Party Girl: A Novel (16 page)

As I extricate myself from Joel’s grasp, Tommy smiles at me. “Oh, Amelia,” he says. “Soon enough, you’re going to learn how to accept love.”

I give Tommy the evil eye but he’s obviously going blind or something because he continues to look at me with this huge grin. Mom is glancing around the place like she thinks someone might run up and snatch her purse—something that at this point actually seems like a somewhat reasonable fear.

“So, Tommy,” she says in a super uncomfortable-sounding voice. “We have to be getting to the airport soon so we don’t miss our flight.”

“Yes, yes,” Tommy says, looking from me to my mom. “She’s in safe hands, don’t you worry.” He glances at his watch. “Group starts in about five minutes, so if you all want to say good-bye, I can take Amelia over there and she can unpack later.”

Mom hugs me and Dad gets tears in his eyes, but I can’t deal with their emotions right now because I have too many questions. Group what? Group isn’t a noun, it describes a noun, and I want to lecture Tommy about how he left off the second part of what I’m about to have to go do and how he should be more accurate when he’s describing something that sounds absolutely terrifying, but Dad envelopes me in a hug before I have a chance to say a word.

“Bye Amelia,” Mom says. “Please be good.” I hug her and realize she’s shaking. It dawns on me how disappointing it must be to have carried someone in your womb for nine months and put up with a whole slew of fights and hassles, only to drop her off at a torn-down-looking rehab with guys like Joel and Stan as playmates, and for a split second I think I’m going to collapse in shame-filled sobs. But I step away from her and stand up straight.

“I will be good, Mom,” I say. “I promise.”

Dad puts his arm around Mom and starts to lead her toward the front door. Then they turn back to wave, and I feel myself tearing up. Apparently, on my first day of kindergarten, when my mom tried to drop me off, I simply wouldn’t let go of her hand. The teacher, Sue, eventually had to literally pry my hand away from Mom’s and I cried inconsolably. Supposedly I was fine by later that day, but transitional moments have never been easy for me.

I wave at their retreating backs, and just as Mom turns around to blow me a kiss, Joel throws one of his bulking hands on my right shoulder.

“Don’t you worry, Mr. and Mrs. Amelia!” he calls. “I’ll keep her good!”

“Group” is apparently short for “group therapy,” and this kind of group therapy involves each of us stating our first name followed by the word “alcoholic,” just like in that ridiculously dull Faye Dunaway movie that always seems to be on the Independent Film Channel. Then Tommy calls on people to “share”—and sharing seems to mean talking about how much we miss “using.” Using seems to refer to anything—drinking, shooting heroin, taking pain pills, whatever. I’m figuring all this stuff out, and feeling like I really may need to talk to the head of Pledges about this bizarre habit they seem to have of leaving off the second part of words—“It should be using
alcohol
or using
drugs
, not just the word ‘using’ without having it refer to anything,” I can picture myself explaining—but the problem is that I’m feeling somewhat frozen into muteness. When I was younger, I was considered shy. I don’t remember feeling shy as much as I remember being described as shy, and how much I hated it. I wanted to be gregarious and confident and outgoing even before I knew what those words meant. And when our family went on a cruise to Alaska when I was ten and I befriended a Southern girl named Amy, who everyone called “effervescent,” I decided that was the personality I wanted to adopt. According to Mom, I changed literally overnight, and she suddenly had a loud extrovert for a daughter instead of the diffident girl who clutched her mother’s hand in quaking fear. Occasionally, shy Amelia creeps back up—especially when I’m around new people—and I have to say, that’s one of the reasons I liked drinking and drugs so much: they made me able to access my effervescent side at all times. Just as I’m thinking about this, and about how horribly traumatized I’m going to be if they make me “share” in this “group,” Tommy turns to me.

“Guys, this is Amelia,” he says, and suddenly, horrifyingly, they’re all looking at me like I’m cocaine and they’ve been waiting for the dealer for hours. In addition to Stan and Joel, there are a couple of older men in brown sweaters, an overly tan blonde girl, an extremely gay black guy, and exactly one superhot specimen—brown hair, blue eyes, Abercrombie-type clothes—sitting in the corner. For his sake, I flash what I hope is a winning smile.

“Want to introduce yourself to the group, Amelia?” Tommy asks, even though that’s what he just did.

“Oh, sure,” I say, pretending that my heart isn’t racing. “I’m thirty years old, and work, or at least until recently worked, at
Absolutely Fabulous
magazine.” The gay-looking guy titters, but I ignore him as I gaze straight at Tommy. “Um, what else should I say?”

“Amelia, this is probably the one place in L.A. where we don’t care about how old you are and what you do,” Tommy says. The gay guy and Blondie laugh. “Just tell us about your disease.”

I’m humiliated for having answered incorrectly and immediately indignant. Clearly, these people—Joel and gay titterer and Blondie and even hot guy in the corner—weren’t holding down jobs, or if they were, they obviously weren’t very demanding or fabulous. And while it’s true that I’m not currently reporting to work anywhere either, these people look like they hadn’t been employed, like, ever. Where the hell are the celebrities and high-level producers? That was the
group
I needed to be in.

“Amelia,” Tommy says, and I realize everyone’s still looking at me. “Your disease?”

Oh, yeah. My disease. When I read through the Pledges literature Dr. Ronald Rand gave me at the hospital, I noticed that they made a big thing about how I had a disease as real as cancer or Parkinson’s but my disease—alcoholism—was centered in the mind.

“See, that’s the thing,” I say, glancing around to catch different people’s eyes as a painfully obvious sympathy ploy. “I really have—had—a problem with cocaine. I mean, I really love coke. When I have it, I can’t seem to stop using until it’s all gone.” I pause, waiting for someone to congratulate me on my quick ability to use one of their ridiculous vocab words in a sentence, not to mention my obvious awareness of and honesty about my drug problem, but nobody says a word.

“When it comes to alcohol, though, I can take it or leave it,” I continue. “It usually just gives me a headache or makes me feel achy. I definitely don’t have a problem with it.” I give Tommy a decidedly un-alcoholic smile.

“So, you don’t drink at all?” Tommy asks with what I can swear is a look of bemusement.

“Well, I drink,” I say. “But just the regular amount. Or I would more drink to come down a little if I was too wired from coke. But I definitely don’t have a drinking
problem.
I don’t even like alcohol.”

The blonde girl nods at me like she understands. Maybe she’s in my situation, a person with a drug problem stuck in this room of people obsessed with calling themselves alcoholics.

“If that’s the case,” Tommy says, “I suggest you take some time—say, a year or two—off of drinking and see if you miss it.”

My mouth threatens to fall open, but I try to appear blasé as I assess whether or not Tommy is joking. “A year or two?” I ask with a slight smile.

“Sure,” he says, folding his arms. “If you can take a couple years off of drinking and not miss it, then I would say you’re probably not an alcoholic.” He smiles at me, and for the first time it occurs to me that Tommy may be an asshole dressed up like a nice guy. But I don’t want to give these people any more ammunition against me than they already have.

“Actually,” I say with a smile. “I was planning to stop with the coke—stop with drugs of all kinds, no problem—and cut down significantly on my drinking. In fact, I heard about a program…I think it’s called a ‘drinking cessation’ program.” I’d heard about this from someone who went there when his family was trying to get him to go to rehab. “Do you know about it?”

The entire room bursts into laughter and I feel myself blushing while also trying to pretend like I know what’s funny. The guy had told me that it was a program you went to when you weren’t an alcoholic but maybe drank too much or didn’t trust yourself not to do drugs when you drank, and I was assuming that the people at Pledges would know all about joining. When everyone continues to laugh—Blondie, who I’d thought was on my side, included—I start to get pissed.

“What’s so fucking funny?” I find myself snapping, alarming myself with the snideness of my tone.

Everyone stops laughing and Tommy glances at the hot guy in the corner. “Justin, you want to tell Amelia what’s so funny?”

The hot guy, Justin, smiles and looks even cuter than he did when he was laughing. He catches my eye from across the room. “Amelia,” he says, and I have an involuntary shudder at such a hot guy saying my name and looking me in the eye, even under these depressing circumstances. “That program doesn’t exist anymore.”

Tommy looks at Justin and asks, “And why is that?”

“The woman who started it got wasted and killed a kid in her car a few months ago,” Justin says. “The program has since been disbanded.”

“And that’s funny?” I say, hoping to shame everyone in the room.

“No, it’s not,” Justin says. “What’s funny is that when I got here, I asked the exact same question.”

“So did I,” Blondie pipes up.

“Good for you,” I say, not sure why they think any of this would be amusing or interesting to me. “But my point is that while I’ve acted addictively with drugs, I’m not an alcoholic.” Everyone is silent and I wonder if they’ve finally come around to actually understanding this extremely simple point I’m trying to make.

“Would you be at least willing to consider the fact that alcoholics and drug addicts are the same thing?” Tommy asks. He’s looking at me so kindly that I almost want to acquiesce even though I know he’s wrong.

“But they’re not the same thing,” I explain.

“I realize you feel that way,” he says. “And that’s why I’m asking if you’d be willing to just
consider
the fact that they
might be.”

I look around at all of them, noticing several people I hadn’t even seen before and an inordinate number of tattoos. Was one of the prerequisites for Pledges a certain amount of permanent ink on various body appendages? Despite their general seediness and ridiculous optimism in the light of where they were currently seated, at this particular moment I find it strangely almost impossible to continue to hate all of them.
And besides
, I think,
Tommy isn’t asking for so much.

“Fine,” I say. “I’m willing to consider that.” The group bursts into applause, like I’ve just performed a vignette, and I stifle the urge to tell them to stop clapping and get a life. Tommy stands up and walks over to me, leaning down to give me a hug.

“Welcome to Pledges, Amelia,” he says, pulling me close to him. And for reasons thoroughly unclear to me, I burst into tears. Everyone in the room breaks into another round of applause.

Later that afternoon, I’m crying again. And I can’t seem to stop. I’m in my room, looking around at my shabby surroundings, and sobbing. The gay guy, Peter, pokes his head in.

“You okay?” he asks. Why the hell do people ask that when the answer is so clearly
no
?

I shake my head and keep crying.

He makes a sympathetic face. “Why are you crying?” he asks, and I look up at him incredulously.

“Why am I crying?” I ask. “My question is, why aren’t
you
? We’re in fucking rehab.”

Peter blinks and smiles like he’s never experienced a sad emotion in his life.
He’s probably thrilled to be here because he gets to room with other men
, I think. I feel thoroughly positive that Peter hasn’t gone through a fraction of what I have and resent his put-together outfit and confused-looking head tilt more than I can even express.

“Please,” I say to him, “just leave me alone.”

He shuffles off and my tears eventually subside enough for me to go back to reading through the Pledges book that Tommy gave me after group. After a while, though, I mostly listen to the people out on the smoking patio. I’d hung around everyone after group and tried to feel comfortable while a girl talked about robbing people at ATMs to get money for heroin and a guy regaled the group with stories of popping “benzos” and other things I’d never heard of. A completely freaky-looking guy with about fifty pierces in his ear joked and laughed with the best of them.
I can’t even fit into a group that clearly accepts everyone
, I thought as I watched Justin pat Multi-Pierced Guy on the back.

So I went to my room to try to start reading this book but when I cracked it open and saw all this stuff about how you stay sober by following steps that involve always looking for your part in whatever resentment you have, I thought,
What the fuck does that have to do with being sober?

And that’s when the tears started. Now that they’ve stopped and I can actually concentrate on this book again, I find myself far more interested in eavesdropping.
They all seem to be in complete denial over why they’re here
, I decide, as I listen to them lighting cigarettes and cracking jokes.
They’re not coworkers on an office break or college students blowing off steam. They’re at the end of the line. It doesn’t get any lower than rehab. What is wrong with these people that they’re not more depressed by their circumstances?

I don’t want to start crying again—I’d actually planned to keep it together because I’ve been told that my roommate is going to be checking in any minute and I’m counting on her being some kind of a saving grace—so I just keep listening to them while trying to read the damn book. I’ve already decided that my roommate will be cute and normal and we’ll smoke and eat candy and plan extravagantly creative good-bye parties for each other like people always do in movies about rehab.