Alice & Dorothy (25 page)

Alice laughed. “You can’t overdose when you’re smoking it. You’d have to smoke this whole brick.”

“Really?” Dorothy said. She scratched at an itchy spot in her hair.”I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yeah,” Alice said. She elbowed the girl playfully. “You can’t believe those Saturday morning T.V. drug warnings for kids. They’re all bullshit. Most people who do heroin are smokers. That’s how I started.”

“But you shoot needles now,” Dorothy said.

“Well yeah,
now
I do,” Alice said. “You know how much it costs to shoot heroin? I can get bombed off my head for like five bucks. I used to burn through a hundred bucks a night easy when I was a
Jolly Popper
. Smokin’ is nuthin’. Smokin’ is what you do to get rid of the blues.”

“What’s it feel like?” Dorothy said.

“Kind of like a warm bath, but inside you,” Alice said. She smiled when she said it, like she was thinking of Christmas. “You should do some with me.”

“I don’t think so,” Dorothy said. “That shit will kill you.”

“It’s safe.
Trust me
.”

And those were the words that stuck in Dorothy’s head.
Trust me
. This was a girl she had escaped from the hospital with. She’d watched Alice beat a man half to death saving her from being raped and probably killed. Would Alice ever do anything to hurt her?

The answer, sadly, was
yes
. Dorothy wasn’t an idiot. She could see the instability in Alice’s eyes, the way she mumbled and talked to herself, or the way she’d suddenly fly into a rage and spout half sentences of random gibberish. There was something wrong with Alice. She might be totally crazy. Of course
the world
was totally crazy, and the world would also like to hurt Dorothy, but there wasn’t anything to be done about that. She could escape the world, given half a chance. There was no way to escape Dorothy though. The blond goddess was inside her forever..

Alice pulled the foil from her cigarette pack and ran her lighter under it. When the paper lifted she peeled it off, tossed it aside, and flashed the foil with the lighter again to burn the rest of the glue.

Dorothy sat down beside her.

“You fold the foil in half so it makes a little valley,” Alice said. “Then you cook it from the bottom. The junk turns into a liquid when it’s heated, and then it’ll burn off.”

“That’s how you smoke it?” Dorothy said.

“It’s
one
way of smoking it,” Alice said. “It’s called chasing the dragon. You roll up a piece of paper or a dollar bill and catch the smoke as it burns off.”

“Sounds simple,” Dorothy said. She unfolded her hands and sat on them, and inched closer to Alice. She leaned down and smelled Alice’s bare shoulder. She smelled faintly of wild flowers and baby powder.

“Oh, it is! Nothing to it. You can watch me, if you want. Then if you want to try it I’ll set it up for you. Then we can lay in the dark and listen to some music or something.”

“That sounds really nice,” Dorothy said.
Am I really going through with this?
Looking at Alice, she realized her mind was already made up for her. Yes, she was. Because it’s what Alice wanted.

“Ah-
ha!
” Alice said. She reached over and pulled the straw out of her drink, then clamped it in her teeth and smiled up at Dorothy. She broke a piece of the heroin off with her fingernail, looked at it for a moment, and then did it again. Then she flicked the lighter under the foil and the brown clumps turned to an amber liquid. After a moment of bubbling, a white smoke rose off the foil and the smell of vinegar and talcum powder wafted toward Dorothy. Alice sucked deeply on the straw and coughed into her hand, then looked over at Dorothy, eyes watering, and smiled. She reached out with one hand and pulled Dorothy’s head until their noses were touching.

Alice kissed Dorothy’s bottom lip. When Dorothy opened her mouth in response, Alice blew smoke into her. The taste of vinegar and Alice’s spit flooded Dorothy’s senses. She held her breath as long as she could, then blew out the last of Alice’s toke into the air. The world began to slow down.

“See?” Alice said, kissing Dorothy again. “Not so bad.”

“Umm,” Dorothy said, and then giggled. “No.”

“Let me set up another one for you,” Alice said. She scraped a bit more off the brick and set it in the centre of the foil. Then she handed the straw to Dorothy.

“It’s not dirty. It’s beautiful. Just wait. And try not to cough.” Alice flicked the lighter and heated the dope. When it began to smoke, she nodded. “Okay,
now.
”

Dorothy drew in her breath slowly, like Alice told her, and her head filled with vinegar. The smoke was extremely rough, even though Dorothy was a smoker, she found herself fighting off the urge to gag on the bitter taste.

“Keep it in!” Alice cried happily.

Finally Dorothy pulled her head back and drew a deep breath to cool her smouldering throat. She lay back on the bed awash in the unfamiliar disconnect of an opiate high, as though her soul had come undone from her body and was now flapping around her like a loose tooth. Alice finished her hit for her and then leaned over Dorothy.

“So?”

“I think I’m in love,” Dorothy said, looking up into Alice’s ice water eyes.

Alice laughed, misunderstanding. “I felt the same way after my first hit,” she said. “Let’s do some more. That fuckin’ shit they were giving me in the hospital is making it hard for me to get high.”

“In a minute,” Dorothy said slowly. There was piano music in her head, melancholy and beautiful and spreading out from her heart and filling her veins with sunshine. It was like smoking pure joy.

Alice set up another hit and smoked it herself, coughing lightly and blowing a plume of smoke out over Dorothy.

Dorothy imagined she could see the particles of smoke like tiny bits of blue-gray caterpillars. “Oh,” she said, suddenly remembering. “I think someone might have called for you.”

Alice laughed. “
What?
”

“When I was looking for the Tylenol, the guy in the booth got a call and I thought maybe it was for you, but he asked for someone else. Then he called you that other name, so it was confusing.” She folded her hands behind her head. She wished she was outside so she could look at the stars, but the bed was comfortable and she didn’t want to get up.

“Here,” Alice said, handing the foil back to her. “You’re not making any sense.”

“Probably nothing,” Dorothy said. She sat up and took the rig. This time when she breathed the smoke in, her throat was mostly numb and she didn’t cough. Instead she leaned over and kissed the smoke into Alice’s mouth. Then she handed everything back and lay down again.

“Him?” Dorothy rolled onto her side and looked up at Alice. She’d never gotten high with someone she loved before. She felt so connected. So warm.

“Yeah,” Alice said. Then she shook her head. “Not important. I think I pulled something out of my dream and it won’t go back.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Dorothy said. “Dreams aren’t real.”

“What if you dream about real things?” Alice said. She rubbed her teeth with her fingers then lay down beside Dorothy. The girls’ arms found each other, and they lay in a tangled heap staring up at the ceiling.

“Maybe. You can only get there when something really bad happens. It’s like, a door or something. An earthquake, tornado. something like that.”

“I dunno,” Alice said. “That sounds pretty fucked up.”

“It is,” Dorothy said. “I guess I don’t really believe it. I just want it to be true so bad. After my parents died it was the only thing I had to hold on to. These stupid baby stories my dad used to tell me.”

“No. When I got in there they asked me all this shit about what I was feeling. I started making up stuff. I don’t know why. Maybe the attention was nice, for once.”

“I get it,” Alice said. “It’s hard to be a ghost sometimes.”

“They gave this paperwork to fill out, and it was really easy to see what they were looking for. It had a sliding chart you know, like
agree
,
disagree
,
strongly agree
, and stuff like that. All the questions that asked about fantasy lands I checked
strongly agree
. Then I added in stuff about the world trying to get me and how I needed to get away. They signed me in the next day. Had a room full of brain doctors in there. Dr Weller was the first one.”

“He’s a fuckin’ prick,” Alice said. “I hate that guy.”

“He’s not so bad. He listened a lot to what I was saying. He said I was a flight risk but I was also a voluntary patient so they couldn’t keep me. That’s why I was allowed to go downstairs for ice creams and sneak out for smokes sometimes.”

“Boy was he wrong,” Alice said. She smiled, then leaned down and kissed Dorothy’s nose.

“He didn’t know what a bad influence you’d be on me,” Dorothy said, wrinkling her nose and smiling. “Probably thought he could save my soul or something.”

“
Probably
thought he could get down your pants,” Alice said.

“Yeah well, that too.”

Dorothy lay still, smelling Alice’s hair and enjoying the places where their bodies were touching. The heroin made her feel drifty. Alice was right. It did feel like a warm bath inside her. Her heart was pumping sunlight as thick as amber maple syrup through her veins. She felt every beat. “I guess I just always feel out of place,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I wish I could just sit and watch the world go by without me in it sometimes.”

Outside the world skipped by, and the girls laid together in the warm dark and watched it go. After a while, they melded into a single, beautiful form.

Hours later the rain had stopped, and Alice lie in the dark staring up at the ceiling with Dorothy sleeping beside her. Her face was twisted in a cruel smile and she mouthed the words
Your hair wants to be cut
over and over again. Dorothy mumbled something in her sleep and pulled Toto close. Alice nuzzled the side of the girl’s face with her nose. She pulled back her lips in a hideous grin and snapped her teeth like she was about to bite Dorothy’s nose off. At the last moment she turned away. Teasing.

“Your hair wants to be cut,” she whispered, careful not to wake the girl. She wondered how people could sleep with another person in the bed. How vulnerable they were, and how little people really knew of each other. And people were capable of anything. They were horrible to one another. The Queen of Hearts was an absolute butcher and yet, she still went to bed at night. Still slept with other people in the room.

Alice carefully unraveled herself from Dorothy and got dressed. Moments later she was standing outside the hotel room, Rabbit’s freezer-gun in hand, breathing in the wet night air. She crossed the parking lot to the front office and tucked the gun into the back of her pants. Dorothy had something queer when they were smoking up, and now Alice and the Hater were going to go check up on it.
Somebody called for you
Dorothy had said. That simply wouldn’t do.