by Jennifer Oko
“Some friend,” I muttered as he let me pass.
Lillianne was still curled up at a booth in the back, just where I’d left her, deeply engrossed, to put it nicely, with the subject of the next round of gossip for the tabloids. It was too dark to tell who he or she was, but I was sure I would be able to find out soon enough if I wanted to. Vivian Ward and a few other familiar faces were also at a table in the corner.
“Hey, Olivia,” she said, making an obvious show of looking over my shoulder. “Where’s Polly?”
“Quick, Viv!” Adam Fald snorted audibly, one of his carefully manicured dreadlocks flopping into his eyes. “You better take something. God knows how many calories are in that martini you have.”
“Fuck you, Adam,” Vivian said. “You were the one who was just looking for her.”
“Guilty as charged.” He bowed his head with great exaggeration and then popped it back up. “So, where is she? Where’s Polly? Where’s her magical bag of tricks?”
I stood there, waiting to see if anyone would scoot over, make some room at the table, waiting to see if anyone would even take notice that my shirt was soaked through.
“So, you haven’t seen her?” Vivian asked, finally acknowledging me.
“No,” I said, “I haven’t.” I didn’t bother to tell them that even if I had seen her, there were hardly any drugs left in her bag. We couldn’t take enough imperceptible amounts from her dad’s office to keep up with demand; our supply had dwindled down to a few packs of stimulants and handful of other random pills.
I snatched up the purse I had shoved under the table earlier in the evening, and I left.
***
When the cab driver finally pulled up to our building, I opened my wallet only to discover that all I had were three crumpled dollar bills. He shook his head with resignation and drove me over to the ATM down the street. It turned out to be a pointless detour; my card was declined because my checking account was in overdraft.
“Just go away,” the justifiably angry cabbie said when I tried to press the last of my cash into his hand. “Clearly you need it more than I do.”
Needless to say, I wasn’t well disposed to talk when Polly emerged from her room the next morning and plopped down on the couch, causing my coffee to splash across the pile of credit card bills and grant applications I had spread out on the milk crate.
“He’s here,” she whispered giddily, oblivious to the fact that she’d just made the documentation of my financial life all the more pathetic in appearance.
“Who is?” I grabbed a handful of tissues from the side table and started to mop up the mess when Mitya the gangly DJ emerged from her room. “Oh, Jesus,” I said. He wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of threadbare boxer shorts. Neither was I. It was getting hot, but we still hadn’t installed our air conditioner. All I had on were bikini underpants and a camisole. I grabbed a throw pillow and held it to my chest.
“Hey,” Mitya said, scratching his behind.
I looked at Polly. “You are kidding me?” I shouted in a whisper. “Unbelievable.”
Polly kicked my ankle and said, glaring at me, “Mitya, you remember Olivia, right?” She tucked her knees underneath the front of the deliciously worn out and tremendously oversized once-white Columbia University T-shirt (stolen from one of her past boyfriends) that she often wore to bed. “She was there last night?”
“Hey,” he said again, nodding at the other side of the room. “Bathroom’s that way, right?”
“Yes,” I said with mock graciousness. “It’s all yours. No need to worry about people doing cocaine in the stalls over here.”
Thankfully, he closed the door behind himself.
I looked at Polly. “I can’t believe you. I thought we agreed not to have overnight guests without at least warning each other first.” Not that I ever had such guests myself.
“I tried to tell you last night, before you took off.”
“Before I took off? You were the one who did the disappearing act.” I picked up the wet wad of tissues I had just used to mop up my papers and threw it across the closet-sized room, hoping to hit the kitchen sink. I missed.
“I did not do a disappearing act, Olivia. I just went to change my blouse.”
I rolled my eyes.
The sound of the toilet flushing interrupted us for a moment.
“Your blouse. Whatever,” she continued. “It was pretty uncomfortable dancing around in a wet, see-through top, so I –”
“I’m sure it was,” I interrupted.
Polly shook her head dismissively, untucked her knees, walked over to our kitchenette, picked up the soggy pile of tissues, and tossed it into the garbage can under the sink.
The squeak of the shower faucets echoed out of the bathroom.
“He’s a really nice guy, Olivia. He took me to the office and found a clean dish towel …” She held up the half-finished pot of coffee I’d made hours before. “Want some more?”
“A dish towel?” I repeated, ignoring her offer. “Quite the knight in shining armor you found there.” Of course, no one had come around to assist me when my shirt got wet.
“It was a bar, not a spa, Ols. Anyway, he was incredibly nice and gave me a T-shirt to wear while we tried to fan the blouse so it would dry faster. That’s probably where I was when you were looking for me.” She put the pot back on the burner. “I guess you don’t want any, right?”
I watched her walk past our funhouse mirror and it crossed my mind to tell her that with that oversized off-white T-shirt, her distorted reflection looked like Casper the Ghost, but I wasn’t in a joking mood. So I just continued our clipped conversation, trying to rush out information before Mitya turned off the tap.
“Who was playing the music while he was back there?”
“I don’t know,” she said, getting testy. “Maybe it was on autopilot. Who cares? The point is, he was really sweet. I might really like him.”
“So you brought him home?”
“It’s not what you –”
“Hey.” Mitya popped his head out of the bathroom door. The water was still running. “Okay if I use this towel?” He held out my favorite white terry bath sheet.
“Hey, that’s my—” Polly shot eye daggers at me before I could finish the sentence.
“Be nice,” she mouthed. “Sure,” she said out loud before I could continue protesting. “Dry off and come join us. Olivia already made coffee.”
“Great.” Mitya tucked himself back behind the door. The shower was still running, but I could hear him brushing his teeth. I didn’t want to know whose toothbrush he was using.
“He’s wasting water,” I said.
“God, Olivia. Why do you have such a beef with him?” Polly had returned to the couch, coffee mug in hand. I took a good look at her. Her hair was fittingly disheveled and a ring of mascara circled under her left eye. She was a mess.
“I don’t,” I said, my irritation subsiding. “I’m sorry. It’s not him. I’m just concerned.”
Polly bit her lower lip. “I’m not a child, Olivia.”
I raised my eyebrow.
“Fine. I know what this must look like. But I swear, this is different. We didn’t even sleep together last night.”
I raised my other eyebrow.
“You know what I mean.”
I snorted.
“Stop that.” Polly laughed. “I swear we didn’t.”
The water stopped running.
“Finally,” I said.
Polly nudged my ankle again. “You’ll be nice, right?”
“Sure,” I said, and stood up to go change my shirt.
Ten minutes later, the three of us were nursing caffeine around the milk crate, me and Polly on the couch, Mitya chivalrously taking a spot on the wove
n jute rug on the floor. He wasn’t bad looking, I’ll give her that. He was lanky, sort of like a basketball player, but without any muscle tone or the chart-breaking height. Maybe that’s a bad analogy. It’s probably simpler to say that he looked exactly what you might imagine the archetype of a downtown hipster to look like: thin, pale and dressed in an intentionally distressed T-shirt with a logo of a faded rock band and low-slung jeans. His still-damp dark hair was shaggy, like that of a little boy who continually resisted his mother’s attempt to take him to the barber.
“So, do you normally hit on girls by tossing drinks on their shirts?” I asked once we had settled into place.
“Works every time.” Mitya winked.
“Ha. Maybe for you.” I told them about my own drenching of the previous night. “The guy was cute, but I can’t say his move was a turn on.”
Mitya grinned. “I guess I must just have that je ne sais quoi thing going on.” He reached forward and placed his hand on Polly’s knee. His fingers were covered with tattoo art. Well, not exactly art. The unidentifiable shapes were more like half-finished blue squiggles of indelible ink. He caught me looking at them and immediately snapped up his hand and placed it at his side.
“Hurt too much to finish the job,” he said in a manner that made it clear he wasn’t about to explain what the drawings might represent.
“Mitya was actually a nervous mess after he spilled the drink,” Polly said, oblivious to the tense non-verbal exchange Mitya and I had just had. “He was so apologetic, I offered him one of my peppermint Certs just to change the subject and calm him down.” She smiled and cupped her hand around her mouth as if to tell a secret. “He said he needed something stronger.”
“Yeah.” Mitya patted her knee with his other hand. “Luckily you were well-equipped.”
“I gave him a Sanitol,” Polly explained with a laugh. “Actually, I gave him two.”
“What?” I said. “Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“We agreed we wouldn’t hand out anything without consulting with each other first.”
“It was just a couple of pills, Ols.”
“Well, you don’t even know what you’re doing. You could have gotten him sick.”
Polly rolled her eyes. “This isn’t rocket science, Olivia. You of all people should know that.”
“And you of all people should have known that would piss me off. We were supposed to be doing this together.”
Mitya cleared his throat. “Um, I’m going to let you two work this out.” He stood up and gave Polly a quick kiss on her cheek. “I should get going, anyway. I have to meet my aunt for lunch down in Brighton Beach. I’ll call you later, okay?” He walked out the front door before Polly could protest.
“Happy?” she asked once the door shut.
“No,” I said. “I’m not. First of all, that was bullshit.” I nodded toward her bedroom. “You could have found me. You could have at least left me a message.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not that big a deal.”
“More importantly,” I continued, “what you’re doing is dangerous. And stupid. Plus, we had already promised what little we had left to Lillianne and her friends.”
“It was a couple of pills, Olivia. Get off your high horse.”
“My high horse? I’m so over this,” I said, making a show of straightening up my papers. “You know what? You want to play doctor? You’re on your own. Feel free to distribute whatever remains in that purse of yours however you want. I have better things to do with my time.”
“Jesus. You are totally overreacting. Mitya’s a good guy. We were flirting. I gave him two pills. So what?”
She was right. I was overreacting. This wasn’t all her fault. She couldn’t help herself. Not really. I put my papers back down. I took a deep breath and then loudly exhaled. “I think you’re addicted to dopamine,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Come on. You just can’t get enough of the rush you get every time you develop a new crush. Why else did you give him the Sanitol? Were you trying to show off?”
“Show off? That’s an obnoxious thing to say.”
“Right back at you,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not being obnoxious. I’m concerned. I mean, what are you taking these days, anyway? I think something in there,”—I tapped her head—“is out of whack.”
She recoiled. “What?”
“You need to separate your dopamine rush from this equation. You don’t know this guy at all. And here you are, acting like he’s the end-all-be-all, wasting what little supply we have left on a stranger. I think it’s a problem.”
“I think you’re jealous,” Polly said, glaring at me with a look that surely should have been able to kill, if looks could do such a thing. “That’s what this is about, Olivia. You’re the one who needs some restructuring.” This time she tapped my forehead.
I sat back and pedantically crossed my arms. “You can think that, Polly, but I think I know a little bit more about this stuff than you do. So before you get all head over heels here, just think about it.”
“About what?”
“Seriously, what are you taking these days? Maybe it’s impacting your judgment.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“I’m not your lab rat, Olivia.”
“Maybe if you were, you wouldn’t be acting like such a fool.”
“Incredible,” Polly huffed, going back to her room and slamming the door behind her so hard it caused a few of my less-wet bills to fly off the milk crate.
It did not seem like a very good time to ask her for a loan.
15
June 9 (B.D.)
The Same Day.
Later.
Polly didn’t speak to me after our little tiff that day. She showered and dressed (in her own clothing, I noted) and walked out the front door, saying only, “I’m going on a date with my dopamine rush. See you later.”
That was one of the last half-normal interactions we had in our apartment. After that, she became so absorbed with her new relationship that if I wanted to see her and have an actual conversation, I basically had to make a date with her myself.
The lust-inducing hormone norepinephrine can do that to people—cause them to become oblivious to the world around them and dismissive of friends they once called four or five times a day. All of those love-making neurotransmitters—dopamine and its chemical brethren—they can make you do things you might not normally do.
I suppose I should have been less quick to judge Polly’s new relationship, especially considering that given the chemical structures in her brain, some of her behavior was out of her control. But I am (I was) only human, and had my own synapses to contend with, like the ones that were being inundated with vasopressin and oxytocin (yes, the hormones associated with jealousy. I suppose I can admit that).
In the end, though, it no longer matters. For all of my studying about what molecules do what to which part of the brain, there is not one molecular structure that could change my current situation. Come to think of it, if you could create a pill to stop death, it would be the biggest blockbuster in history. Imagine the money in that. Imagine the lengths pharmaceutical companies might go to get a hold of that patent. Maybe that’s what I should have been focusing on all along. Then I wouldn’t have been in this predicament.
I’m half kidding, of course. First of all, it’s a ridiculous premise. Second of all, money was never the point. Not for me. At least it wasn’t initially the point. It wasn’t the point of our trading in pharmaceutical swag, and it wasn’t the point of my research. I wish I could have kept it that way, but I was broke and underfunded, so that stopped being an option. Unfortunately, as the proverbial “they” so often say, money ruins everything.
Money is the reason why the vast majority of new prescription drugs hitting the market each year are aimed at “lifestyle” and not at “lifesaving.” It’s the reason why pharmaceutical companies spend 90 percent more on marketing new medications than actually researching them. And money is the reason why I got even more deeply involved with Missy Pander than I otherwise would have.
I was desperate.
The tuition for my program was covered, but it didn’t count for things like living expenses, dresses from Prada sample sales or bottles of Cristal. (OK, I only paid for the Cristal once. Usually when we were with Lillianne or any of her pals, everything was complimentary.) The thing was, even with all the scholarships and aid money, going to graduate school in New York City was doing me in. Working in a grant-based research lab while dressing like I was a senior editor at a Conde Nast publication only made matters worse. I was saddled with undergraduate loans, and it didn’t help my credit card debt when my extracurricular activities started requiring a wardrobe that was more Barneys than Banana. In the past, Polly had often helped bail me out, at least covering the minimum monthlies. When she started dating Mitya, I probably owed her almost as much money as I owed my university, and given the current tenor of our relationship, I wasn’t about to ask her for any more handouts.
So there I was, stewing on our ratty couch, drowning under the pile of still wet bills, feeling rejected by my best friend, and, well, sorry for myself. I admit it. I shouldn’t have been harassing Polly about her dopamine addiction and her hyper-emotional amygdala when my own brain was suffering from an overactive prefrontal cortex. She might not have been fully balanced, but she was right. She wasn’t the only one with a brain that was out of whack.
I looked at myself in our funhouse mirror.
What a pathetic sad sack I was; with my unwashed stringy hair falling forward and the puffy, swollen circles under my eyes, I looked like Droopy.