Love Drugged (20 page)

She gestured with her hands as she spoke, as if they were helping her to search for words. “So, if you’ve been holding back, or taking things slow or whatever, because you’re scared of me getting pregnant—you don’t need to be.”

I nodded again like an idiot, my brain scrambling for something to say. “Does the Pill prevent one hundred percent of pregnancies?”

“No, but—”

“Does it prevent STDs?”

“Jamie!” She pretended to look angry and insulted, then burst out laughing. “You know I don’t have a friggin’ STD. We both come to this with zero experience. Unless you’ve been lying to me. Which you better
not
have been.”

I grabbed her hand playfully, but she drew it away. “Relax,” I said. “I was kidding.”

“Okay, so, in fact—when you think about it—we’re never going to have a safer experience than the first one.”

“True.”

Across the room, the espresso machine hissed and gurgled.

“So, what do you think?”

I sat back in my chair, trying to contain the panic that was rising in my gut. I knew the pills made me less attracted to boys, but I wasn’t sure if they would get me through sex with a girl—yet.

I remembered to smile. “Okay, great! Thank you. That gives me something to think about.”

She raised an eyebrow, annoyed. “You’ll think about it? That’s what you have to say?”

“Well,” I said, then stopped. “Look, I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Whatever.” She pushed away from the table and reached for her bag. “Listen, I’ve got to get back to school. I’ve got Latin Dance in twenty minutes, and I’m going to be late as it is.”

She was still frosty to me when we got to the sidewalk.

Another iceberg to navigate.

“Celia, in the first place, where exactly do you expect us to
have
sex? On the bus? In your backyard, like Amanda Lynn?”

She rooted through her backpack as if she didn’t want to look at me. “What’s wrong with your house? You’re always telling me your family leaves you alone.”

“How am I supposed to explain having a beautiful girl over? I’m not allowed to date, and neither are you.”

“There’s always an excuse with you.
My
house, then.”

“Celia, I don’t understand why your dad is so trusting. He lets me come and go, hanging out in your room like I’m any ordinary friend. Your dad’s a freaking genius. Why is he so naïve?”

“Oh, about that.” Her smile was sarcastic. “Here’s the other thing I’ve been meaning to tell you. And don’t freak out or anything.”

“Tell me.”

She turned away again, facing the street. A garbage truck rattled by, its brakes screeching as it slowed at the corner.

“My dad thinks you’re gay.”

I stepped backwards. “Whoa. Why does he think that?”

“Because—I told him so.”

He thinks I’m gay.

He knows.

“It’s funny when you think about it,” she said, her voice softening finally.

It was so Not Funny when I thought about it. At that moment, the old phrase
the blood drained from his face
applied perfectly to me.

“Relax, will you? Jamie, my father would
never
let you come to the house if he thought you were my boyfriend. Or even if he thought you were any random straight boy. Please. I had to tell him something. We were just lucky he believed me.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Don’t you think it’s worth that tiny, silly, stupid lie so we can spend time alone together?”

“Maybe.”

“So what’s the problem? In my dad’s view, you’re welcome at our house any old time. We can have sleepovers! Problem solved. No more excuses.”

I shook my head, speechless. I remembered the private conversation I’d had, all those weeks ago, on a rainy winter day with Dr. Gamez inside the café.

“Wait, when did you tell him I was gay? Just recently?”

“No, a long time ago.”

“When? Tell me the day.”

She shrugged, as if growing impatient. “I don’t know. When we first started hanging out together.”

“Before Mexico?”

“
Of course
, before Mexico. Jamie, keep up. My dad would not have let you come with us otherwise. Okay, I remember. I told him after the first time you came over—when we designed those stupid flower tags. I didn’t want to get in trouble for having a boy over.” She smiled, a little bitterly. “At the time, I had no idea how useful it would be for us.”

Now it all made sense. Dr. Gamez could not have known I’d be at Rita’s café that rainy day, but when I walked in, he saw his chance and took it.

Opportunities arrive like trains and they depart like trains.

Celia looked at her watch. “I gotta run.”

“Me too.”

“Bye.”

No kiss.

After she ran off, I stood in front of the café, trying to process this new information. I reconstructed the story from the beginning. As soon as we’d met, Celia had lied to her father to allow us to spend time together. Dr. Gamez, thinking I was gay, told me about his “secret” new drug, and then immediately gave me the opportunity to steal the pills. He invited me to Mexico to monitor the effect of the drug, and even let me take more pills when I wanted them. All along, he’d been using me as his guinea pig. He knew the truth all along.

The only person who didn’t know was Celia.

twenty-one

This time I was prepared.

With Celia safely at dance class and the six digits of her birthday in my head, I had no trouble getting past the security checkpoints and into the house. My anger made me confident. I knew what I was doing. Inside, the place was quiet. Late-afternoon sunlight poured through the front windows, landing on the carpet in intervals like warm spotlights. I stepped lightly down the hallway toward the kitchen and stopped in front of the white security door that led to the lab. I punched in the birthday code and reached for the metal handle. It released, turning with a cold
click
. Easy as opening the refrigerator at home.

The lab corridor was long and brightly lit, a series of five office doors. My sureness wavered a little as the door shut behind me. Dr. Gamez’s lab assistants would be gone for the day, but I listened for sounds of activity anyway. Nothing but distant, slow piano notes. Classical music.

I crept along the linoleum floor, taking slow steps. Fleetingly I remembered that scene in
The Silence of the Lambs
when FBI agent Clarice Starling approaches the evil Hannibal Lecter’s jail cell for the first time. She faces a row of scary-looking cells, and the audience knows by instinct that Lecter’s cell is the very last one; likewise, I knew that Dr. Gamez’s office would be the farthest away.

The air was sterile-smelling and familiar, like the old tin of Band-Aids in my grandparents’ medicine cabinet. At each office door, I paused, taking a quick peek. Four indistinguishable offices, each with a cluttered, messy desk. Corkboards lined the walls, decorated with charts, photographs, cartoons ripped from magazines. I didn’t see anybody. Across the hall, a door led to the big lab—elegant rows of black Formica counters, chrome fixtures, glass beakers.

I paused just before the last office. The classical music was louder than ever. I wanted to catch Dr. Gamez by surprise. I tilted my head forward, expecting to find him bent over papers or working at his computer.

Instead, he was looking right at me. He stood behind his desk, facing the door, his fingertips resting on the desk surface in front of him. His stare and his smile rattled my nerves. “Good afternoon, Jamie!” he said cheerfully.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Why wouldn’t I know it?”

He gestured toward a security monitor in the corner of the room. It looked like the little TV in my bedroom. Its black-and-white screen showed the entire lab corridor, one end to the other.

“Dr. Gamez, you haven’t been honest with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“The pills. You’ve known all along.”

“Of course, yes, I know about the pills. I invented them.”

“You haven’t been playing fair.”

He smiled, unflustered. He turned for a moment to lean down and silence the classical music. “I might say the same thing about you. You stole many pills from me.”

“You practically handed them to me! You set them down in front of me and walked away. After Celia had
told
you I was gay.”

He shrugged, grinning, as if embarrassed to be caught. “The funny thing is, Jamie, I could not know for certain if Celia was telling the truth. Teenagers lie all the time, as you well know.”

“If you weren’t sure, why did you show me the pills?”

He crossed his arms. “It was a safe gamble. If you had no interest, you would have left the pills alone. I knew that you had taken them the moment I left the café and got into my car. It was a simple matter of counting. I gambled and won. Celia may have thought she was lying to me, but she was telling the truth.”

“Is that why you invited me to Mexico? To study me?”

“You may see it that way. There were a lot of reasons. Celia wanted your company, obviously. The fact is, you were safer under my watch. I needed to monitor the effects of the medication on your body.”

I didn’t buy it. “You were using me. You still are.”

“Some might say you were using me. Naturally, I was eager to see if the drug would work. In retrospect, Mexico was a waste of our time, due to your carelessness with the local water.”

“Does Celia know about you experimenting on me?”

For the first time, I saw a flash of something dark in his eyes. His tone was firm, but his voice remained even. “Now listen. Celia is
innocent. She knows nothing about any of this, and we need to keep it that way.”

“Maybe I’ll tell her.”

“No, that’s not a good idea. Or do you want your
girlfriend
to know that you are a homosexual?”

“Girlfriend? What makes you think—”

“Jamie, let it go. I have known since the beginning that you and Celia are seeing one another. I know my daughter. I could see how she felt about you from the start. She may be naïve, but I’m not.”

I didn’t know what to say.

He smiled. “Given the time you have spent together, I certainly do not want Celia’s feelings to be hurt at this point.”

“Whatever. We don’t tell her then.”

“Jamie, please don’t be angry. I wanted to help you, and I still do. You have already put forth such an
effort.
It seems to me that you are very close to being cured.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to take them anymore.”

I spoke in a rush of anger, but the words lingered in the air as a sort of question to myself. Did I really want to stop taking the drug?

“We both committed to this process the day you stole those pills from me at the café.”

“I’m done with it,” I said stubbornly.

His stare was powerful, full of disappointment. “I have to say, Jamie, I’m surprised at how ungrateful you seem. And foolish.”

“To be honest, Dr. Gamez, I don’t care what you think of me. I’ve got about fifteen pills left, and unless you want them back, I plan to flush them down the toilet.”

He stood up. “Not recommended. The development of this medicine is of vital interest to my company. It’s too late to stop what we’re doing here. I’m sorry, but if you choose not to continue with the experiment, I will need to have you arrested for theft—grand larceny—and it will take every dollar of your parents’ and grandparents’ money to keep you out of prison. They’ll be bankrupt.”

Probably too late for that
.

“Face it,” he continued. “Your family cannot afford an attorney. And even if they could, he or she would be no match for my legal team, the best that money can buy. I take this work very seriously, Jamie, and I can afford to protect my interests.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I couldn’t argue with the facts.

He added, more gently, “This whole argument seems so unnecessary, since I am helping you get what you want.”

“You have no idea what I want,” I mumbled, but it was true. If the drug worked, I still wanted to be straight. To be normal. I wanted to be obsessed with girls the way Wesley was. I wanted to be like every other boy at Maxwell. And I wanted the option of someday having a wife and children of my own. Maybe, if I kept taking the pills, all this would happen.

Dr. Gamez pulled his chair under him, sitting at the desk as if he intended to return to work. “Here’s what you want,” he said calmly, not looking at me. “You want to curb the attraction you feel for the boys in your class. You want to stop hating yourself for never fitting in, always having to hide your secret desires. You want to stop feeling like an outsider in your own family.”

There was a long silence.

I nodded, ashamed. He was exactly right.

“Do we agree then?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper.

He sighed. “Thank goodness. Honestly, I have had quite enough of this
negative attitude
for one day.” He pulled open a desk drawer next to him and busied himself with the files inside.

“I need to go,” I said.

“Wait, before you leave, I want you to answer a few questions. Sit down. Over here, next to my desk. Hurry up.”

My instinct was to flee, but I did as he instructed. I didn’t want him to “out” me to my whole family. Even more, I still wanted the pills to work.

From the desk drawer, he pulled out a folder. It was thick with papers, what looked like his notes. Next he grabbed a legal-size yellow pad, the kind Celia sometimes brought to school, and flipped the pages until he came to a clear sheet. “All right then. How often have you been taking the drug?”

“Only when I think I need it. Before seeing Celia.”

He frowned. “Is that all?”

“Or when I see a boy at school.”

“One particular boy?”

I nodded.

He wrote something in his notes. “I thought so. And since taking the drug, what has the response been? Do you think about this boy as much as you did previously?”

No,
I mouthed.

“What was that?”

“I said no.”

I don’t dream at all anymore.

“Excellent. Any side effects?”

“Yes,” I said quickly. “Lots of them. It started off with my spit tasting like pennies, and I got headaches. And now my vision gets blurry. My friends think I need glasses.”

“Perfectly common. Anything else?”

“Sore neck and shoulders. It’s hard to sleep sometimes.”

“Normal.”

In Dr. Gamez’s view, everything I’d experienced was
normal
or
common.

“And if I take the pills for several days in a row, my arms get all spastic.”

He was writing it all down. “Spasms in the upper extremities,” he said. “One arm, both?”

“Mostly my left arm. Sometimes even my leg. People notice, and it’s hard to explain.”

“Yes, very inconvenient. How many pills do you take each time?”

“One.”

He looked up from the notepad. “Only one? I need you to start taking two. Every day, without skipping days. Take them both in the morning, starting tomorrow. Understand?”

I nodded.

He stood and went to a stainless steel refrigerator. He removed a large plastic container of the pills and set them on his desk. He asked, “Have you been refrigerating your pills?”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to. Besides, I couldn’t. Someone would find them.”

“Where do you keep them?”

“In my room. In a plastic bag.”

He mumbled some words of displeasure. I guess it was a good thing I didn’t mention the plastic Army tank. He opened the container and poured about twenty pills onto a sheet of plain white paper. My friendly blue pills looked a bit less friendly under these circumstances. He took a baggie from a desk drawer. “Take these for the coming week. Keep them in a cool dark place.”

“Won’t taking two pills every day make the side effects worse?”

“Jamie, you must trust me. I’m a doctor. Based on what you said, I’m giving you a slight variation of the original formula. As soon as you get home, you may flush the others down the toilet. Just as you wished.”

I nodded, feeling skeptical. At the same time, I wanted to believe he was right and I wouldn’t suffer more side effects. I put the pills in the bag, two and three at a time.

He watched me. “You need to start coming every week at this time. That way, I can examine you and you can get more of the drug.”

“How am I supposed to explain coming over here like this?”

He took several deep breaths, thinking it over. “Very simple,” he said at last. “You need service hours for school, yes? We could use assistance here in the lab. Sanitation services. I expect you can be handy with a bucket and a mop and not make a mess of things.”

He spoke with such obvious condescension. Had he only
pretended
to like me all along? My neck felt hot with sweat.

“Unless you have any other questions,” he said, seeming very pleased, “we’re finished here for now. We need to get you home.”

He led me out of the laboratory and through a door in the garage, then up some damp concrete steps to the back garden. He didn’t want us running into Celia or the housekeeper any more than I did.

The sky was dark. I could hear the river in the distance, fast and high after the spring rains. The circular terrace was bordered with the first signs of daffodils and tulips, and the curving hedge was turning green. The garden was more beautiful than the first time I was there, but also muddier. We walked through the spongy grass to the side of the house and stopped at a high iron gate, secured with a padlock and chain.

Dr. Gamez got out his keys. He spoke in a low voice. “I am very glad we came to a shared agreement, Jamie. We both have much to gain by working together.”

I nodded, staring over his shoulder. I just wanted to get away.

He inserted the key into the padlock and opened it. “See you next week.”

“Right,” I said.

I ran to Western Avenue as if I were being chased. The bus came immediately. Riding north on Western, I fell into a sort of daze as we passed all the familiar sights: Maxwell Tech, used-car lots, gas stations, and the dark cemetery with its high cement wall. The fluorescent lights inside the bus were so bright that I mostly saw my own ghost-green reflection in the window glass. My eyes looked hollow and there was a deep crease between my eyebrows. I looked like I’d been crying, even though I hadn’t been.