Mom sent Marlena home with a Tupperware full of tuna casserole for Sal after making Marlena promise that if she needed anything at all she should feel free to come over and take it right out of the fridge. I stood in the doorway, watching as she trudged through the unshoveled snow. Despite the temperature, she walked slowly. I tried not to let myself fully articulate what I was feeling, which was that the day had been the best ever, that it was the start of a new life for me, a real life, full of friends and maybe a little danger.
Marlena carried her coat over one arm. The plastic bag hanging from her wrist clunked against her thigh, bare except for a film of torn stocking. Halfway between my house and hers she stopped in her tracks and tilted her head so far back I thought for sure she was going to fall. She began to spin in a circle, her arms out, the bag twisting until the handle buried itself in her wrist. She spun and spun and spun and then she quit and just stood there, swaying dizzily, so long I grew tired of watching her. But then the barn door opened, throwing a block of orange light onto the snow, and a man’s voice towed her toward the house. In the stretched shaft of light, the shadow she cast appeared to have wings. It gave me the creeps.
Omissions
There are things I wish weren’t part of this story.
So far I’ve made no catalogue of what she swallowed that day at school, what she inhaled. I did not describe the cigarettes we smoked together between French and detention, standing on a toilet in an out-of-the-way girls’ bathroom near the gym, exhaling into a ceiling vent so the smoke didn’t creep out into the hall. I didn’t tell you that she received texts all day, text after text, or how every time she looked at her phone something happened to her face. I left out the fact that after meeting with Cher, Marlena took another Oxy and fell asleep in the crawl space under the auditorium stage for three hours, high enough to remain unconscious throughout the whole of jazz band rehearsal, which is why she was so early to lunch. I barely mentioned the scabbing-over cut on her left temple, intentional-looking and still slightly damp with blood.
Over the course of our friendship, I learned about Marlena’s pills in pieces. They were bluish and their precious core was protected by a time-release coating that needed to be sucked off before the pill was crushed with a school ID against a textbook or the kitchen counter and cut into chalky lines, snorted with a rolled-up dollar bill, a straw snipped into sections, a torn piece of notebook paper. They were small and yellow or small and white and could be dissolved under the tongue. They were bright orange and made you shit, or they were oblong and snowy and blocked you up for days. They came out of Marlena’s pin, one and two at a time, or from an unlabeled tube in her tote bag, all mixed together, appearing when we were in some bathroom or in my room with the door shut or walking through the woods on our way to the railcar, where I had to hide in the fringe of trees so I wouldn’t be seen, because she needed some money. She kept careful track of her pills. In her palm, they were all different colors and sizes and they were tiny doorways, expanding the options of the place where we lived by a millionfold. They were called Oxys and benzos and Addys and Xany Bars and Percs. Ritalin and Concerta were just Ritalin and Concerta and were not ideal—Ritalin too weak, and Concerta, with its coating and plastic barrier, was too much work. Mostly, she thought nicknames were stupid.
Marlena got Oxys and Percs from Bolt, Addys from the richer kids at school, generic benzos from her dad’s topmost dresser drawer, E and whatever else from Ryder, who was a minor league dealer and an amateur, idiotic cook, but could be counted on to always have something. They cost a lot of money, especially Oxy, a dollar a milligram, more, but she had an arrangement. The first time she bumped an Oxy in my presence we were skipping school, hiding out at her place, and I was too intoxicated by the whole thing, our friendship, this new world, to be anything more than curious. I asked her for some and she asked me for thirty dollars. I laughed, thinking she was kidding. She wasn’t. Here, she said, and gave me a Vicodin. I ate it, heart racing, excited and anxious and a little reluctant but wanting, more than anything, to show her that I thought it was no big deal. An hour went by, and then two, and nothing really happened; we watched TV for hours, I felt a little sleepy, but that was it. An anticlimax that made me even less afraid. She didn’t share Oxys with me or anyone. Pills were okay because they originated with a doctor, and they weren’t meth, which would kill you. It felt like a full-body orgasm, we’d heard, which was appealing, but would make you lose your face and teeth. Meth was gross, Marlena said. For rednecks. She had terrific scorn for it, and didn’t seem to equate what she was doing with her pills to her dad and his railcar lab, her mom and her vanishing. I looked up Oxy on the Internet, once, when she was shivering in my bed, calling Bolt over and over and over again, crying a little though she hardly seemed to notice her own wet face, and I comforted myself by reading a very long and detailed article that argued that if you took Oxy as directed, which she claimed to mostly do, it wasn’t addictive. Her skin smelled curdled; she threw up first in my neon-pink trash can, and then in the bathroom while she ran the shower. The next day I washed my sheets.
Marlena was protective of me, in her way. I wasn’t allowed to bump anything; she liked to remind me that I was fifteen, as if she hadn’t put anything up her nose just two years earlier, at my age. When she shared pills with me, which was rare, it was Addys, mostly, or Ritalin—fun to do together because they made us talk and talk and talk—and I had to take them regular. One of those times, the two of us trapped in an elaborate conversation that lasted from nine in the morning to seven at night, pacing all through the woods, sucking down a hundred cigarettes, she told me that if she were a drug, she’d be a pill as big as a marble, a magical new compound. “Snort me or swallow me,” she said. Her high would be like sleeping: anything could happen and nothing would hurt, except the user would be fully awake. “And me?” I asked. What would I be?
“You?” she said, confused.