I threw up several more times on my way home, and when I got there, I spun in bed until the morning, where I woke up into a hot cloud of shame. I was determined to change, to become a person who smoked pot easily, without coughing or throwing up, or fearing they were dying. I just had to practice, was all. I had to practice out of Ian’s range; I had to do what I’d said I’d already done, which was smoke a lot of pot. I had to make good on my lie by wrangling my present to double as my past, until I was such a seasoned pot smoker that my claim would become retroactively true. In order for a lie to become the truth, you must make it your priority. The time you have between lying and getting caught is limited and if you don’t take control of the situation, locking in a masterful timetable, you’re screwed.
Daniel smoked pot. I could practice with him, without letting on that our smoke-outs were technically dress rehearsals.
Turns out, he was totally game. When he came downtown with the practice pot, I felt confident in my ability to overcome my first-time reaction. I studied him as he rolled the joint, determined to master that next. He lit up, took a deep drag, and handed it off to me, before lying down to stare up at the sky. We passed it back and forth until a creeping horror began to rapidly spread inside me. It was happening again; this time was worse. I was being squeezed from the outside by the atmosphere and couldn’t breathe no matter where I stood, and that’s when I realized that this was true dying, which is why I became suddenly religious and excused myself for the bathroom where I went to vomit and pray. I did not like smoking pot. It made me die. It was actually killing me at that very moment. How was I going to fake this? Actors relied on fake props all the time, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how I was going to finesse a false inhale.
I lived in fear of going back to Ian and Caroline’s place, but I could only stay away for so long without having to provide some sort of believable excuse. I came up with one-liners for when he pulled out a bag of weed. None had traction. I couldn’t “already be high” when we’d been together all afternoon. I couldn’t be “trying to quit,” because no normal teenager in the prime of her pot-smoking years makes a measured decision to scale back her drug use.
When I did return to their apartment it was for a party. I assumed all the kids would be there, but Daniel and I were the only ones. I was overwhelmed by all the “adults” but Daniel was used to them, he even knew their names, and he knew what Ian wanted when he asked to “borrow” him. When they returned, Ian “borrowed” me. He brought me down the hall to the bathroom.
“You’ve done coke before, right?”
I quickly rewound the tape of all the lies I’d told him but was unable to recall all the drugs I’d lied about doing.
“Yeah, obviously,” I said.
He smiled, took my hand, and slipped something into it. “Have fun.”
In the bathroom, I looked at the object and while I knew it was a vial (I recognized it from the street), I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. How much coke was normal for a person to do? I opened the vial, shook a little out, turned on the faucet, and rinsed it down the drain. To be safe, I emptied a little more and when I cleared the sink basin of the granulated remnants I returned to Ian and Daniel and handed it back. Ian investigated.
“Wow. You’re a fiend,” he said. “Nicely done.”
“Thanks,” I told him, accepting a beer.
The next time I went over to their apartment, it was with Ian alone, who had a “surprise” for me. I was afraid. But each time I stepped into the persona side of myself, the more in control I felt, as though the strange things happening inside were happening to her and not to me. The more time I spent playing this dark part of myself, the farther down I pressed the real me. Truth is, I much preferred this other me, the tough-girl, punk, no-bullshit, nothing-can-hurt-me, my-family-is-more-fucked-up-than-your-family attitude, than I did the scared girl who was, well, frankly, a baby.
Ian, it turns out, was impressed with my aptitude for doing coke, and as luck would have it, the baggie he held up didn’t contain pot, it contained powder. He wanted to do two things with me, he said—get me into a bathing suit and “do blow,” something I’d done a million times, of course, as evidenced by last week’s party. There was no getting out of this. I had to do it. I watched everything he did. The way he chopped that little block of hardened powder into loose mounds, and separated them into military lines. He had a straw he’d cut and he put it under his nose and over the coke and vacuumed away the troops. My turn.
Coke, it turned out, was just my speed (sorry). It knew me better than I knew myself. It made me more hyper, more vigilant, more masterfully in control of my body and self. There was no impending death, no fear, no conviction of my weakness and failings. In fact, I was invincible. Even my lies felt true. I never smoked pot with Ian again. He’d given me an out, and the out was coke. Every time he rolled a joint, or held up a bag of pot, I’d say, “Kid’s stuff.”
And so, with Caroline’s money, Ian funded our seemingly endless supply of cocaine. He’d pick me up from school, drive me to Caroline’s country house without her knowing, make me prance around in a bathing suit, attempt to talk me through giving blowjobs and handjobs, and began telling me how psyched he was for me to turn eighteen.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Because then I’ll be legal to fuck you.”
I was flattered he thought we’d still be friends in four years, but I was also terrified. I was more afraid of sex than I was of death. What was I going to do in four years? How was I possibly going to get out of that? Short of cutting him off forever, I hoped four years was long enough to strategize a master plan.
We spent the next four years inseparable, and the catalog of unacceptable behavior started to feel acceptable, but the closer I got to eighteen, and the more he reminded me about what was going to happen when I got there, the more panicked I grew. The day I graduated from high school, I stopped going to the acting school, and I stopped returning his phone calls. I never spoke to him again. He’s tried contacting me twice. The last time was a few months ago, through my website. Here is the letter he sent me:
From: IAN
Subject: Hello Old Friend
Hello Amanda, Wow What a trip to see how great your career is going. how are you? Just thought It’s been a long time since I saw you last, a lifetime really. Just wanted to say Hi and maybe we can catch up on life
.
I’m very proud and quite impressed with your accomplishments. I hope to hear from you soon
.
p.s. Don’t freak out about this. Always your friend, Ian
One last thing. After a treacherous few months when I was twenty-seven, I was finally diagnosed. Turns out things did happen to me that didn’t usually happen to others. I had panic disorder and there were drugs, that were not cocaine, to treat it. While I seldom have panic attacks anymore, I still feel a tugging anxiety at the sight of preteen girls and the men who pay attention to them. It’s only now, when I look at those full, baby-fat faces that I have perspective and can see with objectivity how morally despicable Ian was to prey on me. I feel sad for Caroline and I even feel sad for Ian, but I feel sadder still for their baby girl, born fourteen years ago, and the age now that I was when I met him.
J
AN
H
ELLER
L
EVI
is the author of
Once I Gazed at You in Wonder
, which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. “Eve Speaks,” included in her second collection,