Ballads of Suburbia (28 page)

“I've been dating Jason the whole time,” Stacey said proudly. “We haven't been around because this is a high school party. Jason's not in high school. He's got an apartment. I'm over there a lot.”

She launched into the story of her life since we'd last spoken in the fall. She elaborated on Jason, telling me how nice and laid-back he was. She went on forever, playing up how cool his apartment was and playing down that he paid for it by selling pot. She also told me the names of all of his fish before she asked, “So, what have you been up to?”

I didn't want to talk about Christian so I told her about Adrian, referring to him as my boyfriend for the first time and acting like I'd been seeing him all along even though the night she'd met him was the night I'd walked away from him. I also neglected to mention the heroin, enthusing about the screenplay instead.

“Awesome! You're writing a movie? My best friend's gonna be famous!”

I grinned, more at her still calling me her best friend than her saying I was going to be famous.

“Can I see the notebook? Can I write my story in it?” she asked, blue eyes wide.

I took it out of my backpack, warning, “You have to write yours before you can read anything.”

She snatched it from my hands and gestured at Jason, who'd shown up with our beers midway through my explanation of the script/scrapbook project. “That's fine, get to know him.”

Jason and I made small talk, mostly about his fish, while Stacey wrote. I sipped from my beer, but didn't really drink it. I wanted another line pretty badly and was about to excuse myself to the bathroom when Cass appeared.

“Can I talk to you, Kara?” Both her voice and her expression were flat. Not good.

“Uhh…”

I looked to Stacey, hoping to be rescued, but she was so into her writing that she didn't even raise her head. She waved me away, saying, “I'll find you when I'm done.”

So I trudged upstairs to Shelly's bedroom with Cass. She half closed the door and then glared at me with her arms crossed over her chest. “What the hell is going on with you?”

Damn, I wanted a line. I shook my head. “What are you talking about?”

Cass set her jaw hard. “Heroin. You do a little bit, fine, it's your deal. I had my acid phase, I can't judge. But you and Quentin are doing way too much. And now you're going with them to buy?”

“Where'd you hear that?” I tried to look shocked, hoping it was from Jessica or Mary so I could easily deny it.

“Straight from the horse's mouth. Quentin doesn't know what he's saying sometimes when he's high.”

“Well, if he doesn't know what he's saying—”

“Don't fucking lie to me!” Cass thundered like an angry drill sergeant.

“Don't fucking yell at me. You aren't my mom.”

Cass seemed near tears as she twisted her dreads around her fingers. “Since Wes left I've tried to look out for everyone, but I can't handle it anymore! You and Quentin have a serious drug problem. Maya's been weird since she ran away and I need you to help me with her, but instead you're high all the time.”

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are. You think it's not noticeable, but everyone knows, Kara. They may not see how often you're high, but I do and it's out of control. Adrian got Quentin sucked into this and now you—”

“Don't blame Adrian for what Quentin and I do. Adrian's not forcing us to do anything. If you and Quentin have problems—”

Cass flailed her arms wildly. “This whole goddamn town is on drugs and it's not okay anymore! It's not pot and acid and beer. I'm not saying those things are good. But Kara, shit, Adrian and Quentin are
shooting up.
You know that, right?”

A chill ran through me. I was doing drugs with them, how could I not know that? “That's bullshit.”

She flared her nostrils, clearly trying to suppress the urge to slap me. “No, it's not. And you should also know that your brother's smoking crystal with Shelly and Harlan.”

“What?” I exploded. “Now I know you're lying!”

“Go find him,” she challenged. “Look in the garage. You'll notice right away that the smell of the smoke isn't like pot.”

“Shut up!” I shrieked. I didn't need this. I needed a line. And who cared what Cass would say about it? I didn't need her or Maya. My old best friend had resurfaced.

As if on cue, Stacey walked in. She looked at us warily and asked, “Um, should I come back?”

Cass stalked past her. “No, I was just leaving.”

Stacey watched her go, then blinked twice and said, “Didn't we shoplift with that chick once?”

“Yeah—”

Glass shattered in the next room. I heard Adrian scream “Fuck!” and when I reached the bedroom door, I caught a glimpse of him fleeing the bathroom.

He nearly knocked Cass over as he hurtled down the stairs. She clung to the railing, but recovered quickly and made it to that hellish pink bathroom before I could.

I didn't see what was inside right away because she blocked the doorway, eyeliner coursing down her cheeks in black rivulets. “Call 911 now!” she hollered at me.

“What hap—”

Cass dropped to her hands and knees, revealing Quentin slumped between the toilet and the sink with a belt around his arm. His face rested on the fluffy toilet lid cover; Quentin was naturally pale, but against the pink his skin appeared stark white. Even his lips, which were partially open, looked color
less. Cass sat him up straight and gently but firmly slapped his cheeks. When his eyes didn't flutter open, I started to hyperventilate. Cass turned to me and screeched, “911!”

I ran for the phone in Shelly's room, collapsing to my knees in the center of the floor to dial. When the operator picked up, I breathlessly rattled off Shelly's address and “I need an ambulance now!”

“What's your emergency?” the woman asked, sounding so calm I wondered if I was speaking to a recording.

“My friend overdosed.” I shuddered as Cass shouted Quentin's name over and over, growing louder and increasingly hysterical.

“Do you know what he took?” the robotic voice questioned.

“Help!” Cass wailed. “Help!”

“We need that ambulance now!” I insisted, digging my fingernails into Shelly's carpet.

“It's been dispatched, but the more information I can provide, the more prepared the EMTs can be.”

I tore out pieces of pale blue carpet, picturing the studded belt around Quentin's skinny arm. “Heroin,” I sobbed. “He shot China white heroin.”

After the operator said something about the ambulance being a few minutes away, I dropped the phone, scrambled to my feet, and rushed back to the bathroom.

As word filtered downstairs that the cops were coming, everyone—literally
everyone,
even Shelly—fled except for Maya, who'd been sitting on the front porch smoking a cigarette by herself when Adrian came flying out of the house like he was on fire.

Maya hurried upstairs, fighting the current of kids streaming outside. We met at the bathroom door and found Cass hugging Quentin. She'd stopped screaming. Instead, she repeated, “No, you have to wake up. No, no, no,” in a ragged whisper.

I clung to the door frame, taking in the details of the scene. There was a spoon and a lighter sitting beside the shell-shaped soap dish on the sink. The needle lay on the shaggy mauve rug near the shower. Apparently Adrian had yanked it out of Quentin's arm during his attempt to revive him. Then he'd bashed his fist into the mirror. Shards of it were scattered in the sink, across the floor, and even on Quentin's lap.

Maya and I knelt on the broken glass, trying to pull Cass off of Quentin so we could attempt to resuscitate him. But Cass had already felt for Quentin's pulse, and unable to find it or feel him breathing, she knew. Just
knew.

Quentin was gone. He had died before Adrian even walked in on him.

I'
D LOST THE
“S
TORIES OF
S
UBURBIA”
notebook in the shuffle at Shelly's, but I still saved all the articles about Quentin. The story of his OD made the
Chicago Tribune
and got a whole spread in the local paper: front-page article, follow-ups, editorials, and letters to the editor from angry parents who wanted to know how the hell high school kids were getting heroin (apparently they hadn't seen the article on page three the prior week) and how these parties had been going on under the police department's nose. In full-on suburban witch-hunt mode, they cried out for criminal charges against Shelly's dad for negligence and felony penalties for various drugs (heroin and pot) and paraphernalia (pipes for smoking both marijuana and methamphetamine) found in his house.

Since Shelly's dad was a lawyer, he got out unscathed, but he sent Shelly to rehab and then boarding school, because obviously, spending less time with his daughter was the solution. And I'm sure the people who cried out against him were the same kind of parents whose kids fended for themselves every day after school while they pulled long hours. Maya normally would have told us that her grandma always said, “People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones,” but she hardly tossed clichés around with her usual panache anymore.

Even though Cass raised concerns about Maya not even five minutes before we found Quentin dead, now Maya and I worried over Cass instead. After all, there wasn't much worse than finding your boyfriend dead of an overdose.

There was no obituary in the slew of articles about Quentin. Quentin's mom made a statement that her son was “a nice, quiet boy who'd never done something like shoot heroin before.” She knew that wasn't true, everyone did, because the medical examiner's report estimated he had been shooting up for two months. The papers were nice enough not to contradict Quentin's mother, though. They also cited all funeral services as private. Presumably, Quentin's family didn't want media or Quentin's weirdo friends reminding them of who their son had been toward the end.

But Maya insisted that Cass needed to say good-bye. She left a message for Quentin's mother using the sugary, southern politeness she'd learned from her grandmother: “Ma'am, I know you're going through a lot, but your son had a girlfriend who loves him very much. She's my cousin and I'm calling because she's too broken up to talk right now. If you could please call me back with information about the wake so I could help her say good-bye to your sweet boy, I would really appreciate it.”

Maybe it was the tearfulness in Maya's voice or the way she called Quentin a sweet boy, but Quentin's mother did call back. She simply asked that we didn't bring too many people, vehemently singling out Adrian as uninvited. Not that we knew where he was. No one had been able to find him since the night Quentin died. Not even the cops.

We saw a completely different side of Quentin in the pictures of him as a child arranged at the front of the funeral home. I'd thought he'd been born with that inky black hair, since it suited him so well, but he was blond as could be as an infant in his crib.

“He's so sunny,” Maya murmured, touching a photo of six-
year-old Quentin building sandcastles on a beach. “Reminds me of Taylor Williams.”

“Who?” I whispered.

She cracked a smile for the first time in weeks. “Just a li'l boy I knew back in Florida.”

Scanning the funeral home, where everyone was at least twice our age, I felt out of place and inappropriately dressed. Maya and I both wore vintage finery. Her dress was black velvet even though it was a warm spring day, mine was too lacy to be formal, and they both were too short. But those were the kinds of dresses we had. Cass didn't own any. She looked like a frumpy housewife with dreadlocks, expressionless and stiff in the shapeless, ankle-length black dress Maya had found for her at the thrift store.

I glanced back at the door wishing we could leave, but Cass stared straight ahead at the open casket.

Maya took a deep breath. “Sure you're ready?”

Cass nodded sharply.

So Maya led her toward it while I lingered momentarily in front of the pictures. There was only one that included Adrian. I was surprised they hadn't cut him out, but you could barely tell it was him, his eyes shaded and scruffy brown hair disguised by a blue baseball cap. He and Quentin wore matching Little League uniforms, Adrian tossing a ball, Quentin swinging a bat. They had to be about nine.

Soon after that, the pictures changed. In his seventh-grade photo, Quentin had the black hair; beginnings of short braids stuck up from his head like inch-long wires. Aside from a shot of a stoned-looking, teenage Quentin standing beside a Christmas tree with his arms crossed, there were only school pictures from junior high forward, each with Quentin's braids grown longer. The photo montage ended abruptly when Quentin stopped going to picture day sophomore year.

The last image I saw of Quentin was the one I didn't want to see. I treaded slowly down the aisle toward the casket, which Maya and Cass now stood beside. Inside lay the most unfamiliar Quentin of all, dressed in a suit, cheeks drowned in fake color, and hair chopped military short to remove all of the braids and most of the black dye.

This is not my friend. My friend is not dead,
I told myself.

But as I denied, Cass came to terms. She cried for the first time since she found him. She cried as she bent down to kiss his cold face. She cried as we walked to our seats in the back of the room. She cried as she listened to Quentin's father call his son “a smart boy who fought to overcome a learning disability and became an avid reader, a Little League champ, and winner of the sixth-grade science fair.” He stopped at the point the candid photographs had, when Quentin suddenly became the person he didn't know.

I realized that it would be the same way if my parents had to eulogize me. It was probably the same for any teenager, but most of us would grow up and eventually allow more photo opportunities at college graduations and weddings. Quentin wouldn't have that chance. That's when his death finally hit me and I started to cry. Knowing that I had a chance and would probably screw it up made me sob harder.

Cass stood. “Quentin,” she sniffled, voice cracking for a moment before she took a deep breath and gained her usual tough-girl poise. “Quentin and I…we've been together for over a year now and we've been friends a long, long time. He was the kindest…” She stopped to breathe again. “He was loyal to his friends, and he was the best thing in my life. He made me a better person. I just wish he…” She blinked, taking in the eyes of all Quentin's relatives around her. “He was wickedly intelligent. He knew more about philosophy than anyone. His poetry and other writing…well, he did great things. And I loved him.” She
groped for me and Maya on either side of her and we eased her into her seat.

“That was real good,” Maya assured her as the last relative rose to speak. Cass stared straight ahead at the casket and nodded, crying silently again.

Between the service and the trip to the cemetery, I excused myself to the bathroom supposedly to fix my makeup, which I did, but I also poured the last of my heroin onto the corner of the sink and snorted it. It wasn't nearly enough to make me as numb as I wanted to be when they put Quentin in the ground, but I'd been rationing what little I had for a week, using only every now and then to take the edge off. I think Maya knew what I'd been doing because she wore a tight-lipped frown when I got into the car.

At the cemetery, I kept looking for Adrian, figuring he would find out where Quentin was and risk arrest to say good-bye. I never saw him, though, and we were among the last to leave. Cass got on her knees and patted the fresh mound of dirt, murmuring, “Bye, Q. I love you. I won't ever forget.”

When she stood up and dusted the dirt off, she thanked Maya. “You were right. I needed to say good-bye.” She glanced at me, too. “Thank you both for taking care of me. I need a little time alone now.”

And that was it. Not to say she was instantly better, but she was ready to grieve without using us as training wheels.

I wish I could have been as strong as she was and grieved without my personal crutch.

I went two days without getting high. Two unbearable, awful days. I threw up in the mornings and had chills all night. When I managed to sleep, I had nightmares of Quentin in his casket under six feet of dirt. He had the strange fake-tan makeup and the military haircut, but the studded belt was still wrapped around his skinny arm. Maggots ate away at the hole where the
needle had been. I woke up sweating and screaming. I tried to cut myself, hoping it would soothe me, but I could barely control the knife with my shaking hand. When I finally cut, the sight of blood just made me feel sicker. I cradled my arm, crying. I wanted numbness, not pain.

I admitted to myself that I was an addict and would do anything for the drug. It was okay. I could do it for a little while longer because my friend had just died and my boyfriend had disappeared. I'd grieve, I'd be a junkie for a month or so, and then over the summer, I'd get my shit together and prepare for senior year. That excused what I was about to do.

The third day without heroin, I knocked on Liam's bedroom door. I heard him cough and scramble about, and then Harlan let me in.

“Hey, sexy,” he purred. The purple circles under his eyes matched the shade of his hair.

My brother nonchalantly sat on his windowsill, smoking a newly lit cigarette. Three sticks of incense burned on his dresser, but it didn't cover up the acrid smell that definitely wasn't pot, more like burning bleach.

I gave Harlan air kisses, as was his new custom, and strolled over to Liam. I stared right into his bruised-looking eyes and told him, “I know you're smoking glass.”

“Uhh,” Liam blustered, but I held up my hand to stop him.

“I just want to know if your guy can get me heroin, too.”

Harlan appeared behind me, hands on my shoulders, guiding me into a seated position at the foot of the bed so he could give me a massage. “My guy can get you anything you want.” He smiled, flicking his tongue against my earlobe.

I swatted at him. “Harlan, you are so weird!”

But I pulled out three twenties and placed them on the bed beside him.