I ate lunch alone in the library for the rest of the week, picking a different spot each day to avoid Justin who always seemed to be lurking. Maia didn't try to speak to me. For that, I was thankful. I didn't want to apologize, and I definitely did not want to explain to her what the fuck was going on. I didn't even know for sure. Was I going because I owed them or did they need something? Most likely a combination of both. Whatever they wanted would go towards starting to pay off my debt.
Kaylan had agreed to take me to the spot. That was why he'd been a little rougher. A down payment, he'd said. It didn't really matter. I was just glad I had a way—and an excuse—to meet up with them.
Lauren quizzed me in the living room about what Kaylan and I were going to be doing. Dinner, a meeting, and then to the fall festival if we were feeling it. If not, we'd go back to his house. He had the list of reasons for why I wouldn't come back before curfew. He'd already warned her that it was going to be a late night.
I was thankful that Kaylan was early, not because I wanted to get there any sooner than necessary, but because I wanted to get away from Lauren. It was hard to lie to her. Not the actual lying part, but the way that it made me feel to do it to her.
"Remind me again," Kaylan said as he drove, "why they've never met your actual sponsor?"
I was picking at a cut on my hand. "I never really had a legit sponsor. The one I had ended up OD'ing and back in rehab. I haven't really had one since. Didn't need one in juvie."
"And the foster system went with that? Your foster parents did?"
I shrugged, bringing the cut to my mouth to make it stop bleeding. "I was a fucked-up kid who wasn't so fucked up anymore. He's a cop. Figured he could handle it, I guess. I don't really know."
"Huh."
As we got closer to the meet-up point, I sat up and scanned the area. I remembered breaking into a couple of the stores, making a deal in a parking lot, begging for money from strangers, whatever I had to do to survive. I didn't regret living. I regretted how I did it.
"Just park around the corner. I'll meet you at the diner when I'm done," I told Kaylan as we got close.
He nodded and pulled off to the curb. He shifted in his seat to look at me. "Be careful, you hear? I don't want anyone messing up your pretty face."
"I'll be fine," I muttered and got out of the car as he reached for me.
I pulled my hood up and walked quickly down the street, keeping my head down. The sun was just starting to set, so there was still a good bit of people wandering around. It would be my luck that someone would recognize me.
I walked around the back of an older brick building. People were entering the front to grab some of the "state-renowned" pizza. It tasted like shit. Like someone had picked up shit at the park and dumped it into the crust mix. It was a wonder that people kept coming back to eat it.
I knocked on the back door. As I waited, I rocked back and forth on my feet. They took their time as always. Probably checking to see if they needed to hide their stash.
The door finally opened and a large man I had never seen before opened it. He wasn't large in the muscular sense. He was large in both length and width. I looked him up and down as he sneered at me.
"Julian here?" I asked finally.
He grunted and stepped aside so I could enter the dimly lit stock room. I weaved my way through the shelves to the middle of the room. When inspections were happening, it was transformed into the area where pizza boxes were being put together. A simple flip, but effective.
There were just three guys sitting at the table. Bags of heroin were in front of them along with stacks of cash. Julian was sitting on a stool, carefully counting his money while the two goons—both of which I had never seen before—were weighing the little bags of white powder. God forbid that they went over a gram.
Julian looked up and saw me, his face twisting into a sinister grin. "Rafe! My man!" He clapped his hands together, shaking his head slowly. "You are one lucky little fucker."
"Why's that, Julian?" I asked, crossing my arms over my chest.
"Because you managed to get the good life while the others are serving fifteen years," he replied, the smile slowly fading. "Wonder why that is?"
"No clue," I told him. "What do you want?"
"Did you snitch? You know I hate snitches and I'll find out who it was eventually," he said, his eyes not leaving mine.
I held his gaze and replied without blinking, "I would never do that to you."
He looked at me for a moment longer before he looked away. "Well, whatever. You owe me money."
"I only have five hundred," I said as I started to pull out the money Kaylan had paid me. That wasn't all of it. He'd given me an advance for tonight, but Julian would only want more if he knew that I had it.
"Do you know how much money I lost when you guys got busted?" he asked, his nose wrinkling up. "Way more than that. I didn't just lose product. I lost my men. I lost my customers. You really fucked me over, kid."
"What do you want?" I asked again.
He was silent and then snickered. "You're going to work for me again. Without pay and if I get wind of you fucking me over, you're going to wish you were in hell."
I crossed my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes at him. "You realize that I live with a cop, right?"
He looked over at me. "And that's exactly why you're the perfect person for the job. These counties work together to bust people that do business like we do. You can let us know any information you find out and steer them away from us, while also doing whatever I need you to."
"Whatever you need me to do for you? What the fuck do you mean by that?"
"What you did before, only you don't get a say. You do what I tell you, when I tell you, and no questions asked. You're playing by my rules now. There is no partnership anymore," he said and then slid a bag toward me. "Consider this a gift. You'll pay me back later."
I looked down at the bag. My body was craving it. It'd been almost two years since I'd had any of it in my system. Julian added a syringe to the pile, a grin on his face as I took it and stuffed it into my pocket.
I hated him.
"Here's a burner phone," Julian said, pushing an old flip phone toward me. "I'll call you."
My fingers felt like they were burning once they touched the plastic covering. The feeling was worse as I slid it into the pocket that held the needle and drugs. I'd worked so hard to get to where I was, and I still had a long way to go. Being there and having those things felt as though I was taking not just one step back, but a leap backward.
It was only going to get worse.
----------
Kaylan didn't ask questions. I gave him what he paid for in the backseat of his car and then he dropped me off at the front door of my foster parent's house. Lauren came out onto the front porch and waved at Kaylan as he pulled away.
"How did it go?" she asked as she followed me inside.
I kicked off my shoes and shrugged, sure that she already knew what was in my pocket. "Fine. Nothing special, really."
"It's good that you have such a great man to be your sponsor," she said as I walked towards the kitchen to get a drink to wash down the vomit rising in my throat. "He seems like he's really put his life back together."
"Yeah, he has," I mumbled. I grabbed a glass from the cabinet and poured some water into it. "I'm pretty wiped, so I'm going to shower and go to bed."
"I think that's a good idea," she said, sitting down as Elijah walked in from the garage. "You've been looking tired lately."
"Everything okay?" Elijah asked as he put his lunch box on the counter.
"Yeah, just school's been kicking my butt lately. I'll be fine," I told him. I picked up the glass and started towards the stairs.
"Oh, before I forget, your friend called. Maia?" Lauren said, twisting on the stool to look at me. "I invited her to lunch tomorrow. She's a sweet girl. I don't know why you don't invite her over more."
"Busy schedule," I mumbled.
When I got to my room, I gently closed the door. Where I was going to put those drugs so they wouldn't be found, I didn't know. I couldn't take them to school with me. I couldn't just hide them in my room. Elijah had warned that he would randomly check my room and do drug tests. If he found anything, he'd be sending me back to juvie. That was the arrangement he'd made when he'd offered to foster me.
I made sure the ringer was off the burner phone and stashed it in my backpack. I stared down at the drugs. One way to make them disappear was to use them, but then there was the issue of the drug test. Elijah didn't leave me unsupervised for those. I couldn't make myself flush it either.
I took the needle and went over to the plants. Carefully, I moved the dirt and buried the needle in the pot and then fixed it so that the dirt didn't look like it'd been disturbed. I took apart one of the mechanical pencils on the desk and carefully poured the powder into it. I put it back together and put it back in the holder. They weren't the best hiding spots, but for what I had to work with they would do.
I took a quick shower and lay down on the bed, but my mind kept thinking about those drugs. There wasn't a day where I hadn't craved a high, but I had never had the resources to actually get high. Now that I did, it was all that I could think about. My body was aching for me to feed the fire. My brain was telling me that it wouldn't hurt to have just a taste of it. My conscience, though, was screaming at me that it wasn't a good idea.
It'd taken a lot of work from me, and a lot of other people, to transform into the person I was. It was a person that I had always been. I'd finally stopped suppressing it and always being on guard. I didn't think I'd ever fully put my guard down. I'd had years of abuse that had formed the walls I had built. Every day that I resisted getting high was a day that I was improving myself. Drugs didn't define who I was. The abuse my parents put me through didn't define who I was. The things that I did while I was high didn't define me. Kaylan didn't define me. It was what I took from each of those things, what I let be a part of my life, that defined me.
I stared up at the ceiling. I'd left Spencer with my parents. I'd abandoned him and left him to deal with that abuse on his own. He didn't have anyone left to defend him and I didn't even know where he was now. Once I'd gotten hooked on heroin, I'd forgotten all about him. What did that say about me? That now that I was clean, I didn't try to find my own brother? A person didn't just disappear, let alone three people. Somewhere, someone knew where they were.
Doing Julian's deeds didn't mean that I was going back down that dark road. I was making amends, as I was supposed to when in recovery. If I didn't make things right, then I was never going to be able to move forward. Not that Julian was ever going to fully let me be free now that he had his hands on me again, but I could at least try. I could at least keep the new people in my life safe for as long as possible. Before long, I could leave this place and get far, far away.
I just had to keep it together long enough to do that. I couldn't let these people get in my head and twist my words and thoughts again. I couldn't let them lead me down the road of violence and addiction again.
That wasn't going to be an easy thing. With Kaylan back in my life, I now had the funds to pay for drugs. With Julian, I had a means to get them. Staying clean was so much easier in a rehab center and in juvie because people were constantly watching me. I'd been out for two months with twenty months of sobriety. In another two months, I was going to be able to erase the past two years.
I put a hand on my chest and felt my heart pounding in my chest. If I kept it together long enough to get Spencer somewhere safe—although in this world, I have no idea how—then I had done enough. He was the last person that I needed to make amends with.