Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [57]
When we’re done eating, Robin walks me over to Dr. Thistle’s office and tells me she’ll see me later in group. It’s beginning to dawn on me that group happens constantly, like every moment we’re not eating or sleeping or cleaning our dishes. So far, no one’s mentioned a word about the pool or equine therapy.
Dr. Thistle—or “Doc” as everyone around Pledges calls him—nods and takes notes as I tell him about all the coke I’ve done but when I explain my situation with Ambien, he starts shaking his head and looking disapproving.
“Up to five pills a night?” he asks, dumbfounded. This was a guy who listened to people come in and talk about shooting vats of drugs up their ass and doing eight balls in five-minute spans, if what people had been sharing during and after group was any indication, so I don’t know why he had to be so judgmental about me taking a few sleeping pills.
“Look, I wasn’t taking them for fun,” I say. “I was taking them because I suffer from insomnia.”
“I understand,” he says. “And when did you stop taking them?”
“The other day,” I say. “When I got out of the hospital, I decided to go cold turkey.”
Doc shakes his head. “That wasn’t smart. You should have told them how many you were taking when you were in the hospital so they could have detoxed you off of them with an IV. You could have had a seizure.”
I don’t think anything sets me off more than being told I’ve done something stupid—so I have to stifle an urge to start wringing Doc’s neck. No one in the hospital asked me how much of anything I took and it certainly didn’t cross my mind to offer it up. “Well, clearly I did not have a seizure, Doctor, so I guess we can conclude that I survived despite my stupidity,” I say.
“It’s going to be a while before you’ll be able to sleep through the night,” he says. This guy needs to be given a serious lecture about glass half-full versus glass half-empty logic, but I’m too desperate to get away from him to be the one to do it.
14
I’m trying to focus on reading the Pledges book when Tommy pokes his head in my room.
“Just wanted to see how you’re adjusting,” he says, cheerful as ever.
“Oh, great,” I say. Even in this ridiculously downtrodden state, I seem to care about what my drug counselor thinks of me so I don’t want him to know how scared and miserable I feel. I try to smile. “Everyone’s really nice,” I add, even though it’s a bald-faced lie.
Tommy just looks at me. “Why don’t you and I take a walk?” he asks.
A walk, like anything else right now, sounds absolutely unappealing, but what are my options? To sit here and think about how much I must have fucked up my life to be ensconced in this place with a bunch of losers?
“Can I smoke?” I find myself asking.
“Absolutely,” he says, as he helps me to my feet. “In fact, I encourage you to.”
I grab my Camel Lights and my lighter, slide on a pair of flipflops and follow Tommy outside as he picks up a pebble that was sitting on a picnic table covered with ashtrays and starts walking down the Pledges entryway toward the street.
“I’m going to say something and I don’t want you to be offended by it,” Tommy says as he tosses the pebble onto the ground and leads me onto a busy street lined with thrift stores and fast-food places. It’s my first time seeing civilization since I checked in a few days ago, and it seems shocking that the real world has actually only been a few hundred feet away.
“Shoot,” I say, lighting up what has to be my eighty-seventh cigarette of the day. I had to imagine that getting offended was probably going to be the nicest thing that would happen to me today, now that my life was shaping up to be a series of depressing incidents brightened only by Camel Lights and the occasional brownie. Besides, I like Tommy.
“You strike me as pretty much spiritually dead,” Tommy says as he leads me across the street. He looks at me sadly while squinting his eyes, as if my face were the sun and he’s not wearing sunglasses.
I’d expected him to tell me he thought I seemed really depressed or like I wasn’t fitting in or that