Blood Sugar(8)

I would have been happy enough to go to Kremlin by myself, but something that night allowed me to be swayed. Maybe it was a deep and hidden sense of self-preservation pushing me to stay with my friends. We piled into Hannah’s dad’s Mazda and made the drive into Miami, over the causeway. As far as I was concerned, leaving South Beach to go to a club in Coconut Grove was like leaving Rome to go eat pasta in Cleveland.

“Don’t be such a snob,” Sharon said to me.

“She is so not a snob. Have you seen the guys she goes out with?” Hannah was a master at the fuck-you compliment. Building you up yet putting you down at the same time. Like, “Ruby, your French braid actually looks good today!” But I had to laugh at this one. She wasn’t wrong. As I did a bump in the back seat, I reviewed my taste in boys. It was often peculiar and always inconsistent.

When we arrived at Club Rox, I realized it was eighteen-and-over night. That was the worst. It meant lots of other fifteen-year-olds would be there, and nothing about the night would feel advanced. Amy and Erika, each only children, blond best friends since kindergarten who pretended to be sisters since they wished they were, headed right to the third floor. I could hear Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” blaring. Hannah, tall and lanky and pale, dyed-black hair in a high ponytail to show off the shaved underside of her head, wanted to go to the fifth floor because she had heard the goth-themed area had an S&M room and she wanted to see if it was true. Sharon, her giant natural boobs pushed up to maximum capacity in her new push-up bra, went straight for the first-floor bar since her immediate objective was to meet a guy and get a free drink.

I had schlepped to this god-awful place to spend time with my friends, so I decided to stick with at least one of them. I worked the bar with Sharon, and we did some shots with a couple University of Miami guys. I looked at their puka-shell necklaces in disgust and wondered why it was that to me a neck tattoo of a spiderweb was sexy but these douchebag adornments were nauseating. Who was I to judge? I did another bump.

We went to the fifth floor to find Hannah. We all watched as a hot chick got spanked and flogged by a guy in cheap pleather pants. I did another bump.

Sharon, Hannah, and I made our way to the eighties-music floor and found Amy and Erika dancing. I gave up on wanting to be too cool for school and joined them. I danced and danced, the movement feeling good for my heart. I was trying to keep up with it, to give it a good reason to be beating so fast. I was having fun. Giggling and jumping and goofing around with my four best friends. Dancing to songs I loved but usually pretended I didn’t. It was the closest thing to being a normal teen that I’d experienced in a long time. So I did another bump.

I had started the night with a little over a gram. I wasn’t sure how much I had left. Like the ring in Frodo’s pocket, the remaining coke seemed to be calling out to me, distracting me from enjoying everything else. I thought, Maybe I should just do it all now. So I don’t think about it anymore. I can snort it up, dance like crazy with my girls, then drink it off before I even head home. It was a good plan.

Rox was not cool enough to have coed bathrooms. And the line for the women’s room on the third floor was way long. So I took the stairs, two at a time, to the fourth floor. Classic rock was playing. It was the Doors. I knew this because Ellie had made it a priority to teach me about what she considered to be good music. She would put on songs and quiz me: “Who . . . is this?” If she paused in a certain way, I knew it was a clue, and the answer was the Who.

The women’s bathroom was empty except for one woman. She was old. Like forty-five. But she looked much older. Haggard. Years of baking in the sun unprotected showed on her leathery and splotchy skin. Deep wrinkles around her mouth were evidence of chain-smoking cigarettes. Her gaunt face could have once been plucky but was now hollow. Her legs looked frail, patterned with varicose veins and sunspots. Her cheap, long, bright pink acrylic nails were not helping to detract from her swollen fingers but instead brought attention to them. She was skinny and bloated at the same time.

She hunched over the sink, frantically tapping a vial onto the counter. A few tiny wisps of white powder came out. Not enough to snort. She ran her finger around the rim of the vial and over the area of the counter she’d tapped on, and then pushed her finger into her gums, rubbing above her yellow, nicotine-stained teeth, trying to absorb whatever was left of the magic.

Is this what happens to a person who does too much cocaine? Do the good times run out, like the posters say? Does it have to get too expensive to keep up the habit so you end up frantically licking wisps? Does it destroy your looks and your insides and your future? Is it really a slow death by what seems at first like a fun, fast ride? The woman felt me staring at her and she looked up. Her eyes were bloodshot. And ashamed.

She said, “Ruby?”

And it took me a moment. But then I knew who she was. It was Duncan Reese’s mother.





CHAPTER 6


    ANGEL



Mere seconds after Duncan’s body was deemed dead on arrival by the medics who had reached the beach, Duncan’s mother had started screaming at his father. Blaming him. “Why weren’t you watching him?! You should have been watching him!” And the father blamed the mother. “This is on you! You’re the one who wanted to work on your goddamn tan and go to the beach! This is your fucking fault!”

No one blamed me.