Richard Shelley was an oncologist, head of the cancer treatment ward at Decatur Hospital. His wife, Emily, had at one point been a real estate agent, but she’d quit that job when Joyce, their first child, was born. John came three years later, and the Shelleys thought their world was complete.
Emily had been one of those mothers who threw herself into parenting. She was active in the PTA, sold the most Girl Scout cookies, and spent the end of most school years sewing costumes for the Quaker Friends School’s graduation gala. As her two children grew up and stopped needing her—or wanting her, for that matter—she found herself with a lot of time on her hands. By the time John was in junior high and Joyce was two years away from attending college, she had gone back to the real estate agency part-time just to give herself something to do.
Their lives were perfect except for John.
The lying came early on and seemingly for no reason. John was at home when he had said he would be at football practice. He was at football practice when he said he would be at home. His grades started slipping. He let his hair grow long. Then, there was that smell. It seemed like he wasn’t even bathing and his clothes, when Emily would pick them up off the floor of his dank bedroom to throw them in the washer, had an almost chemical feel to them, as if they had been sprayed with Teflon.
Richard worked long hours. His job was emotionally and physically demanding. He didn’t have the time or inclination to be concerned about his son. Richard had been sullen when he was John’s age. He had secrets when he was a teenager. He got into trouble but he straightened out, right? Time to take him off the tit. Give the boy some space.
Emily was worried about marijuana, so she did not register danger over the powdery residue she found in the front pocket of her son’s jeans.
“Aspirin,” he told her.
“Why would you put aspirin in your pocket?”
“I’ve been getting headaches.”
As a child, John had put stranger things in his pockets: rocks, paper clips, a frog. She was worried about his health. “Do we need to take you to the doctor?”
“Mom.”
He left her standing there in the laundry room, holding his pants.
The Shelleys, like most affluent couples, assumed that their money and privilege protected their children from drugs. What they did not realize was that those two factors helped their kids get better drugs. Even without that, Emily Shelley wanted to believe her son was a good boy, so she did. She didn’t notice the glazed look he had in the mornings, the eyedrops he was constantly using, the sweet, sickly smell that came from the back shed. For his part, Dr. Richard didn’t look across his newspaper at the breakfast table and see that his son’s pupils were the size of half-dollars or that his nose bled more often than some of the cancer patients on his ward.
Life came apart in pieces.
A random search at the school yielded a bag of pot tucked into a pair of sneakers at the back of John’s locker.
“Not my shoes,” John said, and his mother agreed that the shoes didn’t look like any she had seen him wear before.
A security guard at the local mall called them to let them know their son had been caught stealing a cassette tape.
“I forgot to pay for it.” John shrugged, and his mother pointed out that he did have twenty dollars in his pocket. Why on earth would he steal something he could pay for?
The last piece came undone one Friday night. An intern at the hospital called, waking Richard Shelley to tell him his kid was in the emergency room, having overdosed on coke.
Talk about ripping off the blinders. Medical evidence—something his father could wave under his mother’s nose as physical proof of their son’s worthlessness.
At night, John would sit in his bedroom and listen to his parents argue about him until his father screamed something along the lines of “and that’s final!” and his mother ran into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Muffled sobs would come next, and he’d turn up his stereo, Def Leppard screaming from the speakers, until Joyce (studying, of course) pounded on the wall between their bedrooms, screaming, “Turn it down, loser!”
John would bang back, call her a bitch, make enough noise so that his father came into his room, yanking him up by the arm and asking what the hell was wrong with him.
“What are you rebelling against?” Richard would demand. “You have everything you could possibly want!”
“Why?” his mother would ask her boy, tears streaming down her face. “Where did I go wrong?”
John shrugged. That’s all he did when they tried to confront him—shrug. He shrugged so much that his father said he must have a neurological disorder. Maybe he should be put on lithium. Maybe he should be put in a mental home.
“How did it start?” his mother wanted to know. There had to be a way she could fix it, make it better, but only if she could find out how it began. “Who got you hooked on this? Tell me who did this to you!”
A shrug from John. A sarcastic comment from his father. “Are you retarded now? Autistic? Is that what’s wrong with you?”
It had started with pot. There was a reason after all that Nancy Reagan told kids to just say no. John’s first hit, fittingly, was right after a funeral.
Emily’s brother, Barry, had died in a car accident on the expressway. Sudden. Fatal. Life-changing. Barry was a big guy, ate whatever he wanted, smoked cigars like he was Fidel Castro. He was on pills for high blood pressure, taking shots every day for diabetes and generally working his way toward the grave in a slow crawl. That he was killed by a truck driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel was almost a joke.
The funeral was held on a hot spring morning. At the church, John had walked behind the casket, his cousin Woody at his side. He had never seen another guy crying before, and John felt weird watching his tough cousin, four years older and cooler than John could ever hope to be, breaking down in front of him. Barry hadn’t even been the guy’s real father. Woody’s mother was divorced—a shocking event in those days. She had only been married to Barry for two years. John wasn’t even sure if the guy was his cousin anymore.
“Come here,” Woody had said. They were back at his house, so empty now without Uncle Barry in it. His uncle had been a gregarious man, always there with a joke or a well-timed chuckle to take off the tension in the room. John’s dad didn’t like him much, and John suspected this was out of snobbery more than anything else. Barry sold tractor trailers. He made a good living, but Richard put the job on par with selling used cars.
“Come on,” Woody told John, walking up the stairs to the bedrooms.
John had looked around for his parents, no reason but the tone in Woody’s voice warning him that something bad was about to happen. Still, he followed him to his room, shut the door and locked it when he was told.
“Shit.” Woody sighed, sinking into the beanbag chair on the floor. He took out a plastic film canister from behind a couple of books stacked on the shelf behind him, then pulled some rolling papers from under his mattress. John watched as he deftly rolled a joint.
Woody saw him watching, said, “I could use a toke, man. How about you?”
John had never smoked a cigarette before, never taken anything stronger than cough medicine—which his mother kept hidden in her bathroom like it was radioactive—but when Woody offered him the joint, he had said, “Cool.”