“Where do you get these drugs?” Nick demands. He’s recovered his composure, mostly, although he still looks winded.
“Around.”
“Come on, Josh.”
“I get some from online pharmacies.”
“You can’t get—ketamine—from an online pharmacy,” Nick says in a voice of authority, and Josh laughs again.
“Shows how much you know.” There is such contempt in his voice, I marvel at it. Where did it come from? When did we lose Josh’s little-boy love, the adoration a child has for his parents? A long time ago, of course I know that; it’s normal, a natural process of growing up, letting go. Yet underneath the teenaged silences and sulks, I thought there was a solid bedrock of familial devotion. Now I wonder if there is a bedrock to anything. How on earth did we get here?
Nick does his best to recover from his misstep. “Where else?”
“Nowhere.”
“You said some from online pharmacies. What about the rest?”
“What does it matter?”
“Whenever you ask that, Josh,” Nick says, “it’s because it does matter. Why don’t you just tell us, because we’ll find out one way or another?”
“Are you going to punish me?”
Now Nick is the one to let out a huff of hard laughter. “Are we going to punish you? You’re dealing drugs, Josh. You’re breaking the law. What do you think?”
I see a calculating look creep onto my son’s face. “If school finds out, they’ll kick me off the team.”
Nick stares at him blankly, but I know what Josh is getting at. Having a son doing two varsity sports—maybe even playing one day for a college team—is a major point of pride for Nick. Whenever we meet someone new, he almost always works Emma’s college admission and Josh’s sports into the conversation.
But every parent in this town, in this whole state, does the same thing, or some version of it. I’ve never faulted him for it, never even minded, yet now I feel sick, because I realize Josh knows this as much as I do. He stands before us with his arms folded and an expectant smirk on his face, seeming utterly assured of the power of the trump card he’s just played.
Nick still looks blank, impervious. “Then you’re kicked off the team.” He speaks as if it’s obvious, but then I see the realization seeping through him like poison. Josh kicked off the teams, suspended or even expelled from school. No Dartmouth, maybe no college. All our hopes for our son extinguished.
Or am I being overdramatic? Maybe this is the new normal. Maybe, if I dared to talk to Julie or my other friends about this, they’d laugh at my floundering innocence. Oh come on, Ally. All teenagers experiment a little. It’s different drugs, maybe, but it’s the same kind of thing. Didn’t you ever try a joint?
Actually, I never did. It wouldn’t have been possible, even if I’d wanted to; I wouldn’t have known how to procure any drugs, whom to talk to at school. Presumably everyone at Josh’s high school knows to talk to him. The thought makes my stomach churn and I feel as if I could be sick.
Nick draws himself up. Again. “You need to throw out all the drugs,” he states. “All of them.”
Josh gives an indifferent shrug. “I don’t have any now, anyway.”
“And we’ll need your laptop. I’ll have to go through it.”
Josh tenses for a second, but then he acquiesces—too easily, I think. Whatever damaging stuff he’s got on there, he must think we won’t be able to find it.
“And you must promise never, ever to sell any drugs again, Josh.” Nick speaks severely, like he’s telling Josh to stop telling lies, or stealing cookies from the jar. I have an absurd urge to laugh, except I know I will actually sob. I press my lips together tightly enough to hurt. “If people ask, you tell them you’ve stopped selling. Period. Got it?”
“Fine.”
I stare at Josh, and then Nick, and I wonder if my husband actually thinks this is going to work. How on earth will we know if Josh is dealing drugs or not? And even if he isn’t, we haven’t so much as approached the terrible root of the problem—why he’s doing this, how he could do it at all, how he came to it in the first place.
“So that’s it?” Josh asks for another tense moment. “You won’t tell school?”
“I haven’t decided,” Nick says sharply. “I haven’t decided at all. It might be that I have a legal obligation to inform the school,” he adds, a bit sanctimoniously, but I realize that he surely does. And then I realize I probably have a legal obligation to inform Monica. Maybe Dylan will be removed from our home. In fact, he probably will.
“Well, when will you decide?” Josh asks in a bored voice, and I feel as if we’ve lost him, as if we lost him a long time ago. He doesn’t care what we think; he’s not upset that he’s disappointed and hurt us. He just wants to jump through whatever hoops we’ve deemed necessary so he can keep on living his life the way he wants. The realization is so painful, it actually takes my breath away.
Looking at this sulky-eyed boy-man with a fuzz of hair on his upper lip and the sullen cast to his features, I am reminded of a different Josh—four years old, apple-cheeked, innocent. Once he slipped out the front door and across the street while I was putting in a load of laundry. Someone saw him alone and stopped their car, and brought him to my front door with a friendly smile, along with a flicker of judgment. As a result, I scolded him sternly, more than I usually would have, and a tearful Josh presented me with the crumpled tulip he’d picked from our neighbor’s flower bed.