Everyone in the circle looks to Vandy, but my eyes are the last to land on her. She’s still got her arms crossed, but her face is hidden from me now, obscured by a curtain of her pretty blond hair.
Emory sighs. “Vandy, you have to—"
“I know.” She pushes her hair away from her face and finally I can see that she’s not stalling. She’s just slipping into some armor, building some defenses. Her eyes are guarded but resolute when she begins, “It started a few years ago.”
Inside, I freak out a little, because I thought for sure being here would be her big sin, and it’s suddenly occurring to me that a lot of these girls' confessions are about something sexual, and it’s all been dubiously consensual bullshit, and I just…
I can’t hear about someone doing shit to Vandy.
I can’t.
Just the thought of it makes me want to get up and pace.
She goes on, voice soft, “I had a few surgeries that first year, and they had me on morphine for a while.” Fuck fuck, no. Now I’m the one who wants to cover my ears. “Eventually, they put me on other painkillers. They were patches sometimes, but usually pills. I was almost always hurting, so I was almost always on them. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.” She takes a breath, and I can tell she’s chewing the inside of her cheek. “At some point, the pain stopped being so bad. Or, at least, it wasn’t bad all the time. I could have stopped taking them.” She looks up, into the camera. “But I didn’t.” Her shrug is tight. “I kept telling them it hurt, and they kept giving me the pills. For a long time, it was really easy. Getting an oxy script was like asking for a drink of water. Everyone just automatically believed me. I can’t even remember most of my Sophomore year, I was so stoned out of my mind all the time.”
I chance a glance at Emory. He’s watching her, wide-eyed, like she’s someone he doesn’t even know. I’m too busy being grateful that I’m not hearing about some doctor’s bad touch to feel much of anything else.
Vandy looks down at her wringing hands. Her cheeks are red. “It’s really hard to come off that stuff. The doctors tried to wean me in stages, last year. I acted like I was following the protocol, but I wasn’t. I had built a nice stash over the two years, so I could keep taking them. And taking them. And taking them.” Her smile is something tight and guilty. “Eventually, the stash grew a lot smaller. I tried playing up the pain, but it just led to more procedures and prodding and babying. I knew no one here would sell it to me, but I’ve even bought some off a couple Northridge guys.” Her eyes move to Carlton, who’s been watching passively. “Yours, I assume?”
Carlton’s wide eyes snap to Emory. He points to her, voice insistent. “Bro, I didn’t know about that.”
“It was hard getting money, though,” she continues, picking at a fingernail’s chipped polish. “My parents would always ask what it was for, and it got easier to just steal it.”
Emory runs a hand down his face. “Jesus, V.”
She stiffens, almost imperceptibly. Her voice is harsh and biting when she says, “You don’t know what it’s like, okay? You have this whole life that has nothing to do with—” She swallows down the rest, exhaling in a hiss. “It was the only thing that got me through, and it’s not like it’s something you can just quit, cold turkey.” She flattens her palms to her thighs, pushing her shoulders back. “It’s taken me all year to get my dosage down to a point where I wasn’t getting sick.”
Caroline cautiously asks, “Are you still…?”
Vandy looks up at her, and then around at the rest of the people in the circle, Emory last. “No,” she finally mutters, head shaking. “I’m done with it now.”
There’s something she’s not saying. Maybe the others don’t notice the slight crack in her voice, or the way her shoulders twitch when she says the words, but I’ve seen enough liars—been enough of a liar—to know when something’s being held back. Maybe she’s still addicted. Maybe she still gets sick. Maybe she still thinks about lying to the doctors.
It doesn’t matter.
Among all those maybes is one certainty: Vandy’s biggest sin is just another sick repercussion of my own.