What Passes For Normal

Chapter 18

"Of course they should stay with us! There's plenty of room."

"Absolutely not."

"It's no problem at all."

I raise my voice. "It's a huge problem! There's no chance, OK? It would be horrible."

Our waiter looks over from another table where he's taking an order from a couple who are also looking in our direction. Guess I should try not to get us thrown out of the place. I calm down a bit and look back at Neea.

"Please try to understand that having my mom in the same house with me at a time like this would be incredibly bad, OK?"

Neea's expression changes. "OK, I understand," she says.

We're on our salad course at an Italian restaurant called Cucina. It's not far from the house, and really close to where Neea works. It isn't white-tablecloth fancy, but it's still pretty nice. The kind of place where you don't find a lot of homeless people or drug addicts but somehow I'm here and I'm eating an arugula salad and some fairly bougie pasta.

I keep thinking about the Thanksgiving dinner in Kamloops at Kev's house. My folks will be there and, I guess, sharing the shocking news of my shameful situation with everyone. What will they think? What will Kev think of his little sis doing drugs? Should be quite the dinner conversation. I'm officially a scandal.

What's up with Italians? Marco Polo goes to China, learns how to make noodles, comes back and everybody's like, cool, we're going to take this and make it into a thousand different shapes. We'll give each one its own name and pretend like it isn't all the exact same thing! I'm not complaining—I love pasta—but I'm not sure about this one. I'm having the crab agnolotti. Agnolotti is apparently just like ravioli except bigger, so instead of getting a nice bowl full of ravioli Chef Boy-Ar-Dee-style, I have, like, four big pasta throw pillows with crab meat and cream sauce.

It's real crab though. Both the waiter and Neea really want me to know that, as if it matters to someone who's been eating whatever shit a street kid can steal or scrounge. I suppose the agnolotti is good, but I'm just picking at it. Food doesn't get me excited much these days. Another one of those fun side effects of meth.

Neea is constantly telling me how fantastically I'm doing, how much progress I've made, etc., so this isn't just a Thanksgiving meal but, for her at least, a celebration of my recovery. Seems a bit premature to me though cuz I just don't see the improvement she sees. To me this still sucks. I know this little dinner means a lot to her but I just can't work up much cheerfulness. I feel like shit, I'm irritable, nothing makes me happy, everything pisses me off and the only thing in the entire world that can fix it is the one thing I can't have.

Well... time. Time will fix it too. That's what Neea says. That's what the books and the Internet say. Time will make me better. With enough time, the damaged dopamine receptors in my brain will hopefully start to repair themselves and there's a good chance I'll have the capacity for joy again. Plus, in time, I won't get so damn mad at every little thing.

"Do you want dessert?" asks Neea as she scoops up the last bite of her pasta.

"Not really," I say. "Can we just go?"

Neea pays for dinner and we walk the few blocks back to the old house on Rendall Street. I manage to thank her for dinner without sounding too miserable. The evening is cold. I can see my breath and I have my hands buried deep in my coat pockets to keep them warm. As we round the corner onto Rendall I catch a glimpse of a couple guys carrying bags and walking quickly down the street away from us. It's dark and they're down at the other end of the block. I only see them for a second before they veer off onto Beckley Avenue, but I immediately think one of them is Kodi. That looked like his long-stride walk. The other might have been P. L. Probably not them, I think. Why would they be here?