Other Broken Things (2 page)

“Huh? What's that?”

“You know . . . the people working the program because they have to. Sober because someone told them to get that way. The ones who relapse the fastest.”

My mouth drops open. “Fuck off, dude. You don't know anything about me.”

Kathy comes over then and nudges Joe. “Leave Natalie alone. She's here. That's what matters.”

He shakes his head again and zips up his coat. “I'm going out for a smoke. I'll see you.”

“Yeah. You coming to breakfast on Sunday?” Kathy asks.

“Nah. Can't. Gotta do a work thing. You'll need to cover it.” He trains his eyes on me and for a second I think I see concern. But it's masked right away into indifference. “Come back, Natalie. Even if you don't believe it. It might sink in eventually.”

I nod and shove my hands in my pockets. I finger the court card and wait for him to leave, but he lingers just long enough that I get pissed and pull out the card anyway. He's fucking with me and I frankly don't care. I push the card at Kathy. He scoffs and heads out the door, muttering.

“Can you sign my court card?”

To her credit, she doesn't even bat an eye. “DUI?” she asks.

“Yeah. Like I said, I'm just out of rehab. Now I've got six months of meetings and community service.”

She grabs a pen from the basket full of two-dollar donations and signs the card. “Rehab your parents' idea?”

“Yeah.”

She hands the card back to me. “You're lucky.”

“Hardly.”

“Least you got someone who gives a shit enough to help you get sober.”

So, huh. Kathy isn't going to treat me like a kid. Maybe she's my ticket out of this place.

“Well, that might be overstating things,” I say.

She shrugs. “Your folks drive you here?”

“Yeah.”

“There you go then.”

I almost tell her I don't really fit here. I almost tell her I'm not an alcoholic. I almost tell her this is all bullshit, but I decide against it. For some people all this stuff means something. They become addicted to meetings in the same way they became addicted to booze or drugs in the first place. I saw a ton of kids in rehab on their third go-around who were all gung ho about meetings, and it didn't take me long to realize it was just replacing one thing with another. Therapy and group became their new drugs.

Personally, I'd take booze over sharing bullshit feelings any day, but who am I to burst someone's bubble? So I nod at Kathy and thank her and tell her I'll see her again.

“You got my number. Use it,” she says to my back as I'm walking out.

“Sure thing,” I call to her.

I pull out my phone and delete her contact info before I'm through the front door.

Of course Joe
is the only one outside smoking. What a worthless group of alkies, not one of them even hangs out to smoke. I release a breath and take a step forward. Before I can pull my shit together enough to ask to bum a cigarette, Joe thrusts out his pack and flips the lid open.

“Thanks,” I say, and grab two Parliaments, hoping he doesn't see me slide the second one into my palm.

“Could've just asked for two.”

My shoulders drop. This is the problem with sober people. They're so fucking observant. I hold the second cigarette out to him, but he shakes his head.

“Keep it.”

“Thanks.” I put one of the cigarettes in my mouth and lean into the lighter he's held up, taking a deep drag. I was only ever really a social smoker before, at parties or after I was stoned or when I was drunk and tired and needed to stay up. Now cigarettes are my candy canes. Delicious and something I want all the time.

“Sorry I gave you a tough time,” he says. I inhale deeply and hold the smoke in my lungs until it burns the back of my throat.

“Whatever.”

“What's the court card for? DUI?”

“You all must see a lot of those.”

He shrugs. “When teenagers are in here it's almost always because they got caught by the cops. Sometimes it's just open bottles in their cars, sometimes it's DUIs.”

“How come you guessed DUI for me?”

He takes a drag from his cigarette and lets out a long stream of smoke. “ 'Cause you don't look like a kid who got caught being stupid just once.”

I flick my ash at him, but he doesn't even step back. “What do I look like?”

“You look like a kid who's done a bunch of stupid shit and it finally caught up to her. You look like an addict.”

I take two full inhalations before I piece together a response in my head. “First, I'm not a kid, period. Second, I'm nothing like any of those people in there. I've said four sentences to you. What do you know about my life?”

He drops his cigarette and steps on the butt. Then he picks it up and tucks it back in the pack like he's going to dispose of it later in the proper canister. Do-gooder. Should've figured.

“I don't know anything about it. But I've been coming here for over five years. I've seen dozens of you come and go.”

I blink. “You've been sober for five years and you're still coming here?”

He shakes his head. “Only sober for three of them. The first two I was just dicking around, trying to figure my shit out after being locked up.”

Whoa. So maybe not such a do-gooder.

My head is spinning. This dude actually has a backstory. I can almost ignore all the Judgy McJudgyPants parts now that I know he's been in prison. “What were you locked up for?”

“What were you in rehab for?”

“Driving drunk.”

He nods. “Me too.”

I take a last drag on my cigarette and then crush it on the ground. His gaze darts between my face and the cigarette. After a few seconds he sighs and leans down to pick it up and tuck it into the box with his. Heh. Sucker.

“That must not have been your first DUI if they locked you up,” I say.

“It was. But it wasn't your standard DUI.”

“Jesus. Did you hit someone? Kill a biker or something?” I want to take a step back, which is ridiculous and wimpy, but somehow it feels a little too real for me, a thing I've been patently avoiding, so maybe I don't want to be having this conversation.

Joe shakes his head. “No. I drove into a White Hen Pantry, shattered the front window. Then I panicked and bailed. DUI. Leaving the scene of the crime. An unsympathetic judge. It all added up to a few months in corrections.”

“Fuck, dude. You shattered a window and left the scene? You must've been really loaded.”

He shrugs. “It was a long time ago.”

I think about lighting up the second cigarette, just so I can get more of his story, but I see Mom's Lexus pull onto the street. Great.

“I gotta go,” I say. And now I feel like a child because my mom's here to pick me up. Like I'm on a playdate, not cruising out of the twelve thirty AA meeting.

He nods. “I hope I see you again, Natalie.”

I shrug. Maybe he will and maybe he won't. Probably depends on him more than me, since I'm going to be here on the regular for at least a few more months. I give him an awkward wave and bolt to my mom's car. I'm not sure why, but suddenly I feel way younger than I have in years. Like some dude just schooled me, even though he really didn't.

Mom's bursting with questions when I slide in—the front passenger seat this time, Rudolph is evidently safely at home—but I hold a hand up and shake my head. Then I roll down the window, search through my jeans pockets for my lighter, and light up the other Parliament that Joe gave me.

“In the car, Natalie? Really? Is this smoking thing
that
necessary?”

“Well, Mom, you pick, cigarettes or all the other stuff I've been up to this past year? Your call.”

Mom's mouth drops into a tight frown, but I know she's not going to say anything. She wants to talk, but not if she can't steer the conversation. She's careful that way, not liking to get her hands too dirty if she can help it. Which frankly suits me just fine. She turns up the Christmas music and starts humming as I blow smoke into the frozen air.

One meeting down, fifty-nine to go.

I'm not even sure why
I'm bothering with catching up at school. I'm a senior. This is supposed to be my coast year. Only my grades suck. They sucked last year too. I'll either end up at a shitty state school or community college, if I graduate this year at all. A month away at rehab is a long time, and to be honest, I was pretty much phoning it in most of the semester, most of the past year really, so the rehab excuse is pretty flimsy. I'm going to have a crap ton of incompletes, but I guess it's better than failing. I don't care about school, but I do care about getting out.

Luckily, I only have three weeks until winter break. Most of my teachers are actually being kind of cool about the stuff they're piling on, trying to minimize the assignments I don't really need to do. I'd be shocked by it if I didn't know it was all motivated by my mom meeting with each of them when I was in rehab, discussing my “situation.”

My first day back, my ex Brent comes up behind me at my locker and slides his hands so they're less than an inch below my boobs. Classy. Can't believe how much time I wasted with this guy.

“Fuck off.” I slap his hands and turn to see a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Nat. I missed you. How was rehab?”

I shrug. “How the hell do you think rehab was? It's rehab. Not Universal Studios. And I wouldn't have even had to go if I weren't driving your drunk ass home.”

He steps forward and grabs my belt loops, pulling me into him. Brent is hot, but he's a huge player and I'm not in any kind of place to deal with our past crap. “That's not how I heard it. I heard you got in a wreck three blocks from your house. Smashed into a stop sign. That's not my fault.”

Okay. That's probably true. The fact of the matter is that I would've stayed at the party way longer and gotten a lot more hammered if he weren't puking in the bathroom and I hadn't felt obligated to take him home. Not that he deserved it, but he's held my hair enough times for me to return the favor.

“Still. It was after I dropped you off, so it's partly your fault. And I don't see your parents sending you to rehab, even though you must've gotten grounded for being so wrecked that night.”

He slips his thumbs under the hem of my shirt and for a second I remember how good he is with his hands. Really good. But I don't need this noise, so I push him off and turn back to my locker.

“I told them I was burning off steam. Stressed out about college applications. They let me off,” he says. Of course they did. His parents are
those
kind of parents. The kind that want to be cool. Don't get me wrong, I'd kill to have parents like that, but still, it's all phony bullshit.

A bunch of people pass behind us, but they ignore us. Our school is pretty big. Close to five hundred kids in each class. Not really the kind of place where you pay attention to what's going on outside your circle of friends.

Brent presses up against me from behind and rests his hand flat on my stomach. He drops his face into my neck and sucks a little on my skin. It's been too long since I've been touched, I think.

“Are we having a moment here?” I snap, shaking myself out of the urge to sink back into him.

“I missed you,” he says, and something in his voice sounds real. I turn and he's dropped the player mask and looks like he wants to talk.

Hell no. I've worked too hard to forget Brent and the whole mess of him in rehab.

“No you didn't. You probably had your tongue down some girl's throat fourteen seconds after I was admitted to the hospital.”

He bristles, but it shuts him down. “Don't be a bitch.”

I shrug. “Calling it like I see it.”

His face changes again and I can almost hear him calculating. The way his face works, he's the loudest thinker. I wait to see how he's going to play this, ready to shut him down again.

“Wanna go somewhere and spark up?” he asks.

Unexpected. For a second I consider it, but then he steps forward and slides his hands around my hips, circling his thumbs against my stomach, and just like that, I jab him in the gut.

“Jesus,” he hisses. “What the hell was that for?”

I grab my Coach bag, not even sure I've put all the right books in there, but it doesn't matter because I need to get away from this. “Brent. I can't get high with you. My parents made me go to rehab. They're having me pee in a cup every week. They're jury-rigging the car with an attachment that will keep it from starting unless I do a sober Breathalyzer. So the answer is no. I'm not going to spark up with you. I don't even like you.”

He shakes his head. “You used to like me.”

“No. Not really. I used to like fucking you. I never actually liked you.”

He looks hurt for half a second, but then he snaps back. “Such a pretty mouth. You can still fuck me. I don't care if you like me.”

I let out a long breath and hitch my bag on my shoulder. “Yeah. I'm gonna pass. But thanks for the offer.”

“Nat . . . ,” he calls as I barrel down the hall.

I turn, see his face, and immediately regret it.

“We should talk.” All pretenses are gone now. His expression is hard and serious.

I flip him off. “Nope. Save it for your therapist.” Then I swivel on my heel and bolt down the hall as fast as I can go without breaking into a run. I clench and unclench my fists, using the physical sensation to block out everything. Move forward, don't look back, don't think, don't feel. I used to have booze to help with this, but now I only have my brain's refusal to hang on to anything from before rehab. Which luckily, is enough.