Nothing Real Volume 1 (7 page)

“My rib, Dad, I've got to ice it.”

He took me by the arm and I leaned in to him. We hobbled down the hill to where he parked, and I did what I shouldn't have, what I felt negated everything for him: showed him who I really was. I sniffled and wiped my nose, let hot tears run down my cheeks. I didn't take it like a man. In the car, I really started to cry, moaning a little even.

At the ER, the doc was cool. “Got your moment of glory, now, did
you?” I said yeah, though it felt like ancient history by then. He taped me up and said I'd be out for as long as the ribs took to heal. At least five weeks, could be twice that. “Broken things want to be still,” he said. “But ribs are things that move even when you sleep, every time you breathe.”

I started some noisy-ass crying then, right there in front of the guy. He was younger than my dad, maybe late thirties, bald and skinny with a big nose and watery blue eyes, the kind of eyes that darkened with concentration when he looked at you. He seemed to understand the blubbering better than I did. He stared at me long and hard over that beak of a nose, trying to see what he was dealing with.

“I'm going to give you something to help you rest, okay?” he said at last. “Last thing a wounded warrior needs is a bad night's sleep.” I nodded, and waited while he gave the nurse the prescription.

When we got in the car, I told Dad we should stop and pick up the drugs on the way home. “Hurts that bad?” he asked. Dad was anti-drug, barely ever took aspirin, and hated the idea of a cloudy head. A one-beer-a-game kind of guy.

“Yeah, he said it's important so I stay still when I sleep. Otherwise, I might miss more of the season.” It was a small lie, a white lie, I figured, and I wondered about that expression, how the difference between lies that hurt and those that didn't was a kind of cloud, or a smudge.

“It was some game you played,” Dad said, as he grabbed my leg and gave it a squeeze. “When you do something right, even pain afterward is a kind of a sweet reminder.” I let that statement hang
there, didn't even nod.

What he said stayed with me. I was determined to forget not only the pain, but the impulse that had taken over me, that had made me a winner in his eyes. I knew all along what I was doing out there, and it wasn't winning I'd wanted.

I'd wanted the pain.

When we got home, Mom had dinner waiting for me. She was still in her work clothes, some sort of blue, silky pants. I had already taken a Percocet before I sat down to eat, and I remember thinking those blue pants she wore were the most beautiful pants I'd ever seen.

There are more half-douche guys out there than there are either good guys or full-douche guys. I might even be half-douche myself. It's hard to say. Jay was a definite half, but better than most. Girls went nuts for the guy, and that should tell you, because one thing you can guarantee about girls is that they aren't lining up to go out with someone genuinely nice. Never happens. Jay and I were best friends because he wanted it that way for some incomprehensible reason. He was not a deep dude, but he'd get real certain about stuff—where to go for pizza when all the pizza in town sucked, or how Pamela Mahoney had the best tits ever. He meant this shit. Like Pamela was hotter than Scarlett Johansson, or some fucking swimsuit model. He was like that about friendship too, with about as much reason. “My main man,” Jay'd say, and smack me on the back. I'd nod like Jay and I were tight, and like we ever talked about anything deeper than whether my guy, Sam Weissman, sold better weed than Sam Smythe, Jay's delinquent,
porn-obsessed neighbor—that was it, Purple Cush versus Green Crack. That was basically our bond. Plus Jay would take shots at my head all Saturday afternoon in the goal cage my dad bought me over the summer.

Dad thought I'd love to practice with him on those long August evenings before double sessions started up. I made it a point to be out of the house by the time he finished dinner, even if that meant riding my bike over to May's, even if her mom was home. Even if we just watched TV and ate the organic chocolate-chip cookies her mom bought, which tasted weird and whole-wheaty when you mixed them with milk. At May's it was like there was no time of day, maybe because she didn't live with her dad, and there was no one coming home all jazzed up from the day of being the most important fucking tax attorney in New York City, in the world.

I didn't tell Jay about my new best friend. I didn't tell him how when I got almost done with my little nonrefillable bottle of Percs, I started looking on the internet for a way to get a prescription, or a way to get something like them. It wasn't hard and they were a shit ton better than Sam's weed, in my book.

Percs aren't an in-your-head buzz like weed. Percs are all over you. On Percs, life is a slow dance and the sex is hotter than it even should be. Of course, May wanted in.

The internet is made for shit like buying Percs. There are about a hundred websites where you fill out your name and some bogus doctor
info, and then a little credit info. I've got one of those prepaid credit cards from Dad, so online shopping is not a problem. Mom didn't ask a thing about the little brown package when it arrived, because I'm always ordering vitamins and protein bars from Bodybuilders.com. She figured it was more of the same.

Parents are easy to bullshit, since they want the same thing you do. They want to believe in magic. That things can be made right by shutting the front door and saying,
Hi, Mom, I'm home.
By setting the table with the good napkins, and saying
sure
when someone suggests you clear your plate.
He does what I ask him,
they think.
He's a good kid.
They want that whole happy-family thing that smells like bubble bath and baby powder.

At first I was afraid there'd be something wrong with the almighty Perc buzz, that the pills would be fakes or something. But they were the real deal all right. May made one of her trademark humming sounds after downing her first one. I should have known the game would be up fast that night when May lay in the crook of my arm and told me she loved me. That should have meant something, but I just laughed. Because yeah, I loved her too, but I also loved the roses on her tacky bedspread, and the way her tan-and-brown sneakers had holes in the toes. I loved the way the sun came in her windows through the sheer blinds, and I loved doing nothing but lying there high as shit, and loving nothing so much as I loved Percocet.

Dr. Mick told me at intake that mine was the fastest crash and burn
he'd seen in his nineteen years of working with fuckups. His saying that almost made me doubt myself, doubt I was legit, that I needed to be here at all. Because that's how I think. Am I even the right kind of fucked up?

There was an incredible arc to the whole thing, a kind of structure, looking back. It began with me and Jay a few weeks after my heroic game, and the beginning of me being the Perc king, a version of myself so mellow I stopped being afraid of Dad. A version of me that cared so little, May's silence stopped feeling like peace and started feeling like emptiness.

I had been taking two, three, four Percocet a night. That was my main thing, stoning out on it up in my room at night when the house was quiet. I'd put on some ridiculously chill music. Electronica, weird trance tapes that Jay got from some kid he knew from camp.

One night, as the melting of my joints began, I drifted off. I was neither asleep nor awake. There was a sudden unity to things that I could sense through my body, up through my spine—a oneness. I felt a rush, a desire to speak out, to call to someone. I startled myself out of it with the sound of my own voice. I was calling for Mom. Not out of fear, but to tell her there wasn't anything to fear. I thought the news would ease the pinched appearance of her mouth when she looked at me and Dad, the knowledge of our icy separateness an obvious, everyday pain. I wanted to tell her it didn't matter. This sort of pain was nothing.

I had found bliss and I wanted her to be proud.

There was the morning I stumbled on the stairs coming down to breakfast. I hadn't popped any pills since the night before, but my legs were still soft and slow beneath me. Dad looked up from his iPad, but only glancingly. Mom was frying him an egg. She frowned at me, as though I had done something on purpose to disrupt them. Neither of them detected any stonedness.

Later that same week I fell asleep in Ms. Grayson's English class. She touched the back of my head with her small, light fingers. People laughed when I raised my head and looked around. “Look alive there, Adam, this is junior year,” Ms. Grayson said, and continued her high-heeled circuit around the room. She was that teacher you might glance at twice if she were a lady in the supermarket, or pulled up next to you in her car—high cheekbones, hair slightly gray in front. I never got into that old-chick fantasy. But I always wanted Ms. Grayson to like me, because she was smart and pretty and seemed like the sort of woman a grown man might want to marry.

After a couple weeks of splurging on Percocet with May, I passed some along to Jay. “What the fuck is this?” he asked. I explained the origin of my stash, how I got turned on by the ER doc. We were in his bedroom, his two-foot bong by his side. He eyed me skeptically, and for the first time since I started taking the pills, I began to wonder myself:
What the fuck is this?
It didn't feel like real life anymore, but a sort of pillowy existence. I hadn't thought how I would get back to the world of hard edges, of requirements, of work.

I gave Jay what looked like a normal bottle of Advil, and after he
examined the contents, he tossed the bottle onto a side table cluttered with rolling papers and BIC lighters. “Maybe for Saturday night?” he said. Bonnie Fine was having a party. She was a skanky friend of Jay's, not mine. I never could get those girls, the ones who kept lists, scorecards of drunken, late-night hookups. I thought guys that did shit with them were douches.

“Sure,” I said. “But it's not a party drug, exactly.”

“What you mean?” he asked, packing the crushed, almost iridescent bud of Green Crack into the metal bowl of his bong.

I watched Jay take a hit. A month or so ago I would have been jittery, waiting for my turn. But I didn't even really want to smoke; I was only taking my turn to be sociable and not to have to listen to Jay's whining about how boring I'd become. “Percocet's mellower than weed. It's hard to explain.”

I couldn't tell him about the melting feeling when you're fucking. I didn't talk dirty shit like that with guys, especially not about May. She was the kind of person you felt could be damaged by that, by things she didn't even have any way of knowing.

There were four or five cars in Bonnie Fine's driveway when Jay and I pulled up. Jay's one of those rich kids with a spanking-new MINI Cooper. Scott Bardfield's beat-up Toyota was parked crookedly next to Bonnie Fine's banged-up Subaru, like a stray, unpiloted object. I was feeling heavy in the legs, reluctant to drag myself inside. An hour or so earlier, I'd been in my bedroom alone staring at my Advil bottle full of pills. The yellow-and-blue Advil label contained few legible
letters; only half a
V
, an
I
, and the
L
remained. But it wasn't an ordinary pill bottle to me anymore. It was a sort of totem. When I glanced at the bottle, I felt a preliminary warmth flood through my body. I felt the soles of my feet within my shoes. I felt loose in tight places. The center of my lower back, in particular, felt vibrant, autonomous. It felt strange and animal-like to have a body like this, a body that responded, part by part, to an idea, the idea of popping a Perc.

Inside, there were fifteen or twenty people hanging out. Mostly Bonnie's girlfriends—Lizzy Dorf, with her blond, field-hockey player's ponytail, dip-dyed blue at the ends; Sara Anderson, braless in a pink sweater. There were some guys from soccer, James Fox and Morgan Grant, both major douche bags with their retro, preppy sweaters and floppy haircuts. Naturally, the girls flocked to them. Morgan, the worse of the two, smoked a fat spleef, not passing it along.

I tried to tell Jay earlier, I didn't even like those girls. There was no point to a party like that. Girls looking on as some guy rolls a joint, passing it around, big show of every hit. Then people disappearing, doors closing, and the reemerging with self-conscious looks all around. No one sure if they want people to know or not. Why the hell should anyone care? I've always wondered that. If someone's a skank, I figure that's her business.

I sat down at the kitchen table far away from everyone else. Jay passed me a beer from the six-pack he'd conned his older brother into getting us. I took a swig, and set the bottle back on the table. It tasted like swamp water. Miller Light, not cold. Jay had a thing about buying the cheapest crap available unless you were talking weed.

Jay took the joint from Bonnie, and then passed it to me. I shook my head. I felt a strange sensation in my neck, like maybe I was moving it either a little too fast or a little too slow. I thought people might be looking at me. I took another swig of beer.

“Adam not smoking?” Sara raised an eyebrow. She was a smart, snarky girl who liked to razz people, and to wear shit like the sweater she had on, underneath which you could faintly make out the outline of her nipples. She kind of got away with strutting her slut on account of being in honors English, and because of the cool-eyed way she'd stare other girls down. “I've never seen you abstain before,” she said, and raised her eyebrows. I noticed how dark her eyebrows were compared to her hair.

She took the joint from Jay and blew her smoke my way. “No pressure, Adam,” she said, laughing and coughing. “I just hate losing my shit with you sitting there looking all owlish.” Everyone laughed. I realized I had been staring, that my eyes were probably dilated. I could've been out-and-out drooling for all I knew. But even though I knew she was giving me shit, I'd heard something in her voice when she said my name, something delicate, an invitation.