Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [60]
Okay, I’ll admit that having a beautiful specimen like Justin around helps. After group the day that I shared about hating everyone and everything, he asked me if I wanted to go on a walk. We walked and smoked and bonded about absolutely everything. He’s from the Palisades and went to USC but, details aside, we’ve been living nearly parallel existences. Before he’d gotten into using coke, Justin had been a screenwriter and producer and was dying to get back in the business. We took turns telling each other that our respective businesses would surely want us back once we were clean and sober. And before I knew it, Justin was my best rehab friend. I always made sure to keep my obsessive crush on him on the down-low—Tommy had warned us extensively about what happens when people substitute their drug of choice for sex and had all but begged us to ignore our sex drive for the month we were in treatment. I was shocked to discover that, despite the way I’ve been living the past two decades or so, I’m something of a rule follower.
One day when Justin and I are wrangling everyone for group, Tommy leads a newbie down the driveway toward the basketball court. Unlike the previous new people, however, who all seemed to walk in with their heads hanging low and their clothes drooping off their skinny frames, this one wore stiletto heels, spandex pants, and a leopard-print tight tank—sartorial decisions that seemed all the more shocking because she’s pushing her mid-forties. With a jolt, I realize the leopard-printed spandex wonder is Vera, my go-to dealer before I found Alex.
“Vera!” I shriek as I rush over to give her a hug. She gazes at me quizzically and a little freaked out. Tommy looks from me to her.
“Oh, you know each other?” Tommy asks excitedly. The man gets excited about anything that he thinks might help someone stay sober.
“Yes, I—” I’m about to launch into the whole story about how I met Vera at a party in the Hills, where she gave me free coke all night—but she winks knowingly at me and I shut up. I’ve been here for a few weeks so I know that we can confess our most horrific sins in rehab and never get in trouble—I’d literally listened to Peter, the gay titterer who turned out to be really cool, talk about having male prostitutes shoot heroin up his ass in bathhouses—but Vera clearly didn’t know that yet.
“Yes, we know each other from temple,” Vera says, reasonably convincingly. Tommy looks absolutely delighted and just a bit confused, seeing as I’d explained to him that I hadn’t seen the inside of a religious establishment in over a decade.
“People from temple,” I say, feeling a little bit better about the lie because surely if I did go to temple in L.A., someone there could have referred me to Vera. Rehab hammers home this idea that we have to be “rigorously honest” and “we’re as sick as our secrets,” so lately I’ve been extremely uncomfortable with anything even close to a lie.
Despite Vera’s external confidence, deafeningly loud outfit, and overall smooth demeanor, I can see in her eyes that she’s basically terrified. They make a big deal at Pledges about “getting out of yourself” and “being of service to other people” and while at first I thought that was a scam to get us to do all the dishes and clean toilets and stuff so that they didn’t have to hire actual housekeepers, I’ve been surprised to discover that doing things for other people actually feels good. If I’m cleaning or helping out someone who just got here and is as freaked out as I was when I came in, I’m not thinking about the fact that I’d become a cocaine addict who ended up in rehab at thirty.