Shannon sucked in a breath and scrubbed her hands along her thighs. “That was me. I did things that were incomprehensible. I stole from my parents. I stole from my great-aunt, who was dying. I went to visit her and stole jewelry right out of her bedroom, and medication from her bedside table.”
In my folding chair, I felt my body flush, remembering the pills I’d taken from my dad. Shannon continued, her voice a monotone. “I slept with guys who could give me heroin. I sold everything I had—artwork my friends had made for me, jewelry I’d inherited—for drugs.” Her lips curved into a bitter smile. “You know how they say an alcoholic will steal your wallet, but an addict will steal your wallet, then lie about it and help you look for it the next day? I can’t tell you the lies I told, or the stuff I stole, or the things I did to myself in my active addiction. And you know the scariest part?” Her voice was rising. “After everything I’ve done, everything I’ve been through, I don’t know if I can stop. I don’t know if I want to. I’m not even sure that when I get out of here I’m not going to be right back on that corner. Because nothing ever—ever—made me feel as good as heroin did. And I’m not sure I want to live the whole rest of my life without that feeling.”
The entire room seemed to sigh. I found that I was nodding in spite of myself. I looked around, waiting for a counselor who would say “One day at a time,” or tell us to “play the tape” of how our pleasures had turned on us, or remind Shannon it wasn’t for the rest of her life, just right now, this minute, this hour, this day, that she had friends, that there were people who loved her and wanted her to get well . . . but there were never any counselors in Share. Nobody here but us chickies, Mary had said when I’d asked her.
“The last time I went home, there was one navy-blue dress in my closet, and a pair of shoes. My parents had gotten rid of the rest of my stuff—my desk, my books, my clothes, all the posters I used to have on the walls. There was just that one dress. My mom told me, ‘That’s the dress we’re going to bury you in.’?”
Nobody spoke. Shannon rubbed her palms on her jeans again, then looked up. Her shoulder-length hair was in a ponytail, and if it wasn’t for her pockmarked complexion and the deep circles beneath her tear-reddened eyes, you would have no way of guessing that she was a junkie. She looked like any other young woman, dressed down, like she could be a teacher or a bank teller or a web designer. Just like me. And now she was trapped. The thing that had once been a pleasure, a treat, was now a necessity, as vital as air and water. I don’t know if I can stop. I don’t know if I want to. Just like me . . . because, honestly, I wasn’t sure I could stop. And I knew what all of that meant: that I wasn’t just a lady who’d taken a few too many pills and developed a pesky little physical dependence. It meant I was an addict—the same as Mary and her DUI, and Aubrey and her six trips through rehab, and Marissa, who’d lost her front tooth and custody of her kid after she and her boyfriend had gotten into a fistfight over the last bag of dope.
Hello, I’m Allison, and I’m an addict.
I shook my head. It wasn’t true. I wasn’t an addict. I was just . . . it was only . . . Aubrey was staring at me. “You okay?” she asked. Her eyes were wide and clear, rimmed with sparkly silver liner and heavily mascara’d lashes. The bruises on her arms had started to fade. She was still way too thin, but she looked better.
“I’m fine,” I whispered, even as a shudder wracked my shoulders. My skin bristled with goose bumps. My stomach lurched. I hadn’t let myself think much about the future, or anything besides getting through each day, keeping my head down, not attracting attention, doing what was necessary until I could go home. All this time, I’d been telling myself I wasn’t an addict, that I didn’t need to be here, and that as soon as I could I’d go home and go back to my pills, only I’d be more careful. Now every question I’d been asked, every slogan they’d repeated, every phrase I’d glimpsed on a poster or heard in passing was coming at me, like dozens of poison-tipped arrows ripping through the sky. Who is an addict? began the chapter of the same name in the Narcotics Anonymous Basic Text. Most of us do not have to think twice about this question. We know! Our whole life and thinking was centered in drugs in one form or another—the getting and using and finding ways and means to get more. We lived to use and used to live.
That wasn’t me, I thought, as Shannon pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of her back pocket, a list like the one they made all of us write, a list of what we had that was good in our lives besides drugs. “My parents still love me,” she read in a quivering voice that made her sound like she was twelve instead of thirty. “I can still write, I think. I’m not HIV-positive. I don’t have hep C.”