Blood Sugar(11)
Again, I was lucky. I could have become physically dependent at any moment. Or I could have bought a bad batch and had a heart attack. Or bought an incredibly good batch and had a heart attack. Or irreparably ruined my nasal passageways and then been forced to escalate to smoking crack. Lost my teeth. Lost my resolve to use condoms, gotten AIDS, and ended up dead in a gutter by twenty. But none of these things happened. In my applications, I omitted my true rock-bottom moment of seeing the mother of the boy I had murdered all coked up in a bathroom, and instead wrote about my inherent sense of self-preservation. My essay (titled “Miami Vices: A Teenager on Cocaine”), my impeccable grades, my varied extracurriculars, including a long-standing relationship with the bird sanctuary, and my perfect SAT score on the verbal section got me into Yale.
My freshman year I lived on Old Campus. My roommate, Ameena, was friendly and shy, from India by way of the suburbs of Chicago, her thick, long black hair usually braided and then piled high in a bun. She always slept with two pillows, one under her head and one over her face, a system she developed when she was young and had to share a bedroom with her often loud, fussy infant twin brothers. She was just as neat as I was, making her bed each morning, hanging her clothes up immediately, keeping her little desk free of clutter. We were extremely compatible in that way, but were just different enough in our habits that life together was interesting. I used one pen, a purple-ink Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine Rolling Ball, until that one pen ran out. And then I started with a new pen. She respected that and never borrowed my one pen, which would have thrown off my entire system. She, however, used pens erratically, several at a time, kept in a little plastic organizer. Not caring about color of ink or thickness of point. What she cared about was symmetry and even numbers. She told me that during sex she either had to have no orgasms or she had to have two. Only having one left her feeling anxious. If her boyfriend wouldn’t oblige, due to laziness or drunkenness, she would take care of the second one herself.
I started college with a declared major: psychology. My penchant for eavesdropping and my curiosity about human behavior seemed like a clear path to becoming a therapist. And I thought the training would also lend some insight into my own past. I had heard that all psychiatrists and psychologists are “wounded healers,” they themselves fucked up beyond belief. I wasn’t sure if I was wounded exactly, but I knew there had to be some baggage in there somewhere. And I liked the notion of healing others.
College suited me because I thrived on the structure and clearly defined expectations. Each semester in each class I was given a syllabus. A list of all the lesson plans, books to read, papers to write, and tests to pass, with dates assigned to each. I hated having anything loom over me. Knowing I had to get something done was far worse than actually getting it done. So I was the opposite of a procrastinator. I would attempt to do it all immediately. This resulted in me finishing my workload about a month before the final paper was due or final test was to be given. I would then petition my professors, asking them to allow me to turn in papers early and take final exams immediately after their last lectures were given. Most professors were delighted to comply, excited to hear from a student who was asking for a reduction in time instead of the usual extension.
This way of doing things gave me weeks of extra vacation between semesters to go back to Miami Beach and frolic in the waves I so desperately missed. At first, Ameena thought I was crazy to rev up syllabus deadlines, but she quickly started to adopt my methods. We got along so well we continued to be roommates all the way until graduation.
Before winter break our freshman year, Ameena’s parents found out she was dating a Black guy. They didn’t care that he was kind and funny and smart. Premed at Yale. Bound to be successful. All they cared about was that his skin was even darker than Ameena’s, and they worried their grandbabies would “look like soot.” I could hear Ameena screaming at them on her phone while pacing our dorm hall: “Don’t you worry about that since I’m not having babies at all! If you care about grandchildren, especially pale ones, I suggest you put your energy into the twins marrying light-skinned women!”
She threw her phone down, knowing this rant would whip her parents into an even bigger tizzy. And she didn’t care. She was fed up and decided she would not be going back to Chicago for the winter holidays. So she followed her syllabi, pushed herself, and finished her schoolwork a solid three weeks before the official end of term. She came home with me and basked in the tropical sun day after day without wearing a hat. Letting her beautiful Indian skin get darker, just to piss her parents off even more.
By now my core group of high school friends who’d sworn to never break apart had, of course, gone in different directions. Time and distance and interests all inch people away from childhood bonds. But Hannah was in town. She was always in town, going to the University of Miami. She still lived at home and commuted to classes. She kept changing her major; schedule and syllabi were meaningless to her. She felt no rush to get anywhere.
Our first day in Miami Beach, Ameena and I grabbed an afternoon drink on Ocean Drive with Hannah, and we caught up. I was still sober, having an iced coffee. It was strange to see Ameena and Hannah chatting, two friends from two different parts of my life. But it felt nice, the space-time continuum coalescing. Hannah’s aggressive goth style had softened a little, become more refined. She was now goth chic, or, as she liked to say, “postapocalyptic elegant.” And she was passionate about creating a line of clothes for sun-sensitive people that actually looked cool, instead of the usual hideous salmon-colored windbreakers with hoods and special ear flaps.