Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Because you’re the most interesting asshole I’ve ever met?”

  He takes a step closer to her, and she stares up at him. His angular face shows the marks of exhaustion as surely as hers must: messy hair, purple bruises beneath red eyes. He traces her jaw with long fingers, the pads red and rough enough to tickle her. She shivers and closes her eyes.

  “I can’t tell you what you are to me,” he whispers, and presses something smooth and cool into her left hand.

  By the time she opens her eyes again he’s heading in the opposite direction, flipping a pen between his fingers and then high in the air, a magician of nervous energy and inveterate paranoia. She watches until she can’t see him anymore, and then she opens the note.

  WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING. MEET ME IN FRONT OF LOWER SCHOOL AFTER CLASSES. YOU CAN BRING AARON, BUT THIS NEEDS TO LOOK LIKE A DATE. BURN AFTER READING — CHECK YOUR POCKET.

  It feels like magic when she reaches down and pulls out the battered metal lighter that she’s seen him use hundreds of times. He must have slipped it there when he touched her face.

  She laughs. The cold-dry skin on her bottom lip cracks with the spread of her grin. She tosses the lighter in the air, fumbles on the catch, and crouches to pick it from the mulch.

  “You’re a lunatic,” she says to the burning paper, lighting it close to the earth.

  “Pretty sure fire starting is against the honor code,” a voice says.

  She jerks, loses her balance, and sprawls on the ground. Roosevelt adjusts the lapels of his gray blazer. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says. “On my way to a meeting.”

  She glances down, where the last of the paper has curled into ember and ash. He follows her gaze and offers a hand. She stands on her own.

  “Here,” he says, and his hand is still out and something is in it. A pin: red, white, and blue, with the words Only you can protect the homeland. If you see something, tell an authority. He drops it into her open palm before she can snatch it away. Grease refracts a muddy rainbow from its plastic casing, and something sick rises in her throat as she remembers her father’s warning.

  “I’ve got one in Spanish if you’d like to give it to your new boyfriend.”

  She lets it fall to the mulch, in the ashes of Coffee’s letter, and smashes it under the heel of her boot. “He speaks Portuguese. And he’s not my boyfriend.”

  He smiles softly. “Paul told me otherwise. You picked wrong, you know.”

  “What the hell can you do about it?” It’s bravado and it’s desperation, straight from her shaking hands to her cracking voice. If her father won’t give her a straight answer, then she can ask the man himself.

  The smile stays, but it strains. “Well, Emily, your parents have been cooperating, but you …”

  “What about me?”

  His hands twitch, and for a moment she’s afraid that he’ll grab her again. He seemed so contained at the Robinsons’ party, in control of every gesture, every veiled threat. But something is fraying him, just like he’s been fraying her. He has unraveled a little more each time they meet. And even though these glimpses of his anger frighten her, they also convince her she’s doing something right. Only a threat could get under his skin like that, only a girl he never expected to have any power.

  “You’re a bit tricky, Bird,” he says. “It’s my job to make sure our operations here go smoothly. And my superiors are concerned you might interfere with that.”

  “And how exactly could I do that, Roosevelt?” She emphasizes his name, to let him know that she noticed what he called her. She hates the sound of that nickname in his mouth.

  He laughs softly. “It depends, doesn’t it? On what you think you remember about that night. Wish me luck at my meeting. If you think you don’t like me, just wait till you meet my bosses.”

  “Why would I meet them?”

  “Remember that Russian spy? Someone passed him on the street, pricked him with a needle, and just like that” — he snaps his fingers — “he was gone.” He nods at her dry terror. “Be seeing you, I hope.”

  He’s an actual nightmare, a specter come out of the deep dream to walk the Earth. He trails horror like ichor, he shines his boots with insecurity and doubt. He is a hollow man, and he will suck her dry if he can. Don’t give Roosevelt David a reason to suspect her? He already does, Dad.

  She picks herself up. She goes to school — which is to say, she fights.

  * * *

  Coffee looks sexy in his rubber smock and safety goggles, like a cover model for Mad Scientist magazine with his dirty blond curls tousled in that bedhead look she wishes she could believe he intended. In fact, she’s pretty sure he has no idea how much she’s always ogled him here in his pun-intended element. Even back when she was in almost-love with Paul, she couldn’t help but notice the nutty genius in AP Chemistry.

  To watch him now is to feel her lead turned halfway to gold, to feel special and chosen and in unspeakable danger. He titrates a solution over a burner, each movement as careful and precise as a surgeon rearranging a heart. He doesn’t glance at her, he doesn’t speak to her; he mixes his chemicals with an ecclesiastic intensity that doesn’t so much contrast with his normal jitters as explain them.

  She and Coffee are alone in the chem lab. Aaron wasted no time introducing himself to the music teacher and wanted to spend some time with the instruments. Coffee said he needed help catching up on his chemistry coursework and took her here, blithely unconcerned about the unlikeliness of this cover story. Coffee could teach AP Chemistry, and everyone in the class knows it.

  “What are you testing for?” she asks when he turns off the burner.

  He glances up, startled at her existence. “The concentration of thiocyanate iron in an aqueous solution.”

  “That was our lab two weeks ago.”

  “When I was sadly absent from class due to a momentary lapse in judgment that I deeply regret. It’s hard to truly appreciate central heating until you sleep next to the Potomac River in November.”

  He pushes his goggles onto his forehead. “So, are you going to help me?”

  “Come on, Coffee, you can titrate a solution in your sleep.”

  He gives her a lopsided grin. “But then I couldn’t do it with you.”

  He never flirts with her like that, like he’s having fun and doesn’t quite mean it. “Coffee, what the —”

  He shakes his head once and lifts his pants leg. The ankle monitor. She hops off a lab stool and crosses over to him.

  “Don’t be paranoid,” she whispers, so close to the ridged curve of his ear that his hair slides through the Vaseline on her lips.

  “Don’t be naive,” he says, though it’s more the feel of his mouth and skin that conveys his meaning than the words, subvocalized.

  She now understands the strange wording of his note: This needs to look like a date. She frowns.

  “What,” she says at normal volume, “I’ll let you find my molar mass if you let me change your polarity?”

  He bursts out laughing. “You’ve already done it, baby.” She freezes at the sound of his happiness, unable to tell if he’s mocking her or flirting or just appreciating the absurdity of their situation. That he might be stating the truth is a possibility she does not entertain.

  He pulls off his gloves and fiddles with his open laptop. Heavy breathing and lip suction fill the silence of the room as he turns the computer in her direction.

  This way they won’t suspect we’re doing anything useful, are the words typed on the screen.

  She stares at the words and then back at Coffee, who looks remarkably smug. The sounds coming from the computer make her face feel warm, so she turns away and gets her notebook and a pencil.

  If you’re going to be paranoid, what about keyloggers?

  His eyes get wide. He takes her pencil.

  I FIGURED OUT WHAT THEY USED IN THE CANTEEN.

  Where’s that secret lab of yours, anyway? Here?

  NEED TO KNOW BASIS, B. I HA
VE SOME FRIENDS. ANYWAY, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW OR NOT?

  Lay it on me, Q.

  Q?

  Dude, if you’re going to play superspy, you at least ought to familiarize yourself with the genre.

  He takes the pencil from her fingers before she can quite finish the last word.

  IF YOU THINK I’M PLAYING, I SHOULD HAVE GONE TO BRASILIA. THIS ANKLE MONITOR IS A JOKE?

  He’s pissed, but the lip smacking and grunting is making it hard for her to focus on higher-order emotions like empathy and contrition.

  And Debbie Does Dallas is some serious business, huh?

  He snorts.

  IT’S A COVER STORY!

  Cause it’s so im

  The pencil tip snaps and she tosses it on the ground in frustration. He glares at her and picks it up. They are separated by less than an inch, and so she gives up the game and leans in. “That you might want to?” she whispers.

  His hands smell like rubber and isopropyl alcohol, and they touch the pencil instead of her.

  THE BEST COVER STORIES ARE THE MOST PLAUSIBLE, EMILY BIRD.

  She catches her breath in time with the sound track. His look might be an invitation, but she doesn’t take it. Desire and fear are mutually insoluble compounds after all.

  What did they give me? she writes.

  In response he writes out a chemical reaction, a long chain of molecules reacting with other molecules in a sequence that looks like the most complicated problems for further research at the end of their textbook.

  And then, at the very end: I’VE NEVER SEEN THIS ONE BEFORE, BUT I’M 99% SURE. IT LOOKS LIKE IT WOULD BE SIMILAR TO GHB. BUT IT WOULD BE HARD TO SYNTHESIZE EXCEPT IN VERY WELL-EQUIPPED LABS.

  GHB? The date rape drug?

  He lets his fingers twine through hers as he takes the pencil, and nods very slightly. IT’S A DISSOCIATIVE. PEOPLE USE IT FOR LOTS OF STUFF, BUT WHEN IT’S GIVEN TO SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE GETTING? NOT GOOD. IT CAN CAUSE SHORT-TERM MEMORY LOSS. THIS ONE MIGHT BE EVEN STRONGER — THERE’S NO REAL WAY TO TELL WITHOUT TRYING IT MYSELF, BUT … THERE’S A REASON WHY YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT.

  He offers her the pencil and she stares at his clean, blunt-cut fingernails with fascinated incomprehension. The make-out track starts its second loop — she remembers that breathy female gasp and stifled giggle, and wonders if Coffee’s imaginary eavesdroppers will notice. She remembers lots of things about that night, she would tell him if she could. She remembers what he said about her and how much it hurt. She remembers wishing that she’d broken up with Paul. But she doesn’t remember what matters. She doesn’t remember what Roosevelt did to her, and she doesn’t remember what she did after. Is it possible that those memories still exist in some dusty gyre of white matter, and all she needs to unlock them is a key? Everything is a drug, Coffee taught her that. Some are legal and some are illegal, some your brain makes on its own, and some your doctor dispenses in orange bottles, but it’s all brain chemistry in the end.

  “Bird?” Coffee’s whisper is light, but the worry behind it brings her back to herself. She picks up the pencil and writes, very carefully:

  If a drug can make me lose memories, could another bring them back?

  His foot starts its restless beat on the chemical-stained linoleum. The skin wrinkles between his eyebrows, an expression too familiar on that malleable, kinetic face. She doesn’t understand it when he rips the paper from her notebook. He takes two ground-eating strides to his computer and some growling, thrashing death metal replaces the make-out session.

  “I’m not some pusher, Bird,” he says, just soft enough that she has to strain to hear him over the music.

  “You’re a dealer. That’s the actual definition.”

  He grimaces. “Not anymore, and besides, I never did it like that. You’re not the drug type.”

  “Who is the drug type? I need something to help me remember.”

  “What if there’s nothing to remember? You’re … Bird, I can still see the scar from your stitches. You want to toss some extra chemicals in there, just to see what happens? If I give you a nervous breakdown, I think your mother will personally assassinate me.”

  “If anyone’s going to give me a nervous breakdown, it’s Roosevelt David. It’s like he thinks I could become the next Deep Throat.”

  “If you could be, if that’s the scale of whatever he thinks you know … damn. Deep Throat destroyed Nixon. If some CIA agents could have stopped him before he ever leaked to Woodward, don’t you think they’d have gone pretty far? Do you really want to get in the middle of that?”

  “Can you help me or not?”

  He closes his eyes, revealing the tracery of blue veins beneath pink skin. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Didn’t you tell me about peeling back the layers of self with pharmacological tools, or whatever?”

  “They’re not a universal tool.”

  “What? I’m not strong enough?”

  He swallows. “Maybe I’m not.”

  “Coffee?”

  “I’ll look around. Do some research. If we do it, we do this slow, controlled. And in the meantime, we try to do something else about Roosevelt. Maybe you won’t have to remember.”

  She hugs him, because this is enough of an excuse to feel the ridges of his ribs and spine and his collarbone against her forehead. One day she will have to admit what this means, the feeling that gets stronger every time she’s around him.

  But not today.

  * * *

  Hell is loving your parents.

  This is my well-substantiated hypothesis, based on years of building walls and plugging holes with passing bullets. (I do all the work around here.)

  If Bird didn’t love her parents, she could hate them cleanly, purely, dispassionately. She could coldly tolerate her mother and pity her father; she could wait to leave and when she did she could never think about them again.

  But she loves her parents, and so she recalibrates.

  She loves her mother when she says, “You are too much like Nicky not to work harder than you do. You have to fight your worst tendencies.”

  She loves her mother when she sighs to see a pair of Bs on Bird’s report card and says, “Even Monique gets better grades. If you won’t apply yourself, I swear I won’t help you any more than I help Nicky. I won’t enable your addiction to mediocrity.”

  And when Bird, thirteen years old and panicking, decides to talk back (“I’m not Uncle Nicky, I’m your daughter! Why can’t you even look at me without seeing someone else? What the hell is wrong with you?”), she loves the mother whose answer will be an unstitched wound for many years after they have both tried to forget.

  “Greg,” says her mother, calm as frost, “you need to discipline your daughter.”

  Her father looks up from the television. “Uh, go to your room —”

  “You know what I mean, Greg! Don’t fool with me. I’m not in the mood.”

  “She’s thirteen,” Greg says cautiously.

  Carol Bird just glares. He clears his throat. “Emily, uh, I think you have to come here.”

  She can’t believe it even as she approaches him; she watches her parents in a haze of terror and anticipated pain. She has forgotten that Felice and her father should arrive any minute to pick her up for a sleepover. She has forgotten everything but the resignation on her father’s face.

  Something flashes beneath her mother’s calm righteousness when Bird unbuttons her pants. Satisfaction maybe, but Carol turns away before Bird can tell for sure.

  Pants around her ankles, she lies across her father’s lap — a position that recalls a long gallery of punishment and acceptance, and nothing of comfort.

  Above her head, they discuss her. Carol asks for twenty. Greg agrees to fifteen. Greg starts. Bird cries immediately and immeasurably, with choking, snot-filled gales. Greg pauses. The sting amplifies in anticipation of the next falling hand.

  “Carol, this is enough. Look, they’re pulling up now
—”

  “Finish it!” Her heels click away on the living room floor. Greg finishes it.

  Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says after each one, but she doesn’t beg him to stop. No matter how often her mother compares her to Nicky, she is their true daughter. She knows that nothing will make them stop.

  Her snot has fallen from her nose in a long, beautiful filament weighted like a pendulum at the end. She can feel the pull on her septum as it hangs in the air below her overturned forehead, mucus glittering in the glow of the television, jerking with each spank.

  Thirteen. Fourteen.

  “Oh my God.”

  Bird turns her head. The motion finally snaps the delicate thread, and the mucus breaks against her face and the floor. Through a curtain of wet hair, she sees Felice down the hall, her hand over her mouth. Felice’s father desperately tugs her to the door. Bird’s mother stands against the wall, arms crossed. Her lips are pressed tight, and at last Bird recognizes the sentiment bubbling beneath the coldness her mother prefers to express: fury.

  Fifteen.

  “Get up,” he says, not without gentleness.

  She falls to her knees. By the time she looks up again, Felice and her dad have gone.

  Her mother leans over her. “You do not talk back to me, Emily. Not ever. I am your mother, and you will respect me.”

  “You let Felice …”

  Her mother raises her eyebrows. “You’ll never learn any lessons without an incentive, that much is clear. If your friends are the only thing important to you, I’ll use your friends. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Greg turns up the volume on the television.

  Later that night, he knocks on her door. She winces when she sees him standing stiffly in the hallway. Her hands clench.

  “Emily, your mother … she had a hard life. The kind of life you and I can’t always understand. It’s not that she doesn’t love you. It’s that she’s tough, and she wants you to be too.”

  Bird just stares. Greg leans forward on his toes and then pulls a pen from his pocket. She recognizes it immediately: the gold-inlaid fountain pen her father keeps in his bureau drawer, the one he only fills to sign special contracts.