Love Drugged (9 page)

nine

The night was endless, weightless, and suddenly I was dreaming. The dream didn’t have a beginning. No context, no setting. It wasn’t the kind of kiss I had ever experienced—no quick peck on the forehead or cheek. This was the real thing: a hot, wet, mouthy kiss. Hands on my face, pressure against my jaw. It felt amazing. I was so hungry for it, as if I’d been starving but didn’t realize it. For the first time, I felt sexually …
normal,
not like a freak. We rolled over, so that I was on top, and eager hands moved behind my head, pulling me down. I stayed right in it, full contact, no breathing required.

The alarm on my clock/radio would go off in a minute—a fact that my body somehow anticipated each day. I felt myself waking, growing aware that I was only dreaming. I wanted to say,
“No, Celia, keep going—I like this. Thank God … I like this!”
But when I pulled my face away, I wasn’t staring at Celia. Instead, I saw Ivan, the blue-eyed junior from the First Knights. He didn’t speak, just half smiled, lifting his mouth again toward mine. It wasn’t the first time I’d dreamed about him.

I sat up in bed as the alarm went off.

I reached for the pills, and then stopped myself.

Not yet
. I couldn’t waste them. I only had eleven.

An hour later, I was the last person to arrive at the club meeting. The one remaining free seat? Between Celia and Ivan, of course.

Relax.
Focus on the treats.

Gwen, the yellow-haired senior, had laid out three glass platters covered in wax paper. Once the paper was removed, two of the platters revealed chocolate-chip cookies and brownies that Gwen had iced with yellow smiley-faces and pink butterflies. The third platter held sliced pears, apples and bananas. So many choices—some healthy, some decadent. It was all disturbingly perfect.

The goal for the meeting was to prepare for the Valentine’s Day flower sale. Mr. Covici had already approved our message-tag design and caption:
Don’t hide your hart from me!
He’d photocopied the design onto bright red cardstock paper.

Perfect Gwen’s cookies may have been smiling, but she studied the message tags with a sour expression. “What’s that poking its head around the tree? It looks like a big snake with antlers.”

“It’s a deer,” Celia said in my defense. “Jamie drew it.”

“Very clever,” Mr. Covici said. “Poets in Shakespeare’s time used the deer as a symbolic image of love’s desire. I’m delighted with it.”

“Well, you misspelled
heart
,” Gwen said.

Covici explained the heart/hart pun to the group, and I worried it was too clever.

Ivan spoke up. “Anyway, Gwen, snakes don’t have antlers—or ears. You should have learned that fact in your science classes.” His pale blue eyes darted from Gwen to me, and he grinned.

No wonder I’d dreamed about him.
I could smell his after-shave. Spicy, fruity. I wanted to bury my face in his neck.

What am I thinking
?

I needed to curb these thoughts—these hopeless hopes. Seeing Ivan only reminded me of what I dreaded about myself. Maybe I would need to take the pills before seeing
Ivan
rather than before seeing
Celia
.

Mr. Covici divided the labor and put us into two teams. I was with Celia, Ivan, and Anella, who usually stayed quiet at meetings.

“We will work with the
leetle
freshmen,” Anella said, with an accent identical to Ivan’s. She smiled at me. “If we must.”

It turned out that Ivan and Anella were born in the same town in Eastern Europe; their families were friends long before they came to the U.S.

Mr. Covici gave us everything we needed—a big cardboard box (the kind copy paper came in), a stack of old magazines, construction paper, scissors, and glue sticks. “All the Valentine’s messages will go in this box,” he told us. “Make a wide slot in the top and then decorate every inch of it with construction paper and pictures. Make it look romantic and special. People, it’s Marketing 101.”

Another cake assignment. We thumbed through the magazines, ripping out pictures of “love”—couples laughing, kissing, dancing; groups of friends with toothy smiles; newlyweds posed on a bridge. I showed this last one to Celia. “Look, here’s a movie bridge for you.”

Celia studied it. “They look like they’re ready to jump.”

Across the table, Anella used the construction paper to cut out the words “love,” “friends,” “kisses,” and “hugs.” She began gluing them to the sides of the box.

“Don’t forget S-E-X,” Ivan suggested, his sly grin directed at me.

Anella punched his arm, laughing.

Celia said, “Yeah, sure. Send a flower, a little action is part of the deal.”

“I will send a lot of flowers then,” Ivan said.

Anella reached to tap my hand. “Don’t feel bad,
leetle
freshman. With your baby face, you may get a flower or two.”

Celia glued a picture of two puppies to the box.

Ivan scowled. “What do dogs
have to do with love?”

“Puppy love!” she said. “Look at them. Everybody loves puppies.”

Anella held up a photo of two men sitting at a table in an elegant restaurant. Handsome men, wearing dark suits. It wasn’t clear if they were a romantic couple or just buddies out on the town. “Okay if I put this picture on?”

I looked away, feeling nervous.
Is this question directed to me?

“Hey,” Ivan said, “if puppies can go on the box, we can put
anything
on.”

“Sure,” Celia said. “We want to sell these things to everybody. Besides, gay boys are so romantic. They’ll buy lots of flowers.”

Is this true? Are gay boys more romantic than straight boys? And how does Celia know?

Now Ivan addressed me. “What do you think?”

I shook my head, blinking. “What? I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.” Then I whispered, “Gwen’s smiley cookies are freaking me out.”

Gwen may have heard me. “People, my parents are
donating
the carnations,” she bragged loudly at the other table. “So I mean, it’s all
profit
for the club.”

“Okay,” Mr. Covici said, “and thanks to the generosity of Gwen’s parents, each club member can send five carnations for free. You can buy more, of course, but the first five are free, thanks to your hard work.” He moved around the tables, giving red slips to each member. “Or, your
hart
work, in this case. We’ll attach these to the flowers on Valentine’s Day, when we attach the rest of the tags.”

I took my five tags and moved to a far table to fill them out. Despite what Anella said, I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t receive flowers from anyone. So the first message I wrote was addressed to me:
Hey Jamie,
you rock! Love, Yourself

Wesley and Mimi were my lunch posse, so I owed them each a flower. On Wesley’s message, I wrote,
Hey slugger, sorry I won’t be joining you on the field this spring. But I will be your best athletic supporter! Thanks for being an awesome friend. (Sorry this isn’t from a chickie.) Jamie

On Mimi’s, I wrote,
I’m glad Wes introduced us. Keep on smiling! Jamie

I hoped this subtle sarcasm might actually encourage her to smile for once.

Obviously, I needed to send one to Celia. I didn’t want to say something romantic—too early in the game. On the other hand, I didn’t want to write that I was satisfied being only her friend. In the end, I wrote,
Give me my wallet and bracelet back, you bitch! I know where you live. A.L.

I had one message left. My pen stalled on the paper, waiting for instructions from my brain.

The first bell rang. Everyone jumped up and raced for the door.

I addressed the front, then opened the message tag and printed in strange, crude letters,
Hey, Blue Eyes
,
get out of my dreams. Thanks.

I stuffed my messages into the big box and ran for class.

At lunch, Wesley reported that Mimi had stayed home. Ever since she began joining us for lunch, it was rare for Wes and me to get any time by ourselves. So we seized the opportunity and spent most of the lunch period as aliens transported to Earth, trying to make sense of the mysterious utensils on our trays. We cut sandwiches with spoons and sucked applesauce with a straw. Mimi would not have approved.

“This is nice,” I said, breaking out of character.

Wes nodded. “Ever since I started baseball conditioning I feel like I never see you.”

“I was thinking the same thing!”

“No homo,” he said, “but we need to make some time …you know?”

“Totally.”

He looked almost guilty, as if the situation had been weighing on his conscience.

I wanted to let him off the hook. “Don’t feel bad, Wes. I’ve been busy, too.”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Our club is having its annual fundraiser this week. Flower sale for Valentine’s Day.”

“Flower sale, really?” He smiled, as if suppressing a laugh. He loved to tease me. “And, let’s see, you’re still doing the gift-wrapping thing at home?”

“Wes, don’t say it.”

“I’m not saying anything! Very manly activities—that’s all I needed to say.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “I’ve also been hanging out a lot with Celia Gamez.”

“Really?” He leaned back in his chair, as if stunned.

“Nearly every day before school. Sometimes after school.”

“Dude, that is awesome!”

I smiled, feeling proud and embarrassed. I hadn’t intended to tell anybody so soon. “Sorry I haven’t mentioned anything. It’s only been a couple of weeks.”

“You are a
major stud
.”

This made us both laugh.

“Let’s be real,” I said. “It could be over by Spring Break.”

“Well, I’m excited for you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m telling you, Mimi will be … shocked.”

“Of course.”

“She will require photos as proof. Signed statements, DNA samples, and so on …”

“We’ll see what we can do.”

“Listen, as long as we’re in confession mode,” he said softly, “I have some big news of my own.”

“Excellent. Lay it on me.”

“I’m thinking of giving up my pills.”

“Your Ritalin? Why?”

He shrugged. “I’m tired of them. They suck the energy out of me and put me in a fog. At baseball conditioning, I feel like I’m slower than everybody else. I’m sick of not feeling like me.”

I remembered what Wesley was like pre-pills—all the negative drama. It seemed like a lifetime ago. “This is huge. Congratulations.”

“I’m old enough. I’m ready. Baseball tryouts start the day we get back from Spring Break. I’ll stop taking them over break so I’m sharp when tryouts begin.”

“What do your parents think?”

“Well, that’s interesting.” He hesitated, moving his tray back and forth. “They don’t know, and I’m not telling them.”

“Wesley, that’s crazy! You need to tell them. And your doctor.”

“Nope. No one needs to know. And FYI, I’m not even going to tell Mimi, because she’s a loudmouth, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“What if your body has some sort of freaky reaction to going off the pills? What if you start throwing punches again?”

“I know my own body. It’s going to be fine. No punches, no broken glass. I promise, I won’t break your fancy pastels into halves this time.”

I couldn’t help but smile at the memory. “Wes, your parents are going to notice if you stop taking the Ritalin.”

“Duh, I’ll still
pretend
to take it, every morning,” he said. “I’ll pop one in my mouth on my way out the door, and then I’ll spit it out just as soon as I’m on the sidewalk. Maybe some hyper-ass squirrel will benefit from a calmer lifestyle. Miracle of modern science.”

“I don’t know. It seems risky.” All I could think of was the old Wesley I’d known in middle school. The pastel-snapper, window-breaker, fist-thrower who’d been such a terror. But that was years ago. Maturity might have been all he needed. Plus, it didn’t seem fair to argue with him when I had a stash of secret pills in a drawer at home.

The bell rang.

“Trust me, it’ll be okay,” he said, standing.

“It better be.”

Walking to class, I kept picturing those broken pastels spread out across my desk—pastels as fractions. I wondered if that was what would happen to us as we moved through life. Would we become like fractions rather than whole numbers? Each time we started taking pills, and then stopped taking them, how different from our original selves would we become?

ten

The weather was as confused as everything else. After weeks of rain, the snow returned. In the grocery store parking lot, headlights passed through falling flakes. With my grandfather behind the wheel of his old Ford Taurus, we circled until we found a spot. I stretched out miserably in the back seat. There were few experiences I dreaded more than waiting in the grocery store parking lot. Pure torture. The only experience I disliked more than waiting was going in and actually helping.

“Neither of you coming in?” My grandmother was scowling. She opened the passenger side door. “Fine, but don’t crab to me later.”

My grandfather made a familiar sound deep in his chest—equal parts argument and apology. He opened a
Newsweek.

My grandmother slammed the car door shut.

“Damn it,” he said to the magazine, “no need to slam it.”

I smiled at his geezer rap.

Resting my head against the window, I tried to picture Celia reading my flower message, laughing at the joke. I wondered if she had sent me a free flower, too.

My eyes remained locked on the store entrance, waiting. What would Ivan think when he read my stupid message? Would it freak him out? Would he be flattered? Did he have a girlfriend? He would never figure out who sent it. He’d probably get flowers from other people, too. Why had I sent him one? Idiotic move on my part. Ivan seemed like a nice-enough guy, but I did mean what I wrote. He was not welcome in my dreams.

Good riddance, adiós, and peace out, bro.

The car was hot, the windows cloudy. I cracked open the glass.

Why hadn’t I dreamed I was kissing Celia? For weeks I’d been training my attention on her. I had the pills. I was ready to fall in love. Would it only be a matter of taking the pills?

On the floor of the car, my foot brushed against a dog-eared paperback. I reached for it. The book was called
One Hundred and Twenty Bible Miracles in Verse.
It belonged to my grandmother, and it had lived in the back seat of the Taurus for as long as I could remember. I opened to random pages:

The angel came and calmed the lions’ rage

Devoutly Daniel praised God from the cage.

With only bread loaves five and fishes two

Jesus fed thousands and converted souls anew.

Some of the miracles made me smile—especially in Numbers, with the “speaking sass” of “Balaam’s ass,” or Aaron’s “sturdy rod,” which yielded a “good-sized almond wad.” As poetry, it definitely sucked. But I had always wanted to believe in the magical world the book depicted: tales of walking staffs turned into serpents, bodies raised from the dead, and no shortage of miraculous healing cures for leprosy, lunacy, palsy, dropsy, withered limbs, impotence, mysterious “women’s issues,” blindness—a complete anatomy of life-changing miracles. Now, at home in a drawer, I had a miracle of my very own.

With a little blue pill and the approval of God

Overnight Jamie became as straight as a rod.

My grandfather made that sound again in his lungs.

I leaned forward and rested my head against the seat back. “Hey, Pop, do you believe in miracles?”

He set down the
Newsweek
and glanced at the store entrance. “I guess I do,” he said.

“Like what? What kind of miracles have you ever seen?”

My grandmother came out of the store, walking slowly toward the car through the snowy parking lot. A bag of groceries dangled from each arm. She was still frowning.

“For one thing,” my grandfather said, “it’ll be a miracle if she doesn’t poison us.”

“Pop, I’m being serious.”

“So am I. The fact that we all live in the world together, and most of us refrain from killing each other. That’s got to be the biggest miracle there is.”

“What about … love?” I asked. “Do you think love is sometimes a miracle?”

My grandfather leaned over and opened the car door for his wife, letting in the cold wet air. “Not sometimes, Jamie,” he said. “Always.”

Always.

This information filled me with hope.

We sold nearly five hundred message tags the week before Valentine’s Day. Covici asked some of us to be at school at dawn on February 13th, to sort the tags into homerooms and attach them to flowers. The other club members would sort the next morning. At Maxwell Tech, Valentine’s Day was a forty-eight-hour event.

Half awake, I faced a row of plastic buckets filled with pink and red carnations. The library was filled with a sharp leafy smell, like a greenhouse. We started hole-punching the messages and attaching them to the stems with twist ties. The process was fast and repetitive—it reminded me of gift-wrapping at home. For once, my parents had equipped me with a useful life skill.

Although I stood next to Celia, we worked without speaking. Her hair was hidden under an orange knitted hat, and her face looked different, somehow younger. Our elbows brushed once in the frenzy.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry.”

I wasn’t sure if she was tired, or only trying to concentrate, or giving me the cold shoulder. Why were girls always so inscrutable?

Across the isle, Ivan and Anella worked more like a team. They’d divided the labor, one using the twist ties and the other sorting into homerooms. Side by side, they looked almost like siblings, with their dark-blond hair and rosy complexions. I wondered if they’d ever dated. They were so playful together. He marched two flowers across the table toward her and made them dance and sway, earning giggles. It was easy to be distracted by him.

My eyes searched for the message I’d written to him—in hindsight, a bonehead mistake. It was wrong of me to indulge in that negative behavior, even if it proved to be harmless. If I could spot it, maybe I could pocket it and throw it away.

I saw one message that seemed to be written in Chinese. I showed it to Celia. “What do you think this one says?”

She studied it, finally smiling. “It says, ‘
Why does the snake have antlers?’”

“Ah, yes, the question that will be on everybody’s lips this week.”

“Kidding! Jamie, the drawing looks exactly like a deer.”

“No time to read other people’s notes,” Covici advised. “Keep focused, so we’ll be finished when the bell rings.”

I couldn’t find Ivan’s message, but decided not to sweat it. He would never know who sent it. But I made a promise to myself:
Remember KFC. No more sending messages you can’t unsend.

When the message tags were attached and the flowers sorted, we moved them all to a corner, swept the floor, and wiped down the tabletops.

“Excellent work, guys,” Mr. Covici said. “Ivan and Anella, you’ll be selling again at lunch. But all four of you are off the hook for the next early-morning assembly line.”

“Amen,” Celia said, reaching for her books. “I woke up late and I’m a mess. I need to get ready before the bell.”

“You look fine,” I said, meaning it. “Better than fine.”

“I look like I’m ten.” She gave me a small, restrained smile. “It’s weird, but sometimes I feel like I can’t
think
without makeup.”

“You wear makeup?”

She patted my arm. “Jesus, it must be sweet to be a boy. See you later.”

“You look great!” I called, watching as she joined the flurry of students passing through the corridor. Within seconds she disappeared, swallowed by the crowd. I had to admit, there were times when I felt something real around her—a spark, a romantic connection—especially after it had passed.

All morning, my thoughts kept returning to the flowers. I expected to receive two: the one I sent to myself and maybe, if I was lucky, one from Celia. After all, she’d gotten five free ones just like I did. But maybe she’d chosen to send them all to her girlfriends.

At Maxwell, homeroom was the mid-morning period when the teachers read announcements and took care of administrative paperwork while the students slept or ate contraband snacks from the vending machines. When I got there, I saw that my teacher, Mr. Mallet, had laid out flowers at the students’ desks. Mr. Mallet was also the baseball coach. “I don’t want to waste any time on this Valentine business,” he barked. It only figured that a man of Mr. Mallet’s hyper-masculine nature needed to distance himself from any activity involving flowers.

I looked for my desk at the back of the room, to see if there were two flowers waiting there—but there weren’t.

There were four.