South on Highland: A Novel Read online

  I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty.

  “Wait,” Mari said. “We should each get one.”

  “That’ll be an extra five.”

  “Dude, that’s kind of unreasonable.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, and nodded at the kid to take the money.

  He made a big show of looking around, then slunk back over to Andy. He whispered into the Pied Piper of Tobacco’s ear and handed over my bill. Andy disappeared through a hole in the chain-link fence, returning a minute later with a paper bag in each hand. He tossed the smokes to his little buddy, who brought them over to us.

  “Tell him thanks,” I said. The kid just nodded and puffed out his chest.

  Mari opened one of the packs and pulled out a pair of cigarettes. We bummed a light off an enthusiastically cologned man outside a sneaker shop and hunched over, on the lookout for bored cops. Then we made our way back to Mari’s house to get ready for a night that was to include real proximity to her brother, Devon—dreamy Devon, that glorious postpubescent specimen whose name had been doodled in the margins of every notebook I’d owned since middle school.

  Devon’s band was playing a birthday party in Encino, and I’d convinced Mari it was her sisterly duty to attend, best friend in tow, of course. We slid into the tightest selections from our new wardrobes, straightened our hair, and eyelinered cat eyes above our lashes. Not bad, Massey, I thought, looking myself over in Mari’s full-length mirror. I looked mature, grown-up, at least fifteen.

  Mari and I bounded down the steps and into the kitchen, where Devon and his bandmates hovered by the table, passing around a joint. The boys turned their heads when we walked in. The spikiest of them, a guy named Keefo, looked Mari up and down and made a jerk-off motion with his hand. Mari punched him in the arm, but the corners of her lips betrayed her.

  “You guys look cool,” Devon said, smiling at me and sending my heart soaring into my esophagus. The joint reached him, and he took a hit, closing his eyes as he sucked in the smoke.

  He turned to me, looking dazed. “Leila, you want some?”

  I hesitated.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Um.”

  “Leila’s, like, a genius,” Devon said to his pals, who wore their standard uniform of safety-pin earrings and ripped-up plaid pants. “She got, like, this special certificate from the government last year? For, like, being so good at school? I don’t know why she hangs out with my retard sister.”

  Mari stuck her tongue out at Devon, flashing a metal piercing. Although it thrilled me to learn that Devon knew actual facts about me, I wanted him to stop sharing them before a calculator and a pocket protector replaced my body in the eyes of all those guys. So I took the joint from Devon’s hand and inhaled, mimicking what I’d seen the rest of the table do and trying with every muscle in my body to avoid coughing. It almost worked.

  “Damn,” one of the guys said. “We shouldn’t’ve smoked all that weed. Now we’re gonna be too tired to play the show.”

  “You’re right,” Devon said. “Check the fridge for Red Bull.”

  When no Red Bull was found, I experienced a moment of pure internal conflict—perhaps the most ambivalent feeling I’d encountered in my young life so far. I had what was left of my second round of Tyler pills (he actually got to touch a boob this time) right there in my bag. I could share them with Devon and his friends, solving their problem and making me the hero of the evening. But then, of course, I wouldn’t have the drugs anymore.

  “I, um, I’ve got something that might help,” I was saying before I’d even made the conscious decision to loose the words.

  All the boys and even Mari looked me over curiously. I pulled out the baggie and withdrew two of the remaining pills. “It’s Adderall. We could probably, like, chop it up or something.”

  “Dope,” Keefo said, and immediately got to work crushing and refining the pills with his school ID. He rolled a dollar and snorted a line, then passed the bill around the table. The powder went up my nose with surprising ease, burning just a little. It hit quickly. Well, holy shit. My heart raced, and I began talking like an auctioneer, asking Devon and his friends what time their band was going on and if we could get a ride, and God, doesn’t this just feel so fucking good?

  Devon laughed at me a few times, in a good-natured way that only made me feel more amazing. At the birthday party in Encino that night, Mari and I kept taking trips to the bathroom to snort up the last bits of Adderall, somehow always finding more microscopic specks of orange powder at the bottom of the baggie. Then we’d head outside, yank cigarettes from our packs, and smoke them down to the filter. My throat was ravaged, but I didn’t care. We danced up front while the band played, and elbowed anyone who got in our way. By the time we found ourselves back at Mari’s, my skin was crawling and I felt like I hadn’t showered since toddlerhood. I was gross in a way that seemed very adult. Mari and I stumbled into her bed, where we stayed up until dawn recapping the events of the night, finally feeling like we were the kind of girls who fit in at parties. She told me she’d never seen me look so cool as when I was pushing through those throngs of kids, knowing exactly where I wanted to be and refusing to let anyone stop me from getting there. I told her she looked hot in her new clothes, and we both agreed that Keefo had a giant crush on her. I vowed to get us more Adderall, pronto.

  The first time I did drugs, I felt brilliant. The second time, I saw my overly conscious self disappear as it was conquered by an influx of chemical confidence. The third time I did drugs bled right into the fourth time, and that was how I became a teenage addict.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It’s been said that addiction runs in the family, that the desire to chemically alter ourselves burrows its way into our DNA and lies in patient wait until we’ve already embraced it without realizing it had been there all along. This was certainly true of my own family, although I had to stumble on that fact incidentally—because pretending, and even straight-up lying, is a part of my genetics too. We were one of those everything-is-going-to-be-just-fine clans, capable of ignoring problems, of shifting our vision to frame out red flags.

  My mother was a two-glasses-of-wine-at-dinner drinker, nothing immoderate or obscene, always just enough to take the edge off. And my father never drank at all, not a beer after work or a glass of scotch before bed. My dad’s abstention wasn’t discussed or made an example of; it was simply an accepted fact of dinnertime, like how my mom was going to tell a story about someone behaving rudely in the grocery store or say that the chicken was dry.

  My dad was a quiet man, well-spoken and sometimes stunningly clever, but never looking to be the center of attention. He worked in advertising, writing concise copy about the sleekness of a convertible or the potency of an energy drink. He made a comfortable enough living and never talked much about his work one way or the other. When he had time off, he concerned himself mostly with Dodgers baseball and heavy historical fiction.

  I looked up to my father, although I never felt like I knew him. He was present and attentive, by all measurable standards a good parent, but I often wondered about his interior life, suspecting it might be much more interesting than his day-to-day facade of office work and televised baseball games. I got the sense he had stumbled into an existence of clever slogans and pleasant-enough domesticity, and never quite felt like he was alive inside of it.

  It wasn’t until I was twelve that the way I thought about my dad changed—or, rather, it started to fall into place. I was wandering the garage in search of a glue gun and construction paper so I could make my science fair project as aesthetically pleasing as possible to compensate for my lousy methodology. (I still haven’t lost belief in the idea that a little glitter can cover up some pretty big mistakes—same goes for practiced cursive and eyeliner.) I found a crate full of childhood art supplies, which I sifted through, pulling out anything colorful or shiny. I tossed aside spin-art kits and finger paint until all that was left was an unlabeled box
at the bottom of the crate. It was rubber-banded shut several times over, clearly intended to stay hidden in a place no one was likely to look.

  The rubber bands crumbled as soon as I touched them. I lifted the box’s dusty lid, hoping I wasn’t about to stumble upon a secret stash of pornography or something even more upsetting, like a stack of self-help books. Instead, I pulled out a yellowed manuscript, three hundred typewritten pages, with my dad’s name on the author line. A second copy sat beneath, covered in faded chicken-scratch. I flipped through the first few pages, then sat down on the floor to read the thing in earnest.

  It was a thinly veiled roman à clef, with a narrator characterized as “dark in the eyes but bright throughout the rest of the face, just angular enough to be handsome instead of threatening,” a physical description so accurate to my father that it stunned me he was able to capture it. The book started with a chapter about the narrator’s childhood in Baltimore, and then leapt to his high-school years, where he was a late addition to the bandwagon against the Vietnam War. He took weekend trips into New York City to protest, and wandered around the East Village with liberated college girls who found his innocence adorable. Some of the words were faded, and page twenty-eight ripped when I turned it too speedily, but the book felt alive in my hands.

  “Leila,” I heard my mother call from the kitchen. “Can you come set the table?”

  I quickly dropped the manuscript and hid the box. Downstairs, my mom asked how my project was coming, and I lied and said it actually wasn’t due for another week, knowing there was no way I would finish it in time, not now that I had something much more interesting to concentrate on. During the meal, I couldn’t stop watching my father eat his spaghetti and meatballs; even the way he held his fork was now loaded with subtext. He ate delicately, twirling the pasta through the prongs like he might have done with a flower child’s hair during a mild spring day on Saint Marks Place.

  The next morning, I faked a cold so I could stay home from school, and I snuck back into the garage once my parents left for work. I picked up right as my father started experimenting with marijuana and psychedelics, which led to a blur of hazy years. There were nights of existential debates inside coffee shops, a long and winding road trip out West, and a story about robbing a Wendy’s with a samurai sword, demanding ten hamburgers or the little redhead gets it. My father’s character was adventurous and wise beyond his years. He was the one who sat shotgun with the hitchhiker-friendly trucker while his friends all got high in the backseat and nodded off; he and the trucker talked road philosophy (while getting high in the front seat) all across the expanse of America.

  But as the story went on, my father’s character became more and more dependent on the drugs that had started out as a tool for expansion and escape. The psychedelics had made him paranoid, and he was relying on downers to get through his days without panic attacks. The last chapter of the book revealed a drug-fueled psychotic break and a trip to a mental institution, where a diet of Thorazine and bland TV eventually restored him to sanity.

  There were so many character details that rang true about my father that I couldn’t help but read the book as wholly autobiographical, and at the end of it I felt like I sort of understood my dad. I felt close to him. I also heard echoes of myself in some of the descriptions—and some part of me decided right then and there that I was predisposed to live out an addiction narrative of my own.

  I wondered how much of this story my mother knew. She wasn’t a prude, exactly, but I got the sense she’d never experimented. My mom seemed okay with the unexamined life, finding the trajectory of completing daily tasks satisfying enough. She worked as an administrator in the LA public-school system, at first with the goal of making a difference, but then only with aspirations of not screwing anything up too badly. She clocked in and out, then came home, where she enjoyed cooking hearty meals she could then reconstitute a second time around (beef stew on Wednesday filled a potpie on Friday). She was in a book club where no one ever finished the material but where everyone talked long into the night anyway. She always seemed happy enough.

  But I was pretending just as much as they were, and hiding things I knew my mom and dad wouldn’t want to deal with. It was a habit that started young. I never asked the same questions other little kids did. Of course Santa Claus wasn’t real—the timeline was impractical, and a man that obese would have died of diabetes long ago. But I found it fascinating that, in a universe where so much of daily life was all about keeping strangers from penetrating the bubble, the ultimate childhood hero was a guy who popped down through the chimney bearing Tonka trucks and Easy-Bake Ovens, and left immediately, asking for nothing in return. I didn’t want to know if Santa was real; I wanted to know if there were actually people like that—selfless individuals who genuinely cared about the happiness of others above all else—and if our mantra of “stranger danger” wasn’t limiting exposure to those folks. What my parents extrapolated from my inquiries was that I was aching to get to know some overly friendly foreign adults, and that freaked them out completely. So I shut up about Santa Claus and stopped asking those kinds of questions anywhere outside the confines of my own head. I became one thing on the surface and something entirely different inside. But the persona I was crafting for myself was still a work in progress, and I didn’t always lie as well as I thought I did.

  I had been coming down the stairs for a glass of juice the day I heard my parents fighting about me. I was ten, and the juice I was after was my own cocktail of lemonade and unsweetened cranberry, which I liked to rub across my lips until they turned bright red. I paused on the top step when I heard the word “cut” come out of my mother’s mouth. I rolled up the sleeve of my T-shirt and looked at my left arm, just below the shoulder, where two deep slashes ran parallel to one another. The cuts had been my way of coping with getting disinvited to a sleepover by the new girl in my friend group. They still stung, but only when I remembered they were there.

  “She said she scraped herself climbing a tree,” my mother told my father.

  “And you don’t believe her?”

  “They don’t look like the kind of cuts you get from climbing a tree.”

  My dad sighed long and hard. “Beth, she’s ten years old.”

  “Which is exactly why I’m so concerned. She’s supposed to be a carefree little girl, not some morbid creature who stays up late writing in notebooks and staring out the window. When’s the last time you saw her climb a tree?”

  “I’ve seen her climb trees,” my father said.

  “Have you really?”

  The helpless silence that issued from my father’s mouth made it hard for me to breathe. I hated the way I felt, and I hated the way he felt. I dug my nails into the flesh of my palm until tiny droplets of blood appeared on the surface.

  I turned around and headed back toward my room, making a silent vow to become better at hiding my thoughts from the outside world. I pledged to start climbing trees. I heard the front door close and the sound of my father’s footsteps on concrete. My heart still stung a little back then, but only when I remembered it was there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Yes, there was some melancholy to my childhood, but it wasn’t all ruminations on self-harm and the morality of the Easter Bunny. I also had fun, like when I was careening through the loop of a roller coaster at a hundred miles per hour with a scream suspended in my throat, or the first time I got really drunk, off vodka and orange juice, with Mari.

  Mari and Devon’s mother, Diane, was a dental hygienist whose only rule of parenting was that there was no sugar allowed in the house. Diane had a fraught relationship with her second husband, Tony, and often took off for days at a time to either track him down or, once he’d been found, rekindle the spark in romantic Las Vegas.

  I knew Diane was on one of those trips the day Mari showed up to eighth-grade English with a blue-raspberry tongue, trailing a chemical cloud of her mother’s perfume. I cornered her by her locker.

/>   “I’m sleeping over tonight,” I said. “Give me something to tell my parents.”

  “Study night? For the Jack London exam?”

  “We took that test last week.”

  “Did we?” Mari winced. “Oops.”

  Mari’s house screamed “parents out of town” at the top of its lungs from the moment we walked in. Dishes were piled high in the sink; last night’s chosen TV channel still blared. On the counter was a dwindling stack of twenties and the pile of pizza boxes the money had gone toward. There was also a mostly full bottle of Smirnoff with the cap off. Mari said that she and Devon had each had a glass the day before, but tonight we were going to get fucked-up.

  “It doesn’t even taste that nasty if you hold your nose,” she said when she saw the grimace on my face. “Or we could just do shots. That’s how Devon rolls. He’ll be here later.”

  That was all I needed to hear. Ever since the night we’d gone to see his band play, I’d become convinced it was only a matter of time before Devon and I fell passionately into one another’s arms. In my head, I played out the rest of the evening. Devon would open the front door, spot me on the couch with my legs folded and a cocktail in my hand, and there would be a moment where he physically wouldn’t be able to pull his eyes away from me. In this vision, I was wearing velvet and had developed the throaty purr of Katharine Hepburn.

  “Oh, hello, Devon,” I’d say. “We’re just having some alcoholic beverages. Won’t you join me on . . . oh, what is this called . . . the love seat?”

  In reality, what happened was that Mari poured us each a glass of vodka with a heavy helping of OJ, and I was woozy and giggling after three sips. Devon did soon swoosh through the front door, but right behind him was a girl in a tight tank top and dyed-red hair. She chewed gum in a way that felt like a series of accusations, and no one in the room bore any resemblance whatsoever to a Hepburn. My fantasy vanished at the sight of this girl, and I couldn’t even look at Devon as he threw down his backpack and made a beeline for the bottle of Smirnoff.