Placebo Junkies Read online

  A lot of people here have gigs on the side—there’s a whole underground economy. One lady runs a kind of travel agency for medical trials all over the country. She’ll get you signed up, book your tickets, maybe even charter a bus if there’s a big enough group going. Another guy walks dogs and waters plants, that kind of thing, for people doing inpatient studies. He’ll also run errands for you, pick up medicine, whatever, if you’re really hurting and can’t fend for yourself for a while. All for a small fee, of course. Jameson keeps a whole damn pharmacy in the spare room in our apartment. He buys up our unused meds for next to nothing, then sells them for a ridiculous amount of money on the side. But like I said, it’s not as bad as it sounds—it’s not like he’s running a meth lab or anything. He’s just selling medicine that hasn’t been officially approved, or maybe just isn’t available yet, to people who don’t have time to wait for all the boxes to be checked. Occasionally some walking skeleton of a person we’ve never seen before will show up, go back to the extra room with Jameson, and come out ten minutes later in a big rush to leave.

  I don’t ask any questions. You do what you gotta do, right?

  “You’re a good writer. And you let your personality come out more on paper. It’s like you, only … more sparkly.”

  I stick my tongue out at him. “Are you saying I don’t usually sparkle?”

  “Oh, you sparkle all right. You sparkle like a horny teenage vampire,” Jameson says. “I’m just saying that you can be a bit reserved in person, and I like the way you let yourself out of your head cage a bit when you write. You should keep it up, maybe take some classes.” He turns up the stereo to drown out the sound of Charlotte having sex with Scratch in the next room.

  “Yeah, right. Harvard keeps calling, asking me when I’m going to accept my full ride, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.” I kick off my shoes and curl up on the couch as one of my favorite songs comes on.

  “I’m serious, Audie. You’re smart, and you should be in school. Not high school. Don’t even bother, you’re already way past that. Maybe a class or two at the community college, though, or something online.”

  I shoot him a dirty look. He’s doing what Charlotte and I call his Den Mother Thing. For someone who can’t be much more than five years older than me, he can be a preachy bastard sometimes. “Gee, thanks, Dad. And if I don’t, are you going to send me to my room?” I know he means well, but I hate it when people treat me like a kid. I may be young, but I pay my share of the rent and manage my life just fine, thank you very much. “Besides, I don’t see you applying to med schools.”

  “Maybe not, but I’ve already memorized more textbooks than I’d ever have to read in medical school. I’m pursuing my interests. Unlike you.”

  He’s about a centimeter from the border between irritating me and seriously pissing me off. “Yeah, well, there’s a reason you’ve never met a self-taught heart surgeon, don’t you think?” I can hear my voice turning sharp.

  “Easy there, Audie.” Charlotte’s still buttoning her pants as she comes out of her room. “The fine Dr. Jameson has hooked me up with many a cure. He’s a hell of a lot more reliable than most of the quacks working around here.” She hands me a pill. We both started a birth-control study last week and we’re trying to help each other remember to take our pills. Mine are little beige ovals, hers are yellow octagons—it’s anyone’s guess which are the real deal. I’m usually the one to remember first, but sex with Scratch is probably an excellent reminder to take preventive measures ASAP.

  They’re both giving me that look, basically accusing me of being the jerk, and I can tell from the way he starts clearing his throat with little heh heh heh noises that I actually might have hurt Jameson’s feelings. “Sorry, J. You can operate on me any day.”

  Jameson winks away my apology, and we fall into one of those awkward silences. Charlotte shifts in her seat and I can tell by the semipredatory look on her face that she’s about to bring up her plan. She did a psych study once where she had to sit through assertiveness training, which is pretty funny, because Charlotte isn’t exactly a shrinking violet. She kind of got off on the stuff they taught her, and she’ll occasionally throw around some of the techniques she learned. I can tell I’m looking at a few of them right now: Position yourself directly in front of your conversational opponent. Maintain steady eye contact. Always be the one to initiate a change of subject. Match your opponent’s breathing pattern.

  Personally, I would’ve called it Manipulative Asshole Training, but that’s just me.

  After her training session they sat Charlotte in front of a big red button and told her that each time she pushed it someone in another room would get a shock. It’s one of those bullshit things they always tell you in psych studies, like anyone would actually be stupid enough to believe that was really what was going on, that some poor asshole on the other side of the wall was really going to sit there wired up to a bunch of cables and let himself get juiced over and over just because someone in a white coat said not to move.

  Charlotte didn’t press the button a single time. Instead, she used the little pocketknife she used to carry around with her to pry the whole damn button out of its casing, and refused to give it back until the researchers paid her in full for participating in the study. “I didn’t want them to think I hadn’t been listening,” she said. “I mean, what’s more assertive than that?”

  But maybe I am still a little raw about Dylan’s disappearing act, because I’m just not in the mood to be on the receiving end of Charlotte’s Psych 101 bullshit techniques this morning. I start untangling myself from the blanket so that I can leave before she starts pressing me for a commitment.

  I’m not totally lacking in self-awareness—I’ll probably say yes to her plan soon enough. I mean, we both know she’ll talk me into it eventually. I can be sort of susceptible to certain types of people. And Charlotte, for all her flaws, just has this way of making her version of events seem so much better than anything I could ever come up with. It’s like being best friends with a cult leader, sometimes.

  Sooner or later I’ll drink the Kool-Aid, but sometimes you have to show some resistance, put up a little fight, just to remind yourself that you can.

  Fortunately, Scratch comes out of Charlotte’s room and drags a chair over to join us just in time to distract Charlotte from pouncing on me.

  Scratch. Poor, revolting Scratch. True to his nickname, he’s got a rash. Scratch always has a rash. He’s allergic to damn near everything. You so much as eat something for lunch that ever sat next to a tree nut and he’ll sprout hives if you breathe on him three hours later. He’s the peely-est, sniffly-est dude I’ve ever met, and as much as I’ve gotten used to finding his eczema shrapnel dusting our cushions and hearing him hawking up lung butter in our bathroom, he still makes my skin crawl at times like this, idly fingering the yellow-helmeted battalion of pustules marching up his neck. I would think he’d give the techs a heart attack whenever he walks into a lab, but he’s carved out a nice little niche for himself volunteering in skin and allergy studies; he’ll smear damn near anything on his flesh. I’m pretty sure Charlotte only fools around with him now and then because she feels sorry for him.

  As usual, he bears news. Scratch is the human equivalent of a tabloid magazine—all things conspiratorial and scandal-adjacent will find themselves embellished by his fuzzy tongue. Today is no different, and he’s practically panting to get it out.

  “Yo, guess who’s back in town?” he says, dabbing at a bleeder on his neck with the collar of his T-shirt. “The Professor. I ran into him last night. He says he’ll be getting back to work this morning.”

  Jameson groans. “God, I was hoping he’d disappeared for good.”

  Charlotte, on the other hand, cackles and then rubs her hands together. “This,” she says, sinking back into the couch next to me, “is gonna be fun.”

  Chapter 8
/>   By the time I get dressed and head over to the labs, everyone else has already left, presumably to entertain themselves by messing with the Professor en masse.

  Back when I was a kid, I don’t know, maybe eleven? Anyway, I had this friend, Krissy. I liked hanging out at Krissy’s house because she lived with just her dad, who was one of those benignly negligent parents who just sort of assumed Krissy’d let him know if she needed anything, but otherwise left her alone. There was never any food in her house, but her dad was good about leaving cash. Whenever we got hungry, we’d walk over to the neighborhood convenience store and load up on all the junk food we could carry. That’s one of the great things when you’re a kid—you can stuff your face full of ten pounds of Pop-Tarts and licorice and whatever other high-fructose un-food you can find on the shelf that’s never come within a hundred miles of any naturally occurring substance, and you never even get sick. You just stuff that processed shit in your face until you can’t, and then you lie in a stupid, happy little sugar coma until it’s breakfast time, and then you just start it all over again, but this time with syrup on top. It’s awesome to be a kid sometimes. Or at least it was awesome to be a kid at Krissy’s house.

  Anyway, we used to take a shortcut to the convenience store, because otherwise it was a really long walk. We’d climb under this chain-link fence someone had cut through at the bottom, jump over a muddy ditch full of used condoms and empty beer cans, and then walk along the railroad tracks for about a quarter mile until we got to the back of the store. This one time we were heading back right around dusk, and as usual we weren’t paying attention to much of anything, when all of a sudden we heard a guy’s voice calling out to us, hey, girls, or something generic like that.

  We turned around, and there’s a man standing there on the tracks behind us with a weird smile on his face—not threatening or anything, just more like he’s waiting for us to hurry up and get the joke. I remember I was staring at him, trying to figure out what he wanted, when he starts moving a tiny bit—not walking toward us, but just sort of fidgeting a little where he stood—and part of my brain starts to catch on that something isn’t right. I keep staring at him, but another few seconds tick by before my attention finally zooms off of that weird smile on his face and finally pans out enough to realize exactly what it was that was strange about him. It was his pants. His pants were off, or at least unzipped, and he was grabbing at himself, tugging and jerking a little, and then a lot.

  I was still young enough that I didn’t even really have the words to go along with what I was seeing. I mean, I knew what he was doing, but I’d never seen it actually happening right in front of me. So I’m staring, Krissy’s staring, and the guy’s grinning back at us, jerking himself off even faster now, and it was like we were in some weird time warp for what felt like hours, until finally I snapped out of it. I grabbed Krissy by the arm, and ran like hell.

  We ran as fast as we could, at least I thought we did at the time, but maybe not, because when we got back to Krissy’s house, she still had the two-liter bottle of Hawaiian Punch tucked under her arm, and I still had the Cool Ranch Doritos and the Double Stuf Oreos. I mean, you can’t exactly say we were running for our lives if we managed to hang on to the precious goddamn snacks, can you? We shrieked about it for a couple of minutes, oh my god, did you see his thing? Soooo disgusting. But then our TV show came on, and we just sort of forgot about it. And the funniest thing is, I don’t think it even occurred to us to tell anyone about it, not even Krissy’s dad when he got home a few hours later. It was like it never happened. The guy must not have put up much of a chase, since he obviously didn’t catch us, but still—you’d think we would have locked the doors to the house or called the cops or something instead of shrugging it off to watch some stupid sitcom. Maybe we just instinctively calculated that the guy wasn’t a real threat, and discarded all thoughts of him without getting hung up on all the could’ves and might’ves and almosts that start following you around once you grow up a bit.

  Or maybe we were just too young and too fucking stupid to get it—our brain waves temporarily shorted out from our turkey jerky and Cup Noodles diet plan. To this day, I can’t decide.

  Anyway, I think I feel about the Professor the same way I did about the wanker on the train tracks. My brain tells me there’s something vaguely threatening about him, but I just can’t get worked up enough about it to drop my munchies. I mean, how much harm could he possibly do? He’s shorter than me, probably five four, tops, and with his ridiculous white beard he looks, no shit, exactly like a garden gnome.

  But I still keep my eye on him. And I understand why Jameson hates him so much. The way he always lurks around, listening in on everyone’s conversations, makes you feel like you’re under surveillance. Every so often you’ll hear a rumor that he’s some kind of undercover something or other. A DEA agent, maybe. Or, more likely, a private investigator for the pharmaceutical companies, digging up dirt on the competition. Jameson, who can be a little paranoid sometimes, swears the Professor keeps a file on him.

  I sort of like the idea of someone keeping a dossier on me. It’s like outsourcing your own diary. Let someone else do the writing while I get to focus on the living. Genius, right?

  But the real story isn’t all that interesting. The guy’s nothing but a wannabe academic—some pseudo-legit branch of sociology, I think—and rumor has it he’s been working on his vaguely defined research paper for so long now that his university sponsors forgot he exists. He mostly just hangs out and watches us, constantly scratching little notes. He’s a male Jane Goodall, observing his subjects in their natural habitat.

  Which I suppose makes us his chimpanzees.

  Which is probably why Charlotte fucks with him so much.

  “Hey, Professor,” she’ll say. “Have I got a story for you.”

  He falls for it every time. It’s almost sad how desperate he is to cannibalize our lives, live vicariously through our stories. He’s the ultimate outsider. The consummate wallflower, never invited to dance. So whenever Charlotte comes up and offers him a little nugget, his eyes light up and he copies down every word out of her mouth, scribbling so fast he occasionally has to shake cramps out of his writing hand.

  “Yesterday one of the doctors invited me into his office and told me he was developing a new breast-exam technique and he needed a woman’s opinion. He told me to take off my shirt and bra first, so I did.” Charlotte feels herself up as she tells him the story, running her hands all over her chest, tracing slow, lewd circles around her nipples.

  The Professor nods rhythmically as he writes everything down.

  All the stories Charlotte shares with the Professor are about sex. All her stories are about being watched. She’s convinced he’s a perv like that. They’re completely ridiculous, her stories—I mean, way over the top. Her whole goal in life is to rattle him enough so he either blushes or at least stops writing. But so far none of her stories have ever worked. So far, he’s never blushed. And he never stops writing.

  “They’re testing sex toys in room 342,” she tells him. “The marketing people stand behind a two-way mirror and watch people masturbate. Today they’re giving out gift certificates as a bonus, dinner for two at some steakhouse if you come up with a new way to use their vibrators that they can show in their promotional materials.”

  This one might actually be true. You never know around here. Someone, somewhere has almost certainly been paid to test dildos.

  “There’s a peephole cut into the wall of the proctology lab. Someone set up a camera and they’re live-streaming colorectal exams for subscribers in Asia who pay twenty-nine dollars a month.”

  The Professor never cracks a smile, never stops writing. No matter how crazy Charlotte’s stories get.

  It drives her nuts. She storms around in a pissed-off mood for hours every time she fails. She thinks there’s something wrong with him, that it’s not normal t
o be so detached.

  I don’t feel as strongly as Charlotte or Jameson, but I still keep my distance. I stand back and watch him watching us. Which is why it freaks me out when I run into him on my way into work and he calls me by name.

  “Audie,” he says. “We should talk.”

  Chapter 9

  “No! I swear, I’ve never spoken to him in my life. I have no idea how he even knows my name.” I’m trying to cut through my chicken marsala while I tell Dylan about my run-in with the Professor, but it’s not going well. “He creeps me out.”

  Dylan loves hearing my guinea pig stories. It’s like the world’s grossest soap opera, he says. He can never keep anyone’s name straight, though. “Wait, remind me,” he’ll say. “Is Jameson the one with the mutant cold sore covering half his face?”

  “No, doofus,” I’ll say back. “That’s Scratch. Seriously, how can you forget that? I mean, his name is freaking Scratch, for god’s sake. There’s your clue right there.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he’ll say, usually in a goofy British accent or something. Dylan does awesome accents and impressions. He can be funny as hell when he’s not in pain.

  The pain is why he’s so lousy with names. He never says anything about it, typical guy, but it’s obvious that it gets pretty bad sometimes. I can always tell. It’s like someone unrolls a blanket of fog over him, and his voice and even his eyes just kind of go fuzzy. I love how he still shows up, though—how he still makes an effort, even when it hurts. I love that we still always manage to connect, even through that terrible fog.

  Luckily, Dylan’s having a good day today—no sign of fog.

  “What did that poor chicken ever do to you?” He shakes his head at the mess on my plate, then before I can stop him he reaches over and plucks two black olives off my salad and holds them up to his eyes. “Why, Audie,” he says in a Hannibal Lecter voice. “You’re looking positively scrumptious. We should talk.”