“Mae.”
I stop talking. The way she says my name causes tiny electrical pulses to spread across the tips of my fingers. I’m not like Mom and Nah—I don’t believe in vibes, and I certainly don’t allow Cynthia to do “energy work” on me (good grief). But I do get tingles. Specifically in my fingers. And that’s never good. Never. I know it’s only a biological reaction to external stimuli, but Mom insists it’s an indication of my female intuition; never mind that female is a concept up for debate, anyway.
There’s a pause while my grandmother’s phone converts her next words into an electrical signal, which is then transmitted into radio waves to the cell tower nearest her. The network of towers carries that wave across the country from a condo in Fort Lauderdale to my cell phone in Venice Beach, California. My phone converts her radio wave to an electrical signal and then back to sound.
And the sound I hear is Gram’s crinkly, butterscotch-candy-wrapper voice whisper, “Honey? Something’s happened.”
i am not enough.
Elevator Door
Hedrick Hall, UCLA
Westwood, Los Angeles
2
Hannah
I hate cell phones. They skeeve me out. Priscilla, this circus aerialist who basically lives on the boardwalk and used to sell weed or pills to me sometimes—okay, more than sometimes—she told me that the government can track where you are—and listen in on you—through your cell phone. I’m not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but that’s messed up. Mom’s yoga friends say that cell phones fuck with your vibes and so they’re always setting amethysts on top of their phones to clear the negative energy or whatever. I don’t need any more bad energy than I have, so I figure keeping a safe distance from my cell is the smart play.
And then after March, after what happened, it got annoying, my friends texting me Are you okay? They finally got the hint and now they don’t text me anything anymore and I’m okay with that. I became the Hermit card in Mom’s tarot. I got off social media, too—and, you know, it’s kind of true that if you’re not online you don’t really exist to the rest of the world. Besides, what would I post pictures of? Here’s an empty Suboxone package—physician-approved nicotine for opiate users! Here’s my flat stomach. Here’s my stupid/pointless/lame group therapy Circle of Sad. Here’s the vegan chocolate cake Mom made on day sixty that says Clean Machine in pink frosting, even though I’m not vegan. It was good, though. Here’s the Death card I keep getting.
So when Micah picks me up in his ancient Jeep, I leave my phone at home. Mom and Dad are halfway across the world—there’d be no check-in calls, no curfew. Mom said we’re almost eighteen now, so she’s going to trust us. Or at least trust Mae to make sure I don’t fuck up too much. Cynthia has already come by twice, and taken me to the Circle of Sad herself—I’m sure she’s sending Mom reports.
“You hungry?” Micah asks.
He has to shout because the top is down and we’re on the 405 and there’s magic happening somewhere close because there isn’t much traffic. Blond hair flying around his face—perfect California boy. I shake my head.
“Mind if I get a burrito?”
“Whatever you want.” I smile; he smiles.
When we get to UCLA, we squeeze onto his twin bed with the striped comforter I helped him pick out at Target. The roommate took a three-day weekend to roll in the desert, so we have the place to ourselves.
A poster of Bob Marley hangs on the wall beside us, and Bob looks down, giving us his blessing, one hand holding a joint, raised in benediction.
Normally we would smoke a little, but I can’t, haven’t since last spring—golf clap for my five months of sobriety—so we have to try and remember how to be together without any help. It’s awkward. We’ve forgotten. Even though we’ve done this so many times since what happened in March, we still can’t remember how it was Before.
Micah should have come that day.
He wasn’t there because I told him not to be—I knew he’d rather be anywhere else. He’d looked so relieved when I said it was okay not to come. Smiled. I wanted him to come anyway, to, like, be there for me, but the only guy who came through the door was this dad-aged dude wearing a polo shirt, and that made me think about how Dad offered to come, which was actually really sweet, but I was like, this isn’t Take Your Daughter to Abortion Day, you know? Mom kept trying to feed me Life Savers, those wintergreen ones, until I told her the name was kind of ironic, wasn’t it (lifesavers, get it?), and then she stopped.
Micah looks down at me. “Could we have a drink? Or is that against the rules?”
Yes, it’s against the rules. And he knows it, or at least he should know it. I start to say yes, but you go ahead, I’m cool like I have been since April, but Jesus, I’ve been so good. And a drink is not a pill, and the pills are the problem, the main problem, right? One drink is not the same as one pill. I’m good now, I am. Before, I never could have gone five months without a diamond. I could hardly go five hours without one. Before.
And the thought of doing this—spending the night, a whole night, with Micah and not being a drag like I know I am: I need help. Just a little something.
I bite my lip. Nod. “A drink would be nice.”
“You’re sure? I’m not, like, fucking with your serenity or whatever?”
Some tatted-up college guy who came to speak at group used that phrase once, and I dig it.
“I’m sure. Yeah. Totally. It’s not, you know, Percs.”
Just one little blue pill, one teensy-tiny Percocet, and I’d be fine.
Micah reaches under the bed and grabs a bottle of Popov, which is like drinking Windex, and we drink it straight because the only thing in his fridge is a suspicious-smelling carton of chocolate milk. When we’re done, he sets the bottle on the desk behind us. We will need it later, I think.
The relief is almost instant. Not being me anymore.
It is so warm.
And then I realize: I am no longer sober.
“Hey.” Micah rests a hand on my arm. “You good?”
He’s not in my Circle of Sad, where we try to be honest when people ask questions like that. So I say:
“What? Yeah. Totally. All good.”
All those days of denying myself, of doing the right thing, all that torture—down the drain. So I take another drink, then another.
“This is what got us in trouble in the first place,” Micah says, running his finger along the edge of my lacy bra. He’s just teasing—he’s trying, you know?—but it isn’t funny. Trouble? There are no words to describe what happened in March, but some are better than others, and trouble isn’t one of them. Gutting, maybe. That would be a good one.
This is Micah, I remind myself. He loves you.
But in the elevator up here, when he was tapping his foot and talking about the waves he’d caught this morning, I realized I didn’t give a shit about the waves, and the foot tapping might make me commit a homicide, it really might.
And, look, I know he was right. About what I had to do back in March. The pills, who knew what they would have done to the acorn inside me? Before it happened, the counselor and I talked, and she said that a pregnancy is an acorn—not the tree, not yet—but it contains the possibility of a tree. Acorn. Perfect, right? She didn’t know about Yoko, but it was like she kind of did know, on a psychic level only the sisterhood operates on. And she said it was okay to do whatever I wanted. Did I want to do this? And I told her about the pills and we talked about damage to acorns exposed to high levels of opiates and about risks, but how it’s also possible the acorn would be fine. And I told her about all the trees I wanted someday, I really do, and am I a bad person if I do this? And she hugged me and she said no, but that this decision was mine.