The Way We Bared Our Souls Page 2

  Focus, Lo. I tried to imagine a drug I could take to feel at home in my body again, to feel less scatterbrained and off-kilter. It’d be called TranquiLo™. Side effects included drowsiness, loss of appetite. . . .

  I ran into my parents in the hallway, and as soon as I saw their bleak faces, I knew I didn’t want to engage with them. I told them I was in a rush to make it to the end of fourth period, and then fled the hospital into the vivid New Mexico sunshine before anybody—or anything—could slow me down. I wouldn’t make history class, but I’d get to lunch before the bell, and I desperately wanted to see my friends, eat some potato chips in the courtyard, laugh about stupid teenage stuff, and forget the morning ever happened.

  • • •

  I made it to lunch period just in time to get faux-stern reprimands from my best friends, Alex and Juanita, who were sitting on the courtyard concrete in the midst of an epic hair-styling session. Alex had her legs wrapped around Juanita’s hips for better leverage and was putting the finishing touches on a long, silky braid.

  “Lo! You’re, like, four hours late,” Alex said as she looped the finished braid around the back of Juanita’s head. “Pretty tardy, young lady, even for you. What gives?”

  Alex and I had bonded freshman year over a fetal pig dissection in the world’s grossest biology lab, and my social life hadn’t been the same since. Alex is pretty and blond, and she brought me into her exclusive circle of rich Anglo kids and hot athletes who make up the picnic society around our school’s circular courtyard fountain, which we’d redundantly nicknamed “Agua de Water.” At lunch we also threw coins in the water, wishing for things like calorie-free guacamole and our favorite movie stars to fall in love with us via our Twitter accounts.

  “Yeah, chica,” Juanita said, jumping up and swinging her arms around me after making sure her hair was in place. “Where’ve you been? Alex won’t stop going on about kissing Brett last night, and I need a buffer from her blah blah blahs.” Her hand made a motormouthed puppet. “Oops, sorry,” she said to Alex. “I guess mind-numbing boredom is the price to pay for your beautician services.”

  Alex laughed and threatened to muss Juanita’s hair. “Damn right. Anyway, you’re just jealous that you missed the show last night because you had to help Ellen barf out her guts in the bathroom.”

  “Oh no,” I said, snapping to attention. “Again?”

  “Yup,” Juanita said. “This is after she decided to make a fool of herself with Jason’s karaoke machine. But we’ll talk about that later. It merits serious discussion. Meanwhile, Lo, for real, where’ve you been all morning? Chemistry felt ten hours long without you.”

  “I didn’t tell you guys I had a doctor’s appointment?”

  The truth was, my parents were the only ones who knew about my Mysterious Symptoms. I didn’t want anyone to think I was a weirdo. Or overreact and get worried when I might not even have anything wrong with me at all. I just wanted to be normal until I couldn’t be normal anymore. I wanted to be normal until my normalcy dried up like the river that ran through the center of town. And besides, I was probably fine. I was going to ask my parents if we could get a second opinion from a doctor whose belt buckle didn’t weigh as much as a car engine. Better yet, I’d get better before my next appointment. I was probably just eating too much sugar, or there was toxic mold in my bedroom, or my hormones were out of whack. . . .

  TranquiLo. You’re at school now, in public. I dug around in my backpack for my lunch, only to realize I’d forgotten to pack one.

  “Oh my god,” Alex said, her blue eyes fixed on me in shock. I stopped in my tracks. For a second I thought she knew my secret, like she had gotten hold of my medical chart. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Lo, did you go to the gyno this morning? Did your mom take you to get a prescription for birth control?”

  I laughed, relieved. Alex knew perfectly well that birth control was the furthest thing from my mind, especially since I was a virgin and didn’t have a boyfriend, despite what my DayGlo underwear might suggest.

  “Yeah, right. Just a routine checkup,” I said, feeling a little guilty about lying but deciding that the alternative—making my friends worry—was worse. “So tell me about Brett,” I said, changing the subject. “Dish, Alex. I hate that I missed Weekends on Wednesdays last night.” I might have changed the subject a bit too effectively, because for the next four minutes, Alex didn’t stop talking about the star soccer player’s “pillowy” lips and “rock-hard abs.” I took this to indicate that she’d been reading too many of her mother’s romance novels. (By which I mean the novels that her mom writes, not ones she keeps on the shelf. Slightly overweight and incredibly awkward, Mrs. Karen Reynolds is known everywhere besides her church and the dentist’s office as Cate Mayweather, best-selling romance author.)

  Before I could interrupt Alex’s monologue, Ellen Davis arrived on the Agua scene like a bucking bronco.

  “Who’s seen my backpack?” she practically shrieked, stopping short our conversation, such as it was. I looked around for the bag in question, but someone was sitting on or near every backpack in the vicinity in a proprietary way.

  I hadn’t hung out much with Ellen recently. We didn’t have any classes together that semester, and I’d been distracted by my symptoms since the start of school. Ellen used to be attached at the hip to me, Juanita, and Alex, but she’d started going off the deep end last spring. Though we hadn’t said it to her explicitly, we were all really worried about her. Her pill problem was the worst-kept secret in our crowd. So far her mom, a wealthy state delegate, and the nosy guidance counselors at school didn’t appear to have gotten wind of her addiction, but Ellen routinely came to class either high on something or in a stupor that no amount of caffeine from the cafeteria vending machines could shake.

  And last spring Ellen had discovered heavy-duty pain-killers. Serious stuff, like Oxy and Percocet. So I was definitely worried about the road Ellen was on. But—and I hated to say it, because lord knows I’d had my own mood swings lately—she’d also been acting like a real bitch. After she wrecked her brand-new car last April driving to school on a handful of Xanax washed down with lite beer, we all rallied around her. Even though Mrs. Davis told us it was “only a fender bender” (false) and that they “had enough flowers already, mostly from the capitol building” (brag), we visited Ellen in the hospital anyway. But she was a nightmare patient, cursing us out right and left. She wouldn’t even accept Juanita’s get-well flower bouquet, saying that the smell of roses “made her want to vom.” It got so bad one day that we decided we wouldn’t come back to visit; we clearly weren’t helping her and were maybe only making things worse. Ellen had been drifting further and further from us ever since.

  Now she seemed to be on something far worse than pills. She’d lost a bunch of weight, for one. Her jeans sagged off her hips, and she’d already been pretty thin to begin with (her mom basically stocked the fridge only with flavored seltzers and imitation eggs). For two, her skin, which had always been clear and sun-kissed, was now ghost-white and splotchy. Her bleached blond hair was all over the place, and she had a wild look in her eyes that scared me. She seemed to be staring right through us.

  “No one has your backpack, crazy,” Alex said.

  Ellen whirled around to face Alex. Her forehead had broken out in a sweat, and various stains showed on her baby blue tank top.

  “Then where. The eff. Is it?” Ellen said.

  “Probably where you saw it last, chica,” said Juanita’s sometimes boyfriend Luis LeBlanc, who was approaching from a nearby picnic table. Ellen responded by grabbing Luis’s baseball cap and tossing it into the fountain like a Frisbee.

  “Damn, girl,” he said. “Chill.” For a second it looked as if Ellen was going to retrieve the hat, but then I realized she was just leaning over the Agua wall to scoop up the coins at the bottom of the fountain. When she was satisfied with her handful of nicke
ls and pennies, she held them aloft.

  “Hey,” I said automatically, “those are someone’s wishes.”

  “Yeah?” Ellen said. “Well, I wish you’d all just disappear.” She hurled a couple of pennies across the courtyard, pocketed the rest of the coins, and stormed back into the school. I was stunned. Luis muttered some profanity and made his way back to his table, shaking the water from his cap.

  “What the hell was that?” I said.

  “Meth,” whispered Alex.

  At first I thought she was joking. Then I saw her exchange a grave look with Juanita that indicated she wasn’t.

  “You’re serious?” I said. Sharp-as-a-tack Ellen, who starred in the fifth grade play, won the middle school science fair three years in a row, and had scored practically all the goals on our childhood soccer team, was on meth? What was a sixteen-year-old girl, by all accounts clever and accomplished, doing on such a savage drug?

  “Unfortunately,” said Juanita. “I got it on good authority. Granted, my brother can be kind of a dick, but he’s not a liar, and he knows a lot of people. Last night he told me that his friend Angelina accidentally walked in on her using in the bathroom of Stoops. Caught her in the act.”

  “She’s sure?” I said.

  Juanita nodded soberly. “No wiggle room.”

  “I only just heard about it this morning,” said Alex. “But it seems so obvious now. You should have seen her last night at the party, Lo. She was totally tweaking.”

  I could barely process this. “I know that she hasn’t been handling her alcohol lately—”

  “No shit,” said Alex. “She can’t go out without getting totally obliterated.”

  “And she’s been downing all those pills. But . . . Jesus. Meth? Really?”

  “Really,” said Juanita. “Apparently that complete ass she’s been hooking up with—Mike what’s-his-face—gave her her first hit.” Boyfriends were supposed to introduce you to cool new bands and video games and car mechanics and stuff. Not meth.

  “I feel like we need to do something,” said Alex.

  Of course we needed to do something. But clearly we were out of our league. Sure, we weren’t innocent to the fact that kids our age dabbled in drugs. But that mostly stopped at smoking pot and snorting Adderall occasionally. Crystal meth was way out of the range of substances that could optimistically be called “recreational.” People didn’t do meth in moderation. They did it until it destroyed them.

  Just then, a shot of pain bullied its way through my head, making me feel like my skull was clenching up and trying to squeeze my brain out of my eye sockets. I reeled backward into the fountain wall and put my head between my knees.

  “Lo?” Alex said, as if through water. Electrified water. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just. . . .” Tears came into my eyes, summoned both by pain and by my frustration that I was alone with this secret. “Period cramps,” I said. “They’re really bad this month.”

  “Awww,” Juanita said, putting her arm around me.

  “Um, I know I just got to school,” I said, “but do you guys mind covering for me? I think I have to ditch.”

  “No problem,” Alex said.

  “Then I guess this is where we part,” said Juanita, making a teardrop with her manicured fingernail. “Until later, señorita, mi corazon.” Heart, corazon. Brain, cerebro. I knew a woefully small number of words in Spanish, but I liked to use them in conversation because they always struck me as jauntier than English. I made a mental note to memorize all my body parts in Spanish. Then maybe I’d look upon them more cheerfully if they began to fail, one by one.

  Shut up, Lo. Quit with the self-pity. Bienvenido. Buenas tardes. Mucho gusto encantada.

  “Feel better, babe,” said Alex. “A heating pad and some ibuprofen always help me.”

  “Thanks, guys,” I said, making my way toward the courtyard exit. “You’re the best.”

  “I know!” said Alex. “Finally somebody gets it!”

  “Don’t forget chocolate and mafia movies!” shouted Juanita at my back. “I swear on my heart that The Godfather trilogy healed my eczema!”

  I smiled back at her through the pain.

  • • •

  From school I drove straight to the pharmacy. Fernando’s Pharmacy, in the boonies of Santa Fe, where I could be anonymous. I didn’t risk running into anyone from Santa Fe High there, and the pharmacist never batted an eye when I picked up my arsenal of drugs from behind as well as over the counter. While Alex and Juanita shelled out for new clothes and pedicures every week, I bought ibuprofen, fish oil, super B-complex vitamins, and protein bars with my parents’ credit card—all staples of my morose survival diet.

  As I barreled down the freeway past outlier shopping malls, used-car lots, and Mexican buffets, I tried to get out of my own head. I thought about Ellen. I was furious at myself for being oblivious to her downward spiral. The meth explained so much about her recent behavior. But I couldn’t get over how . . . serious it was. And way too much for me to handle, especially when I wasn’t doing so well myself. But Ellen was tough and distinct and endearingly obscene. She was my friend. I couldn’t allow her to fall apart.

  3

  ARMED WITH OTC PAINKILLERS AND a red basket’s worth of obscure supplements big enough for a horse to choke on, I started out for home.

  The route back from the pharmacy ran along the perimeter of a semi-wooded park that Dad called the “Tinderbox.” For years he’d been trying to get the Forest Service to do a controlled burn of the sage and thick underbrush, to no avail. Now we were in the midst of one of the worst droughts our region had ever experienced, and it was way too late and too dangerous to think of burning anything on purpose. The last monsoon season hadn’t provided us with a thorough soak, and Dad worried that the arid aspens in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains would go up in flames. I envisioned a single match obliterating every tree from here to the Pacific Ocean.

  But I didn’t see any fires that day as I drove and washed down my brain-boosting vitamins with a sports drink. Nor did I see smoke when I scanned the scraggly, desiccated treetops.

  I did, however, see a large mammal dash in front of my car, leaving me only milliseconds to avoid hitting it by swerving into the opposite lane.

  Orange pills flew all over the passenger-side floor, where they were swallowed by coffee cups and candy wrappers. “Cheese and toast,” I blurted, then almost laughed when I realized that I’d instinctively used my mother’s version of “profanity.”

  TranquiLo. Focus. Collect yourself and your medicine.

  I pulled over and looked in the rearview mirror. Standing just where my car had passed, so close that it could probably sniff my wall of bumper stickers (one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. IF YOU CAN READ THIS, I'VE LOST MY TRAILER. horn broken, watch for finger.), was a coyote.

  I’m not scared of coyotes. Unless you’re an escaped housecat or an infant abandoned on a picnic blanket, you have no cause to fear them. Coyotes are everywhere in New Mexico, including downtown Santa Fe, where they frequently wander past tourists in the midst of dream-catcher-buying frenzies. Still, it’s not like I would ever try to hand-feed Milk-Bones to one. Being prolific doesn’t exactly make them docile. You just have to be sensible enough to stay out of their way.

  Or not.

  I stepped out of my car. The coyote didn’t flee, nor did it freeze with fear. It just gazed at me steadily, reflectively, somehow demanding my full attention in return. Its eyes seemed to issue a gentle challenge: Come here, they said. Let me see who you are and what you’re about. Let’s get in each other’s faces and make sure we’re both fully alive.

  Was I losing my mind? Hallucinating? My nerves were already frazzled by . . . the obvious. And the not so obvious. You start the morning with a visit to the neurologist and you never know what’s going to happen
. I felt raw, unmoored, as if I could burst into tears at any moment. And I had never been a crier.

  I inched around the car, my legs shaky from the near-accident and not, I told myself, from the Maybe Sclerosis. I crept toward the coyote and was about to say something pretty nutty considering the context, something along the lines of “Here, pup. Do you need a friend?” when another unexpected body appeared through the trees, this one human. I felt an electric shock plunge down my right leg like a live wire and exit via my boot. I hated it when that happened.

  The man jogged casually toward me, indicating with a wave that everything was okay—stellar even. Though I’m understandably wary whenever strange men appear out of nowhere and make a beeline for me, his smile immediately put me at ease—as much as I ever felt at ease in my own skin those days. The expression on his face was . . . transcendent.

  His silky dark hair hinted at Native American blood, but I couldn’t determine his ancestry for sure. He wore his hair almost to his shoulders, with one funky ponytail on top of his head that resembled the crested plumage of a bird. He looked like a refugee from a local college—the kind of school that taught classes like “Personal Communication in a Machine Age” or “Feminist Puppetry in Elementary Education.” Whether he’d be an older student or a young professor, I couldn’t be sure exactly.

  “I see you found Dakota,” he said in a throaty, harmonious voice that either indicated depth of life experience or decades of smoking. I suspected it was the former. “Or she found you.”

  “This coyote belongs to you?” I said, feeling shy all of a sudden.

  “Well, not exactly. This coyote belongs to me as much as she belongs to you, and as much as you belong to that thirsty tree over there. Today Dakota just happens to be walking in my world. Better than me walking in her world, I suppose. Otherwise I’d be biting the heads off chickens.” He chuckled.