Read Online Nothing Real Volume 1 by Claire Needell - Free Book Online Page B

when the house was quiet. I’d put on some ridiculously chill music. Electronica, weird trance tapes that Jay got from some kid he knew from camp.
    One night, as the melting of my joints began, I drifted off. I was neither asleep nor awake. There was a sudden unity to things that I could sense through my body, up through my spine—a oneness. I felt a rush, a desire to speak out, to call to someone. I startled myself out of it with the sound of my own voice. I was calling for Mom. Not out of fear, but to tell her there wasn’t anything to fear. I thought the news would ease the pinched appearance of her mouth when she looked at me and Dad, the knowledge of our icy separateness an obvious, everyday pain. I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter. This sort of pain was nothing.
    I had found bliss and I wanted her to be proud.
    There was the morning I stumbled on the stairs coming down to breakfast. I hadn’t popped any pills since the night before, but my legs were still soft and slow beneath me. Dad looked up from his iPad, but only glancingly. Mom was frying him an egg. She frowned at me, as though I had done something on purpose to disrupt them. Neither of them detected any stonedness.
    Later that same week I fell asleep in Ms. Grayson’s English class. She touched the back of my head with her small, light fingers. People laughed when I raised my head and looked around. “Look alive there, Adam, this is junior year,” Ms. Grayson said, and continued her high-heeled circuit around the room. She was that teacher you might glance at twice if she were a lady in the supermarket, or pulled up next to you in her car—high cheekbones, hair slightly gray in front. I never got into that old-chick fantasy. But I always wanted Ms. Grayson to like me, because she was smart and pretty and seemed like the sort of woman a grown man might want to marry.
    After a couple weeks of splurging on Percocet with May, I passed some along to Jay. “What the fuck is this?” he asked. I explained the origin of my stash, how I got turned on by the ER doc. We were in his bedroom, his two-foot bong by his side. He eyed me skeptically, and for the first time since I started taking the pills, I began to wonder myself: What the fuck is this? It didn’t feel like real life anymore, but a sort of pillowy existence. I hadn’t thought how I would get back to the world of hard edges, of requirements, of work.
    I gave Jay what looked like a normal bottle of Advil, and after heexamined the contents, he tossed the bottle onto a side table cluttered with rolling papers and BIC lighters. “Maybe for Saturday night?” he said. Bonnie Fine was having a party. She was a skanky friend of Jay’s, not mine. I never could get those girls, the ones who kept lists, scorecards of drunken, late-night hookups. I thought guys that did shit with them were douches.
    â€œSure,” I said. “But it’s not a party drug, exactly.”
    â€œWhat you mean?” he asked, packing the crushed, almost iridescent bud of Green Crack into the metal bowl of his bong.
    I watched Jay take a hit. A month or so ago I would have been jittery, waiting for my turn. But I didn’t even really want to smoke; I was only taking my turn to be sociable and not to have to listen to Jay’s whining about how boring I’d become. “Percocet’s mellower than weed. It’s hard to explain.”
    I couldn’t tell him about the melting feeling when you’re fucking. I didn’t talk dirty shit like that with guys, especially not about May. She was the kind of person you felt could be damaged by that, by things she didn’t even have any way of knowing.
    There were four or five cars in Bonnie Fine’s driveway when Jay and I pulled up. Jay’s one of those rich kids with a spanking-new MINI Cooper. Scott Bardfield’s beat-up Toyota was parked crookedly next to Bonnie Fine’s banged-up Subaru, like