The Way We Bared Our Souls Read Free Page B

bleached blond hair was all over the place, and she had a wild look in her eyes that scared me. She seemed to be staring right through us.
    “No one has your backpack, crazy,” Alex said.
    Ellen whirled around to face Alex. Her forehead had broken out in a sweat, and various stains showed on her baby blue tank top.
    “Then where. The eff.
Is
it?” Ellen said.
    “Probably where you saw it last, chica,” said Juanita’s sometimes boyfriend Luis LeBlanc, who was approaching from a nearby picnic table. Ellen responded by grabbing Luis’s baseball cap and tossing it into the fountain like a Frisbee.
    “Damn, girl,” he said. “Chill.” For a second it looked as if Ellen was going to retrieve the hat, but then I realized she was just leaning over the Agua wall to scoop up the coins at the bottom of the fountain. When she was satisfied with her handful of nickels and pennies, she held them aloft.
    “Hey,” I said automatically, “those are someone’s wishes.”
    “Yeah?” Ellen said. “Well, I wish you’d all just disappear.” She hurled a couple of pennies across the courtyard, pocketed the rest of the coins, and stormed back into the school. I was stunned. Luis muttered some profanity and made his way back to his table, shaking the water from his cap.
    “What the hell was that?” I said.
    “Meth,” whispered Alex.
    At first I thought she was joking. Then I saw her exchange a grave look with Juanita that indicated she wasn’t.
    “You’re serious?” I said. Sharp-as-a-tack Ellen, who starred in the fifth grade play, won the middle school science fair three years in a row, and had scored practically all the goals on our childhood soccer team, was on
meth
? What was a sixteen-year-old girl, by all accounts clever and accomplished, doing on such a savage drug?
    “Unfortunately,” said Juanita. “I got it on good authority. Granted, my brother can be kind of a dick, but he’s not a liar, and he knows a lot of people. Last night he told me that his friend Angelina accidentally walked in on her using in the bathroom of Stoops. Caught her in the act.”
    “She’s sure?” I said.
    Juanita nodded soberly. “No wiggle room.”
    “I only just heard about it this morning,” said Alex. “But it seems so obvious now. You should have seen her last night at the party, Lo. She was totally tweaking.”
    I could barely process this. “I know that she hasn’t been handling her alcohol lately—”
    “No shit,” said Alex. “She can’t go out without getting totally obliterated.”
    “And she’s been downing all those pills. But . . . Jesus. Meth? Really?”
    “Really,” said Juanita. “Apparently that complete ass she’s been hooking up with—Mike what’s-his-face—gave her her first hit.” Boyfriends were supposed to introduce you to cool new bands and video games and car mechanics and stuff. Not meth.
    “I feel like we need to do something,” said Alex.
    Of
course
we needed to do something. But clearly we were out of our league. Sure, we weren’t innocent to the fact that kids our age dabbled in drugs. But that mostly stopped at smoking pot and snorting Adderall occasionally. Crystal meth was way out of the range of substances that could optimistically be called “recreational.” People didn’t do meth in moderation. They did it until it destroyed them.
    Just then, a shot of pain bullied its way through my head, making me feel like my skull was clenching up and trying to squeeze my brain out of my eye sockets. I reeled backward into the fountain wall and put my head between my knees.
    “Lo?” Alex said, as if through water. Electrified water. “Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just. . . .” Tears came into my eyes, summoned both by pain and by my frustration that I was alone with this secret. “Period cramps,” I said. “They’re really bad this month.”
    “Awww,” Juanita said, putting her arm around me.
    “Um, I know I just got to school,” I said,