron’s bed before he regains his balance and walks away. He wings Nicky by the vending machines.

  Watching him leave, Bird feels triumphant, untethered and free. Then she looks back at Coffee, whose eyes are soft and gray in the low light, and puts a cold hand against her head.

  “Was that a very good idea?” he asks softly. “Practically speaking, I mean. Impractically speaking, it was a glorious moment that I will recall with fondness for the rest of my potentially brief life.”

  “Oh, Coffee.” The headache settles in behind her right eye. “What am I going to do?”

  “We,” he says. “It’s always we. If you want it.”

  Bird is no one’s girlfriend. But his hand is palm up, a priceless offering of comfort on the dirty altar of a gym floor, and she takes it. She falls asleep like that, touching him, her head on the edge of Aaron’s cot, lulled by a chorus of a hundred breaths and the hiss of steam through bulky pipes.

  * * *

  When Bird was eleven years old, her school bus crashed in the middle of a small suburban intersection on the way back home from a field trip.

  Gretchen Borowitz had shiny copper hair that Bird had regarded with unrelieved envy for the entire three years of their acquaintance, and as Bird hung upside down from maroon seat belt straps, it was that hair that she recognized from the bloody wreckage of Gretchen’s body. Gretchen had fallen to the ceiling, which was now the floor, one arm flung across the emergency exit. What was left of her neck spurted blood in increasingly sluggish pulses that soaked the dangling edge of Bird’s new beach towel. The single rope of Gretchen’s ocean-soaked braid fell over her eyes, and Bird stared at it to avoid staring at the rest. The seat belt slowly cut off her air supply, but she didn’t shift it, afraid that if she moved even a fraction she might end up like Gretchen Borowitz, broken and red on the roof of the bus. Red f
or hair, red for blood, red for the seat belt that had saved her life. How could one word mean all of those different things? How could one word separate her from Gretchen, who would have sat beside her if Bird hadn’t made a point to glare and put her wet towel on the empty seat? Her mother said that Gretchen wasn’t a good person to have as a friend; she said that Bird wouldn’t go anywhere unless she learned to pick her associates more carefully. And so, ostracized and shunned, the girl with the beautiful also-red hair sat in the seat that would kill her thirty-five minutes later, much to Carol Bird’s horrified relief.

  Bird passed out two minutes after the crash, a combination of low oxygen and high guilt. For years afterward, she refused to wear so much as a red barrette. “It’s so not my color,” Bird would say, and smile, until even she believed it. When asked about the accident, which left a small but noticeable scar behind her right ear, she would explain about the reckless driver who had fled the country that night and never been caught. Sometimes she would mention the nice woman on the ambulance who had given her a Miss Piggy doll that she still kept in her bedroom. Did she remember the accident? the nosy ones would ask.

  No, Bird answers, every time. One moment I’m talking with my friend about Sailor Moon and the next I’m in the ambulance. I hit my head, I guess that’s why.

  She’s not even lying. There’s a lot that Bird doesn’t remember, and that’s the least of it. She dreams of redheads sometimes, strange nightmares with sea-soaked braids that she purges upon waking. Let’s take a page from Donald Rumsfeld, who cribbed his sheet from Aristotle: There are known knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns. But our Bird is in that saddest category of all: the unknown known.

  Coffee doesn’t speak to her in school, but he doesn’t ignore her. For days after the terrorist attack, she sees him in hallways, between classes, with expressions so eloquent she can hear the half words behind them.

  “He’s doing okay,” she told him the morning after Aaron came home. The doctor said to keep him home for a week just in case. There were worries about his immune function, which made Bird remember that the v-flu doesn’t disappear while NATO ground troops amass on the Colombian–Venezuelan border. He just nodded and went back to jotting strange notes in the margins of his AP Chem textbook. Coffee and his ankle monitor provide juicy enough gossip that even a terrorist attack and a new war can’t quite drown out the titillated whispers.

  Bird ignores them. She ignores almost everyone except Coffee, who won’t speak to her, and Marella, who will. Her painkillers have run out, and though she could ask one of the doctors for another prescription, she hesitates every time in front of the guarded lower school doors. Maybe it’s just the memory of Dr. Granger clutching her side on the chapel steps. Betrayed, Bird is obscurely sure, by the pressure of her position here.

  Sasha Calero Granger. They announced her death in assembly the next morning. Sadly departed, intoned the chaplain, and there were looks at the mention of her home country that made Bird furious. The Thursday after the attack, Bird is back to dreaming in her blinks. She dreams in recursive commentary, of classes taught by different teachers on impenetrable subjects, and so with every painful lurch awake she has to remember which class is the dream, and which is real. In AP Chemistry she dreams that Coffee sits beside her. She dreams that she sleeps now the way she did then, fully, deeply, and without even the residue of unremembered nightmares. He pushes his fingers deep into her roots and tells her that he came back for her sake, and two dreams deep she smiles.

  Mrs. Cunningham shakes her awake after class and cuts short Bird’s apology.

  “Just make sure you review chapter seven,” she says. “You looked too tired to wake.” Mrs. Cunningham has never seemed particularly fond of Bird — favorite student status was inevitably reserved for Coffee — so she’s grateful for this unexpected kindness. Bird rubs her eyes and shoves her books into her backpack. Nearly an hour of sleep. That’s a record since her night beside Aaron’s bed. Coffee is gone — she looks — but just as she’s about to close her bag she notices a piece of green paper sticking out of the top of her notebook.

  TESTING THE C FOR DRUGS. HAVEN’T FOUND ANYTHING YET. DON’T ASK, I’LL LET YOU KNOW. BURN AFTER READING.

  Her stomach lurches even as she crumples the note and shoves it in her pocket. Burn after reading?

  “Who are you, John le Carré?” she mutters. But at least now she’s sure that his silence this past week is strategy, not shunning. She’s been almost sure. Almost.

  She doesn’t smoke, a fact that must have slipped Coffee’s mind, so she settles for ripping the evidence into tiny pieces and tossing them in the cafeteria compost bucket. The rest of the note is even stranger, in its way. They both know that Paul drugged her; he as well as admitted it. Does it really matter how? Still, knowing might give her an edge with Roosevelt. She has no doubts about who gave Paul the motive and means.

  After school, she’s tempted to race back to Nicky’s like she has every other day this week. Aaron is passing the time at home cataloging every album and CD in their grandparents’ collection, and he likes to play her his special finds in the evening. But she knows that he’s scheduled to go back to school on Monday, and the prospect terrifies her. Her only plan to do something about it involves Trevor’s mother, and she has been reluctant to engage that particular hornet’s nest for most of the week. After everything that’s happened, her fear of requesting a prescription or of asking Trevor about his mother baffles her. Shouldn’t life-altering events make you less afraid of the little stuff? But it’s the little stuff that paralyzes her: talking, eating, dressing, sleeping. Everyone in school is afraid of the apocalypse; she is afraid of living through it.

  She finds Marella the second place she looks, reading a book in the fiction room of the upper school library. Marella smiles to see Bird — a looking glass expression or a miracle. Most of their lives, Marella has regarded Bird with pained indulgence. But now Bird has won the friendship she had given up hoping for. Some things change for the better, they always do, that’s just physics.

  “I need a favor,” Bird says as Marella cracks the spine and lays the book flat on the table. Nikki Giovanni, collected poems.

  “Is it illegal?” Marella flips her braid over her shoulder and quickly plaits the unraveling end. She looks calm as ever, but Bird can tell she wants her to say yes.

  Bird smiles. “Moral support. Could you come with me to Bradley? I need to talk to Trevor about something.”

  “Trevor? Don’t tell me you’ve joined the line.”

  “The line? Oh, you mean the girls who like him.” Felice has come closest as his date to the prom last year, but it never went anywhere afterward. This sparked the nearest thing Felice and Charlotte ever had to a fight, but in the end Charlotte backed down. It wasn’t Felice’s fault she was gorgeous and outgoing, Charlotte told Bird.

  “You don’t, then?”

  “My love life is complicated enough without Trevor Robinson, thanks.”

  Marella laughs and snaps her fingers. “Thank God for fugitive dealers. Not that I’d get it anyway, but you’d think it would be a little more obvious to those girls that he ain’t never gonna be interested.”

  Marella watches her carefully as she says this. Bird puts it together. “You think he’s gay?” Pam Robinson is one of the most socially conservative democrats in the Senate. She even voted for DOMA.

  Marella shrugs. “I think he’s been redecorating his closet for the last four years, sure, but I’ve never actually seen him with a guy. And hey, what do I know? I’m probably just some bitter dyke. Sarah sent a breakup text yesterday. Like I hadn’t already figured that one out.”

  “Oh shit, Mar. I’m sorry. A text?”

  “What are you gonna do? I’d say I’m looking forward to college girls, but who knows if we’ll make it to college.” Marella bites her lip, a gesture so uncharacteristic that Bird can only stand awkwardly and wonder what to say. “So,” Marella says after a moment, “what did yo
u want to talk to Trevor about?”

  “His mom,” she says.

  Marella doesn’t even ask, just squeezes her elbow and leads the way out of the library. They go to the boys’ side and hang out by the circle. With the new regs, only authorized vehicles are allowed on the roads. The Metro and buses are a clogged mess, a perfect petri dish of potential v-flu transmission, but apparently the government is more worried about car bombs than the pandemic. The school has chartered buses to take students back to certain neighborhoods, but the fact is that staying home or sleeping at school has started to look more reasonable than shuttling back and forth. But apparently senators are still allowed to drive, and Trevor has gotten curbside service the last few days. It was Marella’s idea to wait for him here, and they shiver on a bench while blue-blazered boys on their way inside give them curious stares.

  “You know they’re going to think you’re gay if you keep hanging with me,” Marella says after three guys in their class start punching one another and laughing as soon as they pass.

  Bird flips her middle finger at their backs. “Guys are assholes.”

  “Just guys?”

  Bird sighs. “Not just guys. You’ll get to college, Marella. We’ll get to college.”

  Marella wipes her eyes and leans forward until her forehead rests, warm and dry, on Bird’s. “Promise?” she whispers. Her voice shakes.

  “Promise.”

  A moment later Marella sits up and points. “That must be the ride.” A tan Mercedes with tinted windows pulls around the cul-de-sac and idles in front of the entrance, puffing clouds of white smoke that drift in their direction. Trevor glances at them when he walks out, then shakes his head.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Marella asks.

  “I’m good. You should have time to catch the last bus.”

  “Tell me how it went.”

  Bird waves at Trevor before he can open the car door. His frown deepens as she approaches, which surprises her. He’s always been friendly enough, if distant.