20 Million Tiny Particles

21. Taking

Sheridan and I splintered off after the keynote address. She started her afternoon with a social media marketing workshop, while I joined six other women for a budgeting in business session taught by someone's relenting accountant husband.

We regrouped before dinner in our hotel room. After a few hours of listening to strategies for maximizing Diamondesq profit and hearing from other ambassadors on what was and wasn't working for them, I was exhausted, so after my last session ended, I headed straight for the room and laid down on my bed.

Within moments of my head hitting the pillow, Sheridan breezed in, slamming the door loudly behind herself. "Hi," she called out like a song and threw her bag on the floor beside her bed without looking at me. I flopped over on my side to face her. Turning she said, "Oh, sorry, were you asleep?"

I shook my head slightly, pushing myself up into a reclined position. I adjusted the pillows behind me. "Just laying down."

"Are you tired?"she asked, taking her shoes off. She looked at me like she'd never seen a resting person before.

"Yeah, long day. Driving and, you know, socializing."

"I love it," she countered. "Not the driving, but everything else. Gives me energy, seeing everyone and getting to meet so many new people." I yawned. "You gonna make it to dinner?"

"Of course," I answered. It's not like I came here to sit in a three star hotel room on crunchy sheets and watch local Knoxville news. If anything, I thought Sheridan would be the one to suggest skipping required events, but she was more excited now than I'd seen her all day. Maybe all the socializing really was doing it for her.

"Good, because I met these cool girls, and they want us to sit with them." She was walking from one end of the room to the other, aimlessly picking things out of her suitcase, its contents spilling out onto the floor beside the dresser-slash-television stand. "What are you going to wear?"

I knew I felt like a zombie, but I didn't realize how much I must have looked like one until Sheridan snapped a finger at me and said, in a mom-scolding-her-teenager voice, "Hello? Julie? Earth to Julie?"

I flopped back on the bed where I started. "I need a nap," I admitted. As much of a hard worker as I liked to think I was, this was the first day in a while that didn't predominantly rely on making cut-copy-paste motions to get along. I had to think. I had to interact. I had to be a full human instead of the half one I'd been crutching along as all summer. Had I always been this way? Surely not. It must have been the now habitual lack of sleep catching up to me.

"Here, take one of these," she instructed, walking back to her suitcase and bending over to dig through it.

"I already had an energy gel this morning," I whined. "I don't think I should take another. I'll get all jittery."

"This is different," she told me, pulling out a paper medication box and opening it to pull out the inner sleeve of pills in tiny plastic pockets. She popped one out and pushed it to me.

I raised myself up to squint at the box, but I couldn't read it. "What is that, like a caffeine pill?" I'd remembered watching an episode of some soapy high school drama where a bunch of track athletes got hooked on caffeine pills to help them keep up their energy during practice. I thought it was stupid, but then again, I barely even drank coffee.

"Better. Here, take it." She kept shoving the little tab toward me.

I furrowed my brow. "Not unless you tell me what it is," I said, tired enough not to totally hide my annoyance.

"Fine," she scoffed. She tossed the box onto the bed beside me. The pill was still stuck in her hand, held out to me with impatience.

I picked up the box between two fingers like a piece of dirty underwear from under the bed. It was packaged like cold medicine. "What is this for, bronchitis?"

"Asthma," she corrected, as if that made any more sense.

I raised a palm up in question. "And that helps me how?"

"It's ephedrine. It's a stimulant. People take it for weight loss. It, like, totally wakes your brain up. It's sort of like Adderall, but easier to get."

"Is it legal?" I asked, feeling stupid but still incredulous.

She laughed lightly. "Well I didn't rob a pharmacy." She pushed the pill out toward me again. "Come on, take it. Don't you trust me?"

A red light flashed on in my brain. No.

But I didn't tell her that. Instead, I said. "Maybe half?"

She smiled, victorious. "We'll split it. Okay," she went on, walking to the fridge to get me a mini water bottle to swallow the pill with, "so what are you wearing to dinner?"

She told me she was between two dresses, but I only heard the sound of the water bottle top unscrewing and the crunch of plastic as she pushed it into my hand. The cold of the outside mixed with the breeze of the AC unit and sent a shiver to my spine, electrifying the baby hairs on my arms. I flashed back to Missy, her dark, unnaturally hairless forearms reaching out to me in her hallway, an alien body that couldn't be farther from my own.

She snapped the pill in half with her fingers. I was struck by how quickly it broke. Like a piece of blackboard chalk.

Like graphite.

I popped it in my mouth, chased it with the arctic water.

Who was going to pay the charge of the minibar?

The pill wouldn't show me its effects for at least a half hour, I assumed, so I zombie-walked my way into a patterned minidress that Sheridan approved of.

"Zip me up?" I heard Sheridan call from the bathroom as I tied the inner loop of my blue and white wrap dress.

She emerged from the bathroom, her hair pulled over one shoulder so I could access the zipper of her golden spaghetti strap dress, dotted all over with tiny dandelions. "It's a little tight," she apologized.

I promised she looked great as I held tight the top of the zip enclosure, tugging up the zipper over a field of tiny freckles and moles across her back. I hoped I wasn't snagging her. All I could see were the spikes of her spine fighting against the tight skin stretched against them.

I thought back to her vision board, just weeks ago, leaning up against her dresser in her small bedroom in her family's house. The image of the scale. Just ten more pounds, she had said. She didn't want to keep working toward a few more pounds or a few more anything; she wanted to be all in. She wanted to thrive.

I wondered what came first -- the starving or the thriving.

"All good," I said finally, the zip secured in place at the top of her dress.

She tossed her hair back and smiled at me over her shoulder. "Thanks, girl."

She was back in the bathroom, lipstick in hand before I said, "You're welcome."