He smirks. The chain rattles. The door opens.
I go inside.
Carter catches me in the hallway at home. He’s carrying a bowl of cereal, his nightly ritual he has with June (it’s always June), and stops when he sees me.
He gives me a curious look, not letting me move past. “Hey, man. You good?”
I push around him. “Yeah.”
“Hold on.” His voice drops and he glances toward the kitchen behind us.
I can hear Mom and June talking in the kitchen, their voices so loud I hear every detail about Mom’s “hilarious” run-in with Jerry, some guy at work.
(June. Always, always fuckingJune.)
“At the party,” Carter is saying, “You left with… her, didn’t you? I didn’t get to ask but…” He wiggles his brows in a suggestive way.
My body goes rigid. “I have homework.”
He raises one hand and smirks. “Just asking. I won’t tell anyone. Just curious how it went.”
“I have homework,” I say again, and leave.
Once I’m in my room, I lock the door. The overhead light stays off. The only light is the streetlamp outside my north-facing window, casting a thin stripe across my desk.
I pull the crumpled paper bag from my pocket. From that, I lift a small baggie of clear white powder. I pour a line onto the desk, right across the stripe of light, so the powder glows against the wood. I roll a scrap of sketchbook paper into a tight tube, just the way Snapchat Guy told me.
I lean down and inhale.
It burns. My left nostril lights up, my eyes water and I almost cough, but I hold it. Then there’s a chemical taste in the back of my throat, like I licked a battery. A slow drip slides down from my sinuses. I swallow it.
Within a few minutes my upper lip goes numb. Then my gums, then my front teeth, like lidocaine at the dentist but spreading outward in every direction. Suddenly, my face feels like it belongs to someone braver than me.
My brain finally gets relief.
The pain from Cinna is still there but it’s behind glass now, separate. My thoughts accelerate, but they’re focused and ordered, as if every synapse in my brain finally decided to fire in the same direction. I feel awake in a way I’ve never been before.
Happy and euphoric in a way I never dreamed possible.
I feel like I matter.
I feel like I could walk into any room and the light would find me first.
I grab my sketchbook and start drawing. The graphite moves with a certainty I usually have to fight for. I fill page after page after page. Faces. Bodies in motion. Lions pouncing on prey. It’s all better than everything I’ve drawn in weeks.
Forty minutes in, the high starts thinning. The glass between me and the pain develops a crack. The confidence drains like water from a tub and I can feel the hurt seeping back, and I think,already?
(I don’t want this feeling to end.)
I tap another line onto the desk. Lean down. Inhale.
The sparkling motivation returns. I’m drawing, I’m drawing, I’m alive and making things and the streetlamp light crawls across my desk as the hours pass, and every time the high fades I do another line, and every time I do another line the world becomes a place where I can exist without it hurting.
By 3 a.m. I’ve gone through one bag and opened the second. My nose is raw and one nostril is completely clogged. I’ve filled fourteen pages of my sketchbook, front and back, and the lines in the later drawings are wilder, less controlled, but there’s an energy in them I’ve never been able to access sober.
I don’t sleep.
I don’t want to.
