Clipboard guy gets a stupid fucking smirk on his face. “Is that some kind of country music singer or something? You want me to call you Rockstar, Rockstar?”
Ah, fuck. He’s going to be incredibly obnoxious. It’s going to be so hard to not punch him in the mouth right away. I guess I can store the beating for the end, but that always makes me feel like I’m a bully.
“Alright, Rockstar,” he says, thrilled with his little pet name. “Let’s get you settled into a room now, shall we?”
“Get the fuck off me,” I say to the other two guys. “I can walk on my own.”
They let me go.
I run.
Just for the fun of it, I sprint as fast as I can toward the tree line. I know there’s a fence with razor wire at the top just behind it, but I’ve got a trick for getting through that stuff. It’s called having a thick jacket and praying nothing too sensitive gets caught on the way over.
I scramble up the chain-link like our arboreal ancestors, and…
Crack!
I get tossed off the fence, fall a few feet, and tuck into a roll. I’ve learned how to fall properly over the years. The parkour trend in the early two thousands really paid off for me.
“The fuck!” I curse as my arm cramps. It feels like I got full-body whacked with something very unpleasant. An unseen force. Something supernatural, maybe.
“We added electricity,” Clipboard Goatee says. He’s slightly out of breath from scurrying over, but he is ahead of the other two guys who are bigger, but slower.
“It works,” I groan as I am hauled up between the two of the grunts. They carry me all the way back to the rehab’s main building. There are cabins in the rolling grass beyond it for people who have proved themselves, but I won’t be going out to those yet.
“As I was saying,” Clipboard Goatee says. “You’re an addict.”
This is a script. He’s not wrong about my flaw, but he is wrong about the fact that I am high. I am not high right now. I’ve neverbeen more clearheaded in my life. I haven’t touched so much as refined sugar in weeks.
“It’s going to be a rough few days,” Clippy says. “You have to be prepared to suffer a little. If you feel very bad, worse than usual, then you can always call for one of our nurses. My notes say you’re a repeat guest, so you’ll be familiar with the basic procedures.”
“Get fucked.”
He smiles in the way people who enjoy power do. The wild thing about the clipboard is that we have tablets now. You have to really commit to a clipboard. You have to enjoy shuffling paper in and out of a clip and flipping it around officiously. He’s such an asshole.
“Are you going to take your own shoes off, or are we going to have to wrestle them off, Mr. Levin?”
“Fight me, bitch.”
“Sorry,” he says. “I meant, are you going to remove your shoes, belt, and jacket, because that looks like it contains some sharp items in the form of those cute little badges you’ve got pinned on there.”
Those cute little badges are from Teddy, and that comment is enough to make me swing at Clipboard for real. The two men who are paid to save his ass manage to do that. I feel the back of my pants being yanked down and something sharp pricking the top of my butt.
They pin me down until the world starts to swim and spin, and then they put me on a stretcher, carry me indoors, take everything except my socks and my underwear, dress me up insome light blue scrubs like an oversized doll and deposit me on a bed in a room painted in what was probably supposed to be light pastel sage green, but which takes on a highlighter tone under officious bright white light, creating a more horrifying color than can be adequately described with any amount of words. We are at the intersection of sterile and contemporary, and it sucks.
I could fight the drugs, but instead I let them take me down into slumber. I haven’t gotten a full night’s rest since Teddy died. I need the sleep.
When I wake up, someone is looking at me. I am immediately aware of it, even though I am looking up at the popcorn ceiling that dates the place inexorably.
“Hey,” a guy says to me.
“Hey,” I groan, looking over at my roommate. They always give you one. It’s part of the rehab.
He’s a lanky boy with greasy brown hair and acne. He’s got big brown eyes and he’s wearing a sweater that has to be three sizes too big for him, and jeans that are three sizes too small.
“How the hell old are you?”
“Nineteen,” he says.
