One Good Hustle Read Free Page A

strutting down the hallway like it was a red carpet.
    “Yeah?” I followed her. “Who’d let you in?”
    “That won’t be hard.” She opened the front door of our apartment and tossed me a creepy starlet glance over her shoulder. “I’ll just smile.” Her teeth flashed.
    I watched her head down the hall and push the elevator button. She waved to me as she got on. I slammed the apartment door.
    Do it, then. See if I care .
    I wandered into her room. The top drawer in her dresser was open—that’s where she keeps her stash. I plucked out a prescription bottle: Valium 10mg. When I turned it over, all the little blue happy pills rattled around. Actually, “happy pills” is a misnomer. They’re “I-don’t-give-a-crap pills.” She’d become a big fan of Ativan too. Same shit.
    I read once about this woman who took Valium before she cut her wrists and bled to death in a nice hot bath. Does blood look beautiful when you’re stoned on Valium? In the dressermirror, my pupils were holes in my head. Little black monsters stared out of them. I pushed my hair out of my face. All the cool girls at school seem to have smooth TV hair, but mine is a frizzy, curly, snaky mess. The day I first talked to Drew, he said, “Man, I love your hair—it’s that wild witchy hippie kind of hair.” He loved it, he said. I started to not mind my head so much after that. Drew likes when I wear drapey hippie blouses too. I have lots of those now.
    I don’t know how long I stood there thinking about that sort of stuff, but when I heard the front door opening, I dropped the Valium back in her drawer. I went into the living room as Marlene came waltzing in, all giddy and grinning. Turned out she’d never made it to the roof. She’d been hanging out with the goof upstairs, the unemployed guy with the moustache who lies around on his balcony all day, tanning. I went to my bedroom and closed the door.

    I didn’t tell Mr. Walters any of that, though. I told him I had insomnia. It wasn’t a lie either. I had been awake till one or two in the morning trying to think of quick and easy ways to die: eating Drano (in gel capsules so it’d just slip down), electrocution (blow-dryer in the bathtub), fast-moving truck (stepping in front of). One time on The Phil Donahue Show , I saw a woman tell the whole world how her son died by auto-erotic asphyxiation. He hanged himself with a necktie in his closet, accidentally suffocating while he jerked off over a porn mag.
    How can you tell a guidance counsellor shit like that? You’d sound like a whiny pathetic jerk, snivelling for attention. Sam says that serious people don’t talk, they act.
    But after I left Walters that day, I was pissed off that I couldn’t say anything to him. I’m pretty sure that is when I first started to actually plan Marlene’s suicide. She could wash a couple of Valium down with vodka. Maybe she’d forget and I’d give her a couple more. When she passed out, I could lay the pillow on her face and slowly push down. What would be so wrong about it? She kept on insisting she wanted to die, and I could help. I could be the one to make things right for her. I started to think that this was the only way out for Marlene and me. She couldn’t bear to be alive and I couldn’t bear to watch her misery any more. I would be a strange kind of angel.
    But I had to figure out the money situation. I’d need enough to get me through for the first few weeks at least.
    What if I endorsed the welfare cheque over to me when it came? Or I could deposit the cheque into her account and write myself a new one.
    I couldn’t stop thinking how it would work.
    I remember it was one-thirty in the morning and I was in my room, sitting up in bed, practising Marlene’s signature in my school binder. I had started by tracing her name from an old cancelled cheque. Then I went freehand. I’d done two nearly full pages of Marlene Bell, Marlene Bell …
    It was quiet that night. No sirens in the