A few weeks before my fifteenth birthday, I quit my ADHD medication to impress my older brother’s girlfriend.
“All I think,” Rose said over the scream of car speakers and through the haze of pot smoke, “is that it’s a little nuts we’re this okay with giving kids amphetamines.”
My brother snorted from the driver’s seat and continued guiding us along the unswerving country roads north of Indianapolis. The land was treeless and so flat that even the subtlest change in altitude looked dramatic. Rose took her bare feet from the dashboard and twisted to face him.
“Do you really not think it’s weird? I hate to sound all tinfoil hatty, but I’m just saying that if you want a docile, compliant population somehow okay with staring at Excel for eight hours a day, wouldn’t you like force feed them Adderall from a young age? And I’m not even saying that’s for sure what’s going on—I know some people need them or whatever. I’m just saying it all seems a little fishy to me.”
My brother chuckled in an if-you-say-so kind of way and handed her the joint. She inhaled and bloomed into perfect posture before exhaling and deflating into her usual slouch. She shot me a conspiratorial look. She offered me the joint. It swayed along with the mild bumps of the road, its glowing tip tracing little orange circles.
My brother clicked his tongue. “Jesus, Rose.” He believed his chief brotherly duty was to introduce me to great records, and he had allowed me to ride along on the condition that I stay sober, keep quiet, and listen—really listen—to his music selections. Rose pulled the joint back, and, from the back seat, I watched them hold a nonverbal argument. After some meaningful cocks of heads and a grunt or two, he nodded to her. It wasn’t a terribly enthusiastic nod, more capitulation than assent, and I got a little glimpse of what he would be like as a father: responsible, sensible, and more than a little resentful that he didn’t get to be the fun one.
Rose smiled and once again extended the joint. It was down to a little nub. I tried to grab it, but a sway from the road knocked its cherry into my fingers. Rose inhaled through her teeth, as if she had just stepped on a puppy’s paw.
“Sorry,” she said. “Here. Hold still.”
She unbuckled her seatbelt and twisted around. Propped up on her knees and pressing her chest to the headrest, she brought the joint to my lips.
“Okay. Now a deep breath.”
She sounded benevolent and motherly, and I obeyed. I breathed in as much as I could before expelling the smoke in a series of violent coughs. She smiled in a way that made me feel like a little kid. I was puzzled. I had thought I would feel like a man.
“Way to go, Professor.”
When we had first met, she had willfully confused my myopia, introversion, and general lack of athleticism for intelligence and began calling me The Professor. I would say she was a schmoozer, but, as far as I could tell, her flattery advanced no hidden agenda. She simply knew how others wanted to be seen and told little not-quite-lies to give them what they wanted. I gave her a thumbs up.
Rose handed the joint back to my brother, who took one last pull before cracking the window and flicking it out. Our smoky exhalations followed the roach into the slipstream.
“Alright, alright,” my brother said. “No more talking.”
Rose settled back into her seat while my brother cued up Pink Floyd’s “Echoes,” and we didn’t speak another word for the rest of the ride.
***
In the weeks following the car ride, I lived with a head full of cobwebs. Without Adderall, I felt dreamy and stupid. My teachers noticed and kept me after class, crouching beside my desk to meet my eyeline, their brows furrowed in concern. Their worry felt like disapproval, and I kept my troubles to myself. I could so well imagine their reactions—the things they’d say, the phone calls they’d make—that I didn’t feel the need to tell them. Their imagined disapproval only strengthened my resolve. I was beginning to think that if all the little faces that made up the great faceless Man were twisted in disapproval, then I must be headed in the right direction.
One of the few pleasures I took in those weeks was in the sound my pills made—that little tink—when I moved them from their bottle to a tin Yellow Submarine lunchbox my father had given me. I treasured the way they rattled around, how they soon spread to cover the bottom of the box. More than anything, though, I relished the idea of informing Rose I had quit the stuff. While I doodled in class, my mind a sieve for words, I imagined how her face would cycle through surprise and wonder and confusion until finally landing on respect.
***
My brother and Rose had met as twenty-two year old Freshman at Ivy Tech Community College. They understood each other’s disappointments. Both had grown up in Indianapolis, and both had split for the types of cities in which movies take place the moment they had graduated high school, and both felt their return to the city was more like a retreat than a homecoming. They typically stayed at Rose’s little apartment down in Broad Ripple, but they spent more time than you would think up in the suburbs at our parents’ house. Rose—with her crop tops and tattoos and nose rings and red eyes—unsettled my parents, but they allowed her to hang around—to even sleep over—in the hopes that the structure of their house would secure my brother’s tenuous stay at school. It seemed to help. While there, they studied more and drank less. Still, they would sometimes smuggle me out of the house, where their apartment rubbed off on me as our house rubbed off on them.
One afternoon, while watching Netflix at their apartment, I caught Rose staring at me. I wilted under her gaze. It was an analytical and impersonal look, steady and unembarrassed.
“Do you like your haircut?” she asked.
I shrugged. In truth, I had never really thought about it. Some months before, my mom had stopped pestering me to get it cut, and it now reached down to my shoulders. It was less that I had grown it out and more that I just hadn’t cut it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess not.”
“Let’s fix that.”
She left my brother to watch TV alone and brought me to the bathroom. She had me take off my shirt and kneel before the tub—an incongruously large clawfoot that dominated most of the room.
“Some tub, right?” Rose said over the rush of water. “I looked at a bunch of places before settling on this one—places with more square footage in better locations at cheaper prices—but I could not get this damn tub out of my mind. Shit seriously haunted me.”
After checking the temperature and flicking her hand dry, Rose had me put my head under the flow of warm water. She squeezed some shampoo into her palm and began massaging it into my scalp. It smelled like her. As her hands worked, her voice loosened. She was apparently one of those whose mind relaxes when their hands are occupied.
“Back in high school I used to cut all of my friends’ hair. It was like my thing or whatever. Everyone thought I’d end up going to cosmetology school, but of course that never panned out. I really liked doing it, though. It was fun, but there was also something comforting about it. Like, I didn’t have to just rely on my personality to keep these people around. I could always say, ‘Well, I may be fucked up and selfish and sad, but where else are you geeks gonna get free haircuts?’”
She laughed and paused her shampooing.
“I was going through some pictures of all of us, of my little gang of friends, and, honestly, I was shocked at how hacky a lot of my cuts were. I see what I was going for, but man did I fall short. Really, it’s no wonder no one else wanted to hang out with us. We all looked like absolute dweebs, like these homeschooled religious freaks.”
She laughed and got back to her shampooing.
“Don’t worry. I’ve gotten better since then.”
Rose rinsed out my hair and dried it with a bath towel. She wrapped the towel around my neck, led me from the bathroom, and sat me down on a barstool in the kitchen. The TV flickered away in the living room, my brother watching idly with a math textbook in his lap. Rose flitted off and returned with a traveling case of barber’s tools and a glass pipe freshly packed with weed. She took a hit and studied me. With one hand on her cocked hip and the other holding the smoldering bowl, she appraised me. It was that same impersonal look, but now I knew it was the look of someone searching for the potential within me. I liked it.
Rose frowned. She tousled my hair and squinted.
“Don’t you usually comb your hair to the right?
I nodded, and her frown deepened. She consulted her barber’s bag and selected a comb. She combed my hair left then right and back again.
“I think your natural part is to the left.” She flipped my hair back and forth one last time. “Definitely. It’s definitely to the left.”
***
When the copies of our Christmas cards arrived, my mother called me and my father over to inspect them.
“Don’t they seem just a little empty?” she said, presenting the image to us.
I saw what she meant. Rose’s absence from the card looked mean, like a deliberate exclusion. My father grunted; he saw it too. They had both forgotten the worry Rose’s dress and demeanor had initially caused them. My mother, the same woman who had a few years prior thought the proliferation of yoga pants prefigured the fall of western civilization, had just that day complimented Rose on the bandeau under her overalls. For many years, my father had relished the alone time being the only Colts fan in the house had afforded him; now, though, he seemed lonely if Rose wasn’t there, sitting cross-legged on the couch in the Andrew Luck jersey she had cropped at the belly button, shouting profanities at the screen.
My mother put one of the cards back in the box. The four of us looked incomplete. My mother clutched at her collar.
“I wonder if she’s in anyone’s card.”
I wasn’t sure. I had never heard Rose talk with any specificity about her family. Up until that moment, I had never found it odd. Now, her silence was all I needed to hear, and I suspect my parents felt the same. It seemed that we all then assumed that things had been rough for her, that her silence covered a wound that threatened to reopen at the slightest provocation.
Her willingness to latch on to us so quickly and completely felt like evidence there was no other option. I thought of her scrappy, second-hand clothes, and the way that loud, sudden noises left her spooked and cagey. I began to think that she shined so brightly because she was accustomed to pushing against something dark.
“We’ll have to ask her next time she’s over,” my father said. “And get a fourth Santa hat.”
***
Even after my father looked into the camera and declared a certain image, “The one,” Rose kept the Santa hat on. Partly it was a joke, but she did seem to genuinely enjoy the air of festivity the hat put out. My parents started work on dinner, and I caught Rose in an idle moment. I told her I had something to show her. She smiled and followed me to my room.
I stood on my desk chair and reached up to the bookshelf, where the Yellow Submarine lunchbox waited. It had a pleasing weight to it now. I had begun pouring the entire bottle into it when I received it, and I had just added a fresh bottle. I climbed down with the lunchbox.
“What’s this?”
I shook the lunchbox and several months of pills rattled around. She perked up at the sound. I now realize that she must’ve recognized the noise, that a part of her mind was specially tuned to the peculiar frequency of pills rattling around in a box. I set the box lid-side up on my desk and invited her to open it. She checked the door before unlatching the lid.
“Holy shit.”
She snapped the lid closed, as if some wretched, poisonous, and patient creature would soon crawl out and nestle itself into some hiding place. I smiled at her. Her Santa hat, perched above her widened eyes, looked a little ridiculous.
“That’s a lot of pills,” she said.
I nodded, proud in the manner of someone who had stuck to a diet.
“You should really keep this hidden.”
I nodded in agreement, but I didn’t want to. I liked having my shadowy accomplishment out in the open, where my parents and brother and anyone who came into my room could see it. There was even a part of me that wanted my parents to find it, to see what I was capable of, what I could do in the dark.
My father called out that dinner was ready, and Rose looked relieved.
***
Through some fraternal law of karmic balance, the grade points I had lost that year were awarded to my brother. He, for the first time, had made straight A’s. Rose, too, had done well, and the house buzzed with their success.
The good news changed the texture of their relationship. Our musical-education car rides continued, but they no longer smoked during them. Instead of cop-clear country roads, we drove around different neighborhoods in Indianapolis, my brother at the wheel with Rose in the passenger seat, flicking through Zillow, figuring mortgage payments and student loans against their expected incomes. I listened to their plans from the back seat. With their fingers interlaced on the gear shift, they looked cozy and self-sufficient—complete. The sight of such unity made me feel alone, but it was a good kind of alone. It was a strain of loneliness that comes not just from the absence of love, but also from the firm belief in its possibility.
When they finally decided to celebrate their good fortune, it seemed out of step with the people they were becoming. They planned a road trip that would end in Manchester, Tennessee, just in time for Bonnaroo. Among the travel plans was a short, excited exchange between my brother and father, in which my father happily loaned him money for a ring.
When they returned, Rose’s finger already had a tan line when she took the ring off to show it to my mother.
***
When I climbed up on my chair to pour my thirteenth month of Adderall into the lunchbox, I plucked it up with a jerky motion; muscle memory told me it should have been heavier. Though I didn’t need to, I opened it. It was empty. A little dreamily, I put the box back on the shelf and lowered myself into my chair. Before I even fully understood what had happened, I was already making excuses for her. I wasn’t using them, anyway, I thought. It was a victimless crime—why shouldn’t she take them? Even in my thoughts, I did not think that Rose had stolen the pills; she had merely taken them.
When Rose and my brother came over for Sunday dinner, she had a shiny new iPhone and a tattoo that was still healing. My parents asked how she had afforded it, and my brother explained that a relation of hers, a professor, had recently passed and left her a small chunk of cash. I tried to investigate her eyes, to find the gleam of a shared secret, but there was nothing there. Her look was as pure and unhiding as it had ever been. After dinner, I sat in my room while everyone else went to watch TV. I eyed the lunchbox. I knew that I had a fraternal responsibility to tell my brother about it, and I thought it was only fair to let Rose explain herself before I told him. I texted her, asking her to come to my room.
Footsteps pattered down the hallway, and Rose opened the door. I felt small in my desk chair. She leaned against the doorway, smiling.
“Office hours with the Professor,” she said, as if it was some rare, exquisite privilege, and I knew that I couldn’t bear to ask her. I wanted her to like me. I wanted her to stay in my life. I wanted to keep feeling the way she made me feel. The fact that she seemed to like me was one of the few retorts I had to the sense of worthlessness that had plagued me since puberty. Her very eye-contact was validating. Who knows what else I would have let her get away with. I kept my mouth shut, and that spring I let my brother enter a marriage with an unapologetic thief. I disturbed myself with how little guilt I felt about it. If anything, I occasionally felt a little trill of joy at being in conspiracy with her.
Maybe he wouldn’t have married her had he known. Maybe she would’ve been humbled if I had exposed her. Who knows. What is not hypothetical are the seven years they had together, the years before her infidelities broke apart their union. Even as my brother sleeps on my couch, putting his life back together from the ground up, touring the studio apartments dotting this city, I stand by my decision. They had a good run. What else would he have done with those years? What else is there to do in life besides love and break up and regroup? Besides, there was real joy. Does divorce negate seven years of family vacations? Seven years of inside jokes piling on top of each other and compounding into a private language? Seven years of love, seven years of laughter, seven years of Rose? I don’t think so.
I can’t remember if I said anything, back on that Sunday. I may have just stared at her.
“May I be excused?” she asked.
Of course, Rose. Of course you may be excused.
