Chapter 1

Ithaca, 2010


I have problems: I am out of clean clothes, I cannot find my glasses, my English paper is late, and my pockets are not big enough for all the heroin I have.

But, honestly, more than anything, I want a cigarette.

I’m only ten minutes from where I’m going, and it’s cold outside. The sun is deceptive; it looks like a nice upstate New York morning, but really it’s December and the wind is whipping up from Ithaca’s gorges. I stop walking and push my fingers deep into my pockets in search of a Parliament.

In a minute, there will be police, with questions and handcuffs. By tomorrow, my scabby-faced mugshot will be all over the news as the Cornell student arrested with $150,000 of smack. I will sober up to a sea of regrets. My dirty clothes and late English paper—one of the last assignments I need to graduate—will be the least of my problems.

But that’s all in the future. Right now, I just want that cigarette. Where the fuck did I put them?

When I woke up this morning in the stash house on Stewart Avenue, the first thing I did was look at my day planner—I am over-organized as ever, even on the brink of disaster. Then, I answered the phone after my boyfriend called repeatedly. We got in a fight. I emailed one of my professors to beg for another extension and promised myself today would be the day I would finally finish everything I need to graduate.

Then I mixed up a spoon of heroin and coke and spent the next two hours poking my arms and legs, fishing around under the skin with a 28-gauge needle in search of relief. My veins are all shot out and scarred and hard to find, so my stabs at oblivion usually involve a few hours of crying as I bleed all over the floor, leaving behind the speckled blood spatter of a crime scene.

This time, I got extra-high, and that last shot was really just out of spite; my boyfriend had the nerve to accuse me of stealing from our heroin, and frankly, I’m pissed. I’m pissed at him, I’m pissed at myself, I’m pissed at every moment that’s led me here, and I’m pissed that he’s calling on repeat, screaming and threatening me while I’m just trying to get high, to get smashed, to get far away from the darkness I’m running from—or toward. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

The phone goes off again, buzzing with the pop-punk notes of a New Found Glory ringtone bought with drug money.

You were everything I wanted, but I just can’t finish what I started.

It’s him, of course: Alex. He’s been smoking crack all morning, holed up with my skittish dog in our basement apartment beneath an unofficial adjunct sorority house up the hill in Collegetown. I can imagine him there, his tattooed arms prying the blinds open as he checks for the black bears and SWAT teams of his drugged-out hallucinations. He is fourteen years my senior, but I know how his face looks childish with terror when his dark eyes gape at what is not there and he begins muttering in his parents’ native tongue. They are Greek, and he is whispering a tragic chorus.

Right now, it seems, he’s more focused on his phone than on his fear, as he’s been calling me again and again to demand that I come back immediately with our Tupperware of drugs. He wants me to bring the whole six-ounce stash so that he can check the weight and make sure I didn’t steal any before we sell it.

Before leaving, I take out three or four grams and tuck it under the insole of my black suede sneakers. I like to be prepared. You never know when you might need more heroin. I leave behind the tiny digital scale, an array of baggies and needles, some assorted pills, and my backpack of schoolwork. But then the drugs kick in, and I accidentally nod out for an hour or so in the bathroom before I finally head out into the cold in a black, dragon-print hoodie that leaves me significantly underdressed for twenty-five-degree weather.

I’m a couple houses away—right next to the gorge where I tried to kill myself three years earlier—when I realize I can’t find the smokes.

I was damaged long ago, though you swear that you are true, I still pick my friends over you.

Without even glancing down at my beat-up flip phone, I send Alex straight to voicemail. Then, I whip the clear container full of heroin out of my oversized hoodie and put it down on the curb.

This—like so much else in my life—is probably not a good idea. But it’ll only take a minute, and I need a damn cigarette.

I lose sight of everything else as I hunch over to empty out my pockets, pawing through ballpoint pens, mechanical pencils, gram-sized drug baggies, lint, and the assorted debris of my life.

When I look up, empty-handed, there’s a cop walking toward me. Given the presence of the patrol car a few houses down, I’m guessing he drove—but he sure seems to have materialized out of thin air, a harbinger of bad things ahead breaking through the haze of my high.

Instinctively, I toss the heroin under the nearest car before I stand up, hoping he didn’t see my roadside discus toss. I smile to show that everything is okay. Of course it’s okay, Officer! Why wouldn’t it be?

Then something happens—did I just nod out or black out?—and I’m still yammering away to this cop about the weather (which is not as nice as I’m claiming it is) when a middle-aged lady who works at the nearby flophouse comes plodding across the parking lot. She is large and largely unmemorable—except that she is holding the next two years of my life in her hands.

“Are you looking for this, sir?”

Shit.

Eying the contents of my Tupperware, the cop clears his throat and instructs me to empty out my pockets—which I know hold at least a $150 eight-ball of coke and ten or twenty of the deep-green eighty-milligram Oxys.

Welp.

I decide to make this arrest as painless as possible. I take out the coke with my left hand and as I’m handing it over, I take my right hand and pop the pills into my mouth and swallow them all dry. The cop threatens to pepper spray me if I don’t spit them out—but it’s too late because I’ve already eaten them all. It’s enough to kill most people, but I’ve built quite a tolerance through nearly a decade of self-destruction.

Soon I’m handcuffed and in the back seat, bouncing around like one of those annoying little jumpy dogs. The policeman is standing outside doing paperwork, but when he notices the flurry of movement gently rocking the car, he glances over, disinterestedly asking if I’m okay.

“Okay” is not the word I would use to describe this situation.

But I nod and smile; I need him to turn back around so I can finish transferring the heroin from under my insole to a far less accessible spot—up my ass. I know I’m probably going to jail—at least for a few days—so I’ll do anything to stave off the impending dopesickness.

As the pills really start to kick in, the day proceeds in snapshots of clarity surrounded by dense pillars of cognitive fog. The present fades to the past, and I am seventeen and alone, sitting on a cement step somewhere around Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I came here for Harvard Summer School; my promising figure skating career fell apart and my parents realized there was something wrong. This seemed like a fix. They know about the eating disorders, the depression. They do not know about the suicide attempt. They do not know what to do. And neither do I.


Copyright © 2022 by Keri Blakinger