In the Lion's Teeth: Second Edition

Chapter Three

That night you sleep for nine hours, and when you wake up, it's light outside — well, as light as it can be when the sky is grey with cloud cover. There's no drug hangover, no nausea or dizziness or heavy head like there was with a lot of the mood stabilizers and antipsychotics you tried in the past, and for the first time in your life, you think, maybe you've found something that will actually be effective.

You sit up and paw around under your bed for your laptop, flip it open, and start to search. It's difficult to find reliable information. Most of the information you find is either anti-drug propaganda or stories written by ravers and addicts. The VPN you installed keeps you safe from snooping RAs and school security, so you can be more explicit in your searches than you could otherwise, but it still takes time.

You dig and click and search and bookmark some sites to come back to and look at closer later. There's so much information, but not the kind you need, and you're close to giving up on finding any when you come across a story about a scientist accidentally absorbing low levels of LSD through a spill on his skin. Through some narrower search terms, you find that it has the potential to treat symptoms of schizo-family disorders. Fifty-fifty, apparently. Either your symptoms will get infinitely better or infinitely worse.

Even better than they were with the weed. Even worse than they were before it.

Some others seem promising, while others look useless. This is something you'll never fully understand until you try.

***

Mitch gets home late that night. He enters the room quietly and doesn't immediately switch the light on, always respectful, but when he sees you propped against the wall, reading on your laptop, he does and says, "You're up late." Your eyes dart up to the clock in the corner of your screen. It's just past one a.m.

"So are you," you point out, and he chuckles and shakes his head, shrugging off his jacket and kicking off his boots.

"Why are you sitting here in the dark all alone?" he asks. His voice is light, but you can hear that faint edge. He's been a little overprotective since he found you with that medication bottle, and no matter how well you hide what's going on in your head and no matter how solid your masks are, you've never been able to completely control your mood swings, so everyone knows you're a little... unstable? Neurotic? They don't use such nice words, you're sure. But it's not unreasonable for him to think you might still be thinking about it.

"I lost track of time," you answer honestly. "I'm doing some research. Then suddenly it was one a.m. and you were just getting home from the club."

"Have you eaten?" he asks. You glance up from the screen as he sits down on his bed across from you.

"I... don't remember?" you say honestly.

"I'd ask if you're hungry, but I know the answer is no," he says. He pulls off his polo and drops it in the hamper at the foot of his bed, digs out an oversized t-shirt from the fraternity he was in freshman year and tugs it on.

As he changes, your eyes drop back down to the computer screen. You have over ten tabs open, all on different drugs — marijuana, ketamine, heroin, MDMA, LSD, Psilocybin mushrooms. Your other window has at least ten more, some medical studies, some first hand accounts written by ravers and scientists who have done experiments on themselves. You swallow hard, a little short of breath. If the school finds out you're doing illegal drugs, you'll lose everything — they'll rescind your scholarship and your visa, kick you out of school, and probably deport you back to France, where you have nothing and nobody and nowhere to go.

But last night was the calmest and quietest your mind has ever been, and if you can find a regimen of something, anything, in any combination, that can keep you like that all the time, you'll be really, honestly functional again. You haven't had that since you were fifteen, and you're willing to do anything to get it back.