Page 126 of Life of the Party

“Uh…I think so. I think it’ll be more for having at our concerts, for fans to buy.” A wave of pain contorted his handsome features for a split second, but he recovered quickly. “Tom’s going to try and get us some radio play.”

“What? That’s awesome.” I started to smile, but a blistering stab of heat bore into my guts. I panted around it. “Your songs are going to be on the radio?”

“Yeah.” Grey wiped his brow. “Cool huh?”

I tried smiling again. “I’m so proud of you. You’re going to be famous, Grey Lewis.” I imagined it then—anything to take my mind off the churning—and beamed at him through my sweat, drawing my knees up to my chest.

“You okay?” Grey wondered, placing a sweaty hand on my slick arm.

“Yeah.” I lied. Another spasm clutched me. “You?”

“Yeah.” He lay back and shut his eyes, though, his lips a hard, tight line.

“Grey?”

“Yes?”

“Keep talking to me, okay? It helps.”

It seemed like he tried to laugh, but the sound never made it to his lips. “What do you want to hear?”

“Anything. Something about you, something I don’t know.”

“Something you don’t know…hmmm…” He inhaled sharply, and then his face relaxed. “This isn’t…the first time I’ve had to get off heroin.”

“It’s not?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. “When did you?”

“When I was younger. Like, fifteen, sixteen.”

“Really? I had no idea.” I grit my teeth. “Was it hard to quit?”

“Nah.” He shook his head. “I barely got into it. We smoked it on tinfoil back then. I was such a punk kid, into all kinds of shit.”

I listened quietly, shutting my eyes and focusing on Grey’s low, velvet voice instead of the gnawing in my stomach.

“Things were bad before.” He explained. “We were stealing stereos and stuff to pay for drugs. One of my friends almost got beat to death by a dealer.” He paused for amoment, talking a breath. “I saw some messed up thing go down. When I tried heroin…it was such freedom. I didn’t have to think about my past and my parents, or my present and all the shit I’d seen and done, the little shit-hole apartment that was my home, my frail old grandma waiting for me there.”

I nodded, encouragingly. I loved it when Grey opened up like this. Most of his emotions he expressed in his songs—I had to listen to them, read the lyrics there to really understand what he’d been through, what was going through his head. He had my attention now, my rapt attention, overshadowing the sick, achy blood racing through my body. I would listen to whatever he had to say.

His eyes were shut, in remembrance or pain, I couldn’t tell. His voice shook ever so slightly. “It was my grandma who made me change. I could see her wasting away, so worried. I was leaving, it was late one night, and I needed a fix. She begged me not to go, but I wouldn’t listen. Finally, she lost it on me. I can still see her eyes, they were so wide, so furious. ‘Go ahead and die then, and see if anyone cares! You’re just like your parents, Grey Lewis. You’re a loser! A screw up!’”

“That’s the last thing she ever said to me. Of course I didn’t listen to her, I needed to get high. And when I came back the next morning, she was dead.”

“Oh, Grey.” I gasped. I tried to sit up, to comfort him, but I was too weak. “That’s horrible! I’m so sorry.”

He cringed. “It was enough to clean me up a bit. I had to prove her wrong, you know, to show her I wasn’t a total screw-up. To maybe make her proud of me…someday. She was all the family I had in the world, and I just…” He shook his head. “I…I owed it to her to make something of myself. So I threw myself into music. It became my drug, my heroin. Through it, I found some measure of…peace…”

I grasped his hand, I didn’t know what else to say. The pain was rocketing through me, tearing through my muscles. I moaned and pressed my face against the pillow.

“I’m sorry, Mackenzie. I’m sorry I let this get so far.” The pain was evident in Grey’s face, his blue eyes burning as he watched me suffer. “It wasn’t like this before, I didn’t realize…I mean, I felt a little nauseous…but it was nothing like this.”

“It’s not your fault.” I shook my head. It was mine; I’d manipulated him into it, pulled him down with me, deeper and deeper. I choked back the guilt and squeezed his fingers. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I’m with you.”

“I love you.” He panted. “I’d do anything for you.”

“I know.”

It was agony. I’ve never felt so sick in my entire life. Just when I thought I’d reached the pinnacle, that things couldn’t get any worse, they did. I shook and trembled. I was violently ill. Every noise grated in my ears, the slightest breath of breeze from the window felt like razor blades against my weeping skin. The pain in my stomach doubled, tripled—until I was bent in half, crippled in torture. I tried to stay quiet, tried to keep my suffering to the panting horror of my breath. But I felt like screaming.

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