You'd Be Home Now (32)



Frank4 I’m actually glad we don’t use lockers anymore because I was tired of getting stuffed inside them BethanyRules Storm brewing in Watson’s lit class FrancesP44 Sometimes I’m so lonely at this school I don’t think I’m gonna make it Kids can be so cruel





16


JOEY’S OUTPATIENT CLINIC IS a brick building just outside of town, sandwiched between Nina’s Nail Salon and the Salvation Army thrift store.

“Are you nervous?” I ask as he parks the car.

“Not really. I did a lot of group talk at Blue Spruce.” He takes out his phone. I watch as he texts Mom to let her know we’re here, just like the Rules for Joey dictate.

“Did you…I mean, did you like it there?”

He slides his phone into his pocket and just sits there.

“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.”

“It’s not that,” he says. “It’s complicated. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“What does that mean?” I say.

He slides his hood off and runs a hand over his short hair. “It’s not that I liked it or didn’t like it, but I felt safe there. I felt like I was in a little cocoon, almost. No more Mom, no more Dad. No more disappointing them and you. I felt safe. Like all the noise was gone.”

All the noise was gone. Just like me, Joey was tired of the noise. But for me, Joey was the noise. I never really thought we were noise for him, too, and that makes me sad.

“And everybody there, you know…they were like me. I wasn’t wrong.”

    “Joey, you’re not wrong,” I say, touching his arm. “Please don’t think that.”

He swipes at his eyes. “Sorry, I’m tired. Let’s just go in. This is the last meeting tonight and they don’t let you into meetings late. You have to follow the rules and my life is all about the rules now.”



* * *





The waiting room is hot and crowded and there are no more seats, so I squeeze into an empty space against the wall while Joey goes to the front desk to check in. There’s a clear barrier protecting the woman behind the desk and just a little hole to speak through and a slot in the bottom. Joey slides his insurance card and driver’s license through the slot. The security guard in the corner looks bored.

The boy next to me has a lot of marks up and down his forearms. They look like round, faded scars. His fingernails are rough and yellowy. The lady on my other side holds her purse really close to her blouse, like she’s afraid somebody will steal it. There are some kids here, too, a couple I recognize from school, though I don’t know their names. Last year a few kids overdosed in class and soon after, posters for drug abuse and Narcan appeared in the school halls and in the nurse’s office. I don’t think the kids came back to school. I wonder if these are the same ones. If Joey knows them.

I didn’t know there would be so many people here. For every person who looks kind of rough, though, there are two or three who just look…regular. Clean clothes. Combed hair. I guess I thought everybody here would look like they do in the movies: dirty, desperate addicts.

Suddenly the Blue Spruce handbook flashes in my brain. The way you aren’t supposed to call someone an addict, because it makes them feel shame, labels them, like I just did, dirty addict. Like the person is seen as a problem and not a real person anymore.

    There are two people doubled over, rocking back and forth, grimacing. I can’t tell if they’re nervous or sick and to tell the truth, I’m a little freaked out.

The boy next to me, the one with the yellowy nails, murmurs, “They’re waiting for their fix.”

“What?” His face is very tan and rough, like he’s spent a lot of time outdoors.

“Suboxone. It’s a little strip you take while you withdraw from Oxy or H. They have to come here to get it.”

“I don’t know what Oxy is, really.” H…that must be heroin.

“Good,” he says. “Don’t ever learn. It’s only through the grace of God that I’m alive and here. I prayed to him at my lowest hour and he answered me. My parents disowned me, but God took me in. God answered me.”

The woman next to me leans across me and tells the boy, “Don’t start that with her.”

“I’m just passing on my story.”

“God didn’t save you. God doesn’t care. If he cared, if he existed, I would hope he’d send all the pharmaceutical companies straight to hell. Give a pill for pain, get them hooked, then sell them another drug to get off it. They should burn for what they’ve done to this country.”

I think of Dr. Cooper trying to write me another prescription, and Maddie telling him no, and him giving it to me anyway, and me hiding it in my dresser drawer. All the morphine they gave me in the hospital that worried my mother. Would she have been worried about that if it wasn’t for Joey? If he hadn’t OD’ed, would she have let me take the Vicodin whenever I wanted, just because a doctor said it was fine?

    “Ma’am,” the boy says. “Please—”

She cuts him off. “This is my daughter’s ninth time withdrawing. She is twenty-one years old. There’s no saving this. There’s only waiting until it’s over.”

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