IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Nuvigil to become my new best friend. It made my skin tingle, took a hundred pounds off my brain and another five off my body because I was too busy to eat but never too busy to drink, gallons and gallons of water, like a camel, or bottles of soda that fired like Pop Rocks on my desert of a tongue. At the beginning it kept me high for ten hours at a time, but the best kind of high, the kind that dulls the pain and heightens the senses at the same time. I could memorize the entire Boroughed Trouble script in an afternoon, or write a paper on the Harlem Renaissance that actually sounded good because I’d stayed up till four reading the books and writing feverish notes in the margins instead of googling the Wikipedia entries an hour beforehand like usual.
But it was hard to come down from, and I couldn’t sleep unless I took a few Ambien or smoked a few bowls, sometimes both, washed down with at least two glasses of wine from the stash in the pantry, the good stuff that tasted like velvet and left a purple ring on my lips. And then I’d wake up feeling like shit run over by a dump truck, so I had to take a pill as soon as I got up, and then it all started again. Pretty soon I was up to one and a half a day, then two, going through them twice as fast as Dr. Dante recommended, but that was the thing with medicine: when it wore off you had to take more, otherwise it stopped working.
I needed it to work, because Showcase was looming, getting bigger and bigger in the distance like a wave crashing into shore, and I had to be better than I’d ever been, with a director who never gave me notes because he was too busy trying to make out with me, and a costar who all of a sudden hated being in the same room as me. Which kind of affected our chemistry.
“WHAT HAPPENED?” Ethan yelled one day when we did a run-through for our faculty supervisor, Mr. Francisco. “This scene was perfect last week!”
I couldn’t remember when last week was, or what we had done differently, but apparently it was important because Ethan shut his script with a thud and ran his hands through his hair, his eyes popping out behind his glasses like he was a NASA engineer watching a space shuttle explode. I glared at him and chewed the inside of my cheeks. This terrible thing had happened where just looking at him had started to repulse me, so I was being a giant bitch pretty much all the time, and I was actually even better at being a bitch on Nuvigil since I was so focused.
“You look and sound exactly like Charlie Brown right now,” I said under my breath.
“Bill,” he said, turning to Mr. Francisco, which was exactly the kind of thing Ethan did on purpose to make people not like him, calling teachers by their first names. “I promise, it’s not usually like this.”
“What is it usually like, then?” Mr. Francisco asked. He had snow-white hair and a face dotted with broken blood vessels. Gin blossoms, people called them. I wondered if Mr. Francisco was a boozehound, or if he’d done so much acid in the 60s that his brain looked like a big gray honeycomb. (Joy would sometimes comment, out of nowhere, that MDMA took “ice cream scoops” out of the frontal lobe, or that the DEA listed Adderall in the same class as heroin and coke. I’m pretty sure eighth-grade health class scared her straight forever.)
“Let’s just take it from the top,” Ethan said, sitting back down in his seat looking sweaty and mad. “Scene one, Viola’s entrance. If we can’t get this one right, people, then I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” you said under your breath.
I’d almost forgotten you were there because I was trying so hard to forget you just weren’t talking to me. But I looked straight at you and smiled to pretend it was a joke, so that Ethan wouldn’t flip out. You looked disgusted. I wanted another pill.
“Places!” Ethan barked and walked off stage while you assumed a crouched position front and center, building your bridge. Or burning it, I thought miserably. One thing Nuvigil couldn’t seem to do was take my mind off you. But I guess if anyone ever marketed a drug that made you forget a crush, no one would even go outside anymore, we’d all just lie in bed overdosing.
I watched the muscles in your back move under your shirt as you pantomimed hammering, desire bubbling up from beneath the restless relay race of electrodes in my brain trying to keep me steady.
“And . . . action!” Ethan called.
“It’s not a film set,” Mr. Francisco sighed.
I took a deep breath and tried to get into character. I was totally off-book, but as exhausted as I was from so little sleep and food it was really hard to commit to being a suicidal Polish garment worker whose mother had just died of tuberculosis. Still, I tried to channel how I’d felt leaving, humiliated, from your apartment building—that need to just be anywhere else, and fast.
I ran toward you, trying to arrange my features in a way that looked like I was “making a choice” about how to enter the scene instead of just moving from one place to another. You saw me and leapt up. Rodolpho was supposed to be shocked, but you just looked bored. At least we were both phoning it in.
I stopped short and turned around.
“Wait, wait!” you called. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
I looked back over my shoulder. Maybe I was hearing things, but I could swear that the line hadn’t always sounded so accusatory. Why are you here? Did you just want to see me? Then it dawned on me: we’d already done the scene at your apartment.
“Nothing,” I said, suddenly much more defensive than Viola was supposed to be. Maybe I did. But not anymore. “I was just leaving. I lost my way.”