By then she was already on to the Third and Fourth most terrible things she’d done, having grasped the incalculable pleasure that could be wrung from manipulating people to her desires. The addiction was like a wet washcloth, no matter how many times you twisted it, water would always wring out, even if in diminishing returns.
She should have been more on the lookout for the other addictions. When Ben Harrington started having certain meds around, she stole or cajoled them. Once a month he’d come by her locker and offer her an aspirin bottle with three or four Percs rattling around in it. Once, after school with the hallways empty and eerie, she dipped two fingers into the pocket of his jeans and pulled him close, not because he was giving her pills but because he would complete a satisfying triple crown.
“No, c’mon,” he said, turning bright pink in the high parts of his fine cheeks and pulling his hips away from her. “That’s not even funny.”
How did the line go in his song? Pretty, sad girl / offering a glance for pills / pretty, sad girl / throwing her battered heart into the hills. She hated him for that.
The Fifth and Sixth worst things she’d ever done toggled between a few contenders, but lately not marrying Rick was pushing up in the order. Not that an eighteen-year-old girl should be on the hook for an idiot boy’s sense of romanticism. When she turned him down, she wanted to add, “Are you insane? Don’t you realize that you were an accessory like a purse or a nice pair of earrings?” Later, she took a flashlight, found the ring he’d hurled into the woods by his house, and pawned it for nearly a thousand dollars.
The problem was, by the time she got to Toledo, she’d moved on to Oxy, which was a hell of a nice feeling, but expensive and all-consuming. She had to find a couple of guys who were willing to share their stashes, and this project took up so much of her time, she never even completed a course. She dated Mitch, this American History X–looking guy who had a direct line to all kinds of party drugs. Together, they went to basement raves on the outskirts of the city with metal raging through speakers, the whole joint rigged to be a fire hazard. He was an amazing lay. They’d snort a line of crystal and fuck for hours, then snort an Oxy so the comedown wasn’t too harsh. It was the most carnal and delicious period of her life, the evolutional training for food and sex and other pleasures suddenly rendered cheap and inert by a sniff.
When she ran out of money, she lost her apartment and her enrollment in the same week. She went to live with Mitch, which she quickly understood to be a mistake. He’d leave her alone with his friends for days at a time, and she would lock herself in the bedroom because they all had the glazed quality of rapists who were just too tired to make the effort. Once, when a particularly evil-looking guy was spending time there and she was in a paranoid mood, she even stuck her butt out the window to pee so she wouldn’t have to leave the room.
She knew she had to stop with the crank. One night she left a few shards of it on a butter knife and passed out. In the morning she saw the coating of rust it left on the metal and began having horrific visions of the insides of her lungs and sinuses. She’d heard of people developing sores, their teeth falling out. In the end, her vanity probably saved her from herself.
She stole as much Oxy as she dared and went home, crushing and snorting the pills in her childhood bedroom to help with the tweak. For days, her body shook like she had Parkinson’s.
New Canaan was flush with glass, though, and she needed the occasional bump to get through her waitressing shifts. It allowed her to work seventy hours a week sometimes so she wouldn’t have to be home with her mother and brother. She could pull off the long hours and then settle down to sleep with an array of prescription meds. That helped lead to what was obviously the Most Terrible Thing she’d ever done, the summer of 2004, when she set in motion a thing she could never take back and never make right (and when Bill pressed and pressed her on it, she finally said, “No. Stop. I’m not talking about that—let it be,” and he did).
Not long after that, Hailey laid it out: “I’ll help you if you promise to get help.”
Kowalczyk was a smart cookie and now her last friend. She drove her to NA meetings for the rest of the summer until she left for school at Bowling Green. The problem was, at NA they basically wanted you to confess all your sins, and there was no way Kaylyn could do that. No way. Her solution was to go to one of those doctors at a pill mill and complain about an aching back. She stopped going to NA but she was no longer messing around with meth, so she counted it as an improvement.
In high school she remembered days when she couldn’t leave the house, when the thought of stepping outside filled her with so much panic that her chest cramped up and she couldn’t breathe. Sometimes she’d put a disc on in the boom box in the bathroom and take hour-long showers. Her mother accused her of preening, and wasting all the hot water while doing so. The truth was, she used this time to cry. To weep and weep until her stomach ached. It wasn’t until she found the relief of an opiate dose that she realized she’d needed this for as long as she could remember.
In the years that followed, the pill mill worked just fine. Dr. Redding would pull out his pad, scribble, and she’d be on her way. Sure, there was the interminable line where she would get harassed by the scuzziest refuse of Northeast Ohio, where fights would frequently break out in the parking lot, where broken old men would offer her pizza for a kiss, but at the end of that rainbow was a scrip to get her through the month. If she needed more, all she had to do was complain about the pain getting worse and Dr. Redding would oblige. She liked his no-nonsense business model. As long as she had cash.
When she stopped going to work and lost her job, he wasn’t as accommodating.
“Please,” she said. “I can’t find work without it. You get it? Like in order to get a job to make money, I need it or I’ll crash and I’ll never show up and I’ll just get fired all over again.” She heard how frantic she sounded but was helpless to stop.
“We could make an arrangement,” he offered. That same all-business attitude. She wouldn’t have expected it from him. He had the thinning peach-fuzz hair and frumpy midwestern features of an asexual toad. It wasn’t a pleasant solution but she could sleepwalk through it. Bend over the exam table and after fifteen minutes or less she’d have the scrip. Of course, she never did find a job. Not when she had this simple a trade.
Events passed her by, and she was indifferent to all of them. Curt Moretti died of a heroin overdose and all she thought was, That’s why I’m sticking to the safe stuff. Her mother kicked her out for stealing, and all she said was, “I’ll find other arrangements.” And she did (though she kept going back to fleece what she could until her mom changed the locks). Rick was killed, and she went to the funeral and parade, but she was high for both, her mind as blank as a Buddhist monk’s. There were a lot of people there whom she hadn’t seen in a while, and they all kept coming up to her—Rick’s sweetheart—and she had to fake like she was stunned. Marty and Jill insisted she stand with them at the parade, still looked at her like she and Rick had been in love. Like she’d spoken to him since high school. Like she cared.