Page 66 of Dedicated
By the seventh day I was resigned to being there and seeing it through. I wasn’t excited about it, but shit, I didn’t have anything else going on. I didn’t have a band. I didn’t have Evan. I was a binger, a glutton, an impulse with a pulse, a button too easy to push. None of that was news to me. But I’d always accepted it as my nature, and I didn’t think twenty days in rehab could change my course. Not when the times I’d been intervened on before had done little more than make me switch my intoxicant of choice from pills to something more socially acceptable that I could buy off a grocery store shelf.
When I gotup to my room that night, I was relieved to hear the shower running because, lucky me, Mason was also my roommate. I’d gotten really good at ignoring his voice, but his scent was harder to deal with.
“About goddamn time,” I shouted, no clue whether he’d hear me or not. I stripped down to my boxers and collapsed into bed. The days were long here, beginning at 5:00 a.m., and so monotonous that I longed for the ten-o’clock hour when we were allowed to return to our rooms and either sleep or read from the facility’s library of paperbacks. I flipped through a Dan Brown book I’d gotten sucked into.
Forty-five minutes later, the shower was still going, so I got up and knocked on the door.
“The fuck you doing in there?” I sounded more hesitant than harsh, because my stomach was buzzing with uneasiness.
No answer. I knocked again—pounded, really—having visions of finding Mason’s lifeless body inside. People shared stories about suicide attempts and a few completions, even if the facility searched our suitcases and made us use plastic forks and spoons.
The lock clicked from the inside, so I turned the knob and pushed, exhaling in relief to find Mason sitting against the wall in a thick cloud of steam that whooshed out around me. He still smelled like ass.
He looked up at me, his eyes bloodshot and his skin blotchy.
“Want me to get someone?” I asked.
He shook his head roughly. “Fuck that.”
“What are you doing?” As the steam cleared, I noticed both his and my toiletry kits were upended, toothbrush, toothpaste, combs, and other stuff all over the floor. No razors. We got to shave once a week under supervision. His tube of toothpaste sat next to him. He nudged it. “Trying to will a tube of toothpaste into being a razor.” He gave me a thin, bitter smile and showed me his wrists. They were abraded and red, lined with shallow gouges where the edge of the tube had dug in just enough to well thin ribbons of blood.
I sat down across from him, putting my back to the sink counter. “They’re going to kick you out for that when they see it.”
He shrugged. “This is my eighth rehab. Someplace else will take me. Or my parents’ money, at least.”
I didn’t like Mason, but shit, he looked and sounded wrecked, and it pulled sympathy strings I wasn’t aware I still had. “Couldn’t you just try to get clean?”
“I have. Fuck. The first three times, I tried.” He glared at me. “I tried fucking hard, and it didn’t work. They say I don’t want it enough. Maybe they’re right.”
I bit my lip. “I don’t know, does anyone come in here wanting to get straight?”
“Sure. Mike does. He wants it so bad it’s like a halo around him; he’s always talking about plans for the future, wanting to come back and speak as someone in recovery in five years, ten.”
“Warren would probably say that’s dangerous projection.” We all knew the recidivism rates. They pounded it into our heads daily, right next to the idea that thinking we had addiction licked would be our downfall.
“Fuck Warren, too.”
My chuckle earned me another hot glare. “Sorry, I’m not trying to be insensitive, it’s just… I don’t know.”
“Did you want to come here?”
I had to think about that for a while. Eleven days in and I felt clear-headed the way I’d felt at the cabin, which made it all the easier for me to think maybe I hadn’t been doing so badly after all. That was how addiction worked, though. I’d been paying more attention this time.
“Yes and no. As soon as I got in here, I started to think I hadn’t been so bad off. Also, who the hell wants to entertain the idea that they can never put another drink or drug in their body again? At the same time, I was afraid if I didn’t do something now, I’d do something worse later and then be worse off than when I came in. So it’s not like I came in here with pure intentions, like ‘yeah, I want to get clean and sober forever and ever.’ I just felt backed into a corner, and I’d already gone right and left so many times that I guess I figured maybe it was time to try going up. People always forget that up is an option. Not just sideways or down.”
Mason snorted. “I’ll be back in again. Somewhere, somehow.”
“Maybe I will, too.” I shrugged. I didn’t know what the right answer was; I was just relieved as fuck he wasn’t a dead body on the floor. “But I hope not. I don’t really have anything else to lose at this point.” That wasn’t true. I could lose my house or my belongings, but I’d already lost the thing that mattered most.
“Your music’s not bad, you know,” he said. “My ex loves you guys.”
“I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be an apology for being a dick, but if so, accepted.”
“It isn’t, but take it however. I’m an unapologetic dick.”
Oh, how familiar that sounded. So much so that I smiled. “You still smell like shit, and you need to take that fucking shower.”
He threw his head back and laughed, and then when he sobered, asked me if I’d stay.