Farhoudi residence. New Year’s Eve. Hiyam snorts coke off a mirror in her princess bedroom.
“You little shit,” she said without taking her eyes from the screen.
The scene cuts to black, and the title comes up in caps, just like Wesley’s first film. This one, though, is called ADDICTION.
Hiyam’s burgeoning smirk faded.
There is no soundtrack, only live audio. Hiyam’s laughter. The click of a credit card against glass. Her hard snort and the delicate sniffs that follow. She smiles at the camera, high as fuck, not realizing why we’re recording her. I get her to show me the thirty grand in her secret account. The pills and weed she has stashed all over her room. She loves the attention. She admits to Wesley that she’s blackmailing me. I watch her lick her finger and stick it in her nostril to get all the white. She looks at the camera and says dully, “Ever sucked coke off a guy’s dick? It’s called a blowjob.” She bursts out laughing.
Then, finally, my pièce de résistance.
Hiyam smiles at Gary Rivero in the restaurant, oblivious to Wesley and his hidden camera, and the mic in my sleeve captures the deal for a half-kilo of coc**ne.
The film ends. There are no credits.
“So,” I said, rocking my feet side to side, “class? Thoughts?”
Hiyam scooted her chair back with a metallic screech.
“Sit down,” Wesley said. “We’re not done yet.”
“Shut the f**k up,” she said.
I spun my chair to face her. “I’d like to hear what the star thinks about her film debut.”
“You dumb cunt,” she said, moving toward me. “You can’t do shit. My father will destroy you.”
I stood, waiting calmly for her to reach me. I felt so much like the teacher, all the knowledge and power in my hands.
“I doubt it,” I said, my voice light. “Because we sent him the same video an hour ago. You gave me the idea yourself, with your semester project. Your dad seemed to really care about you. He wouldn’t want you throwing your life away on drugs. You should be getting a call from him very soon.”
“You,” she said. Just that: pronoun, no epithet.
“Let me guess. ‘You won’t get away with this. You’ll regret this.’”
She leaned closer. Her breath smelled like wintergreen. “You will regret it. I’ll make sure of that.”
I leaned close, too. “You know, I feel sorry for you, Hiyam. You have everything, all this money and opportunity, and you’re miserable. You want to live without feeling anything. Why even bother living if you’re just going to numb yourself? I’ve had it way worse than you ever will, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
She had the dignity to keep her mouth shut. She stared at me with dark, murderous eyes, then whirled and stalked to the door. It took her a moment to realize it was locked. Wesley muffled a snort.
Hiyam shot a glance back at me and said, “Did you even f**k him in here that day?”
I smiled at her, pityingly.
She slammed the door.
“God,” Wesley said, heaving a huge sigh. “Did it work?”
I was shaking. I wasn’t sure when that had started.
I sat back down and said, “I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”
All I really wanted was for her to leave me and Evan the f**k alone. She could buy her coke direct from Gary and scrub her brain blank with it for all I cared. I’d told her dad I just wanted this to be over—I wanted to move on, go to college, not live with this sword hanging over my head.
I prayed he’d understand.
“At least the hard part’s over,” Wesley said.
But this wasn’t the hard part. Confronting this junkie was easy. There was one more I had to face, and she wouldn’t surrender before drawing blood.
I sat in the kitchen waiting like I had so many nights when I was little, hungry, bored, alone in the house. When I thought of my so-called childhood, that’s what I pictured above all: a sylvan girl with bramble hair and spooky green eyes, kicking her bare, dirty feet on a kitchen chair, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. That girl should have been running in the woods with a boy, scratching secrets into the walls of an old wolf den, howling, chasing each other, wild and free. Not sitting in a room that smelled of marijuana and drain cleaner, her belly growling. On good nights Mom came home with food, a bag glistening and transparent with French fry grease, smelling like heaven, and I’d go to bed with salty-sweet lips and sleep like the dead. On bad nights she came home stoned, or with a man, or not at all. Those nights I didn’t sleep much. I listened for her key in the lock, or grunting and the bed knocking against the wall downstairs. Once a pair of heavy footsteps came to my door. I lay in bed, terrified, paralyzed. I thought they’d finally gone when the door creaked open, and I screamed, and Mom came running, still drunk, hitting the guy in the back until he left.
I always locked my room after that.
You, I thought, timing it with the ticking clock. You. You. You.
She walked in at midnight. My ass was numb, and my heart, too. I looked at her woodenly. You have my face, I thought. What have you done to it? It’s so old and sad.
“What’s going on, babe?” she said, pulling a tallboy from the fridge.
“Sit down, Mom. Please.”
Hiss, crack, fizz. I could hear her swallowing, working that dry, burned throat. She sat across from me.
“Gary says you took care of things,” she said.
I nodded.
“How the hell’d you manage that?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s my business.”
“Your business is my business, babe.”
“No.” I leaned forward, looking her in the eyes. “It’s mine.”
For a minute I thought she’d pick a fight, but I guess clearing her debt temporarily cowed her. She picked at the tab on her can instead.
“Mom.” I waited till she met my gaze. “I got into college in Los Angeles. I’m leaving the second week of June.”
She said nothing. Her eyes were flat, unblinking. She took a swig.
For the first time I realized my mother might be jealous of me. Of my unspoiled life, all the possibilities I still had to make something of myself.
Deep breath.
“I saved some money. Enough to replace what Nan gave me.” I opened the folded paper on the table and slid it over to her. Until a second ago it had been mere junk.
Mom’s eyes bounced off the paper to my face. “What is this?”
“Read it.”
She mouthed the words. She stopped at Rehabilitation Center.
“It cost every penny I had, but I got you in for sixty days. It’s a good clinic, Mom. They’re willing to take you June 1st.”
She looked at me like I was a potted plant that had just started talking. “What the hell is this?”
“I’m trying to help you,” I said, my voice straining.
She pushed the paper at me, pushed her chair back. “This’s some intervention shit.”
“It’s voluntary.”
“You ain’t making me do nothing, little girl. I call the shots. I’m your mother.”
My palm hit the table, the ring making a sharp clack. “You lost the right to call yourself that years ago. This is not a negotiation. This is your last chance to fix your f**king life before you’re too old and brain-damaged to remember it was ever different.” I stood, glowering down at her. Somehow this woman always brought my accent out, and I let it take the reins of my voice. “This is my offer, Mom. Take it or leave it. You complete the program, you stay clean, and I’ll come see you for Christmas. If you don’t, I’m out of your life forever.” I hit the table again, softer. “Do you understand me? You will never see me again.”
She was breathing shallowly, fast. She stared at some central point on my face, not quite my eyes. “This how I raised you? To make fuckin’ threats about disowning me?”
“No,” I said quietly. “This is how I raised me.”
Green slowly crept back into the world, reawakening it as my own body reawakened. I spent spring weekends in St. Louis with Evan, walking along the cobblestoned wharf, listening to the world thaw. If this was all we had, then I would love it unreservedly. When we stopped to watch the boats I leaned back against his body, my neck arching over his shoulder, my face to the sun. I could feel it kindling in my bones. A cold breeze whipped off the water, smelling of mud and fish, and gulls shrieked and their cries echoed eerily under the stone arches of the Eads Bridge. We walked through sun and shadow and sun again. Our own shadows were long and thin, stretching far down the wharf.
I didn’t ask about LA. My cards were on the table. His move.
The sky was a crisp azure on graduation day. They held the ceremony on the football field, the grass lush and emitting a rainy perfume, our royal blue gowns gleaming in the sun.
Hiyam wasn’t there. She’d been pulled from school, finishing her year with a private tutor. Mom wasn’t there, either, as I’d expected. But the Browns were, all of them—Siobhan, Natalie, and Jack the professor, a man in his sixties, still handsome in a Clint Eastwood way, straight brow and deep-set eyes beneath a wing of silver hair. He sat next to Siobhan, and they chuckled together over private jokes. Once I saw Jack touching the small of her back, looking at her with an old, smoldering fondness.
“Dad’s current girlfriend is twenty-two,” Wesley whispered to me as we sat through the valedictorian speech. “Please tell me you’ll never date a dinosaur like him.”
I flicked his ear, hard.
Evan was there, at the back of the crowd. When they called us to the stage for our diplomas I screamed my head off for Wesley, and on my turn the Browns cheered wildly, but the only person I saw was Evan, standing at the back, the sun slanting in his hair and outlining him in gold, clapping so hard he drowned out everyone else.
Afterward we ran the usual gauntlet of family hugs. When we slipped away and reached Evan, he was surrounded by half our old Film Studies class, eagerly telling him their plans. Rebecca was going to art school in Georgia. A few kids were heading to NYC for theater. Everyone was impressed when we said we were going to LA, and Wesley basked in the attention while I met Evan’s gaze, something twisting in my chest, a strangling vine. The boys shook his hand and the girls hugged him, and when it was my turn I breathed in his ear, “You changed my life, Mr. Wilke.”
His arms tightened around me, and he whispered back, “You changed mine.”
Wesley looked at the two of us, then away.
The crazy thing was that after all of this, no one knew. No one gave me a second glance or raised an eyebrow. They talked excitedly about Hollywood and New York. They asked Evan about his college days. The rumors had died down without Hiyam fueling them. Now he was just a teacher, and I was just another student, not connected to him in any special way. I drifted across the grass, leaving him there in the sun and the warmth of their attention, closing my eyes and letting the light soak through, blinding me with my own neon red blood.
Wesley left with Natalie the day after graduation, heading to California. I had plans to take a plane next week. Carbondale graduated later than us.