She has half a prescription bottle of leftover hydrocodone from when she broke her ankle. She wants to try abusing it. She’s not brave enough to take more than the recommended “one to two tablets by mouth every six hours as needed,” but figures if she takes two at once on an empty stomach, she can float awhile at work.
She is your neighbor. You have seen her on the balcony across the courtyard from yours. You have not met. You do not know her name.
Her job is to transcribe a printer company’s customer service phone calls, judge how successfully the agent solved the user’s problem, and arrange this information on spreadsheets. It is less boring than it sounds, but more boring than she makes it sound when she tells her beer club on Tuesday nights that it is not as boring as it sounds.
At work, she is hungry. She does not help herself to the coffee in the break room. She does not eat the yogurt she keeps in the fridge that is labeled with the name you do not know. She wants her stomach empty when she takes her hydrocodone. She considers that the pills may be expired. She is not concerned.
She eats the pills at her desk. The anticipation of the high makes it either better or worse than expected. She cannot tell which. This is funny to her. She once read a study on surgical placebos in which the brain believed a part of it had been removed during surgery, and so responded to the surgery as if that part had been removed, and so cured several cases of Parkinson’s disease, permanently, even after the patients learned the surgery was a farce.
She wonders if she could press a bunch of sugar pills that look like hydrocodone and put them in the real bottle with some real pills and take two every day and give herself a placebo high because every day might be the day she’s taking the real drug.
She also wonders if her high should be higher but has been dulled because of high (haha) expectations.
As she listens to recorded calls, she writes in two places: the spreadsheet where she categories them for fourteen-fifty an hour, and the notepad she will reference later to remind herself to humorize and glamorize the more interesting calls as stories to tell. She tells these stories to her beer club on Tuesdays. She does not tell these stories to her classmates at night school, but she is considering it. She does not tell these stories to you.
Her high is gone by lunchtime. Her optimism and curiosity go with it. She eats her yogurt and does homework for her night class in the break room, where coworkers tell her they are proud she is getting her education, no matter the pace. They exaggerate their pride. They exaggerate their envy and desire to do the same.
She does not tell her stories to her coworkers.
They and also you do not know she is taking night classes because she has no life at home and needs to fill eight hours between work and sleep. When she punches out, she drives thirty minutes up I-35 and thirty minutes back down to kill time before class. Sometimes she listens to music and enjoys it. This time she drives in silence and feels impartially.
She stops at her apartment to change into sleepy evening clothes. She puts her textbook and her homework in her bag. She eats a bowl of frosted flakes. She wonders if she is so skinny because she eats one bowl of yogurt and one bowl of cereal per average day. She considers adding this to her reference notepad of stories to tell. She does not.
Her mood is good. She does not know why. She considers taking two more hydrocodone pills because six hours have passed. She has eaten a bowl and a half of frosted flakes, so her stomach is not empty, so she does not. She prepares to drive to night class. She considers telling her stories to her classmates. She remembers they are all in their fifties or exhausted single mothers, and stops considering it.
Her mood is still good. The unpredictability of her moods does not make her mood bad. She sends an email to her professor and does not go to class. She leans on her balcony in a glittery Lisa Frank sunset. She glances your way because you’re standing on your balcony as well. She wiggles her fingers at you. You wiggle yours back, but go inside without saying hello, because you’ve got your own life going on.
Jessica Staricka is a Minnesotan earning her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found drawing, baking, or anxiously guzzling beer. Her writing has appeared in River River, the Ninth Letter online edition, and elsewhere.