Heroine(55)

Shit.

Josie answers the door immediately, talking as soon as she opens it. I follow her through the house when she motions to me, sucking on a Diet Coke as we head up to her room. My mouth waters at the sight of it, or would, if I had enough spit.

“So,” she says, “remember what my sister said about graduating?”

“To heroin, yeah. No way,” I tell her.

“I know, I know.” Josie rolls her eyes. “You’ve got this whole, ‘but I’m not a druggie’ thing going on.”

“Yeah,” I tell her flatly. “Because I’m not.”

“Right, and heroin is bad. I get it,” Josie says, leading me into her room, where she flops onto a king-size bed and kicks off her designer shoes. “But you’re already doing heroin, you know that, right?”

“What?” I settle at the foot of the bed. Even as tall as I am, I have to boost myself up onto it.

“Oxy is basically heroin, babe,” Josie says. “I looked into it.”

“Like you read a Wikipedia article?”

“Uh, excuse me, no,” she snipes at me, producing a notebook. She flips it open so that I can see what looks like chemistry notes.

“This is the molecular structure of heroin,” Josie says, pointing to a hand-drawn diagram, layers of notes in her bubbly handwriting alongside it. “And this . . .”

She turns the page.

“. . . is the molecular structure of Oxy.” Josie flips back to the first one. “See any difference?”

“I . . . no?”

“That a question or a statement?”

I glance at my phone. “Look, I’ve got to be dressed and on the field in—”

“Fine, instead of leading you to knowledge I’ll spoon-feed you. Look, Oxy is basically synthetic heroin, just in a pill form. The only difference between them is the delivery system.”

“Also one is illegal and one is not,” I contradict her.

“Uh, you really think the way we’ve been using Oxy is okay? We’re not taking our own pills; we’re buying other people’s. And that is illegal.”

“My doctor wrote me a prescription—”

“For Oxy,” Josie interrupts, “which is heroin. Then your prescription ran out and you found someone who would fill it. You’re basically already doing heroin, Mick. You’re even using a needle.”

“Once,” I correct her. “I have used a needle.”

“Fine,” Josie admits. “But chemically, it’s the same drug. The way you’re getting it is illegal. You’ve got experience with the needle. The only difference is, it’s cheap.”

“Cheap?” My ears perk up. With Mom already on the lookout for anything valuable coming up missing, I’m headed for a hard-core withdrawal in a day, at least.

“Yeah, cheap,” Josie says, flipping another page to a column of numbers. “I talked to Jadine. Her guy said he can hook us up with someone here and we can get a balloon for maybe ten bucks or so.”

“A balloon?”

“Yeah, it’s like, an actual balloon, I guess. Except it’s full of heroin, not helium.”

“Ha,” I say, when she’s clearly waiting for me to acknowledge the joke.

“Anyway”—she waves away my lack of appreciation—“a balloon will have about a tenth of an ounce. Taking into account that pure heroin is about four times the strength of Oxy . . .”

She flips to another page where she’s apparently made a flowchart. Her handwriting is beautiful, with swooping curls. It looks funny arranged in a tight table, numbers precisely aligned and calculated. I have no idea what I’m looking at.

“So you’re, like . . . really smart.”

“Uh, yeah,” Josie says. “Thanks for noticing.”

“No, I mean . . .” What’s in her notebook goes beyond memorizing scanner codes and doing mental math while watching QVC. There are notes in the margins, scribbled questions to herself with arrows pointing to the answers she arrived at later, and a coffee spill marring one page.

Josie sat over this, her mind mulling and working a problem until she found an answer, the same way I took an entire summer to figure out how to hit an inside pitch without popping up.

“You’re going to college, right?”

“Yep, pharmacy school. Mom’s all excited about me bringing home pens. That would be the part she focuses on. I guess a few years ago Viagra made some pens that look like a dick, and if you know the right people—”

I look back at my phone.

“Jos, I’ve got to go.”

“Fine,” she says, snapping her notebook shut with frustration. “Short version: Jadine can hook us up with someone she knows who sells safe, potent stuff that will keep noobs like us really high for a long time way cheaper than Oxy.”

“Huh,” I say.

“Yeah.” Josie throws her arms up in the air. “Huh! Geez, Mickey. I spent all weekend running numbers and drawing chemical bonds and all you’re giving me is Huh?”

“I don’t feel so hot,” I tell her.

“Yeah, you look like shit,” she agrees. “How you gonna play a game?”

“First step is being there,” I say, getting up off the bed and heading for the hall. The staircase is steep and winding. I have to actually use the handrail to get down, leaning on it as my head swims again. I’m at the front door when Josie yells down from the landing.