Are other people’s lives like this? All of a sudden you look up and realize you’re doing something you don’t remember ever choosing?
What I can’t understand is how just this morning I was at work unpacking a new shipment of fake antique watering cans, and now I’m sitting in some house in a questionable Seattle neighborhood buying drugs with Tami Butler.
But the living room is cozy, with soft, if worn, furniture, colorful rugs, art on the walls, and books on the shelves—the old, actual paper kind. It isn’t anything like what I pictured a drug dealer’s house to look like. The guy sitting on the couch across from us is about three times the size of the girl sitting next to him. He tells me he’s an MMA fighter.
“Pre-professional,” he corrects his girlfriend, who says “amateur.”
He’s all muscles and tan and trendy tattoos of various fitness brands and sports team logos. Her light brown skin is free of makeup, black hair in tight braids. A cup of tea and a reading tablet sit in front of her. The guy says, “Raine’s in community college—got dreams of being a social worker.”
“Who dreams of being a social worker?” Tami says.
Raine just looks at Tami and blinks. It’s like she doesn’t speak sarcasm.
“If they had this, no one would need any kind of therapy anymore,” he says, zipping up a plastic baggie with a dozen golden pills that glimmer in the soft lamplight.
I look at Raine, trying to process what she’s doing versus what he’s doing. She returns to her tablet, like this is some kind of study group and not an illegal drug deal. She highlights something with her fingertip and glances up. “Vaughn,” she says. “I forgot to tell you—Lita’s about to get evicted. I offered to let her sleep on the couch, just till she finds a place.”
He leans close to her. “We don’t have room,” he says in a low voice, as if we won’t hear. “We barely fit the people who live here already, and they pay rent. You can’t just take in everybody.”
“It’s not everybody,” she says. “It’s Lita.”
Why would someone get into this in front of company? Because she knows he won’t pick a fight or make a scene with us here? Or does she genuinely not care what we think?
“We can talk about it later,” Vaughn says. He smiles at us a little too big, and changes the subject. “Raine, tell them about how Freedom was invented by scientists for medicinal use.”
She looks up from her tablet again, her eyes focusing like she’d already forgotten we were here. “Oh, yeah. It got all the way to clinical trials,” she says. “So much poison gets approved by the FDA, you know? With all kinds of terrible side effects. My theory is they gave up on it because the self-help and coaching industries are big business and rely on people staying sick. But Freedom could help a lot of people.”
“How noble,” Tami says, and no one but me knows she’s kidding.
“How does it help people?” I say.
“Don’t get them started,” Tami says.
“It helped my cousin,” Vaughn says, and Raine is looking at him in a way that reminds me of how Daddy looks at Papa sometimes. “When he came back from the war in Brazil, he was broken. And of course the VA wouldn’t do shit to help him. He was on a waiting list to see a therapist for like three months. But a therapist couldn’t help him with what he was going through. No one could.”
“But then I did a bunch of research and found out about Freedom,” Raine says. “We had to eat nothing but rice and beans for two weeks to save up enough for one dose.” She smiles. “It changed everything.”
“My cousin’s like a totally different person now,” Vaughn says. “But he needs a dose every day. And the only way to afford it is to sell it.” He holds the baggie out to Tami.
“Well, it certainly helps me,” she says, grabbing it and putting it in her purse.
“We’re not talking about people like you,” Raine says flatly, and looks back down at her tablet.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Tami says. “‘People like me’?”
I look around the living room, but I find nothing that will save me from this. Just mismatched chairs and sheets for curtains.
“No offense, but I don’t think you need it,” Raine says.
“No offense,” Tami says. “But you don’t know anything about me.”
“How about we bring it down a notch?” Vaughn says.
I want to change the subject. I want to ask where all the roommates are. I want to know how so many people live in one house with only one bathroom.
“Raine, how did you and Vaughn meet?” I say, because it’s the first thing that pops into my head, but now it’s Vaughn who looks uncomfortable. He steals a quick look at Tami and I catch a moment of eye contact between them and suddenly I get it. There’s something else going on here. Now I know what Tami can’t get on the island or delivered by a drone.
“We went to the same high school,” Raine says. “Garfield, just down the street.”
“Bulldogs!” Vaughn barks. “Class of sixty-three.”
“It was sophomore year. I’d noticed him, but we weren’t really friends or anything. We hung out with different crowds.”
“She rolled with the brains,” Vaughn says. “I did not.”
“And then one day I saw a kid getting picked on by some asshole, and Vaughn stepped in and defended him.” She smiles. “And I was a goner.” Tami is pretending to ignore the story. She’s tapping on her phone with a scowl on her face.
“That’s a lovely story,” Tami says. “But we have to get going.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so uncomfortable.
“I’m hungry,” Vaughn says. “Are you hungry?” he asks Raine.
“A little, I guess.”
“Do you want to get us something from the kitchen while I finish up in here?”
“Sure,” she says, looking a little confused. “Okay.”
“It was nice meeting you,” I say as she stands up.
“You too,” she says, but she’s looking at Tami, and not kindly. Tami matches her stare, draping her arm over the back of the couch like she owns this place and everyone in it.
Raine is the first to look away.
As soon as Raine is gone, Tami leans in and starts giving orders: “Come to my place downtown. Invite some people. Bring someone for my friend.”
Vaughn reaches over and touches Tami’s face, and she slaps his hand away. “Not here.”
He says, “Sorry.”
Tami has this effect on people. She makes them say “sorry” for no good reason.
She stands up. I stand up. She walks out the door. I walk out the door.
We leave without saying goodbye, or thank you, or anything.
“He’s hot, right?” she says as we return to the car. I have no idea what I’m supposed to say to that.
A haggard man of indeterminate age, possibly drunk, limps by us. He points at me and says, “I know you from somewhere.”
I am the girl who always looks like somebody else.
The car is still parked at the curb, waiting for us. Tami tells the driver the address of her family’s condo downtown. She takes one of the golden glittery pills out of the baggie and washes it down with one of the car’s complimentary bottles of water.
“Two hundred dollars a pop,” she says. “And totally worth it.”
She holds the baggie out to me. “Try one?”
“No, thank you,” I say.
She laughs. “It’s sweet how good you’re trying to be. Don’t worry, it’s not like other drugs. It doesn’t get you high. I don’t know how to describe it. It just makes you feel . . . unburdened.”
I hear Lily’s voice in my head: “You are not seriously thinking about it, are you? Are you?”
“No,” I say. “Thanks. I’m okay.”
“You’re okay.” Tami laughs. “Of course you’re okay. Everybody’s A-OK.”
She passes me the flask and I at least take a drink of that. It’s starting to feel familiar. Warm instead of burning. Like a hug from the inside.
“That girl cracks me up,” Tami says. “Studying all the time and talking like she’s some working-class intellectual with a moral high horse stuck up her ass. But the truth is, her husband sells drugs and beats people up for a living. She’s such a hypocrite.”
“They’re married? How old are they?”
“I may be a bitch, but at least I’m not a hypocrite,” Tami says, taking a swig from the flask. “I know what people think of me. But that’s how you get what you want. That’s how my mom got where she is. Girls like Raine don’t get anywhere.” She looks at me and smiles. “You’re so nice, aren’t you?”
I have no idea what to say to that.
“You never thought I’d be someone into slumming it, did you?” She says this almost proudly, like she took me here, in some twisted way, to impress me. “Did you see his arms?” She laughs. “I’m totally just using him for his body. It’s an incredible body.”
But then something shifts. She looks out the window, and I get the impression that she’s trying to hide her face. “He’s good to me,” she says. “He treats me like a queen.” She’s silent for a few blocks, then turns back to me and says, “Ash is such hard work. Everything in my life is such hard work.” She says this as she’s drinking expensive bourbon out of a silver flask in the back of a hired car, after swallowing a two-hundred-dollar pill that’s supposed to make her forget all her worries. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not good enough for him. Can you believe that? Me? Not good enough?”
I don’t say, “What if that means you’re not supposed to be together? What if that means you don’t fit?” Admitting that would be a failure somehow. And Tami is someone who refuses to fail.
“I can relax when I’m with Vaughn,” she says. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to never be able to relax? To always have to be in control?”
“But no one’s making you,” I say.
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Yes you do,” I say. “You can choose anything you want.” What about Raine and Vaughn? What about their choices?
But Tami just laughs. “I don’t have time for that shit. You slow down for one minute in this world, you stop for just a second to have a feeling or wonder what it all means, that’s how you end up a failure. That’s what makes you weak. I’m not ever going to end up like that. My mom has never cracked. Not once.”
Yes, but where is she?
And what is the alternative to cracking? What if there are things that build and build until there’s so much pressure they need to be let out?
What if there are things that need to be let in?
“You want to know a secret about desperate people?” Tami says. “They fuck like their life depends on it.”
Tami laughs and laughs, and I don’t know if the pill already kicked in, if it’s the booze, if it’s some kind of nervous response to everything she just told me, or if it’s the high of doing and saying whatever she wants and knowing she can get away with it.
For a moment, I hate her. I think, This will be the last time I hang out with Tami Butler. I will go home early and call Lily and confess my temporary lapse in judgment and everything will go back to normal.
But then we enter a new section of the walled part of the city, and the glittering lights of the exclusive clubs lining the street pulse against Tami’s flawless skin. Her face throbs in and out of shadow, split-second snapshots of a glamorous girl in profile, and then I see something shift in the frame-by-frame of her, something drain out, like the shadows are lapping up the light.
I don’t think the pill has kicked in yet. As she stares out the window I am struck with the knowing that I have never met anyone so utterly alone in my life.
Maybe Tami and I do have something in common after all.