In the Lion's Teeth: Second Edition

Chapter Eight

When you wake up, you're still relaxed, but not so drugged up. You can walk steadily again, you can form a coherent sentence - in English, now - and you can keep your eyes open and focus.

School starts in six days. Six days to figure out a regimen that keeps you functional, but not high. The first day you start with two half milligram doses, eight hours apart. By the end of the day you're a stumbling, incoherent mess, unable to keep your eyes open or your body steady.

You cut back the second day, one quarter of a milligram, eight hours apart. Nothing. Not even a vague sense of calm. You're a fucking mess, again, but the kind you're used to being. That night you and Mitch smoke a lot of weed so you can get yourself calm enough to sleep.

The third day you start with a half milligram in the morning to get you going and move on to a quarter eight hours later. It's a little better, but there's too much time between doses. You can't maintain. You start coming down, and it's just a glimpse of what your life will be like if you don't get your shit together.

Finally, on the fourth day, you get down to the clean needle exchange in Boston, because if you keep up this much use by snorting you're going to start getting some kind of damage in your sinuses, and fuck, even if you wouldn't, it hurts like hell. Because of the trip you don't get your first dose until almost noon, rather than six a.m. You're shaking so badly that you almost can't shoot yourself, and there's no way in hell you're going to try to stick a vein like this. You shoot in the leg, in the muscle, another half milligram, and this time, the rush hits you instantly, so much harder than you're used to. But it wears off about an hour sooner, too, and at the rate you're going you're probably going to have to bump it up to three doses a day if you're going to keep yourself steady. You might have to start hopping between the Boston and Cambridge needle exchanges. You don't want them to see your face there too often.

The fifth day, you start with a half-milligram at six a.m. Six hours later, a quarter. Another quarter four hours after that. A joint at night to keep the worst of the crash at bay. It's not ideal, but you're not walking around off your face all day, you can focus, you can work, and your nerves stay steady, your mood stays stable, and your mind stays quiet.

On day six, you go through it one more time, to make sure it wasn't just a fluke. It wasn't. On day seven, you're ready to go back to class and face the world again, and it's the easiest it's ever been.

***

The first few weeks of school go by without much incident. The workload is heavy and the subject matter difficult, and you're back at the hangar again for a lot of late nights and weekends. There's not much time to work on your own projects or models until about a month in when you've gotten used to the coursework and better at budgeting your time.

You were almost done when you left off, so it only takes about a week of tweaking and double and triple-checking before you're ready to go. That Saturday, you shoot up, get dressed, grab your things, and go outside, heading out to the back of the main campus where there's more open space and fewer people and trees to get in the way. There are, of course, still a few people around. Because it's so quiet, it's a great place for studying, and even though the early February air is still cold, the weather is nicer, the sky clearer, the air stiller. The ground is clear of snow and in a few places you can even see the tiny green heads of plants peeking out. They often don't make it when they start to come out this early, but it's still refreshing to see them scattered amongst the dark, wet dirt. You head up the slight incline that everyone affectionately calls a hill but isn't actually anywhere close to being one, glancing around the area to figure out where the best launch point would be to judge the flight path you programmed.