TED

IT WAS ALMOST NINE O’CLOCK when Annie finally made it to Zoe’s apartment in the city. She explained to Zoe, who had come downstairs to meet her in the rain, that this is why she never drove outside the suburbs. That even without this disgusting weather and the dark, she always gets turned around in the city and it’s never her fault.  Zoe said, “You get turned around everywhere,” and reminded Annie that she had never driven to this apartment before.  Annie squealed, started to pull Zoe into one of her suffocating hugs, changed her mind, and rushed back to her BMW to grab her bags before locking the car. Zoe tugged at her boxer briefs, crossed her arms around the big t-shirt that swallowed her small body, peered around the corner, and waited. Annie locked her car, three times until it sounded, and started on about how they should install elevators in these types of buildings, at least then the cost of rent would be worth it. As the two walked up the stairs, Zoe took the heavy bags from Annie and asked how it happened that she was finally able to make it back to see her after weeks of waiting for a returned text or call. Annie said she broke her phone again and that it just so happened she’d finally been able to get a place by herself, “it’s in a trailer park in Jersey, but not one of those,” she said. Apparently it was pretty nice, with a couch, a TV, even a small kitchen, and her neighbors were a bunch of really elderly couples, “one of them is a couple of lesbians,” she giggled. 

Twenty minutes later the rain had stopped and they were going through their first pack of cigarettes on the fire escape, sitting with bath towels underneath them, talking in a manner usually limited to age-old friends. The two twenty-one year olds had a peculiar bond between them because they had been roommates, not in college or in a regular old apartment, but in rehab for two months and then at a women's only sober-living facility called “Wonder” for a year and a half. They had an even stronger bond between them because both of them had been kicked out and at some point or another and both of them were homeless after. Zoe had gotten the boot after meeting up with a girl, one that had been kicked out a while back after they’d been caught together. One that she knew was shooting meth again. She’d joined her in a rank hotel all the way in Greenwich Village until they ran out of money and speed. Soon enough she found herself alone and withdrawing on a bench in Bryant Park. Annie had been kicked out the same year,  just two weeks before. She also met up with a girl to get high and then she disappeared, for the first time, before going to different rehabs for almost two years in Arizona.  

“It was a shithole,” Annie had been saying. She ashed her cigarette over the railing, stretched her legs, and groaned, standing up. “Yeah, in BFE Arizona. Somewhere in Tucson. There’s nothing in Tucson but dirt. Dirt and drugs”. She cracked her back.

“Isn’t it just one big desert?” Zoe asked, following Annie’s falling cigarette ash with her eyes until it melted into the wet pavement below. Annie nodded vigilantly and laughed a great big laugh. Sitting back down she nudged Zoe’s legs over to make room. Zoe was a good bit smaller than Annie. She was a good bit smaller than most people, but she knew how to take up as much space as a man does on public transit.  

“How much clean time do you have now?” Zoe asked. 

“Almost six months. We’re out.” Annie said, crumpling the pack of Reds in her freckled fist and throwing it over the railing.

“Jesus Annie, don’t litter,” Zoe stretched her upper body inside through the open window, grabbed another pack off the kitchen counter, and wiggled herself back into her seat. “Six months huh? That’s amazing.” 

Annie huffed, “Amazing,” She scoffed. “Don’t you have three years?”

“Not yet,” Zoe said. “So,” she leaned forward, blowing smoke in her friend's face, “What happened in Arizona?” She got that crazy look in her eyes that she always got when she was about to hear a war story, and Annie, out of habit, responded with a grin that grew to her ears. 

After taking a nice long drag from her cigarette and letting the smoke leave through her nose Annie started. “One night, you know, after I left Wonder, I regained consciousness or whatever, in my car, on the edge of this road in the woods, and I called my mom. I was freaking out, you know, my car was out of gas and there was this crazy dent in the passenger side and I had no idea how it got there.” She threw her head back and roared. “No but it was actually fucking tragic… I was so high. So high I almost had a heart attack right there. I was like ‘I’m having really bad anxiety, can you hurry up, like I really, I think I need something, can you give me something? I’m freaking out,’ and she was like ‘are you ok?’ and I was not ok–”

“The come down is always a new level of hell. Even when I was doing too much and losing my mind, the comedown was worse.”

“Exactly. Anyways, my mom, she ships me off to rehab in BFE Arizona because where am I gonna go there?”

“BFE?” 

“Bum Fuck to Egypt. And I was supposed to just go for thirty days… and that’s the funniest part of it.”

Zoe cackled. When she cackled you knew something was actually funny because she hated her laugh. “You were supposed to be there for thirty days–” 

“It’s so funny Zo. I mean this place was crazy. Every woman in there had like prison tattoos and wooden teeth and shit. I'm serious! And then, afterwards, after my thirty days they sent me off to this place is Prescott, in Northern Arizona,”

“Right.”

“I had this little quirk about me when I was there. I would do really well for about six months and then I’d be like, you know what, fuck this I’m gonna go get high”

“Naturally.”

“And so, I had this friend, and her and I, we’d run away together a few other times–”

“Oh Christ.”

“I know. So we decided one day we were gonna get the hell out of there–gimme the lighter–and we left the next day without any of our shit.” Annie threw back her head and roared again. “Where’s the cat? Don’t you have a cat?”

“No.”

“Anyways so we're out in the middle of this scarce little shithole town in shithole Arizona, and we’re sitting in front of this grocery store parking lot, and the women who run the rehab are there tryna get us to get in the van but we’re wasted already, so we’re not having it and they can’t force us. So they left. My friend, see she had it in her mind we were gonna make it to Phoenix, which was like two hours away. We did not have a penny. We did not have a phone–”

Zoe cackled again, kicking her feet and slapping her thighs. 

“We knew no one,” Annie continued with a proud smile, “but we begin to roam the streets, and I’m nowhere near as inebriated as I want to be, and we walk and we walk and we walk all night long. At some point a car pulls up next to us,”

Zoe got up and stretched her legs, “I’m listening, do you want water?”

“No, so listen, this guy rolls down his window, this Walter White, looking guy with the mustache and the glasses and everything–”

“Was he bald?” Zoe yelled from inside.

“No. That would have been crazy. So he rolls down his window and is like: I’ve circle the blocks like several times and y’all are still here. Do y’all know you’re standin’ on hoe corner? Anyways he offers us a ride, and we get in the car because you know, we’re stranded and the only thing we have to our name is my purse that has lots of MA literature, and a handle of vodka, and we need a fix like real bad.”

“Christ,” Zoe said again, crawling back next to Annie through the open window. Annie snatched the glass of water from her hand, took a gulp, and handed it back.

“I know. So me and my friend, Emerald, swear to God that was her name–”

“Christ.”

“I know. So me and Emerald, we’re sitting in this man’s car, Ted, his name was Ted–”

“Of course it was.”

“I know. I thought he kind of had this sense about him, I wasn’t quite sure what his deal was, but to me he was like semi-attractive. So we tell him our story and he’s like: Okay, so what drugs do y’all do? And I'm like, meth! And so this man, he pulls out a meth pipe. And I’m like oh my God, there is a God, this is God. And so I’m sitting back there getting blatantly high in the back of this mans fucking 2001 Honda Accord and like, alright, I’m rockin’ with Ted”.

Zoe sat there, leaning in, soaking up every detail. In reality she was jealous. She knew that was insane and she was jealous anyway. Jealous of the high. Jealous of the thrill. 

“So he gets us a room at the LaQuinta and we’re laying in this bed, and he just keeps pullin’ out more and more dope and I’m cutting lines, and he’s like: you snort your shit? And I’m like yeah–”

“Well it is really, I don’t know–” Zoe started.

“Rock-ish?”

“Right, and it hurts to snort–”

“Yeah well I personally, I love it. Anyway, I’m using his drivers license and all to cut lines, and I take a gander at this thing, you know because of my curious nature and all, and see his full name- Anthony Theodore Gonzalez, and I’m like okay… I look at what year he was born, and his date of birth is ninet–wait, guess.”

“I don’t wanna kno–”

“Nineteen forty-nine!”

The two girls burst into laughter, keeling over and kicking each other. Nearly falling over the fire escape Zoe banged her cigarette hand on the rail, dropping the cigarette over the side. 

“God,” she said, rubbing her wrist. “How old is that… seventy-eight?”

“Seventy-four,” 

“And you’re turning tricks with him?”
“Yes!”

“No!”

“Yes, and–”

“See,” Zoe pulled another cigarette out of the pack of reds, lit it, took a drag, and said, “There’s a lot of shit I’d do for a fix.” She let out the smoke, “A man is not one of them.”

  Annie stood up. Struggling through the open window, she landed lopsided back in the apartment. Zoe stuffed the lighter into the pack of reds and the pack into the waistband of her briefs, and followed Annie inside. With all the force she could muster in her frail little arms, she pulled the old window shut behind her. 

“This place is actually really nice,” Annie said, looking around her.

“Thanks,” Zoe said, dusting off her hands. She was actually proud of her apartment. It was her first time living in her own place, paid for by having a consistent job with a consistent salary that wasn’t spent on getting high.

“So I asked Ted if this was a fake ID, you know because I was absolutely fucking mortified,”

“Right.”

“And he was all like: why would I have a fake ID? And I’m like I don’t know, it seems like you might would” 

Zoe giggled. 

“But I had nowhere else to go. By this point we really weren’t sure if he had a job. He’d told us a lot about his life; he has twin sons that were both in prison and he had like six or seven grand-children too. And he kind of put together that us and his grand-children were in the same age range. Anyways, one day he actually goes to work. He leaves me and Emerald alone in this LaQuinta with no phone, there’s hardly running water, the walls are covered in graffiti, there’s not a TV, there’s nothing, but we’ve got meth and blues. And we’re there waiting for him for a lump sum of days and I’m sitting on the bed smoking cigarettes, there’s ash all over the floor, and I’m thinking to myself, oh my God, this man may never come back.”

“Did he?”

“No. And one day I come out of the bathroom and Emerald is like foaming at the mouth, she’s obviously ODd, and I didn’t have narcan in my bag this time so I run out of the room and find somebody with a phone and the next thing I know we’re in the ER and I’m calling my mom.”

“Poor Donna.”

“I know.”

“She’d told me, you know, that you were missing.”

“I know. She said to me on multiple occasions: Zo is the only one that asked about you!” 

For the first time that night Zoe noticed a glimpse of remorse in Annie’s freckled face. Annie was one of the only girls that she kept in touch with from sober-living. One of the only people her age that she talked to who knew the pain of addiction and the struggle of sobriety, but she could never expect her to be very serious when it came to how she really felt. 

“How are you getting along with her these days, anyway?” She asked.

“We’re actually really good!”

“Don’t be funny,” Zoe said on the way to the couch.

“I’m serious! We’re getting along, and you know Eddie is in rehab now. His girlfriend is living with Mom.”

 Donna Crawford was a devoted mother. For some reason, with no background of addiction in her immediate family history, two out of three of her children had turned out to be addicts. She blamed it on their wealth. Annie blamed it on the fact that she had given all three of her children names that would rhyme. Annie was the first, two years later Eddie, and five years later Charlie. Charlie was only twelve, and he was normal. So far.  

“She’s sticking by him?”

“Yeah.”

“Must be nice.”

“I know.” Annie plopped down on the couch, throwing her legs over the side and her head in Zoe’s lap. “Zo, it was so bad. When I got back I told my mom to ship my ass back to Georgia or I was gonna end up dead. I said ‘I swear to God, I’m never doing drugs again.’ I don’t know. I was so paranoid, I was doing too much. Like, I couldn’t get enough though… you know?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah I was doing too, too much. Like back to back to back to back. And I used to, I don’t know…”

“Yeah I always did too much when I was coming down. When I would get depressed and wanna kill myself.”

“Exactly, but this time it was just non-stop. And I mean, if I had done more blues I probably would’ve been a lot better off when I was doing too much meth. But I refused to come down on anything, period. Like I stayed high for six weeks straight.”

Zoe nodded. “Longest I ever went was eight months.”

Zoe was an Adderall fiend more than anything. She figured it was easier to get than meth and it didn’t hurt as much when she snorted it. Plus there wasn’t a huge difference in the high. It just took a lot more to get right and it didn’t last as long. 

“Dude how did you stop without going back to treatment?”

“I don’t know. I just had enough I guess.” The truth was, Zoe had reached the point of desperation, as she had before. Plus it had started to get cold and she didn’t want to be sleeping outside when the snow started.  She didn’t see the point in going back to another expensive treatment center when she could simply start going back to AA meetings. People knew her there, rooted for her there, and that gave her a glimpse of love and familiarity that she’d never had before. 

“Yeah. I’ve had enough this time. Seriously” Annie lifted her head.
Zoe shifted in her seat, stood up and walked over to the TV console across from the couch. She straightened the books, each with orange covers, placed meticulously on the corner of the console, and stood up more erectly. Outside, the wind picked up, sending the windows howling. “You want a Diet Coke?”

“Oh my God yes,” Annie said.  “You’re an angel!” She shouted as Zoe made it to the kitchen. 

Zoe opened the fridge, which was practically empty aside from the soda, grabbed two cold cans, and walked away, closing the fridge-door behind her with her foot. “Do you ever think about what happened to the other girls?” She said tossing one of the cans to Annie who just barely caught it. 

“Fuck… Do you think it will explode when I open it?”
Zoe chuckled, “Only one way to find out.”
The can let out a tiny hiss as Annie cracked it open, with her arms stretched out about a mile away from her scrunched up face. “I used to talk to some of them,” she said. “But you know how it goes.”

“Yeah,” Zoe said. “That place was like a revolving door. When I left I just wanted nothing to do with the it, or the girls”

“Ditto,” said Annie. 

They sat for a minute in quiet contemplation. Zoe was a good listener. Mostly she liked to listen because it drowned out the noise in her head. But when she sat for too long after a conversation her battery drained and she would get hit with a train of straight melancholy. Truth was she was always tired. Truth was her brain didn’t produce a lot of dopamine naturally anymore. “Wanna go to the roof?” She asked. 

They made their way up the fire escape. It was only two floors up to the roof of the building. The first apartment window they climbed in front of was dark, it was late now, and the resident was surely sleeping. In the second window was a man doing lines on his kitchen counter with a baby on the floor next to him. 

When they made it to the top it had started to drizzle again but the wind died down. Zoe flinched at every cold drop to smack the top of her blond head. Annie hardly seemed to notice. 

“I need a stick,” Annie said and reached out a hand.

 Zoe took the pack out from her waistband, took a cigarette out, put it in her mouth, took the lighter out of the pack, and lit it. “Did you ever find out what happened to Ted?” She stood up, losing and recovering her balance, walked to the edge of the roof and looked down.

“Yeah he’s alive. He’s actually going to CMA in Phoenix… I stalk his Facebook a lot,” Said Annie who’d followed Zoe to the edge, taken the cigarette, and put it in her mouth. “He seems like a normal guy now. I know it sounds weird, but I kind of miss him.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Annie said, passing the cigarette back. “Do you miss getting high?”

“All the time.” Zoe flicked the cigarette and the girls watched it fall until the little red ash hit the ground and went dark.