Page 8 of Rat Park
The anxiety of not being high was intolerable. It wasn’t anchored to anything real. Not to a looming exam or his mom’s haggard face, the thumping noise of her parties or the encroaching reality of not being attracted to girls. It flapped freely in the wind, taking him with it. It couldn’t be reasoned with. The feeling was there, all the time, driving his every waking moment.
He’d do anything to get rid of that feeling. Anything.
Dominic tried to never get high at home, but it was the easiest place to do it. Every rule he made for himself—don’t do it at home, don’t do it at home during the day, don’t do it at home when he knew his mom would check on him—got broken under the force of that itch.
Even the ritual of preparing the heroin would calm him down. He sat on his bed and held the flame under the spoon, watching the transformation of the heroin as it bubbled into something his body would take. The acrid smell would almost make his mouth water. He liked the feeling of the tourniquet like a punishment around his arm, his thigh. The slow search for a viable vein, the pinch of the needle, the push of the syringe. He untied the band around his thigh and put it with the needle on his bedside table, lying back on his bed and letting it take him away.
The high was impenetrable. That was the best thing about it. When his bedroom door opened and his mom stepped inside, he didn’t care. Her frowning face was worlds away, where all the noise and the worry lived.
“Nickie. Jesus, what are you doing?” she said, but her voice was a small pebble bouncing off the glass pane protecting him from the world. “Dominic,” she said, shaking him a little. He looked at her hazy figure. She was almost a stranger, then.
“Yeah?” he sighed. He closed his eyes, and the darkness took even her voice away.
When he went downstairs that night, the house was silent and dark but for the bare lightbulb in the kitchen. There was no music thumping away in his chest. Just his mom, sitting alone at the kitchen table, a full ashtray at her elbow, a lit cigarette between her fingers.
Dominic braced himself for a telling off, but his mom just looked at him. She looked tired. Worn.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and even her voice sounded haggard.
Dominic shrugged. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
Dominic was still loyal to her, to this house, but he was fifteen. He wasn’t a little kid anymore. He wasn’t blind to the world he was really living in. Their love for each other was not full and caring. It was just a hollow tube connecting them, frayed and dry with disuse.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Man, are you listening to me?” Mason had a scowl on his face. He’d been telling Dominic something important, something about his latest foster carers. Dominic blinked back online. Twilight was falling around them, birds calling out the end of the day in their secluded corner of the world.
“That sucks,” Dominic said, guessing Mason had been complaining. Mason’s frown only deepened.
“The hell are you talkin’ about?”
“I don’t know, what’reyoutalking about?”
“Fucking hell, Nickie. Why do I even bother?”
“Sorry—come on, sorry,” Dominic said, but Mason was already getting up from the park picnic bench they’d been sitting on.
“Man, there’s no point talkin’ to you.”
“Dude, come on. Sit down, what were you saying?”
“Forget it.”
“Come on! I barely see you anymore.”
“Oh, and that’smyfault?”
“I’m not saying—”
“I’m getting adopted. My—Jack and Cindi. They want to adopt me, all right? They must be fucking crazy, but they…that’s what I was telling you. Whatever.” Mason turned away from Dominic, shoulders hunched, but he didn’t walk away.
Dominic stared at Mason’s back. Adopted at sixteen? That was weird, right? How long had Mason even been with them? Dominic struggled to remember.
“That’s great,” Dominic said. The words came out flattened by the strange pressure inside his chest. Mason snorted. Dominic tried again. “That’s great, Mason.”
Dominic must have managed to inject enough emotion into the words because Mason tilted his head, watching him for a moment before turning fully. As they watched each other, Dominic suddenly realised what the feeling in the pit of his stomach was.
Loss. Because Mason was going up and he…wasn’t.
