Placebo Junkies Read online

  This one’s no exception. On and on and freaking on, about her favorite Crock-Pot recipes and her grandniece’s birthday party, and isn’t that Kelly Ripa just the sweetest thing ever, and most of all her son, her nice boy CPA of a son who’s almost certainly a deviant of some variety, I mean how could you not be, with a mother like this up in your grill all the time? I pick at my cuticles without saying a word, just waiting for her to mention a cat. There’s always a cat. Or at the very least there’s a cat-sized dog, a Shih Tzu or a Pomeranian. Something small enough for a goddamn knitted dog sweater.

  Her knitting needles click-clack while she talks, making her IV line jiggle and sway, and on the opposite side of the room there’s a talk show playing too loudly on the TV.

  In other words, it’s a typical day in the labs.

  Today’s an interaction study. Two drugs already on the market, already considered safe enough to use, just not necessarily together. It’s not twice the money, but close. Interaction studies pay well.

  This one’s not complicated, but the nurse is obviously brand-new and she keeps botching things up and having to start her checklist over. It’s a double-blind study, and you can just see how that totally messes with her mind. Double-blind means, basically, nobody knows who’s getting what. One pill and one IV drip per subject. Is it real, or is it fake? Neither the volunteers nor the nurse knows whether we’re getting sugar and saline or some toxic chemical brew—an autoclaved version of Russian roulette.

  As she checks us in, the nurse keeps asking everyone in this way-too-serious voice if we’re absolutely certain that we understand the risks of the study. Yeah, yeah, we all say, and even the Beagle next to me looks a bit annoyed the fifth time we have to hear the same speech.

  “She’s awfully nervous; she must be new. It took her three tries to find my vein,” the Beagle tsks, admiring the needle marks on her skin like they’re freaking stigmata. “That never happens. I have great veins! Phlebotomists love me. They tell me so every time I come to donate. They say, Phyllis, you have amazing veins for your age. You’re a dream donor. If only everyone had veins like yours, our job would be so much easier … “

  I tune her out by running numbers in my head, trying to figure out this month’s likely cash flow. This business is hard to predict—lots of ups and downs. It’s like a freaking game of Monopoly, except instead of landing on Park Place, you find out the FDA just tightened the screws on some product and all of a sudden Mama and Papa Pharma are willing to pay double, triple for as many volunteers as they can get through the door. Catch a cold, on the other hand, and it’s the equivalent of pulling the go to jail card when you get the boot from the study that was supposed to pay the rent that month. Womp-womp, Do not pass go, Do not collect $200. Anyway, I’m mentally sorting the figures into little columns, working out best-case and worst-case scenarios—am I gonna bust or am I gonna boom?—so it takes me a minute to process the fact that the Beagle’s voice is starting to sound weird.

  I look over and her face, which was perfectly normal last time I looked, is mottled with bright-pink splotches now. She’s still talking, hasn’t even stopped to take a breath, which probably isn’t helping matters, but her words are coming out funny—slurred, like her tongue is growing too big for her mouth all of a sudden. And then I think she realizes something’s not right, because her eyebrows kind of pinch together and she finally shuts up for a second. She’s looking puffier than I remember and I can hear from my seat, even over the noise of the fan and the TV, that she’s making a whistling noise when she breathes. She cocks her head and stares at me with those big concerned eyes, and God help me, but she really does look like an actual beagle now—a thought I shove out of my head right away, because even I know how fucked up it is to be thinking it at this particular moment.

  “Nurse?” I call out, but she doesn’t hear me at first, because she’s messing with someone else’s IV. I look back at the old lady just in time to see the pink fade out of her face like someone flushed a toilet in her head and drained out the color, and then a pale-blue shade starts to creep into her lips. It’s pretty creepy, actually.

  “Nurse! Hey! Somebody get over here quick!” I yell it this time, and without even realizing I’m doing it, I yank the IV out of my hand and then step over and, more gently, I pull the IV out of the Beagle’s hand.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the nurse asks as she finally gets her ass over to us, like I’m the one making the old lady twitch and wheeze.

  “She’s having a reaction or something. It happened all of a sudden—just now.” I can’t seem to get my words out fast enough, and for a second I worry that maybe I’m having a reaction, too, that it’s slowing me down, taking over, but as the nurse races over to a phone on the wall and hits a couple of buttons, I realize I’m breathing just fine.

  I take the old lady’s hand while the nurse is on the other side of the room on the phone. She’s definitely bluish and having trouble breathing, but she’s conscious at least, still staring at me with those puppy dog eyes. “You’ll be okay,” I say to her. “They’re getting help.”

  Paramedics burst into the room a minute later, one of the good things about being right next door to a major hospital I guess, and I get shoved out of the way when they start CPR.

  “There’s blood! Where’s she bleeding from?” one of the paramedics shouts as they move her onto a stretcher.

  “No, that’s my blood,” I explain to him, holding out my shredded hand. I must’ve yanked the needle out the wrong direction—it’s starting to sting. The nurse glares at me again, and then they’re all out the door, still thrashing and pumping away at the old lady’s chest.

  I just stare at the door for a minute after they’re gone. The whole thing seemed kind of violent and rushed, not at all like what you see on TV or on those perky “CPR Saves a Life!” instructional videos that make it look like getting CPR might even feel kind of good, just a particularly vigorous massage to work out some pesky cardiac tension.

  I shake it off, look around, and the other three volunteers are just sitting there in silence. They’re all eyeing their own IV lines nervously, but nobody moves.

  “Do you think we’ll still get paid if we pull it out?” one of them, a stubble-faced guy I’ve seen around before, finally asks.

  Shit. That hadn’t even occurred to me. “Shit.” I say it out loud and sit back down in my chair, wondering if it’s worth trying to get the damn butterfly needle back in. Probably not, even if I could manage it. The nurse already saw me moving around without it. There goes at least half my paycheck. They still have to pay you something, at least part of the fee even if you drop out, but it won’t come close to what I would have gotten if I’d kept my ass in my chair.

  I close my eyes and subtract a chunk of money from my mental spreadsheet while I wait for the nurse to get back. Leaving test subjects unsupervised is a major no-no, but who’s going to report it? Besides, she and everyone else even remotely associated with this study are already going to be up to their teeth in paperwork after what happened to the old lady. I kind of feel bad for everyone involved.

  Better to just take whatever they’ll pay and walk away from this one. There’s bad juju here, and that shit’s more contagious than anything else you’ll run across in these halls.

  Chapter 4

  Back home I start telling Charlotte about what happened with the Beagle, but she stops me before I get very far. “Quit avoiding the subject, Audie,” she says, and throws a handful of popcorn at me. “You still haven’t given me an answer for Leonardo DiCaprio. Before he got all jowly, obviously.”

  I have no strong feelings whatsoever about Leonardo DiCaprio, pre- or post-jowls, but I make a stabbing motion just to mix things up. We’re playing celebrity Marry, Fuck, Kill, but Charlotte never wants to kill anyone.

  “I’m not a pacifist or anything,” she says when I point it out to her. “I just have commit
ment issues. Killing’s too permanent. With my luck I’d off somebody then realize two minutes later they were actually the love of my life. I prefer to keep my options open.” She chews on a fingernail for a minute, until her face brightens with a solution. “There are plenty of guys I’d like to kick in the nuts.”

  We change the game to Marry, Fuck, Sack Tap, and that evens out our ratio considerably.

  “There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Charlotte says once the popcorn bowl is empty. “A proposal.”

  “You’re in no condition to be making any proposals,” I say. “You just expressed your desire to marry the biggest douche bag in the history of reality television. Your judgment is obviously impaired.”

  “Not that kind of a proposal, smart-ass. Though any man would be lucky to call me his wife.”

  “That goes without saying.” I roll my eyes, then duck as she swats at me.

  “Shut up and hear me out,” she says. “I’m being serious here. I think it’s time for us to cash out. Or cash in. Whatever. I’m just sick of this place. I’m sick of being sick, you know? I can’t take it anymore. I’m starting to feel like a prisoner.”

  I start to say something sarcastic about how no one’s stopping her from getting up and leaving right this second, but I stop when I see the look on her face. For once, Charlotte is being completely serious.

  She sits up straight, something else unusual for her, and explains her plan.

  It’s simple enough: She’s going to sign up for everything. Everything. She’s willing to consent to anything—she’ll do any study that’ll take her until her pockets are bursting with cash, and then she’s going to hit the road and never look back. It’s a guinea pig marathon. A game of endurance. “Come on, Audie. It’ll work even better if we partner up. I have a system all figured out.”

  Her system largely consists of binge-testing in staggered shifts. She’ll drag me home from my shifts, I’ll prop her upright during hers. We’ll run distraction for each other if the lab administrators ask too many questions, vouch for one another’s unerring compliance, that kind of thing. We’ll be the guinea pig equivalent of sober sisters.

  I wait until she’s done talking and then I tell her it sounds like suicide by experiment. “You should’ve seen the old lady this morning, Charlotte. The Beagle. She seriously looked like she was about two minutes away from Game Over. No one ever talks about it, but bad stuff does happen here sometimes.”

  Charlotte heaves a melodramatic sigh at me, and when she answers, it’s in the slow voice she uses with people she thinks are stupid. “Duh, Audie. I’m not going to actually take all the shit they give me. I’m not an idiot. Don’t tell me you actually swallow every pill they give you.”

  It’s not a question, the way she says it. Ethics do not weigh heavily on Charlotte’s mind.

  Charlotte prefers to focus on survival.

  “Here’s how you do it.” She starts telling me all the ways you can fake your way through studies. I’ve heard some of them, but she’s turned the tricks people use around here into a science. I can’t help but be a little impressed—Charlotte can be quite the little schemer when she wants to be.

  Toss back a few caffeine pills and then chain-smoke three cigarettes just outside the doctor’s office and your blood pressure goes sky-high, she says.

  Fake a pregnancy with twenty bucks and a quick trip to the waiting room of the low-income clinic. There’s always someone willing to sell you a nice warm cup of piss brimming with all the right hormones.

  Scarf a triple brownie sundae three hours before your glucose test.

  “Fast when they say eat, and eat when they say fast,” she says.

  Load up on iron supplements and aspirin for five days before giving a stool sample. Mix metal shavings into Vaseline and rub it on your body before an MRI. “It’ll fuck up their results enough they’ll have to pay you to come back and do it all over again.”

  Drink enough Visine and you’ll slip into a coma.

  Charlotte has done a lot of homework. She closes her eyes and shows me the way she gasped and snorted her way into a diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea just last week.

  “What?” she asks when she opens her eyes and sees the way I’m looking at her. She knows people who’ve faked cancer. She knows someone serving a rough prison sentence who faked tuberculosis long and convincingly enough to ride out the rest of his time in a cozy isolation room. “Did you know you can order tapeworm larvae on the Internet?”

  It’s no big deal. Everybody does it, Charlotte says.

  I happen to know she’s right.

  I remember the feel of a specimen cup shoved between my legs, my mother’s voice hissing at me to hurry up and tinkle, baby, you can do it, just hurry goddamn it! while the HR person waited outside. Back in the days when she occasionally held on to a job, dear old Mom could always come up with a reason for why I had to come into work with her on drug-testing days. My day care burned down, or maybe I’d just been sent home for lice—her lies rarely skimped on tragedy or humiliation.

  So yeah, everybody does it, but that still doesn’t make Charlotte’s plan a good idea. Right now I do, on average, maybe two or three studies a week. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but once you factor in the paperwork, lab visits, hours and hours of observation time, and multiple appointments for each study, it’s practically a full-time job.

  And then you need to figure in the pain. The recovery time. The side effects. The blisters, the fevers, the days and days of knock-you-retching-to-the-ground nausea.

  It’s just not possible to keep up the kind of pace Charlotte’s talking about. Besides, it’s not so bad here. It really isn’t. This is just one of Charlotte’s funks talking.

  And yet, I can see the appeal.

  Her plan is completely unrealistic. It’s crazy, really—stupid, dangerous crazy. But the money … the money would be nice.

  I happen to have a great need for money at the moment. I haven’t told Charlotte anything about it, but she’s the kind of person who can sniff out that sort of thing. Charlotte’s the kind of person who can smell weakness.

  I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s a useful skill in a place like this.

  “I see that greedy little gleam in your eye,” she says. “I can tell you’re thinking about it. Hey, maybe we can even take off together when we’re done. We’ll be like Thelma and Louise, or something. I don’t even care where we go. Just … away.”

  “You know what happened to Thelma and Louise, right? They died.” But I can feel myself considering what the money would mean.

  She shrugs. Grins. “Who cares? That movie was so good. Ooh, speaking of—vintage Brad Pitt: Marry, Fuck, or Sack Tap?”

  I don’t say anything. It’s a ridiculous idea, not even worth talking about.

  “Hello? Earth to Audie?” Charlotte nudges me with her foot.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  I like to keep my options open, too.

  Chapter 5

  Sometime during the night I wake up, just barely, and Dylan is pressed against me.

  This is a love story, after all. Are you surprised by that?

  I don’t remember hearing him come in, but we’re in my bed, spooning. After the fiasco of a morning I talked my way into a quickie procedure study and got nicked by a catheter by some shaky-handed little shit of an intern, so I don’t feel like fooling around. Did I tell Dylan about that already? I don’t remember telling him, but my thoughts are all blurry, so who knows. Or maybe he can just tell.

  The lab supervisor gave me a couple of Vicodin by way of apology, so I’m woozy on top of sore, maybe that’s why I didn’t hear him come in, but Dylan is awesome about stuff like that. He’s been there, too. Not literally, obviously, though I’m sure guys can get their own version of catheter injuries. I just mean he’s been sick enough that even the thought o
f sex is like someone rubbing sandpaper over a sunburn. Just … no. He gets it.

  He’s not a tester, though. Well, he is, but he isn’t. I just mean it’s not a career for him.

  Testing saved his life.

  Dylan’s kind of a celebrity around the labs. He’s an outlier. An anomaly. A six-foot-one, amazing, amber-eyed discrepancy. Usually that’s a bad thing around here, but in his case it means that, unlike the other thirty-odd people in his sample group, he’s alive. A particularly nasty cancer, fast and mean—I picture his tumors in stained wifebeater tanks and my dad’s bourbon scrape of a voice—and a violent brute of a treatment to match. Dylan somehow survived both. He alone still stands.

  Rather, Dylan still lies. Here in bed. With me. His breath is warm against my bare shoulder.

  He’s my very own improbable outcome, if you’re statistically minded. My very own miracle, if you’re not. Either way works for me; I’m not one to pick apart something this good.

  “I hate seeing you hurt. You should quit, Audie. This stuff’ll kill you.” He kisses my neck as he starts the conversation we’ve had a hundred times before. He doesn’t push it, though. He just keeps kissing little feathery trails, letting the statement breathe on its own.

  I love him.

  I do—I love his mutant, scarred skin and his ninth-life mind. We fit together like two pieces of a waterlogged jigsaw puzzle, our damage swelling us tighter and closer. True, he doesn’t like what I do, but that’s because he still has one foot in Normal. High school, report cards, the whole bit, including a mom who gives him hell when she catches him sneaking out to stay with me. But he doesn’t feel comfortable in his old life anymore, either. There, he’s Cancer Boy. Here, he’s a stud—a test-lab superhero. The Great Teenage Hope for a Cure. That, and I think it’s pretty hard to give a shit about your senior prom after you’ve had nuclear waste injected into your gonads.