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H: Don’t knock when you get here. Don’t wanna wake Neilly. Just text me.
Hayes stared at his phone.
12:57 a.m.
It’d been over an hour since Hayes had texted TK and he was starting to worry. Not only was he worried that something had happened to his friend, but he had swallowed his last three oxys and was down to zero. He wouldn’t be able to get an appointment with the team doctor until at least Friday because of the holiday, but there was no way in hell she would write him another prescription, since this last one was supposed to last him for a month and it hadn’t even made it a week.
In addition to whatever TK was bringing him to numb the pain, he’d asked him to get more pills as well.
And of course he’d agreed.
Hayes wasn’t sure exactly what was going on between himself and TK, but whatever it was, he knew it had the potential to be either really great or really awful.
And that thought, as much as he hated to admit it, excited him a bit.
They were the outcasts.
The black sheep.
The fuckups.
Travis Kadin arrived in New York well after his reputation had, and Hayes had made it a point to defend him in his absence when some of the other guys began talking shit about him in the locker room before a practice one day.
“You understand what a complete scumbag this dude is, right? Fucked Yardy’s pregnant wife. That’s why he’s coming here. Yardy laid an ultimatum on the Preds and they caved.”
“Yeah, but like, how do you know that’s true though?” Hayes shot back at Hughesy, wrapping the heel of his stick with Pride Tape. “That could be a made-up rumor.”
“All I know,” Ray De Haas chimed in, “Is that I’m keeping him the fuck away from my wife. Dude’s a fuckin’ druggie, too. Legit piece of shit.”
“So, you don’t think he at least deserves a chance?” Hayes argued, standing up and putting down the stick that he’d been taping, his tone shifting. “Don’t you think he deserves our respect, man? You’re basin’ all this shit on rumors. He’s gonna need our support.”
“Oh, aren’t you cute? What, you hoping to get a piece of that shit for yourself there, Hayes?” De Haas teased. “I mean, he is hot. I can’t deny that.”
“Yo: watch it,” Hughesy immediately warned him, then offered a nod to Hayes, letting him know he wouldn’t tolerate any of that shit.
“Sorry,” De Haas half-assedly offered Hayes. “Look, man. It’s one thing to rip a couple lines at an afterparty. It’s another to be fucked up all the goddamn time. He’s trashed constantly. And it sucks. The kid had real potential. He’ll be lucky if he sees his 22nd birthday, honestly.”
“I just think you’re being unfair is all. You know what? Fuck this. At least he’ll have a friend in me.” Hayes got up, snatched his stick, and stormed out of the locker room toward the tunnel, the other guys staring until he disappeared.
“Fuck’s up his ass?”
It burned him up to no end when people talked shit about addicts just because they were addicts.
As if somehow, that’s the only thing they had to offer the world, that one terrible fact canceling out every other wonderful thing about them.
As if it was something anyone aspired to be when they were just a wide-eyed, fun-loving child full of wonder and dreaming of what their future will look like.
As if any of them woke up one day and were like, “You know, a family, love, a nice home, and a job I enjoy would all be awesome, but you know what'd be even better? If I could become so dependent on drugs or alcohol that I lose any shred of hope for all of those things in a fuckin’ instant. Ooh, know what else’d be great? If I could leave my young son to fend for himself for most of his childhood while I drink myself to death and get the shit kicked out of me by whoever I happen to be fuckin’ that week.”
OK, so perhaps that last one was personal.
But he knew what he knew: that no one, not one, single, solitary, goddamn soul set out to make this their reality, in the same way no one set out to have their body eaten alive by cancer; both were awful diseases, and yet, being an addict had this ridiculously unfair stigma attached to it. He knew better than anyone that it was, in fact, a disease and he’d always resented the way society had mercilessly scathed those who suffered from it.
Addicts needed help. They needed love. They needed support. They needed someone to listen, to understand.
What they didn’t need was incessant, holier-than-thou judgment against their “choices.”
Because if Tyler Hayes knew anything at all, it was this: addict or not, we all make “choices” that hold the potential to ruin our lives. And those who cast the first stones had better be careful, as Karma had a funny way of showing up and kicking one’s ass when one least expected it to.
