Haven’t had my period in three months, anyway, KK says.
You’re pregnant?
She laughs. I like the way her stomach feels against my hand. She says, No, my system gets all fucked up when I’m using.
Oh.
She places the bottoms of her feet on the fronts of mine. I pull her tighter. I never want to let go.
I knew this was going to happen, KK says.
Chucks?
No, us. I mean, fuck, not the way it happened, but I knew we weren’t done.
Me too.
Figured you’d think that. Called me every day for six months straight after we broke up.
Can’t blame a guy for trying.
Guess not.
I tell her I figured things were looking good during the Marco Polo game.
Get off it.
Just saying …
An accidental touch, KK says.
Bullshit.
I whisper
Polo
in her ear, running my hand over her pubic stubble.
In your fucking dreams, yo.
I know.
Cheese-ball motherfucker.
You fucking love it.
Kind of.
I rest my chin on her bony shoulder.
Breath is awful, she says.
I’m embarrassed but I can’t help but laugh and I tell her I about vomited kissing her and she says, Fuck you, and makes a show of tossing my arm off and I grab her, spin her around, and pull her toward me. We kiss. I tell her I love it, her taste. She calls me a sick puppy and then rests her head on my chest.
I watch her rise and fall. We’re kids. We’re however old we were when we starting getting high. We insult to flirt. I love KK and I tell her this and she says, Do you remember the first thing you ever told me?
That you were sexy?
Serious.
I try to remember. I can’t. The psych ward is a trazodone blur. I tell her I have no idea.
You said, and I quote, I just called my mom a cunt.
Her head bounces with my laughs.
Do you remember what I told you?
Yeah.
What?
That nothing’s as bad as it seems, but nothing’s as good either.
Big cocksucker Derrick makes a production of doling out little cloudy rocks—shitty crank, impure as hell—and I know that Typewriter, KK, and I have been shorted but whatever, we’re new, plus we have a little head stash of that Albino shit.
Derrick stares at me when he talks. He says, This is it for the day. Got it?
Roger that, I say.
He continues to stare and it makes me feel violated. I use KK’s needle and blast the whole thing.
Shit’s stronger than I would have guessed and it gives me a pulse in my asshole.
It’s good, man, I say.
No shit it’s good, Derrick says. He turns to leave, then pauses. He takes a few steps in my direction. He’s holding on to a needle and I’m thinking he’s either going to puncture my eye or offer me another booster and he’s all, This is it, for your little fucking experiment. One shot. One motherfucking wasted dose because Maddie begged me.
I tell him thanks, but I’ll probably be needing—
He cuts me off with a wet laugh in my face.
I think about the pain of having your Adam’s apple tattooed. I tell myself to let his aggression slide. Really, I have no option. The dude’s a fucking beast and would smash my skull with one clubbing fist. He tells me he’ll hold on to it, to come find him when I want to play doctor. He walks out of the cell block and down the hall. Typewriter uses a new vein on the back of his foot. KK uses her darkened one. Randy and Maddie shoot theirs too. Our eyes get wider, our attention peaks.
So now what? KK asks.
Typewriter’s standing on his tiptoes, hitting the Power button on the hanging TV.
Doesn’t work, Maddie says.
I’m kind of dreading another game of Monopoly. I have the urge to retire to the cell with KK. I feel like I could fuck for hours. I try to give her bedroom eyes but she’s dabbing her bleeding arm with her finger, then sucking the blood.
Go watch ’em, Maddie says.
Watch who?
Them.
Randy says, Don’t have to. Might be a good idea to let it be, actually.
I’m confused, I say.
The monitors, Maddie says, that’s how we saw you. We watch the Chucks.
Forget it, maybe another day, Randy says.
I’m down, Typewriter says, I think it’d be some shit to see them when I’m not running away. To study what they’re like, you know?
It’s wild, Randy says.
I know KK won’t want to watch streams of walking dead, that it would probably be the worst thing for her, and I think about the brief moment last night when she actually fell asleep, how she talked in her sleep and woke up screaming.
You two are good? Randy asks.
All good, I say.
The three of them leave and part of me wants to go with and study these things, see how they move, see what the fuck they do when they’re not laughing, but I know I should stay with KK.
You can go, she says.
No, that’s cool.
Chase the chivalrous.
Not sure what I’m thinking is too chivalrous.
KK rolls her eyes, gets up. Her jumpsuit gives me a boner. She stops at her cell door and glances over her shoulder. I’m up and she’s laughing and then we’re doing our thing and I take her from behind and my dick’s at the perfect sped level—hard
and lacking feeling—and she comes twice and then I do into her aluminum toilet.
We sit on her bed.
There’s no sleep coming and there’s nothing to do and KK must be thinking the same thing because she grabs her jean shorts from the floor and pulls out a shard of the Albino shit and we shoot each other up.
KK says, The hand of God, yo.
I’m leaning against the white wall. My forehead jumps in small spasms.
And sometimes it’s all worth it, she says.
My heart is a snare drum.
Fucking love you, I say.
KK doesn’t look, just gives me her hand. I stroke her long fingers.
We’re going over cartoons from our childhood. We’re talking about the Gummi Bears. We’re talking about Rugrats, trying to remember their names. KK swears the twins are Lil and Phil. I say they’re Lilly and Billy. We lie on opposite ends of the bed, our legs intertwined. I ask if she remembers
Captain Planet
. She sings the song. She says, Fuck that noise, let’s get spun.
We’re at the black bookshelf. We’re debating between a game of War and cracking open the red Bible.
I’m feeling War.
Game is ridiculous, KK says.
Go Fish?
Fuck that.
KK takes a Big Book off the shelf. She doesn’t open it. She says, Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our paths.…
She’s reciting “How It Works,” the section read at the beginning of most meetings. She raises her eyebrows, wanting me to continue. I say, Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves over to this simple program.
Remember, huh?
Kind of hard to forget.
Figured you’d blotted that shit out.
Tried, I say.
She says, Usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.
There are such unfortunates.
We laugh and then we don’t because it’s sad. All of us, heads full of AA, veins full of dope. It’s fucking sad because we’d bought into the whole thing—meetings and sponsors and prayers and steps and making coffee beforehand and cleaning up afterward and a life that involved working a real
job and saving for small material comforts and because we’d been happier then, wanting a different life, believing we could have it.
KK puts the book back on the shelf.
Were you ever serious about it? she asks.
I don’t want to have this conversation. To dredge up shit that has no resolution. I shrug.
You were, I know it.
Why are you bringing this up? Like what good does—
It was a question, Chase, that’s it.
But why? So we can go through the whole thing again? How I was somehow responsible for us ending.
Not
somehow
.
That’s great.
She stares at me. She has her cheeks sucked in like she always did when we fought. This is exactly why I didn’t want her to bring it up in the first place, my
seriousness
for AA years ago. It would lead to the same fucking fight, our only fucking fight. Me ruining everything because I couldn’t stop smoking shit. Her blaming me for fucking up her life, telling me that she’d have been clean the whole time if it wasn’t for my pressure, my hints, my assurance that we could handle it, that it would be just this once.
No, Chase, it isn’t
great
. I asked you a question, that’s it.
What are you doing? I ask.
The tension in her cheeks releases. She blinks twice. She says, I don’t know.
I take her in my arms. I kiss her forehead. She tells me she killed Jared. I ask her if she wants to get spun.
You’re fucking with me?
Just something to do, I say.
You realize it’s never going to end, don’t you?
I talk to her about testing for the cure and about being safe and that Randy and Maddie seem rad and I tell her it’ll work out.
KK’s like, Not what I said, yo.
Stop doing this.
KK says, The cure, if there even is one, which there fucking isn’t, is splice. It’s more fucking dope.
I can’t believe she’s doing this. After everything, after finally being able to sleep for a few fitful hours, after being guarded by locks that keep hardened criminals tame, after finally reaching some sort of fucking destination and grasping on to some semblance of a future, she turns. Always the same thing. A tide pulling outward—her attitude and love and psyche—leaving nothing but cement-looking sand stretching for miles, desolate as fuck.
Just try not to fuck all this up for yourself, I say.
The look she gives me is disgust and hurt, her mouth slightly open. She pulls away and heads to her cell and I’m left standing there alone. I call out her name. She doesn’t respond.
I head out of cell block C. I can hear giggles down the hall. I reach the metal doors for the cafeteria and think about going in and seeing if Derrick needs help. Maybe it’ll be a way to
bridge the gulf between us. I push open the door. I’d eaten corndogs in this very cafeteria. I’m about to call his name but I don’t. I’m not sure why. I make my steps light. I can’t hear anything from the kitchen. Maybe he’s with the others watching the security cameras? I walk around the stainless-steel serving stations. I know I should announce myself, Derrick just the type of motherfucker who takes being surprised as an act of war. I don’t. I push open the swinging doors. There’s nobody inside the kitchen. Beakers and tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks cover a stainless-steel rolling cart. It’s the smell of poison, of better moods. What the hell is KK’s problem? I take a few cautious steps into the kitchen. Derrick isn’t there and neither is anybody else. There’s a cookie sheet cooling on top of the oven and I’m a little kid sneaking to a tray of chocolate chip cookies my mother has made for her bridge group and I’m staring down at an eighth of an inch of chalky crystalline candy and who the fuck would notice if one cookie is missing? I can’t shake the feeling of being watched. I give another spin around the room. I take the butt of my lighter, and as delicately as I can, strike it against the tiniest of corners. There’s a soft crack. The half-inch shard is still a little warm. It’s a pleasant feeling in my palm. I slip it into the pocket of my jumpsuit. Can’t even tell it was ever there.
I make my way back out to the hallway. Giggles echo. I walk to the booking station. Type’s sitting in the monitor room, doing the same thing he’s done for the past five years: picking his face and watching screens. I stand in the doorway. He barely registers my presence.
Anything new? I ask.
No.
I stand there thinking of something to say. I watch a feed from outside the garage. There’s an African-sized gazelle herd of Chucks. The door won’t hold forever. I ask Typewriter if he and I are all good.
He sucks blood and scab from underneath his index nail. He still won’t meet my eyes. I know he’s been going over that scene in the Rockwell house for a day now, me with that baby, me losing my shit. I want to tell him the baby had turned. It was the only merciful thing to do. That my speaking to the baby was a momentary thing, scante and death and fear and that pressure behind my eyes and the sun coming through in a single spotlight on the baby’s pajama-covered feet. To tell him that I’ve seen him do the same thing—the head of that little girl underneath his typewriter, the pawning of his dead mother’s jewelry she kept in the hollow bottom of a Gillette bottle of shaving cream, the stuff he told me he’d hold on to until the day he died. I’ll tell him we all get to that point. That I’m better now.
But instead, I say, What the fuck was I supposed to do?
He sits there staring at the monitors. I notice one-quarter of one screen is from the kitchen. Fuck. I wonder if he saw me and maybe I should offer him a little hit. I have the feeling of being a teenager and forgetting to clear the family computer’s browsing history.
Finally, Typewriter says, It for sure turned? The baby?
For sure, man, hundred percent. Only explanation for it to still be making noise.
He turns to me. His fat jowls slide back into a reluctant
smile. I think about it being this easy, people willing to believe whatever they’re told.
Should have seen the set of teeth on that little fucker.
Nasty, huh?
I slap my hand on his back. I tell him he has no idea.
The Chucks on the screen pry at the hole KK blasted in the garage door.
I ask where the others are.
Out divvying up the County guns.
Oh shit yeah. You’re not trying to get one?
Type motions to the shotgun leaning against the wall.
Your loss, man, I say. I give Type another pat on the shoulder and tell him I’m going to check it out. He’s a retriever, eager to forgive and be petted.