by Hannah Sroka

Dante Alighieri was full of bullshit.

Hell isn’t some sort of weird reverse-funnel thing, with people wandering around with their heads on backwards and Odysseus roasting in a flaming metal bull and Homer and company chilling in a house for having the audacity to be born before Jesus Christ. Judas Iscariot isn’t being gnawed and clawed at by Satan, stuck in his mouth in the freezing cold center of the Earth.

No, Hell is the basement of a town hall, because a church was too threatening, where the chairs are placed in circles and everyone’s sitting in them, sometimes frowning and sometimes not. I don’t know where to look. I don’t know where to put my hands.

Someone stands up. I’m Macy, she says.

Hi, Macy, everyone choruses back. There’s not an ounce of life in those words.

I’ve been clean for six months, she says. My little brother made me a card for it, she says. It looks really bad, she says, but she’s smiling. In six more months, we’re going to Disney World, she says.

That’s great, Macy, someone else says. Thank you for sharing.

This is, I think, the greatest punishment whoever’s upstairs could’ve given me. Not being trapped partially under the ice in a frozen wasteland, forced to endure the cold and silence for all eternity, but spending every other Tuesday afternoon in one of these hard plastic blue chairs that are probably borrowed from the local preschool. And the most ironic part of all of this is that I’m not even a narcotics addict.

So maybe, in a way, Dante wasn’t full of bullshit, because it would make sense that the same person who would design a Hell where hypocrites are forced to walk wearing horribly heavy robes that look beautiful on the outside would also design a punishment for me that’s just as cruel. God, you sick fuck.

It seems, though, that my internal monologue has done me some good—or that God and Dante just took pity on me—because the meeting is over, and people are starting to leave. As I move to join them, the session leader, Shaun, stops me. (I think he’s the session leader. I’m not entirely sure what his role is, but he’s the big cheese of the group.)

Shaun asks us to call him Squid, because his initials are SQD, which is close enough to Squid, he says, because vowels are stupid, and anyway, his first name’s got a U in it. And his mom’s and English teacher, so he’s allowed to make that joke, he adds.

(No one laughs.)

Shaun—or Squid, I guess—taps the blue chair next to him. It’s got some weird brown stain on it. I don’t want to know what it is. I also don’t want to sit down, but his bright-eyed stare starts to darken, so I do. He leans closer, tented forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He’s tall and lanky and a lot, with chestnut hair that’s just shy of curly. He tilts his head to the side a bit, like a dog. If he were a dog, he’d be a beagle, I think, with his big brown eyes and slightly dopey expression. His voice is round, rolling around his mouth and off his tongue.

You haven’t said anything at meetings lately, he says.

I just don’t have anything to say, I say back.

That’s too bad, he says. We’d love to hear from you.

I’m not a narc addict, I want to say. So I do. And then I sit back, because the words had just fallen out of my mouth, like they were little pieces of metal stuck in my cheeks and Squid had pulled out a magnet.

Okay, he says, just a bit too slowly. Then why are you here, he asks. I tell him.

He tilts his head the other way. You look like someone who’d be addicted to Adderall, he says.

And now it’s my turn to hold the magnet, and his turn to sit back, his beagle eyes widening slightly. I don’t know what to say to that, so I just get up and leave. He doesn’t stop me.

- - -

It started when I was in fifth grade, sitting at the edge of the hard plushy chair in the doctor’s office, swinging my little legs back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. My sneakers are pink and purple and glittery; my tights have little daisies on them, something I like wearing because they match my name. There’s a hole in one, right at the center of the flower, and I stretch it out, ripping through all the daisy petals one by one by one. In my head, I play the game my friends and I do at recess when we pick daffodils from the school garden—he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.

Stop that, my mom says, interrupting my game. And then, to my doctor: she won’t stop fidgeting.

She’s five, my doctor says. They tend to do that.

No, my mom says, you don’t get it. She never stops.

And then they talk more, but I’m five years old and everything just goes over my head. I go back to my game. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.

My mom swats my hand away, just a bit too hard. Can’t you prescribe her something, she asks my doctor.

Sure, my doctor says.

Then, when it comes in the mail a few weeks later, my mom sits me down at the kitchen table, dumps the bottle out onto the table, and says, this is how you measure pills.

You have a social studies test first thing on Tuesday, so you take one Tuesday morning with your breakfast.

You have a math quiz on Wednesday afternoon, so you take one with lunch.

But aren’t I supposed to take these every morning, I ask.

Yes, my mom says. But we can refill these whenever we want.

Okay, I say. And then I take a pill on Tuesday morning with breakfast, and another with lunch on Wednesday.

Good, my mom says. Now you try.

I have a science project due Tuesday, I say, so I should take a pill Monday afternoon, I say.

Yes, my mom says, when you start working on it. What else?

I have to read three chapters of a book for Thursday, so I should take a pill when I start working on that, I say.

Exactly, says my mom. Also, don’t tell your dad.

(But my dad finds out, of course, and then there’s shouting and screaming and crying and lawyers and split custody, and two Christmases and awkward parking lot exchanges and step-parents and weddings and so on. She’s sick, my mom had insisted, and she needs to be medicated. She’s not sick, my dad had shot back, you’re just insane. And through it all, I just pop a pill, and then the world narrows for a bit, and I can do what I need to do.)

- - -

Addiction runs in my family, it turns out. Not serious addictions—no crystal meth users here—but the tendency to get addicted to things is stronger. My mom and her brothers get terrible headaches without at least three cups of coffee each morning. My dad has to have sugar every evening, or else he gets snippy. I’ve never seen my grandmother (either grandmother, for that matter) without a glass of wine in her hand.

It’s genetics, I think. There’s some sort of gene in me that lives to fuck up my life, that gets a little taste of something and goes, I want this all the time, and it’s all I ever think about, and I’m not going to stop until I get it right now.

I’m watching Riverdale with my step-sister Rosie—she insists she’s watching it ironically, but she’s always just a bit too into each episode—and the blonde character’s mom tells her, in all seriousness, that she has the serial killer gene. And then blondie looks shocked, and the music swells, and it’s all too much and I can’t help but laugh.

Rosie pauses the episode, turns to me, and says, Mom says you have the addiction gene. Like how Betty has the serial killer gene.

I just stare back and think that maybe it’s not genetics after all, because that might just be the stupidest thing I’ve heard.

I tell Rosie that and she laughs, then hits play.

Blondie—Betty, apparently—reacts to having the serial killer gene, but I stop paying attention. Because I hate that Rosie knows this about me.

I never actually got an ADHD diagnosis; my mom always thought I had it, but never bothered to get me tested. Instead, she just pumped me full of Adderall until my grades shot up, my legs stopped bouncing, and my eyes became less wild. My dad didn’t find out for years. Once he did, and once the divorce was finalized, I asked him what I should do with my pills.

Do what you want with them, he said.

(That’s stupid, Squid would say, a decade or so later. He divorced your mom over this but didn’t actually make you stop taking them?

Yeah, I would say back. I think he saw the grades and the opportunities and the scholarships and everything, I would add.

That’s fucked up, Squid would say.

Yeah, I would say again.)

And I did what any twelve-year-old who had only ever known life with the pills would have done—I kept taking them. Except I measured them differently now.

I needed one pill to get me through my morning routine and my first two classes. But if I had a test or something in either of those two classes, I needed an extra one (or two or three or four). If I took an extra one for the morning classes, I had to hope that it would get me through to lunch, since I only had a limited amount of pills and had to disperse them where I could. Then I’d always take one or two with lunch, because that would get me through the rest of the day. And if I had dance practice, I’d take one before then; if I didn’t, I’d take one before starting my homework.

I’d take one before social gatherings, and college interviews, and walking tours and research time and move-in day and welcome weekend and the first day of classes, and then I just needed to take more and more and more.

And then I’d lie awake at night, too hopped up to sleep, and wonder why I couldn’t have been gifted with serial killer genes instead of addict genes.

- - -

I overdose during my last semester of college, and I hallucinate Blondie Betty the serial killer coming to get me, and then I empty my stomach onto my kitchen floor, and then I complain to my roommate that my heart’s beating too fast, and then she takes me to the hospital, where I apparently start convulsing.

The hospital tells the school admin, and that’s how I got stuck in Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Even though Adderall is not a narcotic. They don’t have Adderall Anonymous programs, and the school didn’t know what else to do with me, because who the hell overdoses on Adderall?

I have to attend these meetings every two weeks for the rest of the semester, or else I won’t graduate and they’ll turn me over to the Feds. Or something.

At the next meeting, Macy (hi, Macy, everyone chants) says that she’s six-months-plus-one-week clean. I shift in my awful blue chair, trying to get comfortable. I ended up in the one with the weird brown stain again. It’s freezing in here, way too cold for April, and I wrap my tan cardigan tighter around me. My boot-clad foot bounces. Once, twice, three times.

I feel someone’s eyes on me, and look up to see Squid watching my foot. Maybe he’s into that, I think. I wonder what would be meaner—telling someone they look like an Adderall addict, or telling someone they look like they have a foot fetish.

Would anyone else like to share, Squid asks, jolting me out of my trance. I look up to find his eyes deadlocked onto mine. There’s a challenge there, in his head tilt, and I let myself stare back. No, I don’t want to share. So no, I won’t.

(Squid has the slightest five-o’clock shadow. I never noticed it before.)

Eventually, he cracks. Thank you for coming, everyone, he says. And they all stand up to leave, but I sit there. And then it’s just the two of us.

I still don’t move, but he does, walking carefully across the circle and sitting in the chair next to me. I was hoping you’d talk today, he says.

I’m not a narc addict, I remind him. Besides, I don’t have anything to say, I say.

He shrugs. We’d still like to hear from you, he says.

Who’s we, I ask.

He flaps his arm out, gesturing vaguely to the empty chairs around him. (I know he’s trying to say that everyone in our meetings would want to hear what I have to say, but it also looks like he’s telling me that no one wants to hear what I have to say.) And if you don’t want to talk to all of us, he adds, you can just talk to me. But you have to talk eventually.

That sounds like a threat, I say. And then, before he can jump back in, I say, do we have to talk here? I’m cold.

No, he says. We can go somewhere else. Let’s get coffee. I need the kick.

- - -

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about recovering from addiction.

I knew it would be difficult. I knew it would be a painful process, that I’d spend my days fighting my mind and my body tooth and nail. But what I didn’t expect was constantly questioning myself.

See, once you know you can be addicted to one thing, you start to question whether you’re addicted to everything else. Because it’s not like you really remember what it feels like to be addicted to something—all you know is that you really need something, and really like something. You take a hit of your friend’s vape and wonder if you’re going to get addicted now. You have a piece of chocolate every night and wonder if you’re addicted to sugar, or if you just like chocolate. You go out and drink every weekend or so and wonder if you’re addicted to alcohol. You wonder if you’re addicted to things like picking at your nails, to twirling your hair, to cracking your knuckles, to kissing, to soda and gummy worms and chai tea lattes.

The line between liking and being addicted has blurred for me, and I don’t think it’ll ever be clear again. I don’t know if it ever was.

So coffee always makes me nervous—because hey, caffeine is addictive—but I don’t want Squid to know that, for some reason, so I order something. I think it’s got lavender in it, for springtime. I don’t like lavender.

This feels like a date, I say, once we sit down with our drinks.

It’s not, he says (far too firmly). I’m not allowed to date people from NA meetings.

I’m not a narc addict, I remind him. He just shrugs.

We sip our coffees. The silence is unbearably awkward, pressing down on us and filling the room to the brim. My leg starts bouncing again. Squid doesn’t look at it this time. He doesn’t look at me at all, in fact, but is instead staring down at his hands. They’re smaller than I thought they were, up close. If I were to put my palm against his, our fingers would almost be the same length.

He clears his throat. So are you gonna talk now, he asks. Now that I bought you coffee?

You didn’t buy me coffee, I say back. He just blinks. Besides, I say, why do you want me to talk so bad?

It’s not personal, he says. We just need everyone to do it. Gotta report to the school administration, and everything.

Oh, I say. And I can’t help but feel the slightest bit disappointed, that it’s not because he thinks I’m some cool, mysterious young woman.

Something in my face must drop, and it must drop far enough that Squid leans forward, just so slightly, and says, lowly, they just have to know that you’re talking, that you’re healing and getting better. They don’t need to know that you’re doing so in a coffee shop over a lavender latte that I’m giving you cash for.

And then he smiles—and it’s a really nice smile—so I bite the bullet, lean back, and tell my story to my fingers, with their glossy pink nails drumming a raggedy rhythm on the table, just a few centimeters from Squid’s.

- - -

The other thing they don’t tell you about recovering from addiction is just how used you are to the physical action of whatever it is you were addicted to.

I’m not talking about the rush I got from Adderall, the focus it brought me, the way it skyrocketed me to the top of my class and built my whole life for me. No, I’m talking about actually opening a bottle, taking a pill, and swallowing it.

I haven’t taken Adderall since waking up in the hospital, but I need to physically take something, need to put something on my tongue and swallow it. It’s what I fixate on now, since I fought through the withdrawal and the fact that I don’t actually know how to focus without these stupid pills. And so I got myself some sugar pills, and I pop a couple every now and then, just to remind myself that I’m still sane.

It’s probably not that healthy for me in the long run, but neither was an Adderall addiction. You win some, you lose some.

At first, I was able to placebo myself into feeling the old Adderall effects. That wore off after a few weeks, though, but I’m still clinging stubbornly to it, hoping that maybe I can get it back, that maybe I can be the person I was when I was hooked.

Because that’s yet another thing they don’t tell you. I don’t know how to be a good student without the pills. I don’t have any direction, I don’t know what to do.

So I march into a hair salon a few days after the coffee not-date, and dye my dirty blonde hair so much more blonde that it’s almost platinum. My skin has gained some of its olive color back since my overdose—I would have looked stupid with deathly white skin and bleach blonde hair—and it looks good, I think.

Some of the people at NA comment on it. I thank them. I don’t know their names, even though they introduce themselves ever god damn week.

This will be my last NA meeting, I’ve decided. It’s the first week of May, and my college graduation is a few weeks away, which means I have a few weeks to put my life back together and figure out what the hell I’m doing with it, now that I’m not a pseudo-junkie anymore.

Squid asks who wants to share first, and I stand up before he’s even finished talking. His eyebrows rise slightly, but he doesn’t say anything, just motions for me to get started.

I’m Daisy, I say.

(Hi Daisy, everyone says back.)

I’m not actually a narcotics addict, I say.

But I was an Adderall addict, I say.

And I’m only here because the school administration made me, I say.

And I don’t have an inspiring story, because I just popped a bunch of pills for my entire life, because my mother insisted I was sick, but I wasn’t, really, she just thought I was. I think it’s like that mother who insisted her daughter had cancer or was wheelchair-bound, or something, but she actually wasn’t, and then the daughter’s boyfriend killed the mom, I think. We never really talked about it. But anyway, the pills got me good grades and good scholarships and everything, and then I just took too much one day, and now I’m here. And now I just take sugar pills and sit through these meetings so I can graduate on time, and figure out who I am without the Adderall.

I take a breath, look around the room. I’m taken back to that first time Squid pulled me aside, when it felt like he had ripped the words from my mouth. Except now, it wasn’t just him, but everyone else as well, and they were staring at me, at the girl who’s at least ten years younger than all of them with hair that clearly doesn’t match her eyebrows and isn’t even a narcotics addict—she doesn’t even go here, jeez—who’s been brooding in the corner and only now decided to spill her life story.

But they’re smiling.

Thank you for sharing, Daisy, Squid says, and it feels weird to hear him say my name.

I roll my shoulders back, nod at him, and sit down.

- - -

I run back into Squid a few weeks later, when I’m walking a friend home from the bar, from our last big shindig before graduating. I’m just a bit tipsy, but my friend—Leila—is basically falling over. A car rolls up beside us, and I prepare to book it as best I can with Leila in tow, but then a familiar beagle-esque face pops out of the window, and Squid says, need a ride?

I dump Leila in the back seat and crawl in next to her. Thanks, I say.

No problem, he says back. Are you all going to the same place?

No, I say, and give him Leila’s address. She’s a menace hungover.

We drive in silence, save for Leila’s occasional drunken murmurs. Her roommates are waiting for her when we pull up to her house; I deposit her onto them and grab the backseat door handle.

Sit in the front, Squid says. I feel like an Uber driver with you back there.

You’re awfully forward, I say back. And then pause. He’s got out the magnet again. (Or maybe it’s the alcohol.)

He laughs, and it fills the car, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve heard him laugh. It’s pretty ugly, uneven and brash and bordering on snorty, but it makes me smile nonetheless.

When we get to my house, I hesitate before getting out of the car. We still hadn’t talked, but unlike the evening in the coffee shop, the silence here is comforting, wrapping me up like the pink fuzzy blanket I had in my room as a child.

So, Squid begins. And then he stops. And then he starts again. I didn’t see you at our meeting this week.

Oh, I think. That’s because I’m done with them, I say. I don’t have to go anymore. I graduate in three days. I say it like I’m guilty of something, like I’ve relapsed.

Squid just hums. I kinda wish you had been there, he says, it felt like we made some real improvements since last time. And he sounds disappointed, just like how I felt in the coffee shop. It feels like an eternity ago, even though it couldn’t have been more than a few weeks.

The alcohol/magnet is there again, so I say, I thought you weren’t allowed to date narcotics addicts.

He laughs again, quieter this time. Less ugly. But you’re not a narc addict, he says.

True, I say. And then I say, I could grab sandwiches tomorrow. At the sandwich place.

And then he says, okay. I like the sandwich place.

And then I say, do I have to keep calling you Squid? Cause that’s a stupid nickname.

And then he laughs yet again and says no, Shaun is fine.

And then I get out of the car, and then he drives away, and I don’t know about him, but I’m smiling ear-to-ear.

And then I get into bed, and flop back against the pillow, and don’t even notice that the bottle of sugar pills has been untouched since that day at the coffee shop.