Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Boots trample her hands, a knee snaps her jaw. Get up now, she tells herself, get up or you’ll die. But she doesn’t want to — if she stands she’ll know who’s screaming, and who the soldier shot. She’ll know how it ended, the story of three girls who were sometimes friends. So she stays on her knees, panting and trembling to match the steady buzz against her ribs.

  Someone pulls her up, hard, by the elbow.

  “Come on!” Paul shouts, pushing her forward when she sways. “We have to get out!”

  He’s furious, his handsome face twisted with fear and frustration. His eyes dart behind her, but Bird doesn’t turn around, and she doesn’t ask what he sees. He drags her through an unguarded fire door on the other side of the dance hall, away from the stampede. It lets out in a parking lot adjacent to an alley. He tries to go farther from the door, but she yanks her arm away and glares.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Saving your ass. Not like you deserve it. What the hell did —”

  Her phone buzzes again and she jumps. The screen is shiny with her sweat; she wipes it on her dress before looking at the missed calls. Marella and Aaron. The most recent texts are from Marella, asking if she’s okay, but when she scrolls down she sees two that rip through her like a bullet.

  I need some help. Meet me on George Walk?

  And then:

  Bird, please. Come find me.

  He’d sent that last fifteen minutes ago.

  She starts to run and Paul follows her with a shouted curse.

  “Emily! Wait! I’ve got to talk to you! I got this crazy message from Roosevelt. He —”

  Bird stops at the edge of the street and whirls around to face him. The ground is slippery with an inch of wet snow, but she just manages to keep her balance. “I don’t give the slightest fuck about you and Roosevelt, Paul. News flash: Neither of you are my problem anymore.”

  “He says you made him lose his job! That I don’t have any internship, any summer job. Shit, Emily, you’ve ruined my career before it even started!”

  There’s noise from sirens and helicopters and barked orders inside the community center, but the space between her and Paul feels quiet as death. She blinks away the flakes that have settled on her eyelashes and wonders when he changed. Paul was always self-interested, but the years have honed all his worst traits and discarded the best.

  She shakes her head. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  He looks desperate, utterly convinced that he can pin his problems with Roosevelt on a fight with his ex. On any other night, she would feel sorry for him. “Then who? Alonso?”

  Bird bites back a panicked sob. “Don’t you get it? Me, Paul. It was always, ever, about me.”

  * * *

  Bird runs. A crowd has gathered to watch paramedics load a gurney into the back of an ambulance. She doesn’t look, she doesn’t stop, she just prays for Charlotte and keeps running. She can’t imagine the trouble Coffee must be in to send her a text like that. She remembers his exhaustion of the last few days, and the heat of his skin last night, and runs so fast she slides over the slick, icy ground. The school is a fifteen-minute walk from the community center. A ten-minute run. Her phone rings and she picks it up without checking.

  “Bird! Are you okay?”

  Bird glances over her shoulder, but she can’t pick Marella out of the crowd behind her. “Yeah, I’m fine. I have to go, I think something’s happened to Coffee.”

  “Holy shit. Where is he? Sarah has her mother’s car if it would help. But we have to wait for the emergency stuff to clear before we can get it out of the lot.”

  Bird sees a cab across the street and runs across four lanes to reach it. “I’m taking a cab. Meet me at school as soon as you can.”

  “Okay, will do. First Felice, now Coffee … listen, find him, figure out what’s going on, and call me back, okay?”

  Felice.

  Bird stutters out the name of her school to the cab driver, but she’s thinking about those last moments of the go-go. Not Charlotte on the gurney, not Charlotte going to the hospital with a bullet in her, but Felice. She wipes the tears from her cheeks, overcome with a wave of relief and then self-loathing.

  She calls Coffee a dozen times, but he doesn’t answer. When the cab pulls in front of Bradley, she throws her remaining twenty at the driver and runs. A mulch path leads to the stretch of woods behind the boy’s upper school called George Walk, well-known to hopeful student smokers (well-known to the administration as well, which always made Bird wonder why people kept trying). When she gets to the woods, she slows, shivering despite the punishing pace of her run. She left the go-go without her jacket, and the leaf dress has more holes than fabric.

  “Coffee?” she calls. She uses the flashlight on her phone to illuminate the path ahead. Nothing but tall, bare trees, mulch, and the brief shine of a fox’s reflected eyes.

  “Coffee?” Her voice breaks on the last syllable. After yesterday she can’t believe that she spent all night feeling pissed instead of worried. Did she think he changed his mind? That because he didn’t tell her his trial date he didn’t really love her?

  She calls his name again, loud enough to startle a rat from the underbrush. Then she hears the sound of something much larger crunching on twigs and fallen leaves and she spins around. Someone waits in the shadows of the trees.

  “Not Coffee,” she whispers, and turns off the flashlight.

  Roosevelt flicks on his own. “I figured you wouldn’t come just for me,” he says, stepping onto the path. “So I picked this up.” He flips Coffee’s phone with one hand.

  “Did you hurt him?” She backs up with each step he takes, and fumbles in the dark for the call button. “Where is he?”

  “I didn’t hurt him, no,” Roosevelt says with a grim smile, “but he wasn’t looking very good when I left. It took you a long time to get here, Birdie. I don’t think you’ll be happy if you leave him much longer.”

  Please pick up. Bird angles the screen of her phone away from him. Marella, please, help.

  “There was a riot at the go-go,” Bird says, struggling to keep her voice as flat as his. “Took a while to get out. Where is he?”

  He shakes his head. “Tedious. You know how this goes. I tell you once you give me what I want.”

  “And what do you want?”

  He moves so quickly she doesn’t have any time to react. His hand closes around her arm and shakes. Her phone drops to the ground behind her. This close, his face looks haggard and strangely dull, like he’s just woken up after a night of heavy drinking. But he smells more like menthol cigarettes than liquor.

  “I want you to admit you’re lying. You knew about the bug, and so did your mother, and that’s why she sent you back to the house. You just put on a little play to convince my boss that I’m off my nut, but I’m right, and he’s wrong. The writing on the wall? Do you think I’m stupid? I know you, Bird. I know that you wrote that years ago, not that night. Your clue was something else. You wrote it and hid it somewhere. So where? Tell me where, tell me what you really know, and I’ll tell you where to find your boyfriend before he dies of exposure. Or v-flu. He was pretty sick when I left him.”

  She starts to giggle. She can’t believe that she’s finally beaten Roosevelt only to lose Coffee. The cruelty of it, after everything else she has seen tonight, threatens to break her. They took the pen. They have her clue, whatever it is, but he doesn’t know what it means any more than she does. Roosevelt has never mattered less to her, and he has never seemed like more of a threat.

  “Are you high, you hypocritical cokehead?” He flinches. “Your career is over. Whether I know anything or not. But for the record, I don’t. You’ve been chasing windmills this whole time.”

  “Coke, huh? I’d say you know plenty. You’re much smarter than they give you credit for. And after all the good we’ve done, never mind that one mistake — I won’t let you ruin everything. This country is worth more than your games.”

  Her
exposed flesh burns where his fingers grip, but she pretends that she can’t feel him. She pretends that her body is a fortress, and her words are flaming arrows.

  “I only know what you told me, Roosevelt David,” she says, slow and loud. “If underestimating me is a mistake, then you were the first to make it.”

  He tries to push her, but she uses the momentum to spin away from him and scoop up her phone.

  “Tell me,” she says, panting, a few feet away. “Please, Roosevelt, please. Coffee has nothing to do with this. You can’t just let him die because you lost your job.”

  His shoulders twitch. He stares at her, hollow-eyed and hungry, but he doesn’t approach. “I think I could,” he says softly. “It might make me feel better.”

  “There has to be a human somewhere underneath all that.”

  “Fuck you,” he says, and turns his back.

  * * *

  She finds him behind the chapel, curled on the flagstones. A dust of snow covers him like a faerie blanket. For a hard moment, she thinks that she found him too late.

  Then he shivers and coughs.

  She calls Marella. “The chapel,” she says, kneeling down in her wet tights and pulling his head onto her lap.

  “We’re driving there now. Sarah, turn up the heat —”

  “No.” Coffee’s eyes open and close. “An ambulance.” His skin feels hot where it isn’t cold as the snow. It took her twelve minutes after leaving Roosevelt to find him. She can’t think, right now, about what that means.

  She hears Marella swallow her questions. “I’m calling. Right now. We’ll be there in a minute. Hang on, babe.”

  Bird drops her phone in the snow and wraps her arms around him. At least he’s wearing a jacket and gloves.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers, holding her head close to his frozen cheek. She is almost sure he can’t hear her. “I love you so much. And I’m sorry.”

  His eyelids flutter, his hand twitches, and for a moment she imagines that he’ll come alive in her arms and tell her everything will be okay.

  But he only sighs; he doesn’t wake. He leaves her alone in the silence of the snow and her misery and their love until the flashing red lights tell her that it’s time to let go.

  * * *

  This is the story of a girl who knew something, and understood nothing at all.

  This is the story of a girl who found something, and lost everything else.

  This is the story of a girl who remembered something, and forgot why it mattered.

  But this isn’t a tragedy.

  This is the story of a girl who loved someone, and told herself the truth.

  They take out his blood and they put it back. They cut off his clothes and drape him in linens, clean and faded blue. They run tracks of needles down his arms and cover the violence with shining white tape. Tubes hiss air into his nose, drip IV fluid into his veins, keep the steady watch of his steady heart.

  Saved from the cold, he burns hot as a DC summer. He wakes up in the middle of one long afternoon, two days later.

  “You’re all right?” he asks. His eyes, open and lucid, are all she has dared pray for. She peels off her gloves and takes his hand. She can’t speak, so she calls for a nurse instead.

  That night, the infection goes to his lungs.

  “It would be best if you didn’t come again until he’s better,” his mother tells her in the hallway outside the ICU.

  The worst is that she means it kindly, to spare her what might be a death watch.

  Dread pulls worn claws through her stomach. “I want to stay.”

  “Go home,” says his mother. “Get some sleep. I’ll call you when something changes.”

  “He hates hospitals.”

  This makes his mother laugh, low and bitter and short; she has never looked more like her son.

  “I know far better than you. Go home, Juliet.”

  Bird falls asleep in a bathroom stall when her eyes hurt from crying. She dreams they’re dancing in the snow to Donny Hathaway until a janitor pounds on the door. Reality hits her like it always does, a jump into icy water from a high bridge.

  She doesn’t go home.

  * * *

  “Dad,” Aaron says, leaning against Nicky’s legs, “tell me the story about Pops and the chickens.”

  Nicky looks tired, but mostly healthy. His hospital stay ends tomorrow, which means one more bed will be free for the increasing numbers of critical District v-flu patients.

  Nicky squeezes Aaron’s shoulders and laughs. “I can’t tell it as well as your pops, but all right.”

  Curled at the end of the narrow bed, Bird listens. She loved it when her granddad told this story, with that sweet pipe tobacco curling toward his rapt audience and his slippered feet up on the recliner.

  “So your granddad had an uncle who loved pigs’ feet,” Nicky says, leaning back against the pillows. “Uncle Spanky would bring jars of the things, pickled, to any big meal at your granddad’s house, no matter how much my grandma would holler at him for it.”

  Aaron giggles. “ ’Cause they stank?” he asks.

  “Stank like the devil’s behind,” Nicky agrees, and Bird cracks a smile at his imitation of his father’s voice: bee-hind.

  “So your pops got this idea about how he’d stop Uncle Spanky from bringing those pigs’ feet back around to his mom’s house,” Nicky says, and goes on to tell the rest: the sly, old hunting dog that was always trying to get into the coop, Uncle Spanky’s weakness for cheap whiskey, and the laying hens that broke into the house just when Pops was tossing the pigs’ feet into the yard for the dogs.

  Bird closes her eyes, giving in to the comfort of the story that she’s heard two dozen times before. When the old hunting dog runs back and forth, howling, trying to choose between the pigs’ feet and the chickens, Aaron laughs until he falls onto Bird’s back.

  “Did you hear that, Em?” he says, and then sets to howling like the dog in the story until Bird sticks her hand over his mouth.

  “Hey, do you want us kicked out of here? What if someone notices you took off your mask?”

  Aaron rolls his eyes, but he keeps quiet. Playing with the hospital rules would be a more serious offense if they hadn’t both been vaccinated (the documentation of which her mother has quietly provided), but she doesn’t think the ward nurse will look the other way if they disturb other patients. Nicky starts to tell the story again and Bird drifts off, thinking about the hallway behind them and the isolation room she’s not allowed to visit.

  He got the vaccine too late; she knew that as soon as she saw him in the snow. Thanksgiving: the day her parents came back in an exposed senator’s entourage; the day he told her he loved her; the day she crawled inside her own mind and looked around. The memory of one of the best days of her life makes her want to vomit with self-recrimination and guilt. She kissed him and killed him, between the turkey and the sweet potato pie.

  She clamps her hands hard around her sides, but it doesn’t stop her from shivering.

  “Em?” Nicky’s voice, soft and careful. Aaron’s fallen asleep. “Hey, kid, how you holding up?”

  Even when Marella asks, she finds a way not to answer. Her mom has hardly spoken to her, uncomfortable with Bird’s hospital vigil and any portent of her grief.

  But Nicky watched his girlfriend die of ovarian cancer ten years ago, and though she doesn’t remember much about her Aunt Valerie, she does know that Nicky has never expected anything from Bird but herself.

  “I keep forgetting that it’s real,” she whispers, focusing on the tiny, perfect weave of the hospital blanket. “And then I remember and I …”

  “Yeah,” Nicky says, “it’s like that too. But you’ll survive, Em. You might not want to, sometimes. But remember that you’ll survive.”

  “His mom calls me Juliet.”

  He snorts. “Em, you’re a hundred times smarter than that chick.”

  She doesn’t look up, but reaches her hand over Aaron’s sleeping body and wai
ts for him to take it. He does, and rubs the soft flesh between her thumb and forefinger so she cries a little with the comfort. How did it take her so long to understand the basic goodness at the heart of him? Her mother was never wrong about Nicky, Bird supposes, but she has never been right.

  “Is it that bad?” he whispers after a minute.

  “His lungs.” The awful truth, out loud.

  “Shit.”

  She sighs, floating in the release of that solitary burden. “I love you, Nicky.”

  “Em, what you’ve done for Aaron when I’ve been stuck here, and before, you know … hell, you’re like my other daughter, you know that? God knows how Carol gave birth to you, but there you go. I’m sure she’s asked that herself, knowing Carol.”

  “Knowing Carol,” Bird agrees, and squeezes his hand, her other father.

  * * *

  Nicky goes home; Bird stays. She sometimes sees Charlotte pass through the hospital waiting room, a fellow soldier armed with water bottles and wedding magazines and fat bouquets of flowers. Bird never asks; she can tell from the growing stack of magazines that Felice isn’t doing well. For the first few days, journalists loiter outside for news of her condition; the shooting has become the latest horror in a news cycle full of them. Felice ran straight toward the cop, ignoring all of his warnings to stop. But though the DC police chief defended him, the fact that he was a rookie at the end of a long shift only contributed to the national outrage. Charlotte never stays for long — she trains her hollow eyes on the elevator and then walks through, a firefighter running again and again into a burning building.

  Bird has never been that brave. Even now, she hides in the hospital because she can’t bear to go home and she can’t think of a way to change his mother’s mind. He’s not any worse, that’s all his mother says, after telling her again to leave. Bird catches herself staring through the tinted glass at the smokers outside, envying their persecuted camaraderie, their craving-induced punctuation of the hours that bear down on her with the mercy of an avalanche. She ought to hate the sight of them — Coffee’s habit almost certainly helped the infection bloom in his smoke-stained alveoli — but she just remembers the smell of loose tobacco and the way his hands shook that night when she followed Paul up the stairs.