I almost told him I didn’t have Venmo either, but that would have been a lie. It was just tied to my parents’ bank account. They didn’t mind me using it to pay back friends for lunch or an Uber ride. Maybe they wouldn’t notice this charge. For all they knew, “gregnaut” was somebody’s cousin or something.
I nodded and he let me scan his Venmo code and waited as I picked an emoji. I settled on the cheeseburger one because snorting pills off this guy’s iPad probably wasn’t kosher either. But once they were up my nose I was leaning back, I was falling, I was hitting the pillows with a happy sigh, and I didn’t care what my parents might say.
Inject it directly into my veins, I thought, then laughed because that was, in fact, something people actually did with these pills.
I was too heavy to think much past that. I became a filter through which the rest of the world passed—voices, sensations, the throb of the music. I was a bee trapped in its own honey. Everything tasted golden and sweet.
The bedroom door opened again. Gregnaut’s voice was a low rumble. “She’s good,” he said. “She’s just sleeping it off.”
But then someone was shaking my shoulder—too rough. I groaned and scrunched my face and tried to roll away. The shaking became more persistent.
“Get up,” Chaya said. “Ely, get up. We have to go home.”
“I didn’t do anything to her,” said Gregnaut, sounding offended.
Chaya yanked at my arm. “Did I ask, dickwad? Ely, come on.” She kept pulling and I wanted her to stop, I wanted to yell in her face to let me go, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t even get my eyes open properly.
A sharp heat burst on my cheek, the lance of pain cutting through my honey trap. Chaya Mushka had just bitch-slapped me.
“What did you do that for?” I complained, but it was too late. The high was ruined.
“You’re a mess,” Chaya said. “We have to get you home. Pull it together and let’s go.”
She had to know that was a big ask. But it didn’t stop her from draping one of my arms over her shoulders and heaving me up, her scrawny frame staggering under my weight. I was useless. I couldn’t see straight. But I couldn’t fight her either; I could only let Chaya drag me bodily out of that party and try to prop me against the wall of the elevator. I promptly slid down into a heap on the floor.
Chaya, standing over me, had her arms hugged tight around her middle. Her face was more pinched than ever, staring straight ahead at the shut elevator doors as the floors dinged past.
“Chaya,” I said, but she still wouldn’t look at me. “Cha-aa-ya.”
“You better apologize to me in the morning,” she told me, and even though I never got angry on opiates, that made me angry. Even if the emotion was really just a tiny kernel of frustration burrowing itself into my chest, it still counted.
“You were using too,” I muttered, well aware of how whiny I sounded.
She shook her head. “Not like you.”
And that was the last thing she said to me for a long time. Her next words were to the Uber driver when he picked us up. Then silence for the whole car ride back to Crown Heights. She kept jiggling her leg against the seat, and I wanted her to stop, but asking wasn’t worth the effort. So instead I tilted my face against the chilly window and watched the city lights flash past as we drove away, hipster Brooklyn receding behind us.
Chaya told the driver to drop us off a block away from my place. She let me lean on her for that short walk home, although she kept whispering orders under her breath, as if she thought the neighbors were watching us outside their windows even at three in the morning: “Stand straight…. Pay attention idiot, that’s a curb.”
My keys were in my coat pocket, but I was too useless to dig them out. Chaya had to do it for me, unlocking the door to my building. She paused there, holding the door open with her shoulder, and flipped through my keys till she found the right one.
“This is the key to your front door,” she told me, like I didn’t already know that. “Don’t drop it.”
“I don’t feel good. I think I’m dying.”
“You aren’t dying, unless you count dying from stupidity. You’re fine. Go take a cold shower or something.”
Chaya shoved me gently in the direction of the stairs. I made it all the way to the bottom of them before I realized what the problem was going to be—but when I turned around, Chaya was already gone. I crawled up on my hands and knees, fingernails digging into the winter grime smeared from the soles of twenty people’s snow boots. I rested on the landing, leaning my head back against the wall—but it was too much, too easy to slip under the surface of the dark water that rose up all around me.
I couldn’t fall asleep there. I had to pull it together.
I squinted open heavy eyelids and lurched forward again, grabbing the banister this time to drag myself up the next flight.
My key fit into the lock. I turned the front-door knob as slowly as possible, free hand lifting to graze the mezuzah on the doorframe, then touch my dirty fingers to my lips. Even though Hashem probably wished I wouldn’t; what god wanted the devotion of someone like me?
The apartment was warm and quiet as I slipped inside, shucking off my coat. It puddled on the floor next to our shoe rack, joined shortly thereafter by my hat and boots. I was too numbed out to be scared my parents were still up or even to worry about waking them. Things like that didn’t matter when you were high. It was kind of beautiful.
I shuffled down the hall in my sock feet and let myself into the bedroom I shared with my younger sister Dvora. She was a huddled lump in the bed by the window, the streetlamp light casting silvery waves over her form. I tried to be quiet as I stripped off my dress, but it was no good. I staggered into the dresser, and one of Dvora’s little wooden horse figurines tipped off its shelf and clattered to the floor.
“Whoops,” I whispered as Dvora made a muffled, displeased noise against her pillow, then twisted around to squint at me from across the room.
“What are you doing?” Dvora’s voice was all thick and gloopy with sleep. “Ely, it’s like…four in the morning….”
The night air weaved around me like silk—beautiful but a little hard to breathe. I thought if I went to sleep right then, I might not wake up. The thought didn’t terrify me. Nothing did when I was high. But I was generally aware that dying is something people usually try to avoid.
So I found myself climbing into Dvora’s bed instead of my own, slipping under the covers and burrowing in close to the warm knot of her body. She shifted to make room, her hands tucked together between us, fingers worrying each other.
“Are you high again?” she whispered. Dvora was fourteen. My parents probably thought she didn’t know what “high” even was. But I was sixteen and had been getting drunk since I was her age. She wasn’t that young, so she knew.