Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [56]
“Okay, be right back,” I say and start toward the bathroom.
“Ha ha,” Kimberly says, immediately on my tail. “As if.” And that’s when I realize this bitch is planning to come into the bathroom with me. Jesus! What the hell does she think, that I’m high but storing some “good” pee in my side pocket that I plan to put in the cup if she doesn’t log my every move?
We go into the bathroom and as I pull down my pants, I think that it’s a good thing I don’t have issues about being naked in front of people or I’d really be in trouble. I flip the toilet seat up and am about to sit down when I realize that thousands of skanky, drug-addicted asses have surely been here before me and, based on what I’ve gathered so far about the Pledges hygiene policy, the remnants of those experiences surely still remain. In public toilets, I never have the patience to bother with those toilet covers—I simply squat an inch or so above. But am I going to be able to squat and pee in a cup with a humorless, suspicious wench watching me?
I tell myself to ignore her, then just squat and hold the cup under my stream, grateful that I’m not having performance anxiety. I fill the cup, place it on the counter, finish peeing, and start washing my hands. Kimberly stands there, gazing at my cup of pee.
“It’s all yours,” I say, gesturing toward the cup.
She walks over, picks it up, and gazes at it with wonder. “Amelia,” she says, “you really ought to think about drinking more water.”
“Why?” I ask as I think about how much I want to smack her.
“Healthy pee,” she says, “should be almost clear.” We both look at mine, which is basically orange.
“Great,” I say. “Thanks for the tip. Can I go now?”
She nods and sashays out of the room. As I follow her out, I wonder if she’s going to write down the color of my pee in my file.
I yearn for my BlackBerry so that I can call someone. Of course, I could wait in line for the pay phone that Rich—an eighteen-year-old kid from Boulder, Colorado—has been dominating since I got here. Asking twenty adults to share one pay phone is ridiculously inhumane, but then again, so is silently accusing a nonalcoholic of packing contraband mouthwash for a secret buzz or acting like she’ll probably cheat on a fricking pee test. Even if Rich, the Colorado kid, does ever get off the phone, I know that I don’t feel like talking to Mom or, in fact, anyone. I have no credibility anymore, so my announcing that these people are all psychotic wouldn’t mean anything to anyone. It occurs to me for not the first time that I really don’t have any friends. And for once, this thought doesn’t make me cry. Maybe I’m just all out of tears at this point.
I’m sitting in the breakfast room the next morning, thoroughly exhausted, when Tommy greets me with a huge smile and says that sometime today I have to go see Dr. Thistle, the resident doctor at Pledges, for a checkup. The girl who was supposed to have been my roommate clearly came to her senses and decided to forgo rehab, so last night I slept alone in my creepy room. Of course, “sleep” is a pretty optimistic description of what I’d been doing. Staring at the ceiling, getting up occasionally to smoke and trying to read the Pledges book in order to bore me into slumber more accurately describes last night’s nocturnal activities.
Here at breakfast, everyone’s chattering but I can’t think of anything to say until my third cup of coffee, when I ask the tan blonde, Robin, what she does for a living. She tells me that she’d been a model, once stripped down to her G-string on Howard Stern, and continues to go on sharing anecdotes about her life. I get the distinct sensation that she considers rehab another stop on her party tour—like, summer in the Hamptons, winter in Aspen, spring in Culver City—and I envy her relaxed attitude. Was there something wrong with me for thinking rehab was such