The First True Thing Read online

  Epigraph

  And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

  whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.

  To the flashing water say: I am.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke,

  from The Sonnets to Orpheus,

  translated by Stephen Mitchell

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Claire Needell

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  COVER FOR ME. Told Mom I’m w/you. Senna too. I stare at the text from Hannah and toss my phone on the bed. The last thing I need is to let myself get pulled into Hannah’s shit.

  I know a promise to cover for Hannah is a promise to lie. I’ve already sworn to Mom and Dad and everyone at the Center: No more lies. It’s the sort of thing they’d make me leave Group for. Lying for someone who’s dealing, using, or putting themselves in harm’s way is definitely a “violation.” They’d make me leave, go back through intake, and reapply to the whole program.

  They’d say I’m not ready. Kevin, my addiction specialist, told me at intake that the hardest part about Group would be showing up. At first I thought he meant that literally. Now I know that being a member of the Peer Support Group for New Living means being like one of those foul-smelling frogs we dissected in freshman-year biology. Every afternoon in Group, it’s like I’m being sliced open and stuck with pins. It turns out that showing up at the Center means letting everyone see the weakest, worst parts of you. They say they want to know my story. They say it’s a safe space. But I’ve noticed it’s often in the most frightening places that people insist you feel safe.

  It’s been two weeks since I started at the Center, and I admit that I still want to drink. I still think that drinking made me happy. Or, at least drinking made happiness seem possible. It’s like the feeling you get when you’re little and someone hands you one of those paper birthday party invitations, or a sparkly Valentine’s Day card. A beer is like that for me. It’s something bright and shiny that is already there. A drink is right in your hand until another takes its place, each with the same exact promise. I haven’t forgotten the feeling, not yet. They say I will.

  I’ve tried to explain in Group about the night of my Death Wish crash. Maybe it was just the full moon, but I remember as I rode away from Andy, there was a kind of brightness in the woods, a light I was chasing. It’s like the light I always felt inside me with the first shot of vodka. I could see the same brightness, the same light in Hannah’s face when she did lines—not at the end of a coked-up binge, but in the beginning, when the night first began, and everyone was up. It was all electric then; it was all light. Everyone chased it all summer long, and the more we chased it, the darker everything actually got.

  Now, I’m living in that place between the darkness and the light. Everything has slowed down. Andy and I have started talking more at school again. But since I’m grounded and sober, nothing can really happen. I can’t chase anything—not the light that my first drink of the night always promised, and not the darkness that followed.

  I take a deep breath and stare at my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. My hair has gotten long and loose, it reaches down to the middle of my back in coppery curls. Back in middle school, I hated my hair, and got up early every morning to straighten it, but now I think it’s my best feature—that and being tall. But I can’t say I’m at my best tonight. I have dark circles under my eyes, and my skin, which is usually clear, is blotchy and broken out. But the real problem with my appearance is the scar across my chin. I had the stitches out last week, and I’ve used the ointment Dr. Hagan gave me to keep the wound from drying out and creating a deeper scar. Mom got the best plastic surgeon in the county. Dad talked like I didn’t deserve it.

  “She nearly breaks her neck she’s so drunk, and you’re worried about the size of the scar on her face, Jude? That’s not right.” They were in the hospital room a few feet from my bed, talking in loud whispers.

  “She’ll already be living with this the rest of her life,” Mom said. “She’ll be living with this alcohol issue the rest of her life.”

  “At least she’ll have a rest of her life,” Dad said.

  I was quiet and shut my eyes, so they didn’t think I was listening. When they left the room to talk to Dr. Hagan, I wiped the tears from my cheeks. Then the three of them came back into the room, and Dr. Hagan sat at the end of my bed, like I was a little kid and he was going to read me a story. He said I didn’t need to go away to rehab. “You can get treatment right here in Waverly,” he said in his steady doctor voice. He left the white-and-green brochure for the Center for New Living by my side.

  I thumbed through the glossy pages. There were pictures of counselors with ugly glasses and weird L.L.Bean–looking clothes, and there were pictures of teenagers drinking soda and eating chips, sitting around long tables talking, looking serious and sad. I didn’t know what scared me more—not drinking, or having to talk to the people in the pictures.

  I finger my scar. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but the skin feels rougher than the rest of my face. At the Center, they tell me I’m an alcoholic and that I’ll always be one. But I’m sixteen, and that’s too young to be anything forever.

  I stare out my bedroom window at the ink-dark sky, the silver, nearly full moon. The tops of the trees seem to glow in the beam of the streetlight, their branches waving in the strong, warm wind. It rained hard all morning, but brightened in the afternoon. I lean over, open the window wide, and take a deep breath. It’s so warm it feels more like spring than fall, except the air smells of musty old leaves—dead things, not things coming alive.

  They say at the Center that you don’t keep your secrets, your secrets keep you. I think I know what this means. I almost died the night of my Death Wish crash. When I felt myself begin to fall, and I no longer felt the bike beneath me, I felt free. I’d been trying for months not to fall, and it was finally happening—I could finally let go—into the moonlit woods, into the golden light of the falling leaves.

  When I left Andy that night, drunk as I was, I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t riding home. I was riding away.

  Hannah has her own reasons to want to get away.

  Covering for Hannah, like she’s asking me to do, isn’t anything new. But if I don’t cover for her—if I tell anyone what I know she’s done, my world and her world—everyone’s world—will crumble.

  I pick up my phone and text Hannah.

  Where r u?

  When are you coming back?

  I don’t say I’ll lie for her. But I don’t say I won’t.

  Two

  THERE WERE SO many wasted nights at Robert Senna’s, they all kind of blend into one, but the t
ime we went to Alex’s stands out as being particularly fucked up. I felt it from the start, even before we left Senna’s for White Plains. I think I have a good instinct for knowing when something bad is coming my way; I can feel it, the way you can feel you’re about to get a cold or the flu.

  Early on, there was a fight between Senna and Chuck. As usual, Senna was messing with Chuck’s head—baiting him. Hannah, Senna, and I were all on the couch by the window when Chuck walked up and banged on the downstairs door. Senna is always giving Chuck shit for not having manners—slamming the door to his truck, knocking too hard on the door of the house, or not knocking and walking in on Senna and Hannah when they’re fooling around.

  Senna shouted down, “Why the fuck you banging on my house?” Chuck gave him the finger, and Senna grabbed Hannah’s water bottle from the table, leaned out the open window and emptied it over Chuck’s head. He got him pretty bad.

  We nearly died laughing when we heard Chuck race up the stairs—bang bang bang bang. Then he burst in the room and threw his guitar case at Senna, missing him by a foot. Senna tackled him. Hannah and I screamed and jumped out of the way as Senna crashed around, trying to pin Chuck to the floor.

  Chuck was furious—his wet T-shirt clung to his back, and his damp hair hung in his face as he grimaced and grunted, trying hopelessly to fend Senna off, and gain the advantage. Senna, though, seemed to be enjoying himself—exerting little effort, grinning and laughing as the two of them rolled around.

  “Down boy,” Senna said once he had him pinned, and Chuck stopped struggling. Then, after a tense moment, when it looked like they were about to start fighting all over again, Senna released him, and they sat up next to each other on the floor, Chuck breathing hard—Senna like a big, curly-headed bear, taking an occasional swipe at Chuck’s shoulder, until Chuck finally lay sprawled on the floor, with his arms and legs spread like a hipster Jesus.

  I thought to myself, How did you choose, Hannah? How did you choose Senna the Psycho over wild, innocent Chuck? And just for a moment, I let my eyes rest on Chuck, as his chest rose and fell with his still-heavy breathing. He had his shirt raised and his hand rested on a strip of tanned skin, and because Chuck is so thin, the waistband of his jeans gapped, exposing the elastic of his boxers.

  It was Senna who snapped me out of it. “Yo, text your boyfriend, Marcelle, and tell him to get his A-hole brother over here. I need Jonas to come now if we’re setting this deal up tonight,” Senna said. I stared at him blankly.

  “Whose boyfriend?” I asked. I didn’t like Senna referring to Andy as my boyfriend—it felt like he was mocking me. Andy and I had hooked up a few times over the summer, and a couple of nights before, we had ridden our bikes home from Senna’s through the woods. We were both wasted, so we had stopped halfway and walked. What happened on that walk was vague. In the morning, I had scratches on my legs and leaves in my hair. I remember kissing Andy by the big white rock near Summit. I know things heated up between us, but I’ve lost most of the details. Drunk forgetting isn’t like other kinds of forgetting—it’s like your whole body forgets. Maybe that’s what makes it so hard to ask Andy what he remembers. My brain wants to know, but my body wants to curl up in a corner.

  I felt myself flush under Senna’s gaze as I scrolled through my phone for Andy’s number. I wanted to tell Senna to just text him himself, or text Jonas, but he knew he had me cornered, and cornering people is Senna’s favorite form of entertainment. About a minute after I texted him, Andy and Jonas walked noisily up the stairs. When Andy glanced in my direction, I blushed, and silently cursed Senna. I’d had only one beer, not nearly enough.

  Hannah sprang to her feet when she saw Jonas was carrying a bottle of Smirnoff Silver. “Thanks, Dad,” she said. “You’re the best.” She took the bottle to the kitchen and mixed herself a lemonade and vodka in one of the grimy plastic cups the Sennas kept in the kitchenette. Senna’s parents seem to have abandoned the garage apartment years ago, after his older brother, who had been living there, finally joined the army or navy or whatever.

  “Marcelle, you in need of a shot?” Hannah offered.

  “I’ll take whatever you’re having,” I answered.

  “I’m only mixing for my girl,” Hannah announced. “Don’t any of you guys get to thinking I’m your bitch.” When she handed me my glass, Senna tried to snag it, but Hannah shoved him with her elbow and he frowned, feigning hurt, falling back on the sofa behind him.

  “Elise says the worst thing you can do is train a guy wrong from the start. They get used to it, and then you spend your life in servitude,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Senna said. “And who trains you? That I’d like to see.”

  “I train me,” Hannah said, tossing her head. “And if you’re smart, you won’t go thinking you can change that.”

  Senna laughed. “That’d be like changing a cat to a dog, and who would want to do that?”

  “Getting tired of babysitting here,” Jonas said, leaning forward across the old trunk that served as a coffee table, chopping a small pile of white powder into lines. Senna lifted Hannah by the hips, and moved her to the seat next to him. She leaned back on the armrest, and put her bare feet in Senna’s lap.

  “Well, fucking get started, then,” Senna said.

  “I’m texting Alex now. See when he wants us,” Hannah said. Jonas shook his head.

  “You’re crazier than I thought,” Jonas said to Senna. “Letting your girlfriend loose with Alex.”

  “Shut up, man,” Senna said. “Like you know.”

  About an hour after Jonas and Andy arrived, Senna demanded we leave. I’d had a couple of drinks, but I’d mostly been on my phone, hardly talking to anyone. Even on nights Andy and I hooked up, we started out slow, both of us wary.

  “All right, drink up, kids,” Senna said. “We’ve got to bounce.”

  “Hold on,” Jonas said. “It’s not cool to bring everyone over there. Five high school kids. That’s no good.” Jonas shook his head and crossed his arms, eyeing Senna. Jonas was cold sober, and Senna was close to it, but they both seemed to be spoiling for a fight.

  “Fuck do you know?” Senna said. Somehow, Senna had managed to work things so that he and Hannah didn’t need Jonas as a go-between with Alex, even though Alex was Jonas’s friend. They’d met at the community college in White Plains, and then started working together at the tech company Alex supposedly started with money he made dealing coke.

  “You can just give me your cash, if you think it’s too many people. I’ll drop by your place tomorrow,” Senna said. Senna towered over Jonas, with a calm, almost-blank look, his fists loosely clenched.

  “Fine,” Jonas said disgustedly. “We got things settled already. More talk is just a way to fuck what we’ve got.” But Senna seemed not to hear; he brushed past Jonas and bolted down the stairs, while everyone, including Jonas, followed him like a line of school kids.

  “Let’s go, woman,” Senna said outside, as he grabbed Hannah by her tiny waist and lifted her into the cab of his truck. She shrieked and kicked, playing like she was being taken against her will, until Senna pushed her into the truck butt-first. Without a word, Chuck climbed in on the other side. I was left to go with Jonas and Andy, or not at all.

  Three

  JONAS WAS UPSET about the argument with Senna, and a few times he nearly drove us off the road when he turned in his seat to yell at Andy. “Fucking Alex won’t like this,” he said. “Damn. I should’ve just brought those cokehead idiots, left you and your girl back home.” I cringed in the backseat, both because Andy’s brother didn’t want me there, and because he seemed to know about the two of us. Then I caught Andy’s eye in the rearview mirror, and he gave me a hesitant smile.

  Senna, Hannah, and Chuck beat us to Alex’s by about ten minutes, and when we walked in they were already talking to a twentysomething guy with a dark beard and weird tinted glasses, who I assumed must be Alex. The apartment was crowded with people around Jonas’s age—people, I guessed, fr
om the community college, and some even older guys who were maybe from Alex’s tech company. I could see why Jonas hadn’t wanted to bring us all. We were the youngest at the party by far, and I felt like people were staring.

  Alex came up and gave Jonas a kind of man-hug, then he gave me a look over. Behind his tinted glasses, his squinty eyes were a watery blue. “Name?” he demanded.

  “Marcelle,” I said, and I put my hand out for him to shake, which I instantly regretted. He took it with mock seriousness.

  “So nice to meet you, Marcelle. I think I’m already in love with those fiery curls of yours.” He spoke in a fake, flirtatious voice. I blushed, and looked for a way to escape. “I got other business,” he said. “But I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said awkwardly. Alex, I decided, was one of those guys who make it a thing to go after the girl who isn’t the hot one.

  Alex led Hannah, Senna, and Jonas toward a bedroom down the hall, but he stopped in front of the closed door, turned toward me, and winked. I looked away, but not before he caught my eye, and gave me a look full of meaning. I grabbed on to Andy’s sleeve, afraid of losing him in the pressing crowd of the small apartment.

  In the kitchen, people were playing beer pong at a table by the window, and others were passing around a small wooden pipe. There was a long-haired girl in a crop top with a tattoo across her abdomen that said Child of Nature, with a crescent moon and a sun above it. She was making her way around the room with a bottle of tequila and a stack of plastic glasses. The girl had a sort of lopsided face, but she had a graceful dancer’s body.

  Nature Girl sidled up next to Andy and me. “Bottoms up, baby!” she cried. I took a shot glass from her, wondering if she was calling me “baby” because she realized how young I was, or because she called everyone that. I drank my shot in one swallow, like you’re supposed to, but Andy choked on his, drinking only half. The girl handed him a paper napkin, and patted him gently on the back. Then I put out my glass, and the girl poured me a second shot. Andy gave me a look of surprise, and I shrugged.