“I’ll find out if you’re lying,” he said, but I could tell he believed me.
Inside the cabin it felt like nighttime, even though the overhead was on. Someone had taped sheets of blue tarpaulin over each of the windows. The eggy smell was worse, more chemical, as if the walls were painted with cleaning fluids or just plain bleach; every inhale I took through my nose felt like a slow stripping of the skin inside. I heard a loud whirring, a fan or an air conditioner, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. There was an unopened canister of acetone on top of the TV. Ryder vanished behind a door that, I presumed, led to the bathroom. Marlena was sprawled out on the bed, belly side down beside a yellowy pillow, her groceries and backpack next to her. At the bed’s foot a skeletal girl used a camcorder to film Greg, the other guy I’d met in the car on New Year’s. Such a slick piece of technology seemed extremely out of place in that room. It occurs to me now that it was probably stolen. I perched on the corner of the bed closest to the exit.
Greg was taking apart a child-sized bike. As he pulled off the seat, the back tire, he explained everything he was doing, and then carefully laid each part on the ground in front of him—effectively dismantling and rebuilding at the same time.
“They’re making a movie,” said Marlena. “Greg thinks he’s going to be a star.”
“Why?” I asked.
Greg looked up from the bike for a half second. “Because it’s awesome.” He wiped the sweat off his upper lip, the lone part of his face spared by acne.
“But why a bike?”
“We found it,” the girl said.
“Shit,” Ryder hissed. “Shit, shit, shit.” Something clanged. “Fucking shit.”
“Great,” the girl said. “I love that.”
“You okay, babe?” Marlena asked, and when Ryder didn’t answer she got up and walked over to the door, opening it all the way. It wasn’t a bathroom—more like a very crowded walk-in closet, where Ryder stood over a card table covered with half-filled two-liter bottles, a decorative basket overflowing with batteries, weird shiny ribbons, and a giant rock like the kind my mom used to separate sections of the garden. There was a squished box of generic cold and sinus pills at his feet. The smell made it hard for me to breathe. Here and there a couple of pieces of clear plastic tubing wound around the bottles, and my stomach started to fizz a warning, telling me Leave, telling me These people aren’t worth it, this is not for you, it doesn’t have to be, you can still go.
Marlena put her free hand on Ryder’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch me,” Ryder said, shrugging her off. He was fiddling with something. There was a fan propped in the open window above his head, turned backward, blades spinning fast. Greg and the girl started laughing, the sound a little unhinged, and the fizz traveled from my stomach to my fingertips, saying Go, Cat, go. It’s just, even saying go, something about being there, that fizz, felt good. It felt like having fun, or some cousin of it, and I had missed that feeling.
A handful of the containers were rigged together with the tubing, but I couldn’t really make sense of what it all added up to—the whole thing reminded me of a deranged project at a science fair, the C+ attempt of a kid with useless parents. I didn’t immediately think drugs, despite what I’d already pieced together. These were drugs, but they weren’t drugs. Right?
It’s so simple now, to recognize it all for what it was, my basic, human inability to see the forest for the trees, which Dad once told me was the biggest problem with my “otherwise perfect brain.” He’d kissed me when he said it, right where my hair parted. But forest, trees, whatever—when Ryder carefully scraped something from one of the coffee filters and placed it on the minuscule scale, I knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t know the science behind it, all the street names that had led me there, whether he was high at that moment, what my involvement was, simply by being there, watching him, simply by not turning around, going back the way I came, how that one swallowed action would determine who I grew up to be.
*
Me and Marlena in the woods, six months past that day at the Mapletree, summertime, four months or so before she died. We sneaked out of our houses and met up in the jungle gym. We didn’t wear shoes: it had been part of the dare, one of the ways we showed off our wildness. In the morning I’d pick grit out of my heel with my thumbnail, lower my feet into the steaming bathtub, and hiss, the pain a kind of sweetness, as dirt and blood spiraled through the water. I’d asked her before, tiptoeing around it, but those nights, crickets thrumming all around us like the mad whispers of the world itself, me drunk or sober, her pretty much always at least a little high, the stars sliding down into the trees like something that had held on for a long time and was ready, finally, to let go, I’d push her for a why. Over and over I asked her. If she hated meth so much, after it scrambled her dad’s brains, drove her mom to who knows where, after her cousin Barry died when his backpack exploded, why was it okay for her that Ryder cooked? How could she spend the money he made off that shit, how could she wait in the car while he sold it to teenagers from Boyne City, to his mom’s friends, to the fudgies who overflowed from the beachside condos in the summer? “You’re so na?ve,” she said, that glow to her that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever like the worst kind of blessing. Was the light there then? I can’t remember her without it. “I want to know what the world looks like to you. I want to be able to see things like you do, to decide so easily that one thing is right, that this is good”—she plucked a blade of grass and set it carefully on the blanket—“and that this”—she plucked another—“is bad,” and tore it up.
Marlena called me na?ve, but what I really think she meant is privileged, a word people use like an insult in New York, but that I’ve always taken to mean safe. Privilege is something to be aware of, to fight to see beyond, but ultimately to be grateful for. It’s like a bulletproof vest; it makes you harder to kill. When we shook out the blanket, the torn-up blade of grass fluttered in pieces to the ground.
“It’s about money, Cat,” she’d say. “That’s all it is.”
*
By the time Jimmy pulled up in Mom’s new-to-us Subaru—she called it the bootie, because it was black and shaped exactly like an ankle boot—I’d just made it back to KHS and was waiting, as if I’d been there since the last bell rang, under the overhang by the main doors. Students swarmed the parking lot, their shouts rising in foggy bursts.
Jimmy idled alongside the curb. I jumped in, slamming the door. “Drive, please,” I told the glove compartment.