High Achiever Read online

  I had been wearing a mask for years, and the man on the other side of the door had no idea that he was in love with a thieving, lying drug addict. I hated myself, who I’d become. I wished I could just quit this shit. But the thought of going through withdrawals was terrifying; I’d rather die than have to ever feel that pain.

  “You ready?” Eliot asked as I entered the lobby. “I just got a call; apparently some friggin’ junkie overdosed in the Walmart parking lot.”

  “Jesus, when the hell will these people learn?” I asked, shaking my head and waving goodbye to Sharla.

  40

  On our way to the overdose call, I couldn’t help but think how ironic it was that I currently had a fresh batch of narcotics coursing through my veins.

  This person had done the same exact thing I had just done five minutes before, except for them it was the last thing they would ever do. I stared out the window and wondered what the person must have been thinking. Maybe they were going to shop in Walmart but needed a fix first so the cold air hitting them as they entered the store wasn’t excruciatingly painful.

  Maybe they were having a bad day and just needed to forget, or maybe they had a great day and paused to do a celebratory hit.

  Whatever the reason, I was certain that they did not know that they wouldn’t be leaving their car ever again. That the driver’s seat would be the final place they took a breath. When that person got dressed that morning, they had no clue that it would be the last outfit they ever wore.

  Jesus, I need to stop thinking about it—it’s totally killing my buzz.

  As we pulled up to the scene of the overdose, I noticed that the vehicle was surrounded with yellow caution tape. My mom used to decorate the front of our house with it on Halloween, and it was so eerie to see it in real life.

  “Why don’t you stay here for a minute, babe, while I go check it out,” Eliot said, unbuckling his seatbelt.

  “Uh, hell to the no. I’ve been waiting for this moment all of my life. Please can I go check it out? I won’t look in the car or anything—I just want to see how something like this is handled in real life.” I gave him my puppy-dog pout in a desperate attempt to sway him. In a sick, twisted way, I figured that somehow, some way, seeing a dead body might help me stop using. Seeing the consequences of it in real life might be exactly what I needed to scare me straight.

  “Sorry, I need you to stay here. It’s protocol that if we have a passenger on a ride-along, unless they are currently enrolled in the police academy they aren’t allowed to be present when someone is deceased. It’s a privacy thing. I’ll be as quick as I can,” he said, shutting the door and adjusting his belt.

  I watched eagerly through the windshield as Eliot made his way up to the scene. I thought about the person in the car. The person was probably a heroin user. I had heard awful things about heroin, and people in my town were dying at an alarming rate. Ever since I’d started shooting up, Kayla and Javier had tried to get me to try heroin a few times, but I always declined.

  I was afraid that I would like it too much, and for some reason it made me feel better about myself knowing that what I was doing was “technically” legal. Pills aren’t a street drug—they’re prescribed by doctors. So I felt like it made me higher up on the morals chart than those who used the hard-core stuff.

  I watched as the paramedics and various law enforcement officers methodically worked their way around the scene. Someone was taking pictures, another person was opening a stretcher, and most of them stood around with their hands rested on their belts talking. I could see Eliot pointing into the car and talking to one of his buddies about something. They all simultaneously burst out in laughter and I squinted to make sure I was seeing it right. How could they be laughing at a time like this?

  Eliot made his way back to the car and leaned into the driver’s-side window with a smile on his face. “What is so damn funny?” I asked, unable to fathom how they could find humor at a time like this.

  “Dude…it’s not funny, but it’s kind of funny. When I looked inside the guy’s car”—he paused to laugh again—“the guy is wearing a friggin’ shirt that says SHIT HAPPENS.”

  I tried my best to force a smile but I couldn’t hide the sadness I felt. Only a twisted person could actually laugh at something like that. That was someone’s son, someone’s friend….He was obviously lost and alone. It was fucking tragic, and these guys were able to laugh during a time like this.

  They get to go home to their families, he gets to go to the morgue. I mean granted, he clearly did this to himself, but he was a person. A person worthy of respect. I suddenly had an incredible amount of resentment toward my boyfriend bubbling just under the surface.

  “The guys don’t need my help, they got it covered. I’m gonna go say bye to the sarge and I’ll be right back,” he said, patting the side of the car and walking away.

  My phone vibrated inside my purse, causing me to jump, and when I saw Mitch’s name on the text, my heart started to race.

  Where’s my money?

  I shoved the phone back into my purse just as Eliot opened the door.

  I stared out my window, because I was afraid if I looked over in his direction I would snap. “Is everything okay?” he asked me as he started the car.

  I took a deep breath, trying to compose my thoughts. “No, it’s not. I gotta be honest, Eliot, it kind of pisses me off that there is a dead guy inches away, and you guys are pointing and laughing like a bunch of bullies. Like, it’s disgusting actually.”

  I glanced in his direction with a look of disdain; there was nothing he could say that would justify it.

  “Babe, I totally understand how bad that probably looked. But I need you to put your anger aside for one minute and think about what I am about to say.” He turned the car off and shifted in his seat to face me. “Last week, I showed up to a house where the parents had left their child in the car. Completely forgot the kid was in there. I saw the boy’s lifeless body, glistening with sweat. I sat next to the mother on the porch as she screamed at the top of her lungs about wanting to die. Last month, I responded to a scene where a girl blew her head off in the bathtub. I saw it all. I respond to at least two overdoses a shift, and have seen and smelled more dead bodies this past month than any normal person would in two lifetimes. I try to find something to detach myself from the situations because it makes it less real. Sometimes it manifests itself in humor—and I know it’s fucked up, but if I didn’t do it, I would have ended up in a loony bin by now with all the shit I see daily.”

  I paused for a moment, processing what he’d said. It made sense. How would I react if I had to stand a foot away from pieces of brain matter and shards of bone? I’d probably be a nutcase.

  “It’s a tough job, hon, it really is,” he continued, “and if you don’t believe me, you can come up to the door with me at our next stop,” he said, turning the car back on. My phone vibrated again in my purse. I knew it was Mitch. He wanted his money, and I didn’t have it. I ignored the buzzing.

  “Come up to the door at the next stop? What do you mean?” I asked, feeling confused.

  “Yeah, we gotta go notify this guy Javier’s family that he just OD’d.”

  “Javier?” My heart started to pound as I turned to face Eliot, who suddenly turned to me with a look of realization. “Hey, he had a Barron’s Roadhouse hat on, didn’t your friend Kayla use to work there?” he asked, looking back at the road.

  41

  I realized I had been standing in the same place long after Sharla’s patrol car passed by. I was physically there, but my mind was back to that awful night. The night I’d found out about Javier.

  He was the first person I’d ever known to die from addiction. I had always heard stories about people overdosing, but I’d never seen it firsthand.

  I remember standing in the pew at his funeral, watching his father clutc
h his mother as her sobs caused her knees to buckle.

  Audible sniffles echoed through the church as a slide show of his photos danced across the screen.

  The pictures began when he was a young child, and I remember staring at the toothless grin of this innocent boy by the Christmas tree with his mom. He had a light in his eyes that had long burned out by the time I came to know him.

  He was so joyous in the pictures, so full of life and promise.

  I knew that the little boy in that picture wearing a uniform with a baseball bat resting on his shoulder had no idea that he would only have fifteen years left on this planet.

  His mother had given birth to him twenty-four years ago. And now…he was gone. All that remained was a body lying in a coffin in the church in front of a hundred broken hearts.

  “Are you coming?” a voice said, snapping me back to reality.

  “Yeah…I…sorry, yes,” I said, trotting over to Kelly’s office door.

  In the past few months since I’d started working with Kelly, we’d grown really close. She was the opposite of Dr. Peters in every way.

  Dr. Peters didn’t get fired because of me. I had nothing to do with it, surprisingly. Apparently, she had been writing prescriptions for Claire in return for half of Claire’s disability checks. Claire obviously tested positive for narcotics and was kicked out of Horizons. Last I heard she was staying in a motel with some old guy.

  “So what was going on out there?” Kelly asked, shutting the door behind me.

  “Nothing. I…just saw someone I knew, and I guess I got lost in a memory for a second.”

  “Anything you wanna talk about?”

  “Nah, I’m okay.” I smiled.

  “Okay. How has your week been going?” she asked, kicking her Converse shoes up on her desk.

  “Good, really good. I’ve been doing bag checks for the new intakes. Felicity says I’m better than a bloodhound. I’ve found more hidden drugs this week than they have since the place opened,” I said, proudly.

  “Wow. Well, it makes sense, you probably know all the good hiding places,” she said, laughing.

  “Exactly.”

  “You gotta be careful with that, you know,” she warned.

  “I know.”

  “I know you know, Tiff. But addiction is a sneaky motherlover, so just make sure you aren’t putting yourself in dangerous situations.”

  “Thank you. I won’t, I promise. There’s usually always someone there with me anyway. It helps,” I said.

  “Well, good. I’ll stop lecturing you, then. Oh! By the way, your probation officer stopped by when you were at the meeting. He wants you to go see him tomorrow during the morning meeting,” she said.

  “Wait, what? Why? What happened?” I asked in a panic. It’s never good when your probation officer asks you to come outside of scheduled visits.

  “He mentioned something about your ex-boyfriend’s family, but he didn’t go into specifics. It’s nothing bad, though, otherwise he would have let us know, and of course I would have given you a heads-up.” She winked.

  Her reassurance calmed my nerves a bit, but I was still anxious to know what the hell was going on. I decided to shove my worries to the back of my mind for now and take advantage of our session.

  “All right, let’s see,” she said, pulling out my file and flipping it open. “Last week you and I had just started talking about Mitch, the gun, and how it made you feel, before the session ended. Do you want to pick up where we left off?”

  “I do. Yeah. Because it was the closest I’d come to being caught in the whole two years that Eliot and I had been together. It was actually a pivotal moment for me.”

  “Okay. Good. So, if I remember correctly, there was a knock at your front door, correct?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you and Eliot had been playing videogames at that point?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay, why don’t you pick up from there. I’m interested to hear how you were able to maintain your ‘dual personality’—so to speak—in the presence of both Mitch and Eliot.”

  I glanced up at the clock and realized we only had thirty-four minutes left in our session. It never seemed like enough time to me.

  * * *

  —

  Eliot and I had been playing videogames for about an hour that night when there was suddenly a knock at the door.

  He paused the game and pulled his headset down off his ear to get a better listen. “Did the doorbell just ring?” he asked, looking surprised.

  Before I could answer, he was off the couch and jogging toward our bedroom—the opposite direction of the front door. I knew what he was doing. He was grabbing his off-duty weapon.

  “Be careful, babe,” I whispered nervously, cowering in the corner of the room. I watched as he peeked out the peephole, the gun resting by his right side.

  “Who is it?” he barked, attempting to make his voice lower to sound more masculine.

  “Hi, it’s Mitch, Tiffany’s friend—is she home?”

  My blood ran cold as Eliot whipped his head around, giving me a puzzled look. My eyes grew wide and I furiously shook my head back and forth.

  “Who?” Eliot asked again.

  “It’s Mitch, I’m an old friend of Tiffany’s and I’ve been trying to reach her for a while now, is she home?”

  “Bro, it’s midnight. Is there some kind of emergency or something?” Eliot asked before mouthing What the fuck? to me.

  “Well,” Mitch began, sounding calm and collected, “I guess you could say so, yeah. It’s somewhat of an emergency. She has something of mine and I’d like to have it back.”

  My heart raced as I shook with fear. It was over; despite my innate ability to get out of any situation, this one would be impossible. And to be honest I wasn’t sure who I was more frightened of, the psycho drug dealer on the other side of the door or my gun-toting boyfriend.

  Before Eliot could reply to Mitch, I ran toward the door. I held my hand up to calm Eliot and gently began speaking through the door.

  “Mitch, my phone has been off. I have your old yearbook, and I will meet with you tomorrow.”

  “Yearbook?” Mitch asked, sounding confused.

  Fuck.

  “Oh, I get it. I see what you’re doing. You are pretending to have something less valuable and less illegal of mine, so as to not tip off your deputy boyfriend. Ah, good idea. Okay, cool. Well, you just give me a call tomorrow, then, Tiffany, and you can bring my ‘yearbook’ to me. If for some reason I don’t hear from you, I’ll just come back, okay?” he said.

  It was a threat. I knew that, but I was desperate for him to leave.

  “Okay! Sounds good, bye!” I said quickly, walking past Eliot and heading toward the bedroom.

  I collapsed onto the bed and closed my eyes. When I was a kid, I used to think that when I squeezed my eyes shut, no one could see me. I wished now, more than anything, that that were true. I tried it anyway, just in case.

  “Um. You wanna tell me what the hell is going on?” Eliot’s voice boomed from the doorway.

  Shit, it didn’t work.

  “Honey, it’s complicated,” I said, trying to buy time.

  “Oh, is it? Okay, well, never mind, then. If it were easy to explain I’d tell you to go ahead and explain, but since it’s complicated—don’t even worry about it. I probably couldn’t keep up anyway,” he said.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Thank you. Yeah, it’s a lot and I’d rather not get into—”

  “You have five fucking seconds to tell me everything or you can get your shit and get the hell out,” he snapped.

  “Oh, so you were being sarcastic—”

  “One…two…”

  “Okay, Mitch is a drug dealer,” I said quickly. Like an
idiot.

  Before he could reply, I continued, “Mitch is a drug dealer and…the last time I relapsed, I…I took a bunch of money and drugs from him.”

  I watched his face fall and his arms go limp at his sides. He was still holding the gun, and a small part of me secretly wished he would just point it at me and pull the trigger.

  “I owe him a lot of money. I don’t know how he knows where I live, and honestly, I forgot all about it. I’m so sorry, babe,” I said, as tears started flowing from my eyes. Mostly because I knew that crying was like Kryptonite to him, but also because the sadness in his eyes made me want to die. He hadn’t asked for any of this, and it was clear he was beside himself with shock.

  “So, you’ve got a drug dealer knocking on my door at midnight, because you robbed him?”

  “Okay, no. See, technically I didn’t rob him. He gave me like, over seven thousand dollars’ worth of drugs and I never…um, returned them. The drugs. Never gave them back…to him. So. Technically not robbing,” I said.

  “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “Get….the fuck out of my house.”

  “Your house?”

  “You’re damn right my house. I bought it. I also bought all of the furniture, all of the food in the fridge, all of the plates you eat off of—everything. Every goddamn thing you touch in this house is mine, so I’ll say it again. Get the hell out, now.”

  He dropped his gun onto the nightstand and walked into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

  I sat there in stunned silence for a moment, staring at all the scattered pieces of my life.

  I had nowhere to go.

  Where the hell was I supposed to go?

  It was midnight.

  “Babe, please!” I cried out.

  Silence.

  “Eliot, I’m begging. Let me stay tonight. I’ll leave tomorrow. I don’t have anywhere to go, please. This all happened a long time ago. I have been doing so good….I didn’t know…”