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“You’ll have to do it without me. I’m going home and going to bed.”
“Here, I’ve got just the thing for you,” he replied, slipping something out of a small bag in his pants pocket and handing it to me.
I looked down at the pill and shook my head. There was no way I was taking some strange pill from anyone, not even one of my good friends.
“No. I don’t want to mess with something like that.”
“It’s just a little upper. It won’t hurt you. Come on. It’ll perk you up enough to come to the party.”
“And fail a drug test? No, thanks.”
“When’s the last time you saw anyone do a drug test around here? You know they only do them if they suspect you’re on something and one pill after a game isn’t going to alert the authorities.”
In the end, I took the pill and went to the party. I found that it did help me keep up, so Fitz told me where to get them and I began taking them more often. Soon, I took speed to keep me up for practice, and, when I couldn’t sleep, I took downers. Pretty soon, I graduated to cocaine. I was pounding it heavily by the time I was a junior in high school and hiding it from Rain, whom I’d fallen for while I was still in my right mind.
The end had come when she had arrived at the cabin, our secret hiding place, and I wouldn’t let her in because Fitz and I were as high as kites behind locked doors.
“Come on, Jon. I know you are in there. Open the door.”
We waited, hiding behind the sofa, even though she couldn’t see inside the closed curtains anyway. She knocked several more times before giving up.
“If you don’t want to be with me anymore, you could just say so. Taking another girl to my grandmother’s cabin is a shitty thing to do, Jon Rayburn!” she yelled.
I could hear her crying as she left, but I couldn’t tell her the truth. In my mind, it was much worse to be an addict than a cheater. So, I let her walk away and I crawled back into my cocaine-fueled haze.
I woke up in a half-burned-out trailer. I didn’t know where I was or how long I had been there—I’d learn later I’d missed a whole week. All I knew then was that I was losing my buzz, and that was my main priority. I stumbled out into a trailer park not knowing who left me there or how I was going to get back home. You’d think that would have been a wake-up call, but it wasn’t. That had come during the jail time, where I was forced to get clean cold turkey before being transferred to a more hard-core section of their facility, where people inside seemed to think I should just go back to the drugs. Somehow, I had managed to resist and stayed clean. I had crawled back home to Muskrat Creek, but my father told me I’d made my bed and could lie in it.
“I didn’t raise you like this, Jon. I’m not having any of that nonsense in my house.”
“I’m clean, Dad. I promise I won’t be doing anything like that now.”
“I trusted you to live in my house and follow my rules and you were doing that shit behind my back, Jon. You got yourself in this situation and you can get yourself out of it. You broke my heart and shamed me in front of everyone in this town.”
Later that day, I had a chance encounter with Rain’s grandmother. Leigha had taken me in and helped me get on my feet.
Now, I didn’t want drugs every day, but when things got hard, I found myself at a meeting, relying on others to help talk me out of losing my shit. Even more than ten years later, how could I ask someone else into my life when I wasn’t certain I was strong enough to take care of them? Rain, as far as I knew, didn’t know any of this about me, but it was a small town, and if she hadn’t been around to hear the rumors that dwelled, she’d certainly hear them if she stayed long enough. How could she ever trust a man like me?
Rain was my first and only real love. I had always believed that maybe I’d overhyped things with her, that maybe what you felt at seventeen was more intense than any time after that, but last night with her had killed that theory. My feelings for her were as alive as ever, but I couldn’t afford to drag her down with me if I failed. It was best to call it what it was—just a moment of weakness between us and nothing more.
