CHAPTER 7
REID
You disgust me. This is such an unprecedented statement that I have no idea what to do with it. If she was anyone else, I’d reject it as prejudice because I’m young, famous, rich, entitled—I’ve heard it al , or thought I had. The only other reason for unreasonable animosity is the random girl who doesn’t turn out to be the love of my life after a hot one-nighter—and is somehow surprised by this. Please.
Could Dori be resentful that I haven’t made an effort to get into her unfashionable shorts? I thought I had her pegged as the sort who wants nothing short of respect, though she can take a fair amount of mockery and come back curiously unperturbed. She may be the most patient person I’ve ever encountered, besides George. No matter what I do, including showing up an hour late with a massive hangover, she tolerates it. Maybe that’s her weird way of showing attraction. Maybe there’s a girl under those ginormous t-shirts who just wants attention like the rest of them.
Or maybe I’d add a sexual harassment charge to the drunk driving conviction.
Three weeks and two days to go. I’ve worked on movie sets that were way more grueling, endured costars who were ridiculously unprofessional and survived directors whose tyrannical outbursts would send Dori running for cover. Three and a half weeks and I’l be back to my life.
***
John is about to chew through my last nerve. He and some other guys want to go out tonight. There are no unlame parties, so they’ve decided to bounce through a few clubs.
And since we’re al underage, they want me along because I can usual y get us al in anywhere, plus VIP treatment.
Most nights, no problem. Happy to oblige. Tonight, I’m dead—and I already had a couple of seven and sevens to cool down after that exchange with Dorcas. The last thing I need is noise, people and paparazzi. I just want to stay home and flip through the channels until I fal asleep, so I can get up again tomorrow and take a hired car to a pathetic unfinished house that I’m helping to build and landscape… God, what an out-of-character inclination.
John is having none of it. “Come on, man, just a couple of hours. Why not?” He’s like a whiny toddler. A self-absorbed, ful -grown, 19-year-old toddler.
“Because I’m exhausted and sunburned and have to get up at the crack of ass again tomorrow, not that you give a shit.”
“It’s summer!”
“So?”
“Time to go out and party, not hibernate!”
“John, we live in Los Angeles. It’s never time to hibernate. Whatever. I’m dead. We’l go out Friday.”
“Fine,” he says, dejected. “If me and the guys are bored to death by then, it’s on you.”
I don’t bother answering beyond repeating, “Friday,” and hanging up. I have a backup of texts al basical y wanting the same thing. Parties I’m invited to, parties someone wants entrance to, requests to go out, people bored out of their minds and everyone wanting to score the next high to escape it. After making sure none of the texts or missed cal s are from George, I toss the phone on the table next to my bed and turn up the volume on the television before clicking it off again and walking around my room, clinking the ice at the bottom of my glass.
I’m restless, and I never get restless. At the first hint of it, I’m usual y out the door, not stalking around my room like a prisoner in a cel . What am I staying in for, anyway? So I don’t have a hangover tomorrow morning that Dorcas wil disapprove of? Why would I even give a shit what she sanctions as acceptable behavior—she’s probably at home knitting for chrissake.
I grab the phone and cal John, who’s on his way before I can change my mind.
A couple of nights ago I wanted to find the opposite of Dorcas Cantrel , but that didn’t exorcize her from my head.
Tonight I’m searching for her twin, as impossible as it wil be to find someone so plain in the hangouts we frequent.
Once I find her, I’l be damned if she isn’t begging me to screw her up against the bathroom wal before me and the guys take off.
*** *** ***
Dori
“Hey, baby girl. When do you leave for Ecuador?” Deb must be exhausted, but she always makes time for me. I guess she could tel in our last few texts that I’m stressed. She can always tel . It’s like she’s had a wireless connection to me since I was born.
“Twenty days.”
“Got it down to days, huh?” I hear the smile in her voice.
“Are you counting down ’til you go to Quito or ’til you leave LA?”
“Both.”
“So… I hear you’ve got a daily celebrity sighting at Habitat.”
I sigh heavily and moan, lying back on my bed. “Let’s not talk about him.”
Deb laughs. “Oh, come on. You don’t want to talk about him even a little? Hmm.”
“What?”
“I was eight when you were born, Dori; I know you pretty wel . If you don’t want to talk about him at al , he must be frustrating you in some profound way.”
“Trust me, there’s nothing profound about him. He’s as superficial and vacuous as you’d assume.” Great. I’m almost sputtering.
“Al right, al right, I’m just teasing.” Deb is rarely unkind.
She’s one aspect of my life that gives me the most joy and the most guilt. I have a loving and supportive family, always enough money for necessities—food, clothing, books—
while others have poverty, neglect, il ness, and the constant hunger of never enough. For some reason this line of thinking makes me think of Reid, which is absurd. He has every advantage and more, with no excuse for forcing his egocentricity on people who have so much less.
Pushing him from my mind, I ask Deb about her residency. After four years of col ege and another four years of medical school, she’s final y Dr. Deborah Cantrel .
To become the pediatrician she’s always wanted to be, she’l be working crazy long hours for the next three years, making barely enough to feed herself and begin paying back her student loans.
“You wouldn’t believe how many ER cases are drug seekers.” She sighs, frustrated. “They’re desperate for a fix, so they come in with phony symptoms. The more experienced doctors assume that everyone who gives
‘pain’ as a symptom is a fraud. We keep a list of the repeat offenders.”
I try to imagine my sister in that environment, with her social idealism and her ambition to help people. “Maybe you’re just what those other doctors need—a balance to the pessimism.”
“Wel , it’s going to be a contentious three years.”
“So… met any cute doctors?”
She laughs at my change of subject. “Yes, actual y—one of the attending physicians. But as luck would have it, he’s also the most cynical. Last night, he almost missed a possible placental abruption because the mother-to-be is a known addict. She claimed severe back pain, and he was about to send her out the door with Tylenol. I convinced him to let me do an ultrasound on her, for practice, and we had to do an emergency C-section. If she’d gone home, the baby would have died and the patient could have bled to death.”
“Wow.” I’m not sure exactly what she’s talking about, but it sounds intimidating. “You saved their lives, Deb.”
“Yeah, wel . She swore she hasn’t used since she knew she was pregnant, but to him, once an addict, always an addict.” She breathes an exasperated sigh.
“We know that’s not true.” Our parents have helped dozens of people kick al types of drug addiction through the years. Though a depressing majority start using again, some stay clean. Dad says he has to keep fighting for those few, because you never know who’s capable of kicking it for good.
“Bradford was brought up in a different environment than we were. He didn’t know much about addicts or poverty until he became a doctor. I got him to talk about it a little bit today. He grew up in an upper middle class suburb, and the worst thing he encountered was other kids who smoked pot or did a little X. To him, someone who’s hooked on cocaine or meth is forever hopeless.”
I think of Reid, and how I told him he was hopeless. How angry he was that I deemed him unworthy of my time or attention. I don’t know if he’s addicted to any particular substances, though he’s certainly addicted to his hedonistic substances, though he’s certainly addicted to his hedonistic lifestyle. But is he hopeless? Maybe he’s right. Maybe my snap judgment concerning him makes me a hypocrite.
“So you’re educating Bradford about real life, eh?”
“I’m attempting to, but he’s the most opinionated, obstinate man I’ve dealt with since Dr. Horsham in second year pathology.” Deb almost quit medical school because of Dr. Horsham, until Mom convinced her to go back and prove she was made of tougher stuff than that.
After I hang up, I lie on my bed thinking about my sister fighting for an ex-addict. She was right this time, but she won’t always be. There wil always be addicts who lie to get their fixes, taking hospital resources from those who have actual need. Stil , Deb wil find the people everyone else has given up on and resolve the most unmanageable problem—assuming there is a solution. That’s just how she is.
Mom was pul ing twelve-hour shifts in the maternity ward when she found out she was pregnant with me. She spent the last two months of her pregnancy on doctor-ordered bed rest, so her intention to fix up the nursery was wrecked.
My sister’s old crib, unearthed from the attic, stood pathetical y in the center of the otherwise bare room until Deb and Dad took over nursery decoration. Mom had a lamb-based theme planned, but that idea was tossed.
Thanks to the Discovery Channel, Deb was on a marine life kick, infatuated with the Great Barrier Reef. She insisted on decorating my room with fish.
Dad says I lucked out—her next fascination was lizards.
Deb and Dad painted the room turquoise. Twisting up from the floorboards were sections of coral created from orange posterboard, and twenty-two fish were strung from the ceiling, cut in Dad’s woodshop from a pattern and al painted the same iridescent blue-green. Mom had suggested that they be multihued, but Deb refused anything that wasn’t identical to her National Geographic images of damselfish.
The posterboard coral is long gone, and Mom and I repainted the room a lighter blue just before I started high school. The fish, though, remain. Attached to strands of transparent fishing line hooked to the ceiling, they swim in a school from my bedroom door to the window. My earliest memories are of those fish. As I lie with my head at the foot of my bed, they sway fluidly in the A/C-generated breeze, forever passing through.