Winter Solstice in St. Nacho's (St. Nacho's #5) - Z.A. Maxfield Page 0,44

things until I win or morning comes.

Today, Doc took the five of us who will be leaving Hope House in the next couple weeks shopping for clothes we can wear to job interviews.

There are only two malls in Stockton. We went to the one closest.

As soon as we stepped inside, it became clear how isolated, how insulated, we’d been at Hope House.

Terrance is about thirty, maybe. He’s six foot three, Black, and wears his curly hair in a close-cropped fade. He’s quiet and even a little shy, but he looks like what he is: a former marine going through treatment for drug addiction. Once, he talked a little bit about being deployed and the injury that sent him home. About the disconnect between his experiences at war and this world of strip malls and Starbucks. He’s probably the guy I feel most comfortable with. His silences don’t demand anything. They just are.

Keylan’s white, in his midforties. Based on his tattoos, he’s done hard time. He’s been at Hope House the longest—almost nine months. He looks pretty badass, but inside, he’s scared of his own shadow. He makes everything harder than it has to be sometimes, and he was a bit of a prick to me at first. Doc never let him go too far, and he mellowed as we got to know each other. His wife, Jennifer, does devotion like an old country western song.

John has sleeve tattoos depicting a stylized bloody Mayan history—gods and goddesses, sacrifice, fertility—and a massive Guadalupe on his back. He doesn’t talk much about anything, but every night, he calls his family and asks how they’re doing. He calls his mom and dad and nags his brothers to look after them and their other siblings. I wish he was my dad sometimes.

Lincoln is only a couple years older than me. He used speed and meth and crack cocaine, all things that amped him up. Since withdrawal, he’s acted listless and detached from everything. He hasn’t yet regained the subcutaneous fat he burned off despite eating well for nearly thirty days. He looks skeletal.

I’m the youngest of the group, and since my hair has grown out and I’ve been eating regular meals, I look the part. In a group like ours, I could be mistaken for a kid from the local college.

It’s almost back-to-school time, so mothers and fathers—laden with bags and carrying all manner of fancy coffee drinks—rushed cranky kids from store to store.

Teen girls and baby gangsters of every type flitted and flirted all over the food court, occasionally launching popcorn and french fries—or in one case a half-eaten churro—at one another.

Because my group stayed pretty tight, we walked with the air of a Star Trek landing party faced with a particularly toxic planet.

Doc, who’s like a kindly lion tamer, had his sights set on J.C. Penney, which was located close to the place where we parked. But because of the fluorescent lighting, the masses of people, the shiny tile and marble surfaces that bounced and amplified every sound like pennies in a pop can, the mall seemed to stretch as if it were growing and our goal was getting farther and farther away.

Security eyed us. They stuck close when we were inside any store. Women—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes not—held their children closer as we walked past.

It wasn’t that we exuded any kind of threat, but we were different. We were all recovering from severe psychological and physical illness, and people could sense it.

So, like the lepers from my step monster’s Bible movies, we might as well have been given bells to ring or shouted “unclean.”

In the end, we enacted the smallest, saddest alien parade ever.

There’s recovery, which is hard enough, then there’s the shame of being othered so blatantly afterwards.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over being one of the lucky ones. If I’d slipped away from my peers, I’d have just been another collegiate face in the crowd.

But I would never leave them behind.

Only these men know what I know. Only these men have faced what I’ve faced, done the things I’ve done to earn my next high.

Instead, I keep that awful feeling close and use it to fuel the fire building inside me to make a better life for all of us.

Tug

I thought Tug would be nervous when he “graduated” from Hope House, but I never realized what a wreck I’d be.

For the final farewell of the five men leaving, Dr. Franklin and Roberta organized a picnic in the same