American Heroin Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Melissa Scrivner Love

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780525573128

  Ebook ISBN 9780525573142

  Cover design by Zak Tebbal

  Cover photographs: (concrete texture) R.Tsubin/Moment/Getty Images; (Los Angeles scene) Michael Mann/Getty Images; (silhouette) Alys Tomlinson/DigitalVision/Getty Images; (spray-paint texture) aleksandarvelasevic/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Bum Deal

  Chapter Two: Inside Man

  Chapter Three: Of the Dead

  Chapter Four: Impostor

  Chapter Five: The Calm Before

  Chapter Six: Swap

  Chapter Seven: Battered

  Chapter Eight: Texas Girl

  Chapter Nine: Whitewash

  Chapter Ten: Aftermath

  Chapter Eleven: Bloom

  Chapter Twelve: High Life

  Chapter Thirteen: Autentico

  Chapter Fourteen: Horizons

  Chapter Fifteen: Irreconcilable

  Chapter Sixteen: Blood-Red Tape

  Chapter Seventeen: Syndicate

  Chapter Eighteen: In the Black

  Chapter Nineteen: Yet

  Chapter Twenty: Press

  Chapter Twenty-one: Rock Paper

  Chapter Twenty-two: Lock

  Chapter Twenty-three: Firsts

  Chapter Twenty-four: The Edge of America

  Chapter Twenty-five: Blur

  Chapter Twenty-six: Mother

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Flight

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Mourn

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Home

  Chapter Thirty: Mean Girl

  Chapter Thirty-one: Punishment

  Chapter Thirty-two: Fuck

  Chapter Thirty-three: Past Life

  Chapter Thirty-four: Glass Houses

  Chapter Thirty-five: Homecoming

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Mom and Dad

  For David

  For Leah and Caleb

  For bright futures everywhere

  PROLOGUE

  Christopher has to roll the back window down when Scott lights his first cigarette. They aren’t even at the end of his block in the foothills of Hollywood. The houses on either side are tricked out for Halloween—lit ghosts and pumpkins, talking witches with hair the texture of straw, headstones and cobwebs. The sick bright-orange light from the 76 station’s circular sign is only a glow from here, halfway up the residential street. Behind Christopher, the two-story brick fairy-tale house where he lives with his parents gets farther and farther away. Christopher squeezes his head out the window, not thinking to roll it down more, because he doesn’t want to appear weak to Scott. Or because he isn’t thinking tonight. If he were, he would never have gotten in the car.

  Above him, the centuries-old trees on both sides of the street fold in a welcoming hug. There’s a Gelson’s across from the 76. A few steps away is a coffee shop, a comedy club, and a restaurant famous for crepes and coffee.

  “Where’s Karen?” Scott asks before he exhales in a swishing puff.

  “She had to study. Biology test next week. Mrs.—”

  “Ruiz. Yeah, I had her too.”

  “Fuuuuuuuuuck,” the teenager in the passenger seat says. “She was hot. Hard, but hot.”

  Christopher knows this kid’s name is Erik. Erik and Scott are both seniors at Harvard Westlake, where Christopher is a sophomore. Erik’s father, like Scott’s, is a TV director who travels nine months out of the year, skipping from show to show—New York, Vancouver, Atlanta of all places. Both Erik’s and Scott’s mothers don’t work.

  “Outside the home.” Christopher hears his own mother correcting his thought. “They don’t work outside the home.”

  He doesn’t know why he thinks of his mother now. She wasn’t home for dinner. Christopher can’t remember the last time she was. She hasn’t texted to ask where he is. She wasn’t there to stop him. Even as he thinks it, Christopher knows this is only an excuse.

  “How far is this place?” Christopher asks Scott.

  “An hour in traffic. Shouldn’t be a problem tonight, though.”

  “Fucking traffic,” Erik says.

  Christopher has heard a rumor that Erik got a perfect score on his SATs. It’s difficult to believe in this car, on this night, past midnight, when Erik’s vocabulary consists of “fuck,” “hard,” and “hot.”

  Christopher should be studying for his biology test too. He should be with Karen, sitting on her bed, her bedroom door a careful crack open so her parents, both ob-gyns, can keep a careful ear out for the act that keeps them employed.

  There’s a billiards bar just east of the exit for the 101 South. His parents always share a laugh when they pass it, and his mom touches his dad’s hand. There’s something remembered there, something that doesn’t include him. Something from before.

  “Dude, you’re going south, remember?” Erik pipes up. “There.”

  Even though Christopher isn’t yet old enough to drive, he can tell it’s a tricky exit—eight lanes of traffic, or it seems that way, and Scott needs to get over quicker than he can to merge onto the freeway.

  Maybe there’s still time to not make it.

  But Christopher wants to make it. He knows somewhere deep down, beneath his roiling gut, that what they’re doing tonight will save him.

  He thinks of Karen’s bedroom, the scratchy floral cover with its pinks and purples, the laced ruffle that reaches from the bottom of the mattress to the top of the floor. He thinks of the things he wants to do to Karen but can’t because he looks at her bedroom and still sees someone innocent.

  But the truth is, he is innocent too.

  It’s just his mind that’s fucked. He can’t stop the dark thoughts, of the things he wants to do to Karen, where he wants to stick things, how he wants to make her scream. He thinks these things, and he feels guilty after, and he is alone.

  He used to consider slitting his wrists.

  That was before Scott slipped him his first tab of X.

  “You think they got places to eat?”

  “What?”

  “Where we’re going,” Erik says. “I’m hungry.”

  Christopher has met Erik only a handful of times before tonight. Like Erik, Christopher’s a smart kid, but he’s too young, too inexperienced.

  Christopher still thinks about his mother when he’s going to score heroin for the first time.

  “Yeah, Mexican food,” Scott says, and Erik barks a quick laugh to let Scott know he’s safe telling a racist joke here. But Erik’s laugh stops short and turns to a sigh. He must realize what Scott said is wrong.

  “I don’t think we’ll be hungry. After,” Christopher says.

  “What, have you done this before?” Scott asks. Christopher catches the older boy’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Ice blue. Even in the dark, Christopher can see them.

  “No. I just…I’ve heard.”

  “Probably from Monty,” Erik says.

  Monty is their dealer. He can get the small stuff—pot, X, acid. He’s a twenty-one-year-old criminal-justice student at a community college in Simi Valley who draws his morality line at selling heroin. More likely, he doesn’t have the connections.

  “Monty doesn’t do heroin,” Scott says.

  None of them has either.

  Christopher doesn’t know why Scott and Erik have decided tonight is the night they snort poison powder. He doesn’t even know for sure why he said yes—only that something inside him needs to change. He needs a reboot, an upgrade, and, while he’s smart enough to know heroin has never done that for anyone, he is also desperate enough to try.

  He wonders if his mother would rather have an addict son or a dead one.

  “What’s it called again? The place we’re going?”

  “Huntington Park,” Scott says.

  “Never heard of it,” Erik says, as if he’s heard of every L.A. nook and cranny where a person can buy heroin.

  It takes twenty-nine minutes now, just after midnight, for Scott’s car to make the journey from the Hollywood Hills to Huntington Park. Christopher has no particular affinity for Hollywood proper, a place where blobs of tourists meander in shorts that reach to their knees, clicking selfies and
eating at chain restaurants even though they’re in L.A., for fuck’s sake, a food mecca. A cheap-food mecca. The tiny pale pastel stucco houses with overgrown lawns and bars on the windows aren’t what these tourists expect.

  The 101 moves at a crawl through downtown, where Christopher turns his head to see the members of the L.A. Philharmonic painted down the entire side of a skyscraper staring at him—the violin player with her sprayed-stiff chestnut hair, the cello player in a tux, gray hair slicked back. Are they playing now, while he’s riding in the backseat of Scott’s Range Rover to score heroin? No, it’s too late for that.

  Scott takes exit 1A off the 101 onto Seventh Street, then heads south on Santa Fe Avenue, a street Christopher has never heard of before tonight. A lot of the houses here wouldn’t be out of place in Hollywood. They are the same pale pastel stucco—yellow, blue, peach—with bars on the windows. But here, there are no tourists. Every soul on the street is Latino. A fat man with a name tag embroidered on his work shirt stops to let his pit bull take a shit. A teenage boy and girl sit on a curb, stealing a make-out session under a streetlight. At a red light, Christopher hears laughter in short, violent gasps from the open windows of the corner house.

  When they get to the intersection at Santa Fe and Zoe, Christopher takes in the Mexican restaurant across the street—Avila’s El Ranchito—with its red-and-green awnings and its chili-pepper Christmas lights. It’s now he sees the true distinction between Hollywood and Huntington Park. The restaurant is bordered by an empty parking lot, at least ten spaces deep, five across. And according to the sign, the parking is free.

  There is no such thing as free parking in Hollywood, even when the business that operates the lot is closed. Of course, it’s silly to pretend he’s coming from Hollywood. He lives in the Hills above the tourist trap, but it might as well be on the other side of the country.

  “This is where they sell,” Scott says.

  Christopher has not thought until now that he should ask Scott where he got his intel. He should know better, given his background. He should be smarter. Christopher’s parents have been shelling out a good forty grand a year for his private school education since at least kindergarten, and here he is without the good sense to ask if this heroin score could be a setup.

  “At the restaurant?” Erik asks. “Like, with complimentary chips and salsa?”

  Also racist, Christopher thinks, but these guys are seniors, and he wants what they’ve come here to buy.

  “No, the restaurant’s got nothing to do with it,” Scott corrects. “It’s closed. See.”

  Erik peers out the window as if he’s going to see the darkened windows of Avila’s El Ranchito light up and open, spilling mariachi music and drunken laughter.

  When the light in front of them turns green, a kid rounds the corner on a bike he’s at least a foot too tall to be riding. He’s maybe fifteen, Christopher’s age, though it’s hard to tell because he’s so thin, and the bike is a kid’s bike, with an oversized seat and no hand brakes. Christopher knows because his father bought him a similar one when he was six.

  “That one of them?”

  “I don’t know,” Scott says.

  Christopher thinks that if he were leading this operation, he wouldn’t admit to not knowing. He would also have done his research, starting with the members of the gang they were buying from.

  The kid gets close enough to see their features through darkened glass, but he doesn’t look at them. Instead, he swings his bike in a slow circle, then loops right into a figure eight. Christopher hears the whoosh of his tires out the window. It’s graceful, the dance the kid’s doing on his bike, slow and heavy like he’s moving underwater.

  Christopher hadn’t realized until now how tired he is.

  “You think he saw us?” Erik again.

  “I don’t know.”

  Jesus, Scott, Christopher wants to say.

  “What do we do?”

  “I’ve got the money,” Scott says, as if someone has asked him about it. But no one has.

  The kid is coming back now, so close to the driver’s side of the Range Rover he could scratch the paint with his fingernail if he wanted. Christopher imagines he would want to, if their positions were switched.

  “Drop it,” Christopher hears, but it isn’t Scott’s voice or Erik’s. It is lighter, tinged with the slightest accent. It must belong to the kid on the bike.

  Scott scrambles for the plastic grocery bag, a relic from several years ago, before Los Angeles banned them from supermarkets and drugstores. Christopher wonders if Scott’s parents’ housekeeper has a stash of them somewhere, a ball of bagged bags shoved in the back of the cabinet under the kitchen sink. His parents’ housekeeper does.

  Scott looks both ways for passing cars, like he’s crossing the street instead of checking for cops or thieves or both, but the night is quiet. He drops the plastic bag out the driver’s-side window in time for the Latino kid on the bike to turn and swoop it up, then disappear around the corner.

  No one speaks. They wait, the seconds dripping as slow as water from a broken faucet you trick yourself into thinking is fixed, or the hiccups you think you’ve beaten.

  Erik sighs, and Scott’s knuckles turn white as they grip the steering wheel.

  “You know who he was?”

  “No.”

  “You think he wasn’t with them? Like, maybe he just took our money?”

  Scott doesn’t answer, probably because he’s sick of admitting he doesn’t know.

  “Maybe we should go,” Christopher ventures, but only after he sees the dashboard clock click through a full five minutes.

  “We can’t let them get away with that,” Erik says.

  Christopher doesn’t have to ask who he means by “them.” To Erik, it is a blanket expression for “other.” Black, Latino, even Asian, if he’s talking about drivers. But Erik doesn’t recognize this about himself. If Christopher were to point it out now, Erik would be embarrassed.

  Scott’s hands run the length of the steering wheel, leaving spots of sweat. At the intersection, the light goes from red to green.

  Then an older dude appears, twentysomething, black hair, a short block of muscle, jaywalking with his hands in the pockets of his baggy jeans. He is whistling a pop tune Christopher can’t place—Pitbull? No, Lady Gaga. He skirts the Range Rover, but he doesn’t touch the car. He doesn’t look at the boys inside. He keeps walking and whistling, and Christopher, like Scott and Erik, doesn’t breathe until the man disappears behind the candy-colored stoplights of the next intersection.

  “The fuck?” Erik again.

  “We should go,” says Scott.

  “Wait,” Christopher says. He steps out of the car to retrieve the baggie from behind Scott’s front driver’s-side tire. “He left it for us.”

  The red lights are flashing now, Christopher thinks, even though he isn’t looking directly at them. They are coming from behind him. What he is looking at is only their reflection off the glittery black of Scott’s Range Rover.

  “Holy shit,” a voice inside the car says, but Christopher doesn’t know if it’s Erik or Scott or both.

  Christopher straightens up to his full height—six feet. He fumbles at his door, wondering if Scott is going to gun it out of here without him. But Scott is frozen at the wheel. Christopher fastens his seat belt and says, “Go.”

  Scott hesitates. Now Christopher sees the LAPD black-and-white, its red lights whirring and flashing, its sirens whoop-whooping, and for a split second Christopher thinks how these alarming notes could be the beginning of an aggressive ice-cream-truck jingle.

  But they’re not. They’re the cops. And they’re coming for Christopher, Scott, and Erik.

  “Scott, you have to drive,” Christopher repeats.