by N. K. Smith
I nod and take a step toward the bathroom. “Yeah. Surreal.”
Peter narrows his eyes as he examines me, but his lips are still curved up. He either doesn’t realize I’m freaking out or he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. “Go to the bathroom then. I’ll be right here.”
I wonder if he’ll still be chatting up Shyla when I return. I don’t ask. I just turn and hurry to the restroom.
Once inside, I don’t even have to be subtle and hint around. In the sitting room before entering into the actual bathroom, women sit around a glass table making lines out of white powder. They aren’t even concealing it. It’s a total Hollywood cliché.
“Want a little blow?” one of them asks. She looks familiar, like someone from a television show.
The award starts to slip from my now sweaty hand. My mouth salivates. My heartbeats increase. My whole body tingles. I actually feel something beyond dread and anxiety. It sizzles within my brain, heating it up and erasing the numb to replace it with . . . with something—with want and desire.
I like it. I like feeling.
Chapter 48
“Are you sure you’re okay? You look a little dazed.”
I laugh at Peter; a real and genuine laugh. “I’m great. I’m just riding on the high of winning, you know?”
“It’s been a long night. You’re probably delirious from lack of sleep and too much social contact.”
“Yep!” I throw my arms around him. “So take me home and put me to bed.”
Peter slides his arms around my waist and draws me against him. “We are home,” he says, then shrugs a shoulder toward my house.
I look up at it. “Oh, yeah. Great. Your job is considerably easier now.”
As I tighten my arms around his neck, he hisses as if in pain. Peter twists his arms around to take hold of mine, then brings our limbs between us. “Are you going to hold onto this forever?” He shakes the wrist of the hand that holds the Oscar.
“Maybe. To remind myself that I’m not a has-been, like Lili says. To remind myself that they don’t give these to just anyone and that’s why she didn’t get it. Because she’s the has-been.”
“Wow.” Peter turns us to the house, and we walk up the front steps together. “Remember that time when you and Liliana were actually friends?”
I blink. “We are friends.” I fall back into my automatic answer kept at the ready for when anyone other than myself questions my relationship with Lili.
“Right.” He doesn’t believe me. “Anyway, isn’t that thing getting heavy?”
“Not at all. I think I will hold onto it forever. My arms will be killer. This has been the best night ever.”
He unlocks my door and we glide into the house. Okay, he walks, but I glide, float, flutter, soar. I lift his hand into the air and use it as a balance as I twirl. “I think I need to start reading more scripts. Meg keeps sending them, but for a while, I didn’t feel like doing much.”
“Yeah. You’ve been in a bit of a rut, but now you’ll be in so much demand, you won’t be able to ignore the offers.”
I think about all the awesome things I’ll be able to do, but it’s hard to shake Lili’s words. Peter fixes us a pre-sleep breakfast/bedtime snack of tofu scramble and toast. I eat like a pig even though I don’t feel hungry at all. When he heads upstairs, I follow him and even start undressing for bed, but when I lie down next to him, I don’t feel tired at all.
I did a little bump before leaving the second party of the night, so I’m pretty jacked up and not looking to sleep. I guess I should’ve bought a little pot to help me come down, but since I didn’t, I have to do it the old fashioned way—I have to wait.
“Stop fidgeting, please,” Peter mumbles into his pillow.
“Sorry.” But my foot keeps wiggling.
“Damn, Adra. I would have thought you’d be super tired. Are you—”
“I’m fine.” I throw the covers off me and swing my feet over the side of the bed. “But I don’t want to keep you up, so I’m going to go watch TV or something.”
“Read a script. I’ve flipped through some of them in that stack and they’re so dry, they’ll definitely put you to sleep in no time.”
I laugh as I stand up. “Night.”
“Night. Love you.”
I stop at the door. “Peter?”
“Hmmm.”
“What were you and Shyla talking about tonight? You looked so . . . so comfortable. Not like people who had just broken up.”
He raises his head. “We were talking about how much she hates me, and how now she understands why I dumped her for you. Because of the award.”
“You looked like you were having a good time.”
He closes his eyes again and rests his head back down. “This is Hollywood, remember? Nothing is as it seems. It was important to look like we parted ways amicably. Her publicist issued a statement the next day that we’d just grown apart, and she decided it was time to move on. Don’t you remember? We watched a segment on Locker’s Confidential about it.”
I think back, but I don’t remember at all. I guess my depression trumped everything. “Yeah, I remember.” Lying is easier than explaining how I could sit through a gossip show without hearing a word. “So the world thinks she dumped you?”
“Yep.”
“But—”
“Sleepy time, Adra. Talk in the morning?”
“It’s already morning,” I say.
“Fine.” I can hear the chuckle buried by the pillow. “Later this morning.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
As I tiptoe out of the room, I wonder if I’d be able to score some blow before he wakes up. One or two phone calls should yield good results. I can probably have it delivered in the next two hours. I guess there was a reason I never deleted some of these numbers from my contact list.
Chapter 49
I’ve been lying to Peter for a month now. Okay, not lying, but keeping the truth from him. I’ve gone back to getting high a lot, and by a lot, I mean whenever I can. I’ve tried just about everything else to help me feel something . . . anything, but nothing else is doing the trick.
Winning the award helped, but obviously not for long. Having Peter love me helped too, but again, it was for a short time. We’re together a lot and so I have to keep myself more subdued when I’m high. As far as I can tell, he’s not suspicious, so I must be doing something right. But the acting and pretending isn’t helping the numbness.
I’ve tried volunteering down at that homeless shelter again, hoping it would instill some drive, some higher purpose, but it didn’t. All it did was make me want to get high like the last time I was there.
That woman wasn’t there, but there were tons of others like her. Men, too. And there’s nothing as damnable as some Hollywood star hanging out in a shelter looking for hope. Those people don’t have anything to their names—some of them don’t even have names—and yet I snort more money up my nose in a day than it takes to feed all of them for a week.
It makes me feel like an even more horrible person.
I keep trying to read scripts, but they’re all the same. I even set up an audition for one, but when I got there, I got this feeling that it was going to be another Outside the Club situation in which the director or producer was going to change the script to add some controversial scene. Most likely something that would involve my naked body against another person’s. So I left.
So now I’m basically hanging out, getting high, lying to Peter, and hoping the world starts to make sense again. But the more I get high, the more I want to get high. The more coke I do, the more marijuana I need to help me come down. The more dope I smoke, the higher my tolerance is, so then I take more and more sleeping pills. And the groggier I wake up, the more coke I snort.
I know it’s getting bad now, and today? Well, today is off the charts.
My heart is beating so fast I can’t catch my breath. Everyone’s lookin
g at me like I’m some stranger, like some crazy person they’ve never seen before. The security guy on the lot, the people walking past me as I head for Peter’s trailer.
I couldn’t sit at home any more. I had to see him. I’m convinced something terrible is going to happen, and I needed to reassure myself that he was alive and well on set. When I manage to find his trailer, my knock is hard, loud, and frantic.
“Jesus, just a second!” I hear from inside. I tug on the door, but it won’t give. Finally, Peter opens it up. His eyes go wide. “Holy shit, Adra. What the fuck’s—”
“I just needed to see you.”
Peter pushes open the screened door, and I rush past him.
“What’s going on?” His voice conveys his worry.
When I turn around to face him, his narrowed eyes alert me to his suspicious concern. He’s looking above my eyes. “What?”
“Your hair, Adra.”
I place my hands on my head. Most of it is not there anymore. Shit. I kind of remember doing that earlier this morning during the apex of my freak-out. “I cut it.”
“Yourself?”
“Uh-huh. It’s horrible, isn’t it?”
He refuses to answer, and instead asks again, “What’s going on?” He studies me again, and it only takes a moment for me to register the accusation in his expression. “You’re on that shit again, aren’t you?”
“No.” The denial comes out hurried and juvenile, but I can’t correct it now. Even if I could, I already feel Peter’s scorn muting my high and cutting through the chemical barrier that keeps my emotions in check.
He raises his eyebrow in a manner that’s probably too calm to be real. “I’m not stupid. I’ve noticed how odd you’ve been.”
I shake my head at his forced, steady voice. “No. I just can’t deal with this anymore.”
“Deal with what?”
How can he be so normal? Doesn’t he know the fucking world has gone crazy? Waving my arms around to indicate everything, I say, “This! This Hollywood stuff. The reporters, the gossip, the competition, the photographers! All of it!”
“So you chopped your hair?” His placid voice grates my nerves. He’s talking to me like I’m a jumper. Yeah, like I’m standing on a tall building with one foot in the air, ready to plunge to my death. I don’t want that! I want him to understand me.
I let out an exasperated growl. “Forget about the hair!”
Peter holds his hands up as if to transfer the pretend serenity to me. “Okay.”
“Come away with me.”
He takes my shoulder in a firm, but gentle grip like he’s scared I’m going to slip away. I should slip away. Slip out of his hold, down to the floor, and melt into the small undetectable holes in the hard surface. “Where?” He tightens his fingers on me.
“Anywhere! Just run away from all this crap with me. We can travel. We can go anywhere! We can—”
Before I know it, he’s brought me close to him. I can feel the heat of his body and nearly close my eyes at the sensation. His voice goes hard. “I can’t just leave and if you weren’t so high, you’d know it.”
I stick out my bottom lip and push away from him. “I’m not—”
“You’re high, Adra, and I’m not stupid.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I turn for the door. “Fine. If you don’t want—”
Peter wraps his fingers around my bicep. “I’d leave with you in a heartbeat if I knew it was actually you asking me to go, but it’s not. It’s the doped up version of you. You told me you weren’t going to do this stuff anymore, and now you’re—”
“I’m nothing. I’m just—”
“Insulting my intelligence by telling me you’re not on anything. You need help, Adra, now more than ever!”
I flinch at his shouting voice. It’s not typical for him to raise his voice, let alone yell. I’m not going to stand here and let him scream at me. “Fuck you. I don’t need help. I need—”
Once again, Peter softens, not only his voice but his rigid posture. “You can go to rehab without anyone knowing. There are ways to do it so no one knows.”
“Because you know all about it? Mr. Perfect Life? You know all this about rehab how?”
He relaxes his hold on my arm, and I already know he’s going to try to lull me into feeling safe with him. His voice is mellow and soothing. “I don’t have to be an addict to have known a few. I mean, come on. We both grew up right here, smack dab in the middle of Sin Central. I was offered speed when I was fourteen. It’s a wonder we weren’t in rehab before we got our high school diplomas.”
I don’t want to hear this shit. Why the fuck did I come here? I force my body to still, but I can’t seem to make my heart and mind do the same. I have to at least act like I’ve got everything under control. I run my hands through my hair only to remember that I don’t have much left. “Yeah, well—”
“There’s nothing weak in getting help. Bold people get their shit under control while weak-willed people let the drugs control them.”
“Well, I’m . . .” I stop. He doesn’t need to cut me off because I have nothing to say.
“I gave up a good relationship for you.” I don’t know why he felt the need to quietly remind me of this fact. All it does is make my cold heart freeze a little more.
“So go get her back if you can’t hang with me.”
“I don’t want her back. I want you.”
His words bounce off of me because I’m already preparing for my next attack. “Go back to Shyla and pretend, Peter. I’m sure it’d be easier than—”
“Than dealing with you? Yes, it would, but I don’t want her.”
“Why’d you say—”
“Because you’re so wrapped up with your own life that you forget what others have done for you or because of you.”
“I didn’t ask—”
“No,” he cuts me off again, more and more anger creeping into his voice. “No, you didn’t ask me to break it off with Shyla, but I did. I was happy with her. I could’ve made it work.” He runs his hands through his hair, then drops them down to his sides. “Never mind. Forget I said it. It was the wrong thing to say. I was just trying to get you to realize that people make sacrifices for you and the least you could do is repay those people—no, repay me with trying to get well. I’m not asking for much here, Adra. Just your health.” When he finishes, his body deflates a little, like all the passion and anger of just a moment before has leaked out of him.
As Peter tries to pull me closer to him, I fold my arms over my chest. He responds by holding me by my shoulders and bringing me flush against his body. There is no denying his chest feels good against my cheek. There is nothing I could tell myself to make myself believe that I don’t want him close like this. It is as if his hug transfers understanding between us; his body vibrates with thoughtful sympathy and wishes for goodness, and it soaks into me. It uses my skin and flesh as a highway to my mind, where it nestles in like a splinter.
I don’t give it time to fester. I’ve been down this path before. Waking up in a strange city without knowing how I got there isn’t appealing, but I can’t fight against the chemicals within me and my brain. I don’t really want to give up feeling good, do I?
“I can’t go anywhere yet.” My words are nothing but a whisper muffled by his chest, but he hears them.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s too close to winning the Oscar. People will—”
“People will understand. They’ll applaud you for taking the situation—”
I struggle against his hold until I’m free. This is crazy. He wants me to go away to some facility. Probably so he can have his life back. He must realize he made a mistake with me. Peter liked the idea of me as his girlfriend because we have such a long history together, but now that he has it, he’s realized I’m not for him. He’s going to leave me. This is his way of leaving me.
“Adra?” He speaks slowly, like he’s talking to a scared animal or injured child.
“No.”
“No? No, what?”
I shake my head and try to fist my hands in my hair again, but the short strands slip through my fingers. “I have to go.”
“Where? To rehab?”
Again I shake my head. This time I bite the inside of my cheek until I can taste blood. “Home. I have to get some things.”
“For rehab?” The hope in his tone both guts me and sets me off.
He’s not going to stop. He’s not going to stop until I agree to what he wants. That’s how my mother used to do it. That’s how Elsie used to do it. That’s how Danny got his way. I wear down quickly, and everyone in my world knows it. Small shivers begin in the core of me, but as they vibrate out into my extremities, they morph into full-on quakes. “Yeah, for rehab.”
“I’ll come with you. We need to—”
“No. You’ve got a movie to deal with, you don’t need—”
“Nothing’s more important than you, Adra. We’re almost finished shooting for the day. If you stay, we can leave together.”
I doubt he’ll let me drive back home, but if he thinks I’m going to wait in his trailer for him, he’ll leave me alone. “Fine.” I glance around the small space and avoid his eyes.
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Of course.”
Peter is next to me again, running his hands through his hair. “Good. This is good. I’ll get someone to come sit with you. Do you have anything else on you? You should start getting clean now.”
Fuck him. Like his childhood almost-addiction gives him any right to act like he knows everything. “No.”
“Okay. I trust you.”
He shouldn’t, but I play nice until he leaves on a quick mission to grab some person to babysit me. I waste no time in slipping out the door and jogging away from his trailer.
The white powder in my car’s glove box calls to me. I do a bump before I peel out of the lot. I don’t know how much time I have, but I know when Peter sees that I’ve left, he’ll send out the search party. He’ll have them put me away where everyone can ignore me, where I’ll be a nobody, and he doesn’t have to see me.