Thicker Than Water (6 page)

I felt a sudden jolt of embarrassment, like I'd been caught with my pants down. Something about Lucas made me feel naked. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant feeling. Trying to hide my flushed cheeks, I pulled up my hood and hurried back toward the building. I tried not to think of the realities of what I'd just done—the fact that I was officially a drug dealer and that the money in my pocket was for pills that didn't belong to me. Instead, I tried to establish some sense of moral high ground. There are fewer pills for my brother to take. There was enough cash to pay off my science lab debt to Dr. Schafer.

A Wednesday feels like a Wednesday no matter what. But a Wednesday when you have cash in your pocket is a little better than normal. I found Dr. S at the end of the day. She was clapping erasers outside her window. She might be the only teacher who still used a chalkboard—even our school, tech-impaired as it was, gave all the teachers Smart Boards.

“Dr. Schafer?”

She turned around. The cuffs of her jacket were coated in pale yellow dust.

“Cecelia, hi.” She frowned up at the clock. “I've only got a minute—there's a faculty meeting today.” She gave me an apologetic smile.

“That's okay. I just wanted to give you this.” I handed her sixty dollars. “For my lab fee.”

Dr. S looked at the cash and nodded slowly.

“Right. Well, okay. You actually don't pay
me
, you pay Mrs. Fleishman, the school secretary.”

“Oh.”

All afternoon I was so excited to give her the money, to show her I was good for it. Instead, I looked like an idiot.

“Here.” I reached for the bills. “I can take it to her.”

“No, it's fine.” She shook her head. “I think they just want to try to avoid money changing hands between students and teachers.”

“Yeah. I guess that makes sense.”

I heaved the strap of my bag back up onto my shoulder. The buckle pinched my skin, bringing unintentional tears to my eyes.

“CeCe . . .” Dr. Schafer said, peering at me. “Is everything okay?”

I made a show of unzipping my bag and finding my car keys. “Yeah, sure. Everything's fine.”

“Okay . . .” She didn't sound convinced, and I felt even worse.

I forced myself to give her a tight smile before walking
back out the door. Suddenly, I knew how Dad did it, how he put on the happy face for me. All a smile required was defying gravity. It wasn't nearly as hard as admitting how you're really feeling.

STEALING THE PILLS WAS A HORRIBLE IDEA.

I paced in my bedroom after school, creating an ugly track in the nap of my carpet. I hoped it, and my nervous nausea, weren't permanent. When Dad's truck pulled into the driveway a few minutes later, I watched Cyrus get out, his face half concealed by the brim of his hat. Was it my imagination, or did I sense a searing combination of rage and betrayal?

It was my imagination. He never even came upstairs.

By dinner, Dad was out in the seed shed and Cyrus was either asleep, high, or out. Jane was gabbing away on the phone to her sister in Denver, so I sat down at the kitchen table alone and, between chews and swallows of stringy chicken cacciatore, considered the following:

           
1. I did the right thing. That's four pills that can't kill Cyrus.

           
2. Let Jason shove them up his nose or in his veins or whatever. Who cares what that guy does?

           
3. I'm really doing my family a favor.

           
4. I really need the money for school.

I know I said denial is a refuge, but it's also a time-share. I could vacation there anytime I wanted when guilt threatened to steal what little righteousness I had left.

I started sifting through a stack of mail piled at one end of the table. My eyes skimmed the bills until one long, creamy envelope stopped me short.

Edenton University Alumni Foundation.

I hadn't expected an answer so soon—I'd been accepted at the end of last year, but I only recently applied for their academic scholarship. I ripped it open like it was an Emmy nomination.

And the award for “Most Desperate for Scholarship Money” goes to . . .

            
Dear Ms. Price,

            
Thank you for your recent application. We received many highly qualified entries; however, we regret to inform you that you were not selected to receive an Edenton University Alumni Academic Scholarship . . .

I didn't bother reading the rest. Instead, I crumpled up the letter and tossed it in the garbage. It landed on a Styrofoam meat tray slicked with blood. I wished it were mine.

Suddenly the kitchen felt crowded. It was impossible to see the bright side. That, or there wasn't a bright side. I got up quickly and gripped the back of my chair, a little dizzy. I didn't wait for my head to clear before I clambered out the screen door.

Normally, spring evening air would be refreshing. Instead, I felt like a wet blanket suffocating in a plastic grocery bag. It was almost too humid to breathe. Maybe that's why my tears came quick, like a late summer rainstorm. I wished they were hail, that they were hard enough to throw at something. As usual, my tears couldn't hurt anyone but me.

After-school activities, honor roll—all of it was for nothing. I could have been working, earning money, saving for my future—instead I had a “well-rounded” academic profile. What a fucking waste.

I sat alone in the dark until my eyes were dry enough that I could pretend I was just tired. My nose was still a little stuffy and I reached into my jeans' pocket, hoping I had a tissue. I didn't.

But I did have $150. And then, I had an idea. It bloomed in my head like one of Dad's perennials—all at once and kind of like magic.

I'll swipe three or four pills a week—Cyrus is clearly too blitzed out to even notice.

That's at least $750 a month—better than I could do at a part-time job.

By September, I'll have enough money to enroll in a few classes.

Enough to pay for my books.

I won't have to worry anymore about paying for groceries or gas or prescriptions.

I won't have to worry anymore about waiting for money to come to me.

The back porch light suddenly flickered on and I stepped back into the darker space behind me. Cyrus came through the basement sliding-glass door, pausing to light a cigarette, then inhaling deeply. I wondered when the last time was that he took a deep breath like that of just air. Just then, a car pulled up and, after a few seconds, the driver flashed the headlights. Cy tossed the cigarette into the grass and walked toward the passenger's side.

If you had asked me two years ago if I could steal from my brother, I would have balked. We were close. We were honest with each other. On a night like tonight, I might have made spaghetti with sliced hot dogs like Mom used to when we were little, then Cy and I would have eaten it straight from the pot with forks while we watched TV. Two years ago, my encounters with my brother would have been as innocent as pasta and
SportsCenter
.

And, two years ago, Cyrus didn't have anything I needed.

I waited until the taillights faded away, the red glow splashing against the bank of trees at the end of our driveway. Then I walked toward the basement door. When I got there, his cigarette butt was still smoking, a tiny ember flashing against the lawn.

I moved to smother the glow with my foot, but the damp air beat me to it. The butt was dead, the house was
quiet, and I walked into the basement, feeling nothing but possibility.

It took less than three minutes for Jason to respond to my text message, and less than two for me to make it to my car. As I pulled into his neighborhood, I could see the silhouettes of McMansions lining the street. I forgot that Jason's dad was some kind of real estate tycoon. The image of greasy-ass Jason and expensive Egyptian cotton sheets felt like a paradox of epic proportions.

“Jason's in the basement, sweetie,” his mom said with a warm, fresh-baked smile. I swallowed hard. In what world was it fair that a douche like Jason got a mom like that?

The house was enormous and the open floor plan somehow divided it into levels that were more than separate—like there was a floor that was absent between them. As I descended the stairs, I smelled the same sort of waste, the same reek of human landfill, that Cyrus had polluted our house with. I wondered what Jason's mom thought he was burning down here.

Jason was sitting in front of a massive TV, but it wasn't brand-new. It was one of those big ones that took up more space than a couch.
Call of Duty
and its video game massacres moved across the screen like snapshots.

“Jason.”

He looked up at me, and his stoned eyes widened like hungry mouths.

“You made it here quick, girl. You got something for me?” he asked.

I nodded. I imagined that the Ziploc of pills in my pocket was thumping in time with my heartbeat.

“And?”

For a split second, the Jason in front of me transformed. He was in fifth grade again, trying to remember the capital of Wisconsin in the State Capital Bee. When I whispered “Madison,” he never said thank you. Later, when I forgot the capital of Washington, he was busy biting a hangnail.

“You got something for me?” he repeated slowly, like I was still too stupid to conduct business. I handed over the bag.

“Sixty a pill, right?” he murmured.

“Yeah. There's five pills in that bag.”

“No shit, I can count.”

He got up and headed into another room. From where I was standing, I could see the side of a dehumidifier and a half-full basket of dirty laundry. I started to tally the seconds in my head, but each one felt thick and musty like the air. The higher the numbers, the heavier I felt.

Jason's hand, gripping a wad of cash, reentered the room; the rest of him followed. I just stared at the money. He looked at my expression and smirked.

“I threw in an extra ten.” He handed me the money and I flipped through it clumsily.

What I thought:
You really can count
.

What I said: “Let me know when you're ready for more.”

THE THING THAT'S WEIRD ABOUT A TREADMILL IS THE USELESSNESS
of it, the fact that you're going nowhere fast. (Insert jail metaphor here.) According to Dr. Barnes, exercise is a healthy way of venting frustrations or anger. The way I see it, unless I'm throwing dumbbells at a plate-glass window, working out isn't going to relieve anything festering inside me.

Still, I decide to use the Behavioral Therapy gym equipment this morning. I like the idea of feeling exhausted by something other than my therapy sessions.

Today we have a guest speaker. I've heard it's a pretty regular thing, doctors or teachers or victims coming in to make us feel like crap. I can handle most of this therapy stuff. I can sit through group, I can work with Trina, I can keep my nose clean and stay out of people's way. I just don't think I can listen to someone else drone on and on about what they
think will fix me or enlighten me or fill me with remorse. So I'm trying to see how long I can stall before Nathan, beefy guard du jour, busts into the BT gym and escorts me to the meeting room.

When the door finally opens, though, it's Tucker. He takes one look at me and crosses his arms.

“Since when do you work out?”

“How would you know if I work out or not?”

“Um, maybe because I'm in here every morning and this is the first time you've ever made an appearance.” He grabs a towel from the shelf and hands it to me. “Come on, we're going to be late.”

I glare at him. “Seriously? Are you here just to harass me?”

He shrugs. “You call it harassment. I call it holding you accountable.”

“Fuck that. I'm not even going.”

Tucker rolls his eyes. “Sure you are.”

I keep running. My footfalls feel hollow like promises, but I fill them with all the stubborn attitude I can muster. Tucker, on the other hand, tries for chastisement.

“Come on, CeCe. Don't be an ass.”

I glare at him. “You know, the last thing I need to do is listen to someone who'll make me feel worse about myself.”

Tucker reaches over and pushes the red stop button on my machine. The belt stutters to a stop and I cling to the railing.

“Dude, what the hell?”

He shrugs. “You weren't getting off.”

“That's because I'm NOT GOING.”

Nathan's concerned face appears in the window. Tucker glances back at him, then lowers his voice.

“Look,” he says, stepping closer, “these people that come in—all they do is talk to us.”

“All we
do
around here is talk.”

“No”—Tucker shakes his head—“all
everyone else
does around here is talk. All you do is avoid talking.”

“I think they call that listening.”

“In order for it to be listening, you have to actually
hear
what people are saying. And, you know,
care
about what they're talking about.”

“Whatever.” I snatch the towel from Tucker's hands and wipe my forehead. “What difference does it make if I'm there or not?”

“It doesn't.”

“So then why are you making it your life's mission to get me there? Who gives a shit if I let some asshole lecture me this morning or if I just sweat out a few more minutes?”

Tucker doesn't answer. I narrow my eyes until his form lengthens and fades.

“Why do you always do that?” he asks. I blink hard, widening my gaze.

“Do what?”

“That squinting thing you do. Do you need glasses or something?

I shake my head, feeling stupid. “No, my vision's fine.”

I busy myself wiping down the treadmill's control panel, but I still feel Tucker's eyes on me. I give up. Listening to a stranger is far less intimate than fielding his questions and dodging his gaze while something palpitates inside my chest.

“Listen,” I finally say, “if I go to this speaker thing, will you get off my back? Stop bugging me so much about working through my feelings or whatever?”

Tucker looks genuinely hurt. “I'm not trying to annoy you, CeCe. I'm trying to be your friend.”

“I don't need a friend,” I mumble.

He shakes his head. “Everyone needs a friend.”

Tucker's earnestness, while annoying on the surface, is more than that—it's disarming. So I drop my weapons—towel in the laundry basket, snarky responses left unsaid—and try to follow his lead without hating it.

Everything about Mary Jensen is big. Big head, big hair, big arms, big man hands. I'm sitting in the last row, and she still has a booming voice, like she's holding a megaphone. She's pretty young—maybe early twenties or something. Her ankles look swollen to an uncomfortable degree. I swallow hard. She looks like the Abominable Guilt Trip.

“I'd like to thank everybody for coming today,” Mary says, as though this were some sort of voluntary seminar.

“I'm going to give you a little bit of background so that you know why I'm here and why you should give a shit.”

It's fun when a stranger cusses. In this case, it's like a
substitute teacher tossing out the lesson plan and taking the class to Dairy Queen. I glance over at Dr. Barnes, who's sitting off to one side. He doesn't seem rattled, which is sort of disappointing.

Mary launches into what she considers an “abbreviated” life story: a full ten minutes of droning on about how she has a brother, how her parents have been married for forty years, blah, blah, blah. When she starts talking about her freshman year in college, I have to work hard to control my rising bile. There's nothing more utterly depressing than hearing about a normal person living a normal life. Everyone sitting here is far from normal, and most of us have never wanted to be anything but that.

“I was away at school when my brother discovered prescription drugs,” Mary is saying. “I'd noticed a difference in him since I'd moved out, but I figured it was just the fact that he was growing up. When I was a freshman in college, he was twelve. Sixteen was a whole new ball game.”

She's got a hardened look on her face, like a disguise that she wears to tell her story. Like she's separated herself from it out of necessity.

Been there, done that.

“When I graduated college, I moved back home. While I looked for a day job, I ended up working as a night manager at the fast-food restaurant where my brother worked. We were cleaning up one night and I told him to clock out. When I was cashing out the register, I looked out the window and saw him sitting in a friend's car. He was taking a
hit, right there in the parking lot—lighter sparked, foil hovering, smoke disappearing into a straw clamped between his teeth. I didn't even know you could smoke pills until that night. And when I finished counting out the register, we were about two hundred dollars short.”

Mary stops to take a sip of her water before continuing. I bite down hard on the side of my cheek and let the saliva pool under my tongue.

“My parents were in complete denial when I told them. Even after my brother had been arrested for possession, they still refused to believe that he was a junkie. They did, however, believe every story he fed them—that he was just holding the drugs for friends, that his urine test was positive because he'd been in the same car while others were using—the list of lies was endless. They bailed him out of jail twice, let him live at home, gave him money—at least until they realized he'd been stealing from them the entire time.”

I've watched enough Lifetime to know what comes next—there will be a confrontation, a rock bottom, tearful hugs, and a trip to treatment. People think a story like that is a shocker, that it'll rock the rest of us to our very core. Try again; an intervention, rehab—that's the best-case scenario. There's a fist in my chest now and I realize I was wrong. Stories of a normal life, no matter how foreign, would be far better than hearing someone tell a story you already know by heart.

“The thing is,” Mary says, her voice now a little wobbly,
“nothing stopped him. That's what people don't understand about drug addiction. It isn't the
death
of a loved one that makes you suffer. It's their
life
that's the real torture—watching them use and use and use with no sign of stopping.”

Mary stands up and starts to pace in front of us, and I think,
Lawyer.
And then I think,
Televangelist.

“What I want to talk to you about today is second chances. When you're stuck in here, the last thing you're thinking about is how it's a blessing. But this place is offering you an opportunity. You have nothing but time. You need to take advantage of that time to become the person you want to be. Like my brother, you had to hit rock bottom to get here. Now that you're here, with nothing but time, how are you going to use it?”

This is the part that's supposed to inspire us to change, to motivate us to live a life of service to society or whatever. Mary pounds one fist into her palm like a visual exclamation point and I let my eyelids drop over the world like a curtain. I sit as still as possible and try to make the room disappear.

But even with my eyes closed, I can hear Mary's fist as it strikes over and over. I can't help thinking of the phrase “it hits home” when I hear the smack of knuckles against skin. There's nothing like hearing your own life story, complete with sound effects, to make you feel like you're living it all over again.

But I'm here. And at least I got Tucker to agree to quit his CeCe Rehabilitation Initiative. I turn to remind him
of it, but his chair is empty. Turns out he's the one who bolted early. I guess I should have known better. This place is full of more than just criminals and addicts—it's full of liars, too.

I close my eyes, trying to recall a time when I could trust someone—when lying didn't feel as familiar as family. I remember back in eighth grade, when a couple of girls from school convinced me to steal from Mr. Mulligan, a math teacher who had a propensity for leaving his briefcase open and keeping cigarettes in plain sight. The Marlboro Lights probably weighed less than an ounce, but, for the rest of the day, the pack was a weight in my pocket, like a gun or the Hope Diamond.

But I never considered how much cigarette smoke would actually smell like cigarettes. Or how it would linger on my clothes or in my hair like the perfume I wore too much of. My dad smelled it first; at dinner, I'd taken a helping of zucchini and he sniffed hard, then glared at me.

“Have you been smoking?”

It was a voice I'd never heard him use before, the kind of voice you don't lie to, and I wasn't going to. But my brother did.

“It was me, Dad.”

I just stared at Cyrus, dumbfounded. Five minutes earlier, he'd threatened to tell my dad about the crop tops and short skirts I'd been wearing to school. The dance we did in those days was a passive-aggressive tattletale tango. Yet, every now and then, Cyrus positioned himself to take the fall. It was
like I was some kind of damsel in distress. It was like he was some kind of knight in shining armor.

Back then, lying was something you did to save someone else, not just to save yourself.

“I just don't understand,” Jennifer says, shaking her head.

I shrug. “Dr. Frank skipped town months ago.”

“Were you going to tell me that before I went traipsing all over creation to find him?”

“I did tell you. You didn't believe me.”

The week of perpetual rain has finally let up, so outside privileges have been reinstated. Jennifer and I are sitting at a picnic table in the patchy grass just beyond the cement yard. There are a handful of general population juvies hanging out on their side of the chain-link fence. I wonder if I'll be joining them after my hearing.

Jennifer reaches into her pocket and pulls out one of those “note to self” handheld recorders.

“I think this will work better than taking notes,” she says, pressing a button. She sets the recorder on the table between us. “Okay, so let's pick up where we left off last week.”

“Where was that?”

She consults her notes. “Um . . . you'd started selling your brother's prescription.”

“Well, yeah. That was pretty much it.”

“Had you dealt drugs before?”

“No.”

“Had you taken drugs before?”

“No.”

She raises her eyebrows. Jennifer has only a handful of expressions. This is the “I don't believe you” look.

“Look”—she places both hands, palms up, on the table—“I'm just saying that, usually, people who deal drugs
do
drugs. It's pretty unusual for that not to be the case.”

“Well, it's not.”

“Okay, well, that's great.” She slides one hand across the table and pats my arm. It's a strange gesture; I blink for a second, then pull back a little. Jennifer gives me a sad smile.

“I upset you. I wasn't trying to. Let's move on.”

It takes a lot to freak me out. Jennifer showing emotion definitely does it. She's supposed to be the concrete wall between me and the world. She needs to be impartial and practical and by the book. And that book isn't
Chicken Soup for the Inmate's Soul
.

“Anyway, let's talk about the pills. You started selling them—how did that begin?”

I squint. In the distance, I can see an old farmhouse. Piedmont is surrounded by cornfields; out here, some people still make their living by farming. Strike that. Out here, some people still
try
to make their living by farming. Some of them, like Dad, fail miserably.

“CeCe?”

I wonder what it's like, being the person who lives right next to a jail. Is it a life of extremes? You're either terrified you'll get stabbed in your sleep or you're confident the
guards are doing their job? Not to mention the fences and cameras.