Placebo Junkies by J.C. Carleson

Charlotte’s bed and watch her for a few minutes. I promise myself that I’m going to be nicer to her, to stop rubbing her face in my relationship. It’s not fair to go around flaunting my good luck.
    She seems to have moved on, though. She peels off her shirt, sniffing it before she tosses it into a pile on the floor. “Yuck. I need to do laundry. Where’d the damn maid wander off to?”
    I laugh with her, glad that we can change the subject, and then watch as she rummages through her closet for something to change into. She looks bonier than I remember. The weight-loss drugs must be working double time. Wasn’t she rounder, softer, just a week or two ago? Is it even possible to lose that much weight in so little time?
    I’m about to ask her about it when I get distracted by the tattoos on her back. Small circles, a whole series of them, running down the length of her spine. I would’ve taken her for more of a dolphin-on-the-ass-cheek kind of gal. Maybe a butterfly on the hip, or the Chinese symbol for something or other. Instead, these tats are sloppy and unevenly spaced, almost haphazard, and the one right in the center of her back must be brand-new because the skin around it is a puffy, angry red.
    “Hey, what’s up with the new ink?” I ask her. Looking closer, I can see that they’re not actually circles—they’re snakes, chasing their own tails.

    She frowns, then grabs a shirt out of the dirty pile and yanks it over her head. “Are you going to the party this weekend?”
    She’s changing the subject, which is kind of weird, but whatever. If she doesn’t want to talk about something, it usually has to do with a guy—Charlotte’s the reigning champ of bad breakups. All the more reason I should quit rubbing Dylan in her face.
    Besides, who doesn’t have certain things they don’t want to talk about?
    “Wouldn’t miss it,” I say.

CHAPTER 17
    This is how well Dylan knows me: he shows up with a stack of books instead of a bouquet of flowers.
    Flowers are just so
biological,
the way they fade and wilt and die. It’s the last thing a guinea pig like me needs more of—further evidence of the mortality all around us. Books, on the other hand, are the perfect gift: tidy little packets of fantasy and escape. From pulp to Poe, I love them all.
    I love that Dylan gets that about me.
    He takes one look at my bruises, or at least the inch-thick concealer that’s covering my bruises, and insists that I get in bed to recuperate. He brings me tea, keeping a wary eye out for Charlotte as he sneaks in and out of the kitchen, then drapes his arm over my shoulder and watches as I flip giddily through the pile of books.
    “Here’s where I have to make a confession,” he says. “I’m actually being a self-serving bastard right now. I’m a little behind in English—okay, a lot behind—and I not only have to get through one of these beasts within the next twenty-four hours, I also have to write a five-hundred-word essay brilliant enough to persuade Mrs. Krolnik not to give me an incomplete.”
    I open my mouth, about to say something about the kind of teacher who would penalize a student dealing with cancer, but I remember just in time that he hasn’t actually told me yet that he’s out of remission. “So, which one shall we read, then?” I say instead.
    “Patient’s choice.”
    “Okay, then. How about this?” I hold up a copy of
1984.
“We were reading it in school when I…had to leave, so I never got to finish it.” I immediately wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
    “Mr. Orwell it is,” says Dylan, and for a minute I think I’m safe. But
au contraire.
    “Why didn’t you finish school, anyway?” Dylan asks. Of course he does. There are certain topics I do everything in my power to avoid, and now it’s my own damn fault, since I’m the one who brought it up. “You like reading more than anyone else I know. I bet you got straight As.”
    Idiot,
I curse myself silently. I scrunch up my face and