“You think I’m going to get drugs, don’t you?” Kristen asks. Her eyes well with tears. “How long are you going to punish me?”
Lorna gapes with surprise. “I’m punishing you?”
“Yes! It’s on your face every day. I can see it in your eyes. You don’t trust me. You will never trust me. I could be Mother Teresa, and you wouldn’t trust me.”
“That’s not true,” Lorna insists. But deep down, she thinks maybe it is true. She has believed Kristen’s claim of sobriety, but in the back of her mind, she knows she can’t fully trust her.
“You make me feel so bad about myself,” Kristen says petulantly. “I’m sorry, okay? I am so sorry for using drugs, but I’m not using anymore. I swear to you, I won’t do anything at your party.”
Lorna is so confused. How has she made Kristen feel bad about herself? She thought they were getting along so well. “Okay,” Lorna says, because she feels guilty, like somehow she has become Kristen’s jailer. “Okay.”
Kristen squeals with delight, then takes forever to get ready. But to the party they eventually go. Lorna with her hair in a low braid, wearing jeans that Kristen says make her ass look sexy and a cute top. And her gorgeous, gregarious sister with loose blond hair, wearing a tube top that showcases her flat belly and jeans so tight that Lorna worries she’ll somehow manage to split them.
The house where the party is being held is packed. Thenight turns into a blur. Lorna is in a celebratory mood and uncharacteristically drinks too much. She loses track of Kristen, but that’s okay because the last she saw her, she was drinking water and laughing with a couple of guys. And anyway, Kristen promised she wouldn’t do anything at this party. And Lorna desperately needs to believe her.
It is close to midnight, Lorna thinks, when Kristen finds her and tells her she is leaving with two of Lorna’s college classmates. Nicole and Anna are together, laughing, loose-limbed, clumsy. They’ve been drinking, but Kristen looks as sober as a judge. “Where are you going?” Lorna asks.
“Don’t know,” Kristen says. “We’re just gonna ride around. Anna says she has a pool. We may go there.”
Lorna’s gaze darts to Nicole and Anna again. She has a bad feeling. Kristen grabs her arm and forces Lorna to look at her. “Why are you being like this? I’m fine. Everything is fine. We’re just going to hang out. You’re so like Mom sometimes,” she snaps.
It’s the surliness that ratchets Lorna’s fear. But she doesn’t say anything to stop her friends or Kristen. They are grown women, and Lorna is not her sister’s zookeeper. And anyway, what would she say?My sister hasn’t had anything to drink, but she is a recovering addict, and we should not trust her?Lorna doesn’t say it. She goes back to the party. She doesn’t even see them leave.
It is sometime early in the morning when her mother wakes up Lorna, panic-stricken. She says Kristen has been in an accident. Lorna dresses quickly and they drive to the hospital. Her heart thumps painfully the entire way.
Kristen is okay, just banged up. Anna has a broken leg and will have surgery later. Nicole, though...
Nicole.
Nicole didn’t make it.
Kristen talks wildly on the way home about how she was sitting in the back and didn’t see the car coming. She seems jittery and fearful, but then again, she’s just been in a terrible accident in which the driver lost her life.
Several days later, Lorna learns from her mother that Nicole had meth in her system.Meth?Lorna didn’t know Nicole that well, but she knows what a meth head is like. She looks at Kristen.
“What?” Kristen asks defiantly. Guiltily, to Lorna’s eye. “You think I had something to do with it?”
Of course she did. “Nicole didn’t use drugs,” Lorna says, her voice full of rage.
Kristen shrugs and averts her gaze. “I guess she did that night.” She walks out of the room.
In the days that follow, Kristen says over and over it wasn’t her fault. But wasn’t it? Where else would Nicole have gotten meth? Why did they leave the party, anyway? Why didn’t Lorna warn Nicole and Anna about hanging out with Kristen? She tries to see Anna, but Anna is still in the hospital and is too distraught for visitors.
A few days after the funeral, Mom finds drugs in Kristen’s purse.
“Yes, I have some drugs, okay?” Kristen shouts at her mother. “I almost lost my life in a car accident, Mom! How am I supposed to cope with that?”
Lorna’s guilt at not having warned her classmates about Kristen is massive, pushing all the air from her lungs on a daily basis. She wishes she could somehow apologize to their families for her failure. She wishes she had never believed Kristen could or would change.
Lorna gets her first professional job at a tech company and is saving to move out. Living with Mom is cheap, but living with Kristen is impossible. Mom allows Kristen to come and go, eventhough she is using again. Sometimes Kristen goes a few days without being high. But then she’ll disappear for a few days. Sometimes money and things of value go missing.
And then on rare occasions, when things are quiet and Kristen is clean, she will quietly admit she wishes she knew how to get out from under the rule of addiction. “Have you ever wished you were someone else?” she whispers to Lorna one night.
“All the time,” Lorna says flatly.
“Yeah,” Kristen says, and sighs wearily. “Me too. Just... anyone else.”
Lorna stays in that apartment another year because she feels responsible for her mother, who worries endlessly about Kristen. She has always felt a crushing responsibility to be the good daughter, a role she took on at the age of six. But she finally reaches her limit when Kristen brings home a guy who is obviously stoned, and Mom responds to Lorna’s complaints by saying, “At least she’s not out on the street.”
