Love and Chaos (13 page)

“I need to know what she’s taken,”
says the operator.

How the hell would I know? I never have any idea what’s really going on with anybody else!

But maybe I should have asked, I realize, looking at Coco’s little body lying on the floor. She’s younger than me, she’s infinitely more naive and inexperienced, she’s just a baby, really.… We should be looking after her better.

We should all be looking after one another better.

Suddenly, Coco opens her eyes, convulses, and starts puking again. Sam quickly turns her on her side.

The operator is talking again.
“Ma’am? Drugs, alcohol, prescription medication?”

“Um, I don’t know, I’ll find out, I’ll find out.” I hand the phone to Sam and stand up. “I’m going to search her room.”

He nods, wiping away her puke, and turns to Julia. “Get me a wet towel.”

Julia nods frantically and runs away, completely freaking out the way that über-bossy people always do in a genuine emergency. Madeleine and Heff are staring at Coco in stoned shock. Ethan the Cheesemaker is passed out on the sofa, totally useless, next to a still-sleeping Lev. And I guess Pia is still outside fighting with Aidan. The only people here who can really help are Sam and me. Fuck.

I hurry up to Coco’s room, taking the stairs three at a time. It’s an adorable room: all sloping ceilings and book-lined windowsills. Feeling like a thief, I open the drawers to her nightstand: books, lip balm, tissues, an old keychain, photos of her mom (she passed away when Coco was nine or something). Then I try her desk drawers. Pencils, pens, scissors … nothing else.

I look around. If I were Coco, where would I hide drugs? I wouldn’t have drugs, comes the answer right back. Unless they were prescription. And I’d think of them as medicine, so I’d keep them with my Band-Aids and cough medicine.

Where the hell are her toiletries? I look around and finally see that hanging on the back of Coco’s bedroom door is one of those plastic shoe storage things, you know the kind? With all the little pockets? But she’s using it for toiletries, not shoes. I go through each pocket one by one. Moisturizer, face scrub, razors, deodorant, hairbrush, hair bands, sunscreen … and finally, pills.

Demerol and Xanax.

Of course.

I grab the pills and head back downstairs. The paramedics have arrived; they’re in the living room asking Sam questions. Coco’s eyes are open now, and her skin is a pale gray-blue, like someone has bled the color out of her with some faulty Photoshop app.

“I’ll go to the hospital with her,” I say to Sam.

“I’ll come, too,” he says.

“I’m going, too!” says Julia. “She’s my sister.”

So, somehow, the three of us end up in the ER.

Coco is put straight into a hospital bed, and the three of us sit around her, curtains drawn. Doctors come in and out, calm and preoccupied, concerned and cold. She’s having palpitations, so they want to monitor her heart. And she’s still not breathing properly, so they’ve attached an oxygen mask to her face, plus a drip in her arm to replenish her fluids. She’s conscious again, but the oxygen mask means she can’t talk. Her eyes look even bigger and more blue than usual, and tears are running down her face and pooling around the edge of the mask.

I’ve never been in an ER before. It’s not like on TV and in movies: a lot quieter, more mundane. No gunshot wounds, no stabbings. Just ordinary, run-of-the-mill people who hurt themselves. I can hear the family at the next bed whispering to one another in Spanish, and an old lady talking in Russian down the hall. How scary it must be to be in a hospital speaking a foreign language.

The three of us are sitting in silence, sipping the sweet, metallic-tasting hospital coffee Sam bought, murmuring to one another in that intimate shorthand you use in the wake of an emergency. Strange how a crisis can fast-forward a friendship. Right now, I feel like Sam is one of us.

I take out the bottles of Demerol and Xanax that I found in Coco’s room.

“Xanax?” says Julia. She hadn’t noticed it before. “Oh God, poor Coco, this is my fault, it’s my fault, it’s my fault.…”

Sam reaches out and grabs Julia by the shoulder. “It’s not your fault. These things happen. Drink your coffee.”

Julia obediently picks up her coffee and takes a sip.

“Good girl,” says Sam.

“Don’t ‘good girl’ me, my friend,” says Julia. “I’m twenty-fucking-three-years old.”

“Good … woman?”

“That’s more like it.”

We sit there in silence a while longer.

“I hate hospitals,” says Julia finally.

“Me too,” says Sam. “I think everyone does.”

“No, I really hate them. My mom died in a hospital. They wouldn’t release her, even though she really wanted to go home for the last few days. Isn’t that mean? It was so mean.” Julia is talking in the tiniest voice I’ve ever heard from her, and her breath catches. “I think about it all the time.”

Sam pauses. “How…”

“Breast cancer.”

“I’m really sorry,” he says, and rather than sounding rote or formulaic the way those words usually do, it sounds real. Then, in a strangely paternal gesture, he reaches over, pulling Julia into a half hug, their little plastic hospital chairs clanging together. Like a daddy owl pulling a baby owl under his wing. “But you know Coco will be fine.”

Julia looks over at Coco, now sleeping quietly. “Why would she need a prescription painkiller?”

Oh, my God. Coco never told her sister about the abortion. I never even thought about it, really. I was too busy thinking about Mani, who’d just broken up with me, and partying every minute that I could to obliterate all the emotions I didn’t want to deal with.… Coco and Julia are incredibly close, how could she not tell her only sister something so important?

Because Coco thought she wouldn’t understand. That she’d disapprove, and judge, and make Coco feel even worse. It’s Coco’s secret. Of all people, I can understand that.

So I just shrug. “Who knows? They hand those things out like candy. Didn’t she get her wisdom teeth out last year?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.” Julia frowns. She doesn’t seem surprised about the Xanax. She must have known about that.

Then a doctor comes back in and checks on Coco again. They decide to keep her overnight, for observation.

“What’s really scary is that she was so out of it,” says Julia to the doctor. “What if we hadn’t been there? What if she’d been doing that with a bunch of people she didn’t know? Anything could have happened to her!”

Three thousand dollars.
The Soho Grand hotel. And I still don’t know what happened that night. I shake my head, as if to clear it, getting a strange look from Sam.

“About a quarter of our admissions are related to alcohol and prescription abuse,” says the doctor. “Sometimes more. With your permission, I’ll dispose of those leftover pills safely. If she doesn’t need them, it’s best not to have them in the house.”

Julia hands over the pills and the doctor leaves. Then she turns to us.

“You guys should go home, get some sleep. Thank you so much, Sam. Thank you.”

Sam leans forward and gives Julia another hug, rumpling her hair as he does it. Her face changes from stress to bliss when she’s in his arms. Wow, she really likes him. I hope he does ask her out.

“You sure you want to stay here by yourself?” I say to Julia.

“Totally,” she says, and surprises me by grabbing me for a hug, too. I’m a non-hugger, I come from a long line of non-huggers—but I hug her back out of instinct. It’s like putting on warm socks straight out of the dryer. A sort of
ahhhh
feeling.

“Angie, I’ll escort you home,” Sam says, as we’re walking out of the hospital.

“Dude, I’m fine. I don’t need a chaperone.”

“That wasn’t really my point. We’re outside a hospital in the middle of the night, in one of the not-so-nice areas of Brooklyn. You’d probably get home fine, but you might not. Why take a risk?”

I sigh. “Fine. Have it your way. Jesus, do you do everything right? And how do you know what’s nice and not nice in Brooklyn? You’ve been here, like, a week.” Sam makes a snorting sound and doesn’t answer.

The air outside is cold and crisp, but sort of sweet. A nice change after the stale chemical smell of the hospital. I pull my fur/army coat tighter around me.

“So, talk me through your friends,” says Sam as we walk. “Coco’s younger than the rest of you, right?”

“Yep,” I say. “She’s twenty-one, Jules is twenty-three. They’re from upstate New York.”

“Julia is the overprotective big sister. Coco is the little one looking for approval, huh?”

“More or less. God, I hope she’s okay.”

“She will be,” says Sam. “She just made a mistake, that’s all.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“One brother. And Pia’s your best friend? The drama queen?”

“Um, yeah. Our moms met in the hospital when they were having us, we have the same birthday.”

“The same birthday … that was not the reason for tonight’s surprise party. Because I was that reason.” He pauses. “I feel so important.”

I start to giggle. “Um, well, yeah, so, Pia and I both turn twenty-three in April. And Madeleine is … I don’t know, actually. We’re not that close. She’s hard to talk to. Unfriendly. Sometimes downright bitchy.”

“I thought she was just shy,” he says. “Whenever someone is sort of cold and controlled like that, making weird little comments, I figure they’re shy and awkward. Trying to impress people.”

This idea surprises me. “You might be right. I assume that what you see is what you get.”

“That’s a nice theory. But it can backfire in all sorts of ways.”

I think about Stef, and the yacht, and all the mistakes I’ve made in the past by not bothering to look below the surface of anything, by not getting to know guys before I … Well, by not getting to know guys. That will never happen again.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You do that, missy.”

I smile at him, feeling that same easy warmth I felt with Julia before. The warm-sock
ahhh
feeling. Security and friendship. This guy is a good guy.

“They’re a great group, anyway. Most of my friends are all over the country right now, some studying, some working.… You really fell on your feet in Brooklyn, huh?”

“Yeppers,” I say. Actually, that’s not exactly true, but I don’t want to tell him everything about me.

“Did you just say ‘yeppers’? What are you, nine?”

“Yes. I am nine”—I pause—“kinds of
awesome
.”

Sam cracks up. I don’t even know why I said that. It’s the kind of dumb shit I would say if I was hanging out with just Pia.

“Do you have your favorite childhood toy hidden somewhere in your bedroom back at Union Street?”

I frown at him. How did he guess? “I have six of them,” I say finally. “Big Ted, Little Ted, Grace, Rose, Ralph, and Pinky.”

Sam laughs out loud again. “Six! Are you an excessive person by nature?”

“Shut up! Don’t laugh at my toys!”

“I’m not laughing at them! I have one toy that I take everywhere with me. I just hide him in the bottom of my toiletry case.”

“
Him?
Name, please?”

“Panda … He’s, uh, he’s a panda.”

“You were obviously a highly inventive child.”

“I was indeed.” Sam pauses and smiles at me. “It’s nice. Having Panda with me. It’s a link to the past, you know? A nice one.”

“I know what you mean. I guess I just like knowing that they’re around,” I say.

We smile at each other, and again I get that warm-sock feeling. A male friend I’m not going to sleep with. How bizarre.

When we get to Rookhaven, Sam turns to me. “Well, good night. Don’t try to kiss me or anything, okay? It’d just be awkward, because of how I only like you as a friend.”

I start laughing and punch him lightly in the arm. “Thank you for everything with Coco tonight. You kind of saved her life.”

“Hey, it was nothing. And it’s part of the platonic friend code, right? It’s in the fine print:
save roommates from overdosing
.”

“Right on. So … I’ll call you. About our friend date.”

“You better.”

When I get inside, Pia and Madeleine are sitting on the living room floor, around the wet shadow of a recently cleaned puke stain. The guys have all disappeared.

Pia looks up. “Angie, we need to talk.”

CHAPTER
18

This is weird. Pia, my best friend in the house who I’ve grown apart from recently, with Madeleine, her former frenemy and my least favorite person in the house, sitting down and enjoying a 2:00
A.M.
bottle of Malbec.

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask, suddenly feeling exhausted.

“Well, first, tell us about Coco,” says Pia.

“How is she?” Madeleine pulls her sleeves down over her hands, looking at me anxiously. She’s permanently covered up. Suddenly, I remember what Julia told me earlier. About the cutting. Maybe she is still doing it. Or maybe she has scars. Now probably isn’t the time to ask. “That was so awful.… I’ve never seen someone collapse before.”

“She’s fine,” I say. I tell them what happened. “It was a stupid mistake. She just didn’t know not to combine them with alcohol.”

“Where the heck did she even get those drugs?” says Madeleine. “Seriously. Coco is as straight as they come.”

Pia and I exchange a look. I don’t think we should tell her. It’s not our place.

“She had an abortion,” says Pia. “About three months ago.”

Clearly Pia disagrees.

Madeleine sighs but doesn’t seem shocked, which, though it sounds strange, sort of shocks me. I thought she’d be the judgmental antiabortion type. “Poor, poor Coco. I thought she’d been a little withdrawn lately. I bet she hasn’t told Julia, either.”

“Nope.” Pia shakes her head. “And you can’t tell her, either, okay? If Coco wants to tell her, she will.… Anyway, so, the Demerol came from there. The Xanax … I don’t know.”

“How did you find out?” asks Madeleine.

“Angie found her crying in the kitchen one day, when she thought she was alone in the house.”

I nod, remembering that day back in December. I thought Coco was just reading another goddamn Nicholas Sparks book. She’s always crying over something like that. But she was sobbing—this scared, sort of intense, desperate sobbing—and I knew something was really, seriously wrong. I didn’t know what to do, so I called Pia. She was on her way to see Aidan but came straight over. She guessed immediately. I think she’d suspected for a while. Then Coco told us everything.