“I like boys.”
A beat; then she raises a hairless eyebrow. “I’m flat chested. You could pretend.”
He puts his hand on hers. “Louise,” he says.
She lifts her eyes to his, but this time the look is cautious, scared. “What?”
“Trust me.”
*
A week later Simon meets the Prophet. He’d gone to bed late that night—working through all the checklists for his nighttime ritual took time—and was awakened an hour later by the sound of hushed voices in the hall, footsteps. Simon had always been a light sleeper. He felt no disorientation, sitting up, reaching for the light. The voices came again, moving down the hall. Under the door he sees the hallway overheads come on. He sits up slowly, goes to the window. It’s dark outside, maybe 1:00 a.m. There is an ambulance in the driveway. Its back doors are open, lit by an interior bulb. Simon turns and goes to his door. He turns the handle slowly, pulls the door open just enough to see out into the hall.
Two paramedics are wheeling a gurney out of the room next to his. There is a body on it with a sheet pulled over its face. It’s the new kid, Jeremy something. He moved in on Monday. A ginger someone shot in the face with a freckle gun. Simon watches as the orderlies rolled him down the hall and onto the elevator. Then a male counselor comes out of Jeremy’s room and sees Simon.
“Go back to bed.”
“Was that—what’s his name—Jeremy?”
“Kevin,” says the counselor. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”
“An accident.”
“Go back to bed. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
The counselor hurries off after the paramedics. Simon watches him turn the corner and disappear. From behind him he hears a voice.
“There are no accidents.”
Simon turns. A boy is standing in a doorway down the hall. He has long hair—not Jesus long, but to his shoulders—and glasses. He is eating a Twizzler.
“You’re saying—what are you saying?” Simon asks.
“It’s all part of the plan.”
“Whose plan?”
The boy waves the Twizzler at him, smiles. “That,” he says, “is the million-dollar question.”
And he turns back into his room and closes the door.
*
Before his sister killed herself, Simon thought his father was a doctor the way his pediatrician was a doctor. He pictured a medical office with a waiting room filled with sniffling children and grouchy adults. In his mind, Dad wore a white lab coat and carried a stethoscope, maybe a joke tie. But, of course, Simon’s father never wore joke ties. He wore three-thousand-dollar suits and nine-hundred-dollar shoes. They had a view of the Hudson and a terraced roof, and every morning his father would eat a soft-boiled egg—what he had learned to call a soldier from his time at Oxford—and then he would put on his suit jacket and climb into the back of a private town car, ready for the drive to the office in a skyscraper on Fifty-Seventh Street, because Ty Oliver was, of course, the CEO of Rise Pharmaceuticals, a multinational conglomerate started by his grandfather in 1901.
To this fact, Simon, of course, was blind. He was a fourteen-year-old boy, insulated from controversy. Nor did he know at that age that Rise Pharmaceuticals was the single largest manufacturer of prescription opioids on the planet. And prescription opioids were one of the most addictive drugs ever created in a laboratory.
Boo phooey.
A factory worker in Pittsburgh goes to the doctor for his trick knee and comes out with a bottle of pills. Six months later, he has sold all his furniture and is buying pills in ones and twos from the back of a used Toyota. Or an Olympic skier has ankle surgery. She’s put on bed rest for two weeks. She takes the pills cautiously at first, trying to stay ahead of the pain. But after a while she finds that the time-release mechanism isn’t delivering the dose she needs, so she crushes the pill up and snorts it. And the rush she feels is like nothing a sentient animal could ever experience in the wild.
Scientists have proven that if you put a lab rat in a cage and give it one button to push for food and another for a dose of an opiate, the rat will push the opiate button every time, even as it wastes away. The only thing more addictive than painkillers is money, which, it turns out, can be made in astonishing amounts from the sale—legal and illegal—of prescription opiates.
So when Simon’s father put on his suit jacket in the morning and rubbed his son’s head, he wasn’t going to a cramped basement medical office to check for strep or test people’s reflexes. He was going to the top of a glass and steel office tower to look for ever more profitable ways to turn pain into $.
Don’t get me wrong. Ty Oliver was already a multimillionaire before the pandemic. Back then he was worth a mere $922,000,000 (nine hundred and twenty-two million). Twelve months into the pandemic, his net worth had risen to $4,000,000,000 (four billion). This is what a year of staying home did to people—exacerbated their pain, their need for escape. And Ty Oliver was there to sell them a solution.
For him and the thirty-six other newly minted billionaires, whose collective wealth grew from a combined $2,950,000,000,000 (2.95 trillion) to $4,000,000,000,000 (four trillion). The pandemic was great for business.
Here are some other numbers that Simon learned in the year before he checked himself into an adolescent center for anxiety:
There are more than forty-one million opioid users on Planet Earth.
Three hundred thousand of them die each year from an opioid overdose.
Claire killed herself by swallowing eighty-six pills.
She was one of two hundred plus Americans who died that day from overdosing on pills Simon’s family created and sold. This was before the suicide epidemic began. Just another Tuesday.
Math, it turns out, has its own morality.
*