Recovery Road

by Blake Nelson

  Hearing about Spring Meadow brings tears to my eyes. Or maybe it’s just having such a nice long talk with Stewart. After I hang up, I lie on my bed in my sweater. I know it will probably be weird when he gets out. Of course it will be. And he’s so cute, and so helpless, every girl he meets is going to fall in love with him.

  This is not going to be easy, whatever happens between us. But I let myself love him anyway. I let myself love him with all my heart. I give myself that. I tell myself I deserve it.

  6

  So that’s where the crossword puzzle has been hiding!”

  I open my eyes. I’ve fallen asleep on the couch in the back of the library. My textbook is in my lap with the unfinished crossword puzzle tucked inside it.

  A boy I don’t know snatches it away and takes it to the table. “And you’re the one who gets them all wrong.”

  “I don’t get them all wrong,” I say, blinking myself awake and sitting up straight.

  “You’re not supposed to sleep in the library,” he says.

  “I’m not sleeping. I’m resting.”

  “You should photocopy these puzzles, if you’re gonna mess them up so bad.”

  “Who are you?” I say, staring at this utterly obnoxious boy.

  “Martin Farris. You should know that. We’re in Yearbook together.”

  “Right. Yearbook,” I say, Yearbook being the easiest, dumbest extracurricular there is at our school. I sleep in there a bit too.

  Martin begins reading through the clues I’ve filled in. “You don’t know who Jimi Hendrix is?” he asks. “Nineteen Down? Purple Haze composer?”

  “I don’t listen to classic rock.”

  “You should still know that. Jimi Hendrix was from Seattle.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It’s called knowing about music that’s from your area? Like if you lived in Liverpool you would probably know of a little band called the Beatles?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He goes back to the crossword: “And Turkey’s capital city is Ankara,” he says. “Not ‘ankle’, or whatever it was you were trying to write.”

  I stare at him. “Look at you. You’re like a total dork.”

  “I’m not a dork. I’m a geek,” says Martin without hesitating. “Dorks are physically uncoordinated. Geeks have specialized knowledge of complex systems.”

  “Wow,” I say.

  “So where did you transfer from?” says Martin, still studying my crossword failures.

  “I’m not a transfer.”

  “You weren’t here last semester.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “No, you weren’t,” he says. “I happen to work on Yearbook. I know who was here and who wasn’t.”

  “I took some time off.”

  “What for?”

  “Personal reasons.”

  “What sort of personal reasons?” he asks.

  “None of your business.”

  He pretends to think: “Well…let’s see…personal reasons. That could be health. That could be psychological issues. Maybe you were impregnated by Satan and had to give birth to your demon child in a secret location.…”

  “You’re hilarious,” I say. I gather my stuff, since the bell is about to ring.

  He continues to cruise through the puzzle. “Twenty-two down. Kind of guard. Point,” he says, writing it in.

  I stand up with my backpack. “Thanks a lot, nerd boy,” I say.

  “No prob,” he says, without looking up. “See you in Yearbook.”

  7

  I call Cynthia a few days later, for one of our scheduled follow-up conversations. She’s impressed I’m still alive.

  I give her the lowdown: I’m sleeping better. I’m not really craving anything. I’m going to Dr. Bernstein’s Teens at Risk support group, which I hate. Besides that, I go to school. I come home and watch TV. I hang out with Trish on weekends, (which amuses Cynthia to no end). She sounds pleased with my progress but tells me I need to go to AA meetings.

  So I call Trish the next day and the two of us venture to a so-called “Young People’s” AA meeting.

  Trish’s mom drives us in the Cadillac Escalade. It’s in the basement of an old stone church. We go inside. Not everyone there is actually young, but most are. It’s a boisterous crowd. People have tattoos, weird hair, piercings. Trish finds us seats along the wall.

  There are some cute boys. That’s why Trish likes it. The two in front of us roll their skateboards back and forth under their chairs. They look like hardened criminals to me, but Trish is drooling over them. She’s all sexed up tonight, wearing super-tight jeans and thick, black eye makeup that looks a little scary with her puffy face and multiple layers of foundation.

  She looks terrible, to be honest. So do I, but I know enough to wear baggy clothes and keep my eyes to myself.

  So we sit there and they do the whole AA routine. I remember it from rehab. It gets boring, though, and Trish can’t sit still and so halfway through we sneak out to the parking lot so she can smoke.

  We stand in the cold, under the parking lot lights. Trish blows tight streams of smoke into the sky.

  “If I don’t get laid, I’m gonna lose my mind,” Trish tells me.

  I nod.

  “Do you ever feel like that?” she says. “Or am I just insane?”

  “Yeah, I feel like that.”

  “How could you, though? You don’t even like any boys.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Like who? Name one.”

  “This one guy.”

  “What guy? A guy you haven’t told me about?”

  “Yeah. Kinda.”

  “Really?” she says, smoking. “Where did you meet him?”

  “I met him a while ago.”

  “Where?”

  “At Spring Meadow,” I say guiltily.

  “Spring Meadow?”

  “It was after you left.”

  Trish glares at me. “You met a guy at Spring Meadow?”

  “Not there. At the halfway house. After you left.”

  “And you like this guy? For real?”

  I nod.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, shrugging. “No reason.”

  “Were you hiding it?”

  “No. I was just, you know, trying to keep it…low-key.”

  “Keep what low-key? Did you do it with him?”

  “No. Well…we fooled around a little.…”

  “You fooled around with a guy at Spring Meadow?” says Trish. “Jesus, Madeline. Do you still talk to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And when were you planning on telling me this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That feels really weird to me. You know?” She turns away. She’s pissed. “You got with some guy? And you’re not saying a word about it? And meanwhile I’m slutting around, making a fool of myself? And you’re keeping your little secret romance to yourself?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Well, what’s it like, then? How could you not tell me?”

  “It’s just. I think I love him.”

  “And I don’t love people?”

  “I don’t know. You’re more into…sex.”

  “And you’re not?”

  I look up at the sky.

  “I can’t believe this,” she says, grinding her cigarette out on the dirty asphalt. “You’ve been holding out on me. This whole time. Keeping your pure love away from slutty Trish. I can’t believe this. You think you’re better than me, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You do. You totally do.”

  “C’mon, Trish.…”

  “And you’re supposed to be my friend.”

  “I am your friend, Trish,” I say.

  8

  Y ou better wake up,” whispers a voice.

  Someone bumps against my shoulder and I snap my head up. I’m sitting at a table, surrounded by Yearbook dor
ks.

  Martin Farris is beside me.

  “Is the teacher here?” I ask.

  “No.”

  I refocus my eyes. “Then why did you wake me up?”

  “Because you’re gonna fall off your chair.”

  “I happen to be good at sleeping in chairs.”

  Martin goes back to his fascinating freshman swim team article.

  “Why are you sitting next to me?” I ask him.

  “There was no place else to sit.”

  When Yearbook lets out, I can’t get out of there fast enough. I can’t lose Martin, though. For some reason he follows me down the hall.

  “So…I…uh…” Martin says to me in a voice that is not his usual overconfident, robot dork voice.

  “So you what?” I say back.

  “I asked my friend Kaitlyn about you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I asked her where you might have been last semester. She said you were in rehab.”

  “That’s right,” I say, walking a little faster.

  “She laughed at me. She said everyone in the whole school knew about it, and why was I so stupid?”

  “That’s kind of what I thought too,” I say.

  “And then I started thinking about it,” he says, trying to keep up. “And it all made sense. That’s why you go to the library. Because you used to hang out with Jake and Raj and those guys. But they usually skip out and smoke weed during lunch, so you go to the library and do the crossword puzzle and sleep.”

  “Good work, detective,” I say.

  “So then I was thinking you probably don’t have anything to do on weekends, or anytime really, and maybe I should offer to do something with you.”

  I keep walking.

  “Not anything big,” he continues. “Just like, maybe you need someone to hang out with. Or go somewhere with. Or something like that.”

  “And you were going to volunteer yourself for this duty?”

  “Sure. Why not? We could go to the mall. Go ice-skating or whatever. It’s not like I’ve got that much going on right now.”

  “No kidding? A cool dude like you has nothing going on?”

  He frowns at this but continues his speech. “I just thought I should offer. It was Kaitlyn who suggested ice-skating.”

  “Ice-skating?”

  “Yeah. She said girls like that.”

  “God, you really are a dork.”

  “Or a movie. Or whatever.”

  “And this wouldn’t be a date?”

  “Not at all. It would just be…helping you out. A good deed. Because you probably don’t have any non-stoner friends. Obviously you don’t. You probably don’t have any friends now, if what Kaitlyn said is true.”

  “So you’re offering yourself as a dork-replacement-friend sort of thing.”

  “No. Actually, I don’t think I would want to be your real friend. You’re not very nice. But I could spare a little time to help someone, you know, in a difficult situation.”

  “How thoughtful of you.”

  “It is thoughtful of me. I just…we could even just sit around and do crossword puzzles if you wanted.”

  “No offense,” I say, veering away from him, toward the parking lot. “But that sounds like the worst idea ever.”

  9

  But in fact, doing crossword puzzles with Martin is not the worst idea ever.

  The worst idea ever is going with Trish to the hospital to visit her ex–best friend, who is paralyzed.

  I’d agreed to this before our little fight. And now that Trish has guilt-leverage on me, there’s no escape.

  My mom has to drive us, because Trish’s Cadillac is in the shop. I explain to my mom it’s a “recovery” errand, that going to see the person Trish crippled in a drunk-driving accident is the responsible thing to do. Mom is pretty freaked out by the idea. So am I. But we go.

  We pick up Trish at her house and drive across town to Providence Hospital. Of course I have been telling my mom that Trish is a really important friend and is super nice and normal and not screwed up at all.

  When my mom sees Trish in person, with her swollen face and her bizarre haircut, she is slightly horrified.

  But she says nothing. That’s one thing about my family. We have good manners.

  My mom drops us off at the hospital and we go in. Trish wants to get a bunch of candy at the little store inside. So we wait in line and get a huge box of Hot Tamales and Mike and Ikes and Jujubes and stuff like that.

  “Haley likes Hot Tamales,” she tells me. Then she opens the Jujubes and starts eating them herself. She eats a couple at a time. Her mouth fills up with them.

  We walk deeper into the hospital. Trish knows the way. It’s creepy walking down the long hallways. There’s no windows, no air. Trish isn’t bothered. She’s being her usual flighty self, walking too fast and not paying attention to where she’s going, or who she’s knocking into, unless it’s a cute doctor, or any other guy between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.

  We ride the elevator to the eleventh floor. Trish is downing the Jujubes. I’ve never seen someone stuff so much candy in her face. It’s scary and it makes me nervous about what’s to come.

  The elevator door opens. We get off. We walk down the hall. Trish is moving very fast now. I have to run to keep up.

  We get to Haley’s room and Trish goes barging in, but the room is empty, the bed is empty.

  “I know where she is,” says Trish, pushing me aside and continuing our frantic march down the hall. We come around the corner and there she is, in her wheelchair, a meek-looking blond girl with a small, sad face. She is just sitting in the hall, doing nothing. The look in her eyes, when she sees us, is of deep fear.

  “Hey, Haley,” says Trish, talking about as fast as a human can talk. “This is Madeline, the girl I told you about? We lived together in the halfway house? We’re friends and we hang out, because we’re both sober now and drug free and we’re supposed to be friends with other sober people so that’s what we do. She’s very nice and she’s smart like you and gets good grades and I think you guys will really hit it off. I brought you these too, Hot Tamales, I know you like them, I know they’re your favorite. I also got Mike and Ikes, the fruity ones. And some Jujubes.”

  At this point, Trish grabs my arm and yanks me forward.

  I step up to the wheelchair and reach out my hand. But Haley can’t lift her hands. She’s paralyzed from the neck down.

  I drop my hand. Haley stares up at me. Her face is the saddest thing I have ever seen.

  A nurse comes around the corner. She hurries toward us. She doesn’t look happy to see Trish. “You girls are a little late, aren’t you? Visiting hours are over.”

  “I wanted Haley to meet my friend Madeline,” says Trish. “I think they’ll really hit it off. They’re both sort of the same type and they’ll probably be great friends. Won’t you, Maddie? You like Haley, don’t you? You guys could, like, play chess on the computer or something.”

  Trish is losing her shit. She can’t stop talking. “I can’t play chess at all. I’m terrible at games. But Haley’s good at things like that, aren’t you, Haley? You used to love Chutes and Ladders when we were kids. And Monopoly. You always wanted to play that. I always got bored playing board games. I just can’t sit still, I guess.”

  The nurse grasps the handles of Haley’s wheelchair and backs her away from us. She does not look happy with Trish.

  “Can you feed her these Hot Tamales?” says Trish abruptly, trying to hand the box to the nurse. “She really likes them.”

  When the nurse doesn’t take them, Trish lays the box on the front tray on Haley’s wheelchair.

  I suddenly realize that the nurse considers Trish a crazy person. Haley does too. The nurse wheels Haley away, leaving me and Trish standing alone in the hallway.

  In the elevator, Trish can’t speak. When the door opens, she takes off through the lobby, practically running toward the exit. I run to catch up, and when I do, she stops suddenly,
turns, and collapses into a chair by the door. She lowers her head and starts rocking back and forth. I don’t know what she’s doing, but I sit down too, I put my hand on her back to calm her.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” she moans to herself. She curls up into herself, pulling her fists inside her sleeves.

  “It’s okay, Trish.”

  “Do you see now?” she says, her face bent down almost to her knees. “Do you see now what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” I say, though I don’t really.

  “I did that. I did that,” she says to the ground. “And people want me to get a job? They want me to move forward with my life?” She covers her ears with her wrists.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her.

  “I just wanna be dead,” she whispers into the carpet. “I do. It’s all I ever wanted. I don’t want to be here. I swear I don’t.”

  Then she jumps up and runs out the door. I watch her disappear. I have no idea where she’s going.

  I dig my phone out and text my mom that we might be a while.

  10

  Two days later I’m riding in Martin Farris’s car. We’re going to the mall. I have apparently decided to let him be my dork-replacement-friend.

  Martin parks in the underground parking lot and we go inside. He’s dressed up a bit. He’s wearing new, uncool Nikes, uncool jeans, and some sort of golf shirt.

  We walk along the main concourse. It’s a Friday night. Martin wanted to come on a weekend night because he thought weekend nights were probably the hardest for me.

  “That’s probably when you partied the most,” he said on the phone.

  “That’s right,” I said back, though in fact I “partied” about the same every night.

  We cruise the mall. There are other people milling around. People on dates. It’s pretty embarrassing, but I follow Martin around, like girls are supposed to. That’s how I live now. I do what I’m supposed to do.

  Martin steers us to the Cineplex. We look at the movie times and study the possibilities. One of the other movies finishes and a stream of people come out.