“This is the confession? You’re not a pepper person and we’ll never work?”
“My confession is even hotter. A deep dark secret, straight from hell.”
“Fuck,” Maddy said quietly. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.
"You don't pull any punches, do you? Always straight for the jugular."
She shrugged her shoulders. "Life is too short, Duke. I don’t have time to mess it up."
"That’s the straight truth," I said, taking a deep breath. The breeze stilled and white sun shone weakly through the clouds.
"I’m a drug addict."
"What?" she said.
She looked at me wide-eyed, serious and maybe a little perturbed.
"You mean like weed?"
"Nope, Maddy. You’re looking at a junkie." I took off my jacket and pulled up my sleeves. My one arm was covered in tatts, but the other was full of scars from the track marks. I had scars on my neck and on the back of my hands. There wasn’t one sacred spot on my body I hadn’t used to find an opening, a vein, any port to get the junk in. I’d smoked it, speed-balled, freebased, you name it. I’d rubbed heroin on my gums, eaten tablets of Fentanyl that nearly fucked me all the way up and beyond. I’d been a fiend and couldn’t escape the need that drove me to become another person entirely.
"You still use?” she asked me. The sadness in her eyes squeezed like a fist around my heart, draining it of vitality and the courage to tell her more. I squinted up at the sun and pressed on.
"I’ve been clean for ten years. No relapses."
"But, you're so young. Are you saying you got hooked in high school? Right here in Cherry Falls? "
"Yep." I nodded, staring out toward the field. "I used to play football, quarterback. I was a strong player. Made varsity freshman year, had my choice of colleges lining up to court me. When I was sixteen, I got hit pretty bad and needed knee surgery. The pain was so bad and the recovery was brutal. For some unknown reason, my body rejected the screws and my knee only got more inflamed instead of healing like it was supposed to. They operated again, about six weeks after the first. That surgery was mostly a success, but my pain level was intense. I just took the pills they prescribed to me.”
“Assholes,” Maddy muttered under her breath. She was shaking her head. I knew that my story wasn’t unique, that millions of other people had walked down the same long, lonely, and dangerous pathway before me.
“Eventually, I wasn't feeling the bone-crushing pain anymore, but the doctors inevitably stopped filling those prescriptions. Nobody told me how to get off them, to taper, or to take a non-opioid pain killer to deal with the letdown.”
“I can’t believe they’d do it to a kid, an athlete,” Maddy said.
“It went downhill from there—as you can already imagine. I found a hookup for Oxy and started buying my own supply to keep me high as a kite and away from not only the physical pain, but the loss of my football stardom. Pretty soon I gave fuck all about football. Stole money from my parents and started lying to everyone. It was only like six months before I figured out how much cheaper heroin was. It was easier to get too. I didn’t have to do as much to get fucked up either.”
Madison nodded. There wasn’t judgment on her face, but I could see she was struggling. There were tears in her eyes and she blinked hard to keep them from falling.
“One day, I was careless and my mom found my kit under my bed. She totally fucking lost it. My dad gave me the ultimatum to either get my ass into rehab or get out of the house. All I cared about was my next fix. I said goodbye to Cherry Falls and rode the Greyhound as far as I could with the money I had in my pocket. Ended up somewhere in Ohio. Backpacked and hitchhiked through some of Pennsylvania. Ended up in NYC—the other city of sin and a whole hell of a lot of vices.”
“Did your family know where you’d gone off to?” Maddy asked. The breeze had picked back up and it lifted the strands around her face, which she brushed away and tried to tuck into her ponytail.
“No, we lost touch. I was in deep, Madison. Real deep. But I guess as far as addicts go, I was lucky. Somewhat high functioning. I held down a shitty serving job and later an apprenticeship at a tattoo shop. I lived in an SRO. I was never so high that I didn’t know what my name was. I never passed out for days or got thrown in jail for stupid shit. But I was a mess, a disaster in the making.”