“I need to talk to you,” Justin whispers in my ear as he walks behind me in the middle of a Pledges meeting.
“There you are!” I yell, getting dirty looks from a few people standing around me.
For the past three days, I’ve been throwing myself into a manic schedule of round-the-clock shopping and working out to distract myself from the fact that Adam still hasn’t called, and peppering Stephanie and Justin with constant he’s-going-to-call-right? messages, none of which Justin has returned. It occurred to me after the third unreturned message that I essentially haven’t seen or talked to him in the past month and a half. “Where the hell have you been?” I ask him.
An emaciated man with a shaved head and tattoos covering every bit of visible skin glowers, and so Justin grabs my hand and starts to lead me out the front door of the meeting. As we pass people, I feel the weight of their stares on me. It’s strange because before the column and all the hype, I’d have sworn up and down that I could never receive too much attention. But I hadn’t been prepared for what comes with it. I feel like I hear whispering now wherever I go and I’m not sure if it’s real or coke has left me permanently paranoid. I’ll walk by two girls and swear that I hear one of them mention “Party Girl” or the word column or something, and then I’ll feel them dissect everything about me. Are they criticizing what I’m wearing, deciding that I should be more put-together? Are they accusing me of not really being sober, speculating that a girl who goes by the moniker of Party Girl and lounges in champagne-soaked magazine shots couldn’t possibly be clean? Pledges has taught me that what people think of me is none of my business, but I guess I wasn’t really prepared to have to remind myself of that so many times a day.
“Ick,” I say to Justin, as we make it outside and I light two cigarettes.
“What?” he asks as I hand him one of the smokes.
“The way people look at me now is annoying,” I say, wishing that he noticed this without my having to point it out to him.
“Oh, Amelia,” he says, flicking his cigarette ash to the ground. “Most people are just thinking about themselves. I think you’re too in your head and just being a typical self-absorbed addict.”
For some reason, I want to take my lit cigarette and mash it into his face—or at least onto his hand, where it wouldn’t cause as notable a scar. While the whole world seems to have jumped up to speed and is treating me like I’m worthy of being celebrated, Justin has barely seemed to notice. And suddenly I hate him for this. I’ve always really liked friends agreeing with what I’m saying, and if they disagree or don’t seem to want to indulge in the conversation, I feel like they’ve broken some unspoken contract we have about always backing each other up. In recovery, people get away with this so much—by saying things like “I’m not going to cosign your bullshit” or accusing someone of being too “in their head” or self-absorbed—and I suddenly feel myself as much annoyed with the Pledges world as I am with Justin.
“Whatever,” I say, not even looking at Justin. “They’re probably just jealous.” I pause, and then, “Did you get my messages? Do you understand that I’ve basically been heartbroken?”
Justin takes a drag off his cigarette and nods as he exhales. “Look, I’ve got to tell you something,” he says after a beat.
“Shoot.” He’s still bugging me but I’m willing to let it go—something that wouldn’t have even been a remote possibility before the program.
He tosses his cigarette to the ground and smashes it out. “I’m not really sober,” he says.
“What?” I feel suddenly dropped into a moment of surreality. He’s lying, I think. He’s sober a week longer than me and I almost have six months. “That doesn’t even make sense,” I say, feeling myself start to panic. “How is that possible?”
“Well, I smoked pot last week, had a couple beers a few nights ago, and the night before last, stayed up all night with this guy I met at Marix, doing blow until sunrise.” He says all this completely casually, like he’s explaining the errands he ran at lunchtime yesterday. Where the hell are his emotions?
“Why would you do that?” I ask, and even though I can hear my accusatory tone and know it’s not the right one to have, I can’t seem to stop it.
“Why? Fuck if I know. Maybe because I’m an addict.”
“How did it happen?” I ask.
“Well,” Justin looks down, sadly. “I moved back in with Jason and everything was amazing at first. Turns out I must have been the one instigating all the fights before because with all my new rehab knowledge, we were suddenly one of those sickeningly perfect couples planning picnics at the Hollywood Bowl, going antiquing on the weekends and all that.”
“And then…?” Something has kicked in, some almost maternal instinct that makes it seem like the only thing in the world that matters is making sure Justin is okay. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze.
“Nothing monumental—Jesus, I wish it had been,” he says. “We just started hanging out with other couples, going to Dragstrip, house parties, dinners, whatever. And they all drank—wine with dinner, beer at house parties, nothing big…I mean, none of them drank alcoholically.”
I nod. I’d noticed the same thing when I went out to dinner with some publicists—one of them ordered a glass of wine and nursed that same glass the entire night, and the other had a gin and tonic. A single gin and tonic. And I’d sat there, silently marveling over what would make someone want to drink just one drink when all one ever did to me was make me achy, tired, and coke-hungry. Tommy would tell us that when a normal person drinks and starts to feel a little buzzed, he’ll see a figurative red light and know that it’s his cue to stop drinking. When an alcoholic or addict gets to that same place, however, all he sees is a green light.
“And then last week it occurred to me that smoking pot wouldn’t really be such a bad thing—that it didn’t really count,” Justin says. “I didn’t tell my sponsor or anyone and nothing bad happened when I did it. So then I had a couple of drinks with Jason. He doesn’t know shit about recovery—just what I tell him, really—and when I explained that drinking would be cool as long as I only had a few, he basically bought it. Cut to a couple nights later—me coked out of my gourd at this total stranger’s house.”
“Was it horrible?” I ask, and my whole body clenches in anticipation of his answer. I picture Justin, teeth grinding, paranoid as hell, getting creeped out by this weird guy and tearfully calling his sponsor.
Instead he says, “I wish I could say it was, but it was fun as hell. I don’t know why people say that a head full of recovery and a body full of chemicals is a bad combination, because I felt amazing. It was nice to just get out of my head for once, you know?”
That’s when I feel horribly betrayed. Why is he acting like this? I wonder. Why isn’t he horrified and crying, begging everyone in here to understand, the way other people who slip do? Even when I remind myself that this could be Justin’s “disease” talking, I resent him for casually embracing a way of thinking that’s different from the one we’ve shared since we met. And I feel something else: jealous. I want to be able to get out of my head, to have coke rush up my nose and through my veins, and not feel guilty about it. But then I remind myself that that’s my disease, and that I know for a fact that even allowing my thoughts to go here is wrong.
So I say what I know I’m supposed to. “You should call your sponsor,” I tell him gently, “and raise your hand in meetings.” When you relapse and have to start counting your time all over again, you have to raise your hand in meetings and reintroduce yourself to the group as a “newcomer.”
He nods. “I know,” he says. “I just don’t feel ready yet.”
We sit there in silence and I glance back in the meeting. “I’m just really sort of weirded out by this,” I finally say.
“I know,” he says, and looks uncomfortable. Then he catches my eye and says, “I love you, Amelia. And I could really use your support right now.”
It’s the first time Justin has ever said this to me, so I’m surprised. In rehab and recovery, “I love you,” roughly translated, seems to mean, “Hey, we’re both sober” or “You’re cool,” but since I’ve been out of there, I haven’t been comfortable saying it. Even though I grew up in a family where we said those three words constantly, it always felt obligatory—like it was the way you had to end a conversation, whether it was true or not. So I seem to be much slower than everyone else at tossing the phrase out. My neurosis kicks in, and I go, Wait, do I really love that person? I don’t even know them well enough to say and then I start to feel disingenuous.
I want to feel perfectly comfortable saying it back but I don’t.
“I love you, too, Justin,” I finally say, but the sentence sounds and feels awkward and we both just stand there uncomfortably as people start filtering out of the meeting and lighting their cigarettes.