Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “A handkerchief?” she says, taking it back from him. “Have the preppies finally converted you?”

  Coffee grins and leans against the beanbag. “Sometimes the best defense is blending in.”

  “You?” She wipes her face again and tries to discreetly blow her nose.

  “Too late, huh?”

  She taps his ankle monitor, which the bunched sweatpants let her see clearly for the first time. “I’d say so.”

  He nods, but he’s looking at her in that way he has, like she’s a volatile chemical in one of his experiments. “For both of us.”

  She wonders, suddenly, if ironic accident has branded the leg that led to his first, seminal addiction. From genius chemist to busted dealer in twelve easy steps. She wondered earlier if he regretted his library confession, if his absence when she woke signaled embarrassment or something more complicated.

  But she should never have doubted him: With Coffee, everything is something more complicated.

  “Do you have a trial date yet?”

  Coffee winces. “Tired of me already?”

  “Oh, come on, you know —”

  “Bao is trying to get it dismissed. I’m hoping for continued court delays.”

  He looks so tired. She wishes she could touch him, draw down his head and shoulders until she feels his lungs expand against her stomach, his breath tickle her collarbone with sweet, soft exhales. She wants to gift him with sleep and comfort, to make him need her as much as she needs him. She wants to be safe with him, when they have never been less safe.

  “I should show you something,” she says, and pulls her phone from her hastily packed bag.

  He runs his hands through his hair, and it must be stress that’s doing this to her, this feeling that she might lose everything if she doesn’t just give in and admit —

  Admit what? The denial of her own thoughts is familiar to her as her mother’s voice, and as comforting.

  Her hand is steady and her heart is stone when she shows him the message from her hacked account.

  Coffee whistles low. “This is personal for him,” he whispers, so low the words are more shape than sound.

  “But why? I didn’t do anything to him —”

  She’s too loud. His finger rests on her lips, a single, explosive charge. His wide eyes tell her to stay silent, but she couldn’t speak now to save the world.

  You don’t remember, he mouths. “But something happened. You still don’t know what it means? The email?”

  She shakes her head and whispers, “What about a drug?”

  He swallows, and she can hear all the objections in his eyes: It might not work, it might hurt you, if I get caught I will be in such deep shit. But he knows as well as she does that something is wrong with Roosevelt. The sociopath with the dead brown eyes has some agenda for Bird, and they need to understand it soon. Maybe Roosevelt just has a kink for harassing girls who can’t fight back, but when it comes down to it, he’s just one man in a larger machine. No way his bosses would let him spend so much time intimidating Bird if they didn’t have some reason to keep her afraid and off-balance and, above all, unable to understand what’s happening.

  The only weapon she has in this fight is knowledge. Knowledge she suspects — like the circumstances of Sasha Granger’s death — and knowledge she must have somewhere inside her — like what happened after Paul drugged her at the party.

  She stares at Coffee, willing him to understand her thoughts. He sighs, because he does.

  “If something happens —” he whispers.

  “I’ll forgive you.”

  He winces. “The trouble is forgiving myself.”

  * * *

  For the past month, statistics have littered Bird’s path like ill-concealed land mines, easy enough to avoid until a momentary lapse in attention leaves her picking out shrapnel. Today’s devastation for the unwary: half a million. Estimated deaths worldwide from the v-flu.

  And then another: thirty-three.

  Confirmed cases of v-flu inside the Beltway quarantine within the last twenty-four hours.

  Having overheard this news from nervous hallway conversations after religion class, Bird turns it over in her head until she’s dizzy from spinning in place. She gives her classes as much attention as normal — enough that she might still squeak into Stanford if they survive the apocalypse, but only because of her SAT scores. She isn’t sure she wants to go to Stanford these days, but it seems prudent to keep her options open. In the quiet spaces of her post-Paul life, she finds herself looking at a forgotten archive of photos she’s taken of storefronts and DC neighborhoods, of quirky bookshops with piles of mystery paperbacks in the corners and history books on the shelves. Clicking through the photos, the musk of acid-yellowed paper and burning sticks of patchouli incense cling to her memory. She’s avoided this folder for a year now, ever since her mother told her precisely what she would think if Bird became something so unambitious as a shopkeeper. But she looks at them now, since her traditional comfort of real estate listings has turned into a pixel-dusted, time-stamped Internet graveyard. No one is buying, no one is selling. The whole of the District has frozen like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, waiting for a prince to breach the thorny walls.

  Too bad the dragon beat him here.

  Thirty-three. It might be nothing, a statistical blip of people who took longer than average to manifest symptoms. But after twenty days of no new cases, it feels like the endgame. The safest place in the country is turning into the perfect virgin breeding ground for a flu with five to ten percent mortality. Another statistic she wishes she didn’t know.

  Classes over, she washes up in the senior room, where the usual suspects crowd the television, glowing faces tilted up, receiving the gospel according to Wolf Blitzer. She squints at the stained couch and then sighs and perches on the edge. The Crenshaw twins and Cindy de la Vega are wearing face masks again, and Felice has one on her lap, which means that the school will be back to a hand sanitizer–scented, floral-masked prison by tomorrow morning.

  Wolf is talking via satellite to some official with the CDC. The official is explaining that while everyone hopes the quarantine has held, some kind of breach is inevitable.

  “The Beltway quarantine is the most ambitious, most extensive, most complicated public health project of its kind attempted in the history of pandemic disease,” he says.

  “Where’s Charlotte?” Bird asks.

  Ari Crenshaw glares and turns back to the television. Cindy won’t even acknowledge she’s in the room. Only Felice turns in her direction, her face a mask of distaste.

  “The hospital,” she says.

  “Is she —”

  “Like you care,” Felice says, and lifts the mask from her lap. “What’s the point? We’re all going to die anyway.”

  She tosses it on the floor while Ari stares, openmouthed astonishment pressing a circle against the blue fabric of her mask.

  “She’s one of the thirty-three?” Bird asks.

  Felice still glares, but at least she’s speaking. “Fifty-five now. And no, it’s her parents. They’re confirmed, but she’s still fine, apparently.”

  “That’s terrible,” Bird says.

  “If you really gave a shit, you would talk to her.”

  She and Felice have been friends since eighth grade. She’s always been that perfect, queen-bee Devonshire student, the one with the Abercrombie clothes and cute boyfriend and a dozen girls who want to be her friend. Bird never quite understood why she picked her.

  “You’re the one who ditched me,” Bird says, strangled.

  “You never liked us anyway. You think I couldn’t tell? It’s just that this impending doom thing, it really puts life in perspective. Why keep a shitty friend when I could have my real one?”

  “Charlotte was my friend too.”

  Felice laughs. “See, you’re using the past tense already.”

  “She won’t talk to me! Thanks to you.”

  “I’m not her godda
mned mother. She can make her own decisions, promise. You want to talk to her, then talk to her. But hey, I’m not holding my breath.”

  Bird recognizes this feeling: guilt and cognitive dissonance and the suspicion that someone else might just be right. But it’s Felice, not Coffee, glaring at her through those blunt-cut bangs. Bird forces herself to take a deep breath.

  “Okay,” she says. “I’m leaving.”

  Felice shrugs and turns back to the television. On the door, beside the proliferating photographs of dead friends and family, someone has taped an orange flyer.

  It’s the end of the world as we know it

  We’re going to Go-Go like it’s 1999

  Doomsday: December 15, 7pm, Sidwell Gymnasium To Be Announced!

  Dress to impress & shake your booty, ’cause we’re about to meet our (money) maker

  Bird laughs. She can’t help it: a doomsday go-go?

  “It was Charlotte’s idea. We’re doing it with the Sidwell BSU.”

  Felice stands behind her, but Bird doesn’t turn around. Felice has been involved in the Black Student Union for years, one of the few white kids who bothers. Charlotte loves go-gos to death, though she always recruits a posse of girls to help fend off the grabbier species of dude.

  “The school is really letting you do this?”

  “The location is a little aspirational at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll convince someone.”

  “It’ll be a petri dish,” Bird says.

  “It’s like during the Black Death, people would gather in the town square and dance … whatever, I wouldn’t expect you —”

  “It’s goddamn brilliant,” Bird says, and laughs again.

  * * *

  Bird has had a girl crush on Marella since they were ten. As Bird is about 90 percent hetero, this has remained platonic, though occasionally some lazy spark will drift down between her shoulder blades at the sight of Marella’s long supermodel curls or French-manicured fingers spreading gloss over her wide bottom lip. As far as Bird can tell, she’s not really Marella’s romantic type, not being Latina or willowy or in possession of equally fabulous hair. I think that Marella would probably go for it if Bird swung that direction, but why ruin a great friendship with a mediocre affair? They are neither of them material candidates for the loves of their respective lives.

  Bird joined Africa Club because she thought it might be a way to get to know Marella better. Charlotte and Felice reveled in the scandal of her coming out in ninth grade, since she did it by hooking up with one of the bi seniors right before graduation. The first open interstudent homosexual relationship in the memory of Devonshire prompted the administration to issue special rules about “PDA on School Grounds.” Bird never defended Marella, but she thought maybe it would be okay if she could be nice to her on her own, away from her two best frenemies. It never worked, mostly because Bird cultivated her talents in wanting but not in trying, the better to protect herself. So by the time they fell into copresidency as seniors, their dynamic of tentative approval-seeking and guarded, ironic indulgence had hardened like stale bread.

  But Marella must have always liked her, at least a little. She called her Bird within a month of Coffee. She said, on a shared Metro ride back home from an Adams Morgan party, “That dealer uses your last name, like you’re a guy.”

  “Yeah,” Bird said, squirming into the orange seats of the old train car.

  “You don’t mind it.” Not a question, something Bird liked about Marella. She noticed people, she treated them like puzzles she could never fully solve, but she never gossiped. She wasn’t interested in what people did, but how they felt about it.

  “I guess not.” And then, after the train had pulled out of Dupont Circle and the deep, warm-throated conductor had announced, “Red Line to Shady Grove,” she added, “I like it.”

  “Because you want to fly away?”

  Bird looked down at her feet, at the new blister on her right heel. Her mother had insisted she buy those shoes. “I’d like the option,” she said.

  Marella sprawls across the round fiction room table, listening to music while she flips through a stack of printouts. She pulls a bud from her ear and pats the empty space on the table beside her.

  “Had a flash of brilliance and used Mrs. Rider’s computer while she was teaching some fourth graders.”

  Bird shuts the door. “Wait, you printed the stuff on the USB drive?”

  Marella frowns. “It was a good idea. Who would ever monitor the assistant librarian’s computer? And since her printer isn’t connected to the network, there’s no record of what I sent to it. You’re the one paranoid about keyloggers. We have to read all this stuff of hers somehow, right?”

  Bird perches on the edge of the table and takes a deep breath. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry.”

  Marella flops back on her elbows, the ends of her long curls tickling Bird’s arms. “I forgive you. You’ve been under a lot of stress lately, and I have had the benefit of our school counselor’s extremely focused attention.”

  “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that….”

  “Honestly, she’s nice. I’m rethinking my prejudices about therapy. You might try it sometime. I’d hate to lose my Bird now that she’s finally left her shell — hey, no fair!”

  Bird elbows Marella, and they both laugh. “Brilliant puns aside,” Marella says, “I know it gets hard, being yourself.”

  A silence follows that undeniable truth. “Is that why you never wanted to be friends with me?” Bird asks quietly.

  Marella’s hands tighten to fists then relax, deliberately, against the pocked wood of the table. “I just didn’t trust you to be real enough. I mean, Felice and Charlotte talked about me for years and you never said anything. How was I supposed to know you wouldn’t do it too? No matter how much I liked you.”

  This confirmation feels more liberating than it ought to, like she’s cut her hair off all over again, like Marella has given her a mirror that reflects someone a little better than before.

  “Charlotte’s parents have the v-flu,” Bird says. “And now she’s put together some kind of doomsday go-go when we’d normally have winter formal.”

  Marella flops onto her back. “Good for her. I always thought Charlotte was kind of wasted on Felice. Not as much as you, but still.”

  “I hope we don’t make such stupid choices after high school.”

  “That’s the dream.”

  “It can’t be worse, right?”

  “I don’t know. Devonshire girls can be bitchy, but they don’t usually drop chemical weapons.”

  Bird considers this. “You don’t think that’s the big secret? Like, when people tell us these are the best years of our lives, and all you can think is that they’ve forgotten what high school was like? But what if they’re right? What if we’re just forced to make worse and worse choices until we die? What if the real world is nothing but Felice and Paul and Roosevelt?”

  Marella groans. “London. Paris. New York. There’s got to be a place for me. For us. There are good people in the world. There are people we will like.”

  Bird lies down beside Marella, who smells like the springtime tea roses in the school garden, like fresh laundry and sunshine, like pink and childhood things, but her voice is bitter, her hope defiant. She smells like the girl she once was; she speaks like the woman she’s becoming. Does Bird still smell like Emily? Does she speak like her? Her fears are still Emily’s fears, but her problems are different.

  “Sometimes, when things got bad,” Bird says slowly, “when everything I did disappointed my mom and I was just desperate, I thought, it’s okay, because my real life will start when I go to college. I could major in econ or bio and, when I got Mom off my back, then I would be part of the real world. Then I could open a shop if I wanted, I could live anywhere I wanted, I could date … anyone I wanted.” Bird gulps air. Marella turns her head so their noses are just a few inches apart.

  “I know Paul is supposed to be some perfect guy,
I know you’re supposed to be crazy for dumping him, but Bird, you know better. Maybe he was nice once, but right now he’s big-time into patriarchal douche-hattery.”

  Bird’s panicked breaths give way to sharp, rueful laughter. “Isn’t he? God, this school, it’s like you can go crazy just from being sane.”

  “It’s not all bad,” Marella says. “We found each other. You have Coffee.”

  She narrows her eyes at Marella’s wistful expression. “Coffee and I aren’t … we don’t have —”

  “Oh, I know you aren’t, but don’t you dare tell me you don’t have. I swear, every time you look at each other I hear thunder.” She shakes her head. “London. Paris. Berlin.” A soft and desperate prayer.

  “Marella, you’re one of the most amazing people I know. One day girls will line up to fall in love with you.”

  “Just not now.”

  “Just wait until …” But Bird trails off, the habitual end of the sentence unexpectedly impassable.

  “We could be dead by Christmas. We could be in boot camp training for World War III or we could be holed up in some bunker waiting for the radioactive dust to clear. God, I want to fall in love so badly it makes me cry at night, but maybe I won’t get to. If this is all we have, Bird, our choices right now matter. They might matter more than any other ones we’ll make.”

  Bird closes her eyes, because all she can see is Coffee running after Paul’s car, all she can hear is Coffee asking her, over and over again, Why not, Bird? If he dies, if she dies, will she end her life smothered in the regret of that low voice, those rounded vowels, those sharp and blooded eyes?

  “Coffee’s not a bad guy. He’s been a pretty good one lately.”

  “For a dealer.”

  “Hey, no one’s perfect. He sells decent hash.”

  Bird smacks the table. “Get out. You?”

  Marella grins. “Think you’re the only goody-two-shoes with bad-girl depths? Sure, I bought some off him, but mostly it was for Sarah. Not my scene.”

  She doesn’t wince at the mention of her ex, but she drags out the syllables of her name a second too long, an overarticulation meant to cover the wound. She sits up. “Okay, shouldn’t we get started? Most of the stuff on there is old emails and drafts of articles. You can take pile one or pile two.”