“Tuesday,” Wyatt agrees. He finally looks back at me and smiles, the same smile I remember from the club, with white and slightly crooked teeth. A dumb, golden retriever–type smile.
Well,I think as he finally walks away, my heart still pounding between my ears and my hands clenched into unseen fists.Well.
I’m fucked.
8
WYATT
I don’t see Ely often during school hours.
It’s an intentional choice, obviously. I even double-checked her schedule in the admin office to make sure I knew when to be mysteriously unavailable at my office—which might be overkill at this point, but I don’t trust myself. The thing about being an ex-addict is that you aren’t under any delusions about being a good person; you know exactly how far you’d go if given the chance. I constantly have to stay one step ahead of my own atrophied conscience. Outsmart myself before I can outsmart myself.
Despite intentionally ignoring her, I come close to texting her one night over the weekend. I have Ely’s number programmed into my phone from when she texted me after our night together, before I figured out she was a student. Before I looked at her portfolio again and discovered it was just as brilliant as I’d thought at first glance. She has real talent.
That could be why I haven’t been able to bring myself to delete the text I’ve typed out three separate times:Still on for Tuesday?An innocuous question, maybe, but I wouldn’t text any other student asking it. Which tells me everything I need to know about my own motivations.
“Fuck it,” I mutter at last, erasing the message and tossing my phone onto my desk. It startles Haze, who darts off onto the floor and vanishes into the other room. “Sorry.”
I’m not big on Narcotics Anonymous anymore. Not big on twelve-step programs in general. But they do have their place. And right now, I need the sense of stability and grounding that NA is really, really great at providing. I get plenty of support from my SMART Recovery group online. Or I did, anyway; since I started at Parker, the virtual meetings don’t fit my schedule anymore. Guess I’m gonna be making more appearances in person.
I toss a couple books in my satchel in case I want to spend time reading at a coffee shop after and head out. The Sunday night meeting is at a church a couple of blocks away. Every time I show up one of the members strongly implies this means I have no excuse not to be there every night—which is honestly part of why I keep my distance.
Most of the group has already gathered by the time I arrive. It’s the usual crowd; I spot Marcus, Karabeth, Ji, and Doug clustered together by the sign-in sheet where people on court-ordered meetings get their forms stamped. I occupy myself with the food table. Even when I was the one here on a judge’s orders, I had to admit that these grocery store powdered doughnuts hit the spot.
There’s no official leader at NA meetings. Everyone’s supposed to be on an equal footing here—which means the meeting starts once everyone has found a seat somewhere and one of the attendees volunteers to read the opening text. I have it memorized at this point.
“Hello, everyone.” Marcus is the chosen tribute this time. Which is great because Marcus is both my sponsor and myfavorite out of everyone who comes to these things. “My name is Marcus, and I’m an addict. Welcome to Narcotics Anonymous. Let’s open this meeting with a moment of silence for the addict who still suffers….”
I might have over ten years under my belt, but being back at these meetings still serves a purpose. Just being here as a sign to people earlier in their recovery that youcando this, youcanget and stay clean long term. But it’s good for me too. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how bad things used to be if you don’t remind yourself.
“Hi, I’m Wyatt, and I’m an addict,” I say about half an hour in, when there’s been a long enough break without anyone else speaking up.
Everyone murmurs the requisite “Hi, Wyatt,” and I plaster on a cursory smile.
“I’ve been clean for ten years and four months”—this earns a scattering of applause—“and I’m glad to be back with y’all tonight.”
I put a lot of effort intonotlooking at Doug, who is probably giving me a judgy look. I honestly have no idea why Doug hates me so much. Instead of looking at him, I focus on Marcus, who offers an encouraging nod and a wink.
“I grew up down in North Carolina, in a military family,” I continue. “My dad, both granddads, all my uncles, my brother…pretty much every man I knew went into the Marines straight outa high school. It’s not that youcouldn’tgo to college or get a different job or something, just that nobody did, and so nobody really knew how to do anything else. I had one cousin who got into State, and we all had no clue if we were supposed to congratulate him or not. It was like,Good for you, I guess, and good luck paying down those loans.There was always this unspoken implication that my cousin was a coward too afraid to enlist.”
I have no idea what happened to Rory, actually. We haven’t kept in touch. Maybe I could have reached out at some point along the line—the two black sheep of the Cole family connecting—but having gone to college doesn’t necessarily mean Rory is cool. For all I know, he feels the same way about me as everyone else in our family. Maybe he just learned enough in college to hide transphobia by pretending it was about feminism.
“Anyway, point is, as soon as I got out of high school, I joined the Marines. It was maybe the first time in my life I felt like my parents were proud of me, you know? But that was around the time I started realizing some things about myself. I dunno, maybe a part of me knew all along, but it wasn’t until I was out of the house and at basic training that I started piecing the truth together. When I told the base doctor I was trans and asked to get put on testosterone, I knew what would happen. This was back before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell got repealed. I knew what was gonna happen, but I did it anyway. And I got kicked out.”
I scan the room, just as I always do after telling this part of the story. It’s easy to tell who is shocked by the confession, who is okay with it, and whose smile is just a forced attempt to be polite.
“That was pretty much it for my relationship with family. My dad…he was always tough on us. Well, I say tough, which is what he woulda called it, but I mean he got violent. After a bad fight, he told me I was no child of his. He kicked me out and wouldn’t even let me pack. I spent a couple weeks bumming around Morehead City, sleeping under the bridge at Atlantic Beach, trying to make a little cash selling seashells to tourists. But I ended up spiraling. Got hooked on dope, and then…y’all know how it goes. I was miserable, but at least I was numb.”
So much of those years exists only as a haze in my memories. All I’ve got is a collection of disjointed events strung together like beads on wire: the first time I saw someone OD, the sickening jolt back to consciousness after the paramedics shoot you up withnaloxone, vomit in my mouth and in my hair, the time I spotted my family on the beach laughing and drinking beers and so fucking happy to have me out of their lives.
“I OD’d more times than I can count. It was only after the third arrest that I got my shit together and actually did the work. I was able to get a spot at a free rehab up here in New York. Even then it took four admissions before I actually stayed clean for good. That’s the main thing I wish someone would’ve told me when I was early in recovery: Sometimes you slip up. In fact, you probably will. But you don’t have to give up. You can choose to keep fighting and start over every single day.”
My gaze flits over to some of the newer faces, ones I don’t recognize. They’re watching me, fixated on me. I can only hope some of this is actually sinking in. Recovery isn’t magic. You can’t show up to a few meetings and get better. You have to want it. That took me way too long to internalize.
But maybe they’ll be smarter than I was.
“I’ve been doing good for a while,” I say after a moment, rubbing my doughnut crumbs between my fingers, watching the powdered sugar dust the napkin like a thin coating of snow. “Ten years, like I said. But I recently…I met this girl. She’s in recovery too. I like her a lot. We hooked up, and I kind of hoped it might turn into something, you know, if I was lucky. Well…turns out we have more in common than just being ex-junkies. She’s a student in one of the classes I’m teaching this semester. So basically I’m fucked. We had this crazy connection, but is it worth risking my career? My sobriety?” I shrug. “That’s all I wanted to say, I suppose. I’ll yield to the next person.”
