Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

By this time Jacqui is in middle school, smoking a little weed, drinking some beer, some wine with her friends but mostly she stays in and reads or plays guitar, discovers Patti Smith and Deborah Harry, even Janis Joplin, writes songs with sardonic lyrics This will be my secret / My little secret / I killed my stepfather / Passively aggressively / And it makes me feel good / So good and her mother says she needs to get a job to help out so she becomes a barista at Starbucks.

Jacqui gets good grades in high school, almost out of spite because she hates high school and everything about it except study hall. Her grades are good enough to get a scholarship, but not good enough for Columbia or NYU or Boston University and there’s no money to send her anywhere she wants to go and she’s never going to live in England and be a writer and have a room of her own and her mother wants her to go to cosmetology school so she can make a living but Jacqui holds on to a shred of dream and enrolls at CUNY Staten Island.

It starts with pills.

She’s a freshman at CUNY, living at home with her mother, and it’s Christmas break and someone offers her some Oxy and she’s a little drunk and a lot bored so she thinks what the fuck and downs it and she likes it and the next day she goes out and gets some more because if you can’t find pills in Tottenville your seeing-eye dog probably can. They’re selling it in schools, on corners, in bars, shit, they’re even selling it from ice cream trucks.

The pills are everywhere—Oxy, Vicodin, Percocet—everyone is selling or buying or both. For Jacqui, it takes the edge off, the edge off having no fucking idea what she wants to do with her life, the edge off knowing that she was born in Tottenville and is going to live in Tottenville and die in Tottenville, working minimum-wage jobs no matter what degree she gets from CUNY. The edge off keeping the secret that her stepfather had turned her into a matinee.

The pills make her feel good and she doesn’t have a drug problem; what Jacqui has is a money problem. Not at first, when she was doing a little Oxy on weekends, not even when it was a pill a day, but now it’s two or three at thirty dollars a pop.

Some of the money she gets from her job at Starbucks, then some from her mother’s purse, sometimes she doesn’t need money at all if she wants to fuck guys who have pills. Fucking is nothing, she’s used to lying there letting a man fuck her and it might as well be somebody who can get her high if he can’t get her off.

Jacqui is basically high her second semester of college, then all summer, and then she kind of stops going to class her sophomore year as she goes from a 3.8 GPA to Incompletes, and then she just gives up the sham and drops out.

She drifts into working and getting high and fucking dealers and then she meets Travis.

Who turns her on to heroin.

It would be easy to blame him—her mother certainly does—but it wasn’t really Travis’s fault. They met at a club, one of those grungy coffeehouses where the neo-Kerouac crowd hangs out and plays guitars, and Travis had just been laid off from his construction job—he was a roofer—because he’d hurt his back and couldn’t really work and his disability ran out.

That was Travis’s story—he started taking Vike for the back pain—prescribed by a doctor—and never really stopped. On the age-old theory that if one was good, fifteen is better, Travis started chucking pills like M&M’s.

They were both high when they met but it was like—

BAM.

Love.

They fucked in the back of his van and Jacqui got off like she’d never gotten off; he had a long skinny dick like his long skinny body and it touched her in a place she’d never been touched.

It was Travis for her after that, and she for him.

They liked the same art, the same music, the same poetry. They wrote music together, busked together up in St. George for people getting off the ferry. They were having a blast, but it was the money.

The money, the money.

Because they had a habit together, too, a habit that cost up to three hundred dollars a day, and that was just unsustainable.

Travis had the answer.

“H,” he said, “it takes less to get you high and it costs, like, six or seven bucks a hit.”

Instead of thirty.

But Jacqui was afraid of heroin.

“It’s the same shit,” Travis said. “They’re all opiates, whether it’s a pill or a powder, it’s all the fruit of the poppy.”

“I don’t want to get addicted,” Jacqui said.

Travis laughed. “Shit, you’re addicted now .”

Everything he said was true, but Jacqui argued she didn’t want to use a needle. Cool, Travis said, we can just snort.

He did it first.

It really got him off.

He looked beatific.

So Jacqui snorted and it was so good, so good, so good. Better than anything, until they discovered smoking the shit, which was so much better, better, better.

Then one day Travis said, “Fuck this shit. Why are we messing around? It’s so much more efficient to shoot it, I’m not letting trypanophobia get in the way.”

Trypanophobia, Jacqui thought—the fear of needles.

They both loved words.

But she didn’t think she had a phobia, she thought she had a reasonable fear—needles gave you hep C, HIV, God knows what.

“Not if you’re clean, not if you’re careful, not if you’re … meticulous,” Travis said.

At first he was, using only fresh needles he bought from nurses and guys who worked at drugstores. He always swabbed his arm with alcohol before he shot up, always boiled the heroin to get any bacteria out.

And he got high.

Higher than Oxy, higher than snorting or smoking, he got mainlining-in-your-blood, in-your-brain high. Jacqui was jealous, felt left behind, earthbound while he flew to the moon, and one night he offered to shoot her up and she let him do it. Stuck a needle instead of his dick in her and it got her off more than he ever did.

Once she did that she knew she was never going back.

So you can blame Travis all you want, but Jacqui knows it’s her, it’s in her, the heart and soul of an addict, because she loves it, loves the H, loves the high, it’s literally in her blood.

“You’re too smart to be doing this,” her mother would tell her.

No, I’m too smart not to, Jacqui would think. Who would want to stay in this world when there’s an alternative?

“You’re killing yourself,” her mother would wail.

No, Mom, I’m living.

“It’s that rotten bastard’s fault.”

I love him.

I love our life.

I love …

It’s two hours later when Jacqui looks at her watch and thinks, Shit, I’m going to be late.

She gets out of the van and walks to CVS this time because she likes to switch it up. Goes into the restroom, locks the door behind her, takes some shampoo from her purse and washes her hair in the sink. Dries off with paper towels, and then puts on eyeliner and a little mascara and changes into her work clothes, reasonably clean jeans and a long-sleeved plum polo shirt with a name tag on it.

Back in the van, she rouses Travis. “I have to go to work.”

“Okay.”

“Try to score for us, okay?”

“Okay.”

I mean, how hard can it be, Travis? It’s easier to find H on Staten Island than it is to find weed. It’s everywhere. Half the people she knows are users.

“And move the van,” Jacqui says.

“Where?” Travis asks.

“I dunno, just move it.”

She gets out and takes the bus to the Starbucks on Page Avenue. Hopes the manager doesn’t see her come in five minutes late because it would be her third time in the last two weeks and she really needs this job.

There’s the Verizon bill, gas money, food money and she’s up to fifty bucks a day now just to stay well, never mind get high.