Badger

Chapter 8

Chapter 8I didn’t f**k it up.

Before my interview, I went over Badger’s writing on my cast with Wite-Out, missing it when it disappeared beneath the second coat. The only real evidence I had that he existed, that we’d spoken . . . Still, I liked knowing it was there, undercover. It felt secret and intimate, like a tattoo no one knew about.

When the time came on Tuesday afternoon, I was charming and smart-sounding, and not only did I seem to impress the guy who interviewed me at the museum, Carol DeWitt popped in halfway through and made me seem even more interesting and competent. I told them up front about the scuff on my record and was given the impression they didn’t have any major misgivings, but of course that was for Human Resources to decide. I left in good spirits, confident I’d be offered a second interview.

But I wasn’t.

I was offered a job.

A job with health benefits and vacation days, with a real title and business cards and a starting salary of forty-two thousand, with a raise likely after six months!

I went back to the museum on Thursday and filled out HR forms and took a pee test without fear. Proudly, even. I received two calls inviting me to interview at other places, jobs I’d applied for knowing I’d only ever take them if I was truly desperate. I phoned both back to politely decline, dancing as I spoke.

I’d be starting at the museum in just under three weeks. I might have to beg my landlord for an extension on my rent, depending on when my first paycheck came through, but I could let him know ahead of time, forward him my job offer e-mail as assurance. He was a flexible guy, and he told me all the time I was his tidiest tenant.

I floated for the rest of the week. While I waited for the HR packet I was going to receive, outlining the museum’s policies and benefits, I actively transformed into the New Me. I went window shopping, even bought a couple items on my credit card to bolster my meager business-casual wardrobe. I wore them around the house, the way I used to dress up in my new fall school clothes in August, sweltering but excited by What Was to Come. I called and e-mailed the few people I hadn’t burned bridges with, to share the good news. I told my NA group on Thursday, beaming. I bought a business card case, for crying out loud.

The following Friday in the late afternoon, I was walking down State Street, meandering from Quincy Market toward the stores near the Common, on a mission for a blazer. My phone buzzed at my hip, and I slid it from my pocket. I knew it was from the museum by the middle digits.

“Adrian Birch,” I said brightly.

“Hello, Miss Birch. This is Teresa Shaw.” I’d met Teresa briefly — she worked in the HR department. She’d brought me a cup of coffee while I’d been filling out forms. Someday we might share a hearty laugh at the museum Christmas party.

“Hi, Teresa. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I’m afraid I’m calling you with some bad news.”

I stopped walking to lean against a bike rack. Bad news, like I’d messed up a form and had to resubmit it? Like they’d told me the wrong salary? Like I couldn’t start when I’d thought?

“Okay.”

“I’m afraid your d**g test came up positive.”

Silence from my head, from my mouth. Heaviness in my body, like gravity was sucking my heart into my toes. Finally, “What?”

“Your d**g test came up positive. I’m awfully sorry, but our policy is very strict on matters like this.”

“Positive for what?”

“I’m not privy to that information, only the results.”

“I don’t understand. I don’t use any drugs. I used to—” Shut up shut up shut up! “I don’t understand,” I repeated, numb. Everyone at NA had assured me ten months clean was enough. Everyone. Definitely enough to pass a piss test, plenty even for a hair follicle test, and I’d only had the former. “Can I take another one? It has to be a mistake.”

“You can talk to the head of HR, but I won’t lie — they’re likely to be really hard-line on this, especially in light of your criminal record. But I’m happy to give you the number.”

Yeah, f*****g thanks. I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone until Monday. Not with only a few minutes before close-of-business to calm myself enough to be able to communicate. I took the number down and said thanks, my voice eerily, creepily cheerful, though I supposed that beat crying, as professionalism went.

The call had come at ten to five on Friday, and I knew, I just f*****g knew she’d been putting it off. How many days had they made me waste, still believing everything was going to be okay? Letting me think it was cool to go shopping? To get my hopes up? To let myself feel so good and so f*****g worthy, for the first time in years?

Heaving hijacked my chest, the start of hyperventilation. I moved to sit on the edge of a concrete construction barrier, forcing slow, shallow inhalations. The world grew faint, a movie watched through a pinhole, flat and tiny, monotone. Tourists passed, following a guy dressed as Paul Revere. Cars honked. Pigeons ticked by on their clockwork legs. There was a whir, a click, a squeak, and a pair of orange sneakers stopped before me.

I looked up, and Badger was as fuzzy and far off as everything else, faded like a photocopy. He stared at my face like he was reading a newspaper headline, interested but separate. After a few moments, he wheeled his bike around and leaned it against the wall behind the barrier, and he sat next to me.

“Hiii, Adrian.”

I said “Hi” back, but it was warped by a hiccup, swallowed in a dry sob.

“You look like shit.”

I laughed, then another sob, but the world was coming back into focus, more saturated and in stereo. “Thanks. What are you doing here?”

“Friday rush hour in the Financial District? All-you-can-shoot asshole buffet. What are you doing here? Crying your eyes out?”

“About to,” I admitted.

“How come?”

“I got a job offer, a really great one.” My voice broke, and the tears began rolling. “Then I just got a call that I f*****g lost it, because I failed my d**g test.”

“You relapse?”

“No. I don’t know what happened. I might as well relapse now, if I stay clean for ten months and it still doesn’t matter. f**k!” I pounded the concrete at my side, the most publically enraged I’ve ever been, sober. So. f*****g. Sober. Maybe I could keep pounding it until I broke my other wrist, keep pounding until I had a prescription tucked in my purse.

A silver sedan pulled up in a line of cars at the red light, and the window lowered. A young guy yelled, “The Badger! You f*****g rock, man!”

Badger gave him the finger. “Suck me.”

“Jeez, f**k you too, you dick.”

His former admirer disappeared as the light turned green, and Badger spoke quietly to me. “How close are you really, to a relapse?”

“I dunno. What have you got?”

“Something better than pills, if you want it.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but his offer gave me direction — momentum, if only in following him, in getting away from the ugly place I’d led myself to.

“Get on.” He stood and wheeled his bike around, patting the bars and holding the frame still.

I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I didn’t hesitate, except maybe that doing something stupid and scary and dangerous couldn’t possibly make me feel worse than sitting on that Jersey barrier, successful people with briefcases and job titles streaming by. I shimmied my butt onto the middle of his handlebars, and in a breath we were moving.

I wobbled and clung to the tops of his drop bars for dear life. He pedaled standing to see over my shoulder. I swore a lot. People yelled at us, cheerful stuff from Badger’s fans, plus a few threats to call the cops. I found my balance as we entered the Common, squeaked and yelped as he dodged people and dogs, shrieked as we popped out on Beacon Street and banged a sharp right at Charles, heading for the bridge.

Over the river, past the spot where we first spoke, where he’d shot me. Through Kendall and over to Mass Ave. My purse flapped in the wind, bumping his arm.

In Central Square we passed a teenage thug-wannabe who dropped a candy bar wrapper. Before it even fluttered to the ground, Badger shot him in the a*s, white shittiness all over the embellished back pocket of his pristine oversized jeans. His cussing faded behind us.

I wondered who people thought I was. Badger’s sidekick, his girlfriend? His figurehead? His k********g victim, perhaps, face surely white with terror from the ride, streaked with tears. I heard distant sirens, but either they weren’t meant for us or we got away, and before long they, too, faded to nothing, along with the bustle of Harvard Square, then Porter, then Davis.

We rode for a long time, and somewhere past Alewife Station I lost track of where we might be. We rode until the streets turned suburban and the streetlights blinked on, and the houses grew farther apart. Until my bony butt felt bruised, my knuckles cold and stiff, my wrist wailing. We slowed and cruised through a vast park as the sun was officially dying for the day, and I had no clue where we were. Lexington? Farther? We glided along a paved walkway beside a river, a path winding through a stretch of woods.

Badger slowed us to a stop. I hopped from the handlebars onto rickety legs, extremities dead from the cold and the fearful clenching. He wheeled his bike down to the river’s edge beside an old stone bridge straight out of a fairytale. I followed.

There was no troll underneath, just a cobblestone ledge with tufts of dry fall grass in the cracks. Just privacy and coolness and the echoing white noise of the river.

Badger laid his bike in the shadows then took a seat himself, his back against the wall. I sat beside him.

I was jacked on more adrenaline than I could ever remember feeling. My face was icy from the wind, tears streaking hot trails down my cheeks.

We were quiet for a long time, as my panic dried up and my breathing deepened. The urgency of my misery receded, swept away in the current, bound for the next town.

“Where are we?” My question was magnified by the stone and water and the growing darkness.

“Winchester, maybe. I’m not really sure.”

“You come here a lot?”

“Not a lot. Just sometimes. Is it doing anything for you?”

It felt how I imagined one of those sensory-deprivation pods might. You can’t escape your own thoughts, but you feel sort of okay about it. Your head feels manageable. “Yeah, I think it’s helping. Thank you.”

“You want me to hold you or something?” Badger asked.

“Um, I dunno. Maybe.”

He spread his legs wide, inviting me to sit between them. I did, liking the feel of his chest behind my back, his arms as they wrapped around mine. I was pinned, but it felt nice. Badger was a straitjacket, filling me with a beautiful sense of containment and surrender. I leaned my head against his shoulder and breathed out, out, out. He smelled faintly of cigarettes, but mostly just of himself — his clothes and skin and hair, human and vital. I hadn’t been close to a man this way in ages, and I’d forgotten how personal that was, breathing someone in.

My butt wasn’t far from his crotch, my boobs within easy groping distance, but I didn’t worry he was taking me there. I felt more like a wounded animal he’d picked up and deigned to soothe. Plus, frankly, I wouldn’t have minded him trying to get s****l with me.

“You still want to relapse?” he asked, that growly voice just behind my ear.

“I don’t want to want to, but yeah, I feel itchy for it. If I had anything at home, I’d probably use . . . But since I don’t, and don’t know where to get any, and I’m too sober and chickenshit to go out looking, I won’t.”

“That’s something.”

After a couple minutes, I melted against him. Not gooey, not romantic . . . just the softening of two bodies where heat sealed them together.

I cleared my sticky throat. “Does it seem weird to you, that you found me right when I needed somebody to?”

“I dunno. Maybe. But other times . . .” He trailed off.

“What?”

“That night you had your addicts’ meeting, I found you by mistake then, too. When I see you, I get this weird tug inside me, this pressure. Almost like I need to take a piss—”

I laughed. “Oh, great.”

“Just this funny feeling, like this hook in my guts is dragging me toward something. Only I don’t know it’s you until . . . there you are.”

“I get that, too. Like a magnet.”

“I don’t know why, but I feel calm around you. And I don’t feel that much.”

“I have been called a downer before,” I joked.

Badger gave me a squeeze.

“I find you kind of exciting,” I told him. “Normally I hate that — feeling anything intense.”

“Maybe we’re twins. Except I got all the speedy genes, and you got the downer genes.”

“I already have a twin. I’m pretty sure my mom would’ve told me if there’d been a third person in there.”

I thought about my family, of having to tell them my awesome job was gone — pissed away with a positive result for who-knew-what. Shame stabbed me in the middle, with a chaser of injustice, because goddamn it, I was clean. Those two other interviews I could have had, dismissed with such cocky triumph . . . I still had the job offer, on paper. At least I could use that to get a couple weeks’ extension on my rent. But I could be right back in this position a month from now. Easily. And I needed groceries, means to pay my bills . . .

I was crying again, and Badger shifted behind me as a ragged sob set my shoulders trembling.

“What’s up? Why’re you leaking this time?”

“I need money.”

“Don’t we all.”

“I need seven-fifty for rent, twelve hundred for my medical bills, another thousand I owe my sister’s fiancé.” I groaned. “What the f**k have I done to my life?”

“Better to f**k up your own life than someone else’s.”

For a long time we said nothing, and the tears and the rushing water washed my panic away. The air felt cool on my ankles, but Badger’s body was warm and reassuring. I listened to his breathing, feeling his exhalations against my neck. I could die here, I thought. In the nicest sense. I could’ve died here, and it would’ve been the best I’d felt in ages. Not high and euphoric like when I got offered that job, but a true, simple, sober easiness, even sitting amid the refuse of my reality. A contentedness in simply being.

Maybe by osmosis, I could absorb some of Badger’s ballsiness. I didn’t know if he liked movies, but if we ever went to a theater, he sure as hell wouldn’t hesitate to stand and tell the annoying, gossipy girls behind us to shut the f**k up already. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even manage an over-the-shoulder glare, a shhhh. But I’d like to, someday. I’d love to tell someone to shut the f**k up instead of just marinating in mute, seething resentment.

I heard him lick his lips. “Your hair smells good.” It wasn’t a flirtation, merely a remark.

“Thanks.”

“Smells like . . . pink.”

I smiled at that. “I think it’s supposed to be strawberry-kiwi.”

I wished . . . Oh crap, I wished for lots of things, none of them bright ideas. I wished he’d kiss my ear. His mouth was so close, he could. He just could. But in the end, what good would it do? It wouldn’t bring back my job offer or pay my rent. It wouldn’t fix anything. It’d be another distraction, giving me permission to throw my hands up and shout “f**k it!” at my problems until the thrill wore off and I woke to find things even worse than I’d left them.

I sighed. “I feel like such a loser.”

“Why?”

“Because of how badly I messed my life up. And it’s not like I had the hardest life.”

“That’s what drugs do. It’s nothing personal.”

“Oh?”

“Drugs are like fire. If you’re dry, or if maybe there’s already gasoline on you, and you end up in the path . . .” I felt him shrug, the gesture squeezing me tighter. “You just go up. Sometimes you or somebody else manages to put you out, and you stay out of the path. But some people, because of their circumstances and their aptitude, they just burn. And if you burned once, you want to burn again — you’re primed for it.”

“Huh.”

“Some people won’t catch, no matter how close they stand. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is. You just burn, cupcake. Sorry.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“You’re not a loser. You just need to maybe get better at running when you smell the smoke.”

“It still sucks.” I gave a gross, wet sniffle, but Badger just held the cuff of his sleeve in front of my face. I laughed and took the invitation, dabbing my nose on it. “Thanks.”

After a minute’s silent tear-oozing, I asked, “Were you ever an addict?”

“Long time ago. Now I just dig conflict.”

I nodded, bumping his cheek with my head. “Sorry.”

I felt something against my hair — maybe a kiss, or maybe nothing at all. A wishful thought. “Don’t worry about it,” he murmured.

“What do you want to do with your life?”

“I’m already doing it.”

“Well, what do you think people should do with their own lives? How do you know you’re doing what you’re supposed to?”

After a pause, he said, “I know ’cause it’s what I’m good at. You do what you’re good at, and what you enjoy. Do that for as long as you can, then find something else, or die.”

“What I’m good at doesn’t pay very well.”

“How long’d you spend doing it?”

I thought about it, realizing I’d never really done much illustration outside of college, just the odd burst, and never with the intent to make a serious go at selling anything. “Not very long.”

“Then what the f**k do you know about it?” There was no judgment in his question.

“You’re probably right.”

“f*****g right, I’m right.”

“But anyhow, it’s not a field known for being lucrative.”

“Well, you’d be a retard to know what you love doing, and what you’re good at, and not do it. That’s how you wake up as a stockbroker or a realtor or an alcoholic house-wife.”

Depressing as his wisdom was, it cheered me. Did I really want to write copy for other people’s art exhibits, at the end of the day? Maybe. Maybe for a while, until the time came for someone to do the same for my work . . . But not really. I just wanted to be somebody, labeled by what I was contributing, not what I was recovering from.

After ten minutes, Badger broke our silence. “You live in JP, you said?”

“Yeah.”

“Want a ride back there?”

I shifted from cheek to cheek, a*s still sore from the first half of our commute. My butt said, Let’s find a commuter rail station, but you know my mouth’s answer. “Yeah, okay. Can we go slower, since it’s dark out?”

“As long as the cops don’t spot us, sure. Slow as you want.”

We made it to our feet, and Badger wheeled his bike up the embankment, me at his heels. The world beyond the bridge was still and quiet. It couldn’t have been later than eight, but it felt like three in the morning. It felt like something must have come and wiped everybody out, just him and me left, nobody I owed money to. Nobody to disappoint. Then there was a curt honk — someone locking their car, somewhere in the distance. The human race went on. I went on, for better or for worse.

Badger rode us back, slow and quiet, nothing like the trip out. It was still scary, because he had no lights and there were plenty of cars on the roads, but more anonymous. Plus, I knew where he was taking me. As we passed through Arlington, my butt and wrist piped up to say I should ask to just be left at the T, to make the rest of the journey the safe, comfortable, familiar way. But the rest of me vetoed the idea.

We rode through Cambridge on the back streets, took Memorial Drive across the river and slipped through the alleys and parking lots of the Fenway. I wondered if Badger would come up to my apartment if I invited him.

I wondered if I might make us a pot of tea, and maybe we’d wind up on my bed, since there’s no couch, and maybe we’d kiss. We could roll around on my covers, and I could feel him above me. I could inspire something better than pity in him — affection or l**t. Maybe we could feel that ultimate magnet-snap, the sharpest of tugs in our middles if we f****d. Or maybe that would wreck it all. Maybe s*x would depolarize us, and that’d be the last I ever saw of him, the last I thought of him. No more pull, no more hook-in-the-guts.

We made it to JP without incident, not a single pause for vengeance or even a word spoken until I told him which streets to take. We glided into the laundromat’s parking lot, and I nearly collapsed when my soles hit the ground, my calves numb with pooled blood.

“Thank you,” I said. Badger straddled his crossbar, and I touched his arm. “Thanks for taking me out there, and for bringing me home. And for caring, if that’s what it was.”

He shrugged. “Glad you didn’t jump, this time.”

“Me, too.”

“And you’re not gonna jump, when you go inside?”

I shook my head. “All I’ve got up there is Nyquil. And now I’m too tired to want even that.”

“Good.”

I chewed my lip, glancing up at the dark window of my bedroom. “Are you hungry? Do you want to come in for something to eat?”

He smiled, and it told me everything I needed to know. He knew what I meant, what I really wanted, but he didn’t want the same thing. “Nah. My shift’s not done yet.”

I nodded, working hard to hold the tears inside. “Keep Boston safe.”

“f**k that.”

“Keep Boston’s assholes nervous, then.”

“Will do.”

I took a deep breath, then jumped as a motorcycle blasted to life at an intersection. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Maybe. This town’s got a lot of bridges.”

I nodded, lips opening and closing, so ready to say something but not knowing what it might be. Finally, Badger spoke for me.

“Go inside, dummy.”

I smiled like a dope and gave him a final wave as I headed to the side entrance and unlocked the door. I grabbed my mail and trudged up the steps, entered my kitchen and flipped on the light. I crossed to the bedroom and knelt on the mattress, twisting my blinds open. Badger was still standing there astride his bike. Our eyes locked. I yanked the cord and hoisted the blinds. For a minute we just stared at each other, faces blank, my heart tight and achy. Finally he looked to the road, looked back at me, put a foot to a pedal, and rode away.