Free Invisible Boy by Cornelia Read

holding a Dunhill out the window; she was draped sideways across her bed, now wearing
     the goddamn fur over ice-blue pajamas.
    A rush of frigid breeze ruffled the Indian-print bedspread nailed to the wall at my elbow, the stereo needle starting over
     again fresh on the same Beatles album we’d been listening to for the last two hours.
    “Hail to thee, blithe spirit—”
she read.
    “
bird thou never wert.
Keats.”
    “Shelley.” Astrid flopped over onto her back, making the mattress shiver, then stretched her long legs up the wall beside
     her, crossing her ankles in the middle of Jim Morrison’s poster-forehead. “Title?”
    “‘Ode on a Piece-of-Shit Something-Something I Can’t Remember Because It’s Four in the Goddamn Morning’?”
    “Actually, it’s ‘Ode
to
the Roundly Celebrated Demise of His Whiny Iambic Ass,’ ” she said.
    “
Bien sûr
. And by the way, nice fucking coat.”
    “Mummie’s.”
    “She’s not going to miss it?”
    Astrid shrugged. “She’s away for three months. And you’re dressed like shit again.”
    “Satire,” I said. “Besides which, I’m out of quarters for laundry.”
    “Madeline, one must make an
effort
. All that overbred bone structure wasting its sweetness on the desert air.”
    “Thomas Gray,” I said. “‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ And who’m I going to impress on a Sunday night—the security
     guards?”
    Astrid snapped the book shut, then lolled her head off the end of the bed, looking at me upside down. “Shall we do another
     line?”
    By that she meant coke, not poetry: Swain-of-the-Hour’s parting gift as he’d tucked her into the limo that evening—two grams,
     all told, which we’d already put quite a dent in.
    I flicked my cigarette out the window, watching the glow of its orange ember arc high and then plummet, three stories down
     toward the snow. “That would be lovely, if you can spare it.”
    “Lots more where this came from,” she said, reaching for her hand mirror and razor blade. “So we might as well do
all
of it.”
    “Your generosity is greatly appreciated, even so.”
    I gave the room an aerosol spritz of Ozium before shutting the window. This was a spray billing itself as air-freshener, but
     which actually worked by deadening anyone-who-inhaled-it’s sense of smell for several minutes—essential camouflage in the
     dorm-parent wars since we weren’t allowed cigarettes upstairs.
    You’d find a blue-and-white can of it atop the brown school-issued bureau of every partier on campus, alongside her requisite
     bottle of Visine.
    Astrid laid out two fat lines on the mirror and handed it to me along with a rolled-up twenty.
    I snorted them up, then put the mirror on the floor and pinched each nostril shut in turn, inhaling sharply to get it all
     down.
    “Thank you for that,” I said, licking my finger to swipe the last granules off the mirror, rubbing the slick of white into
     my gums.
    “Straight-arrow Maddie Dare giving herself a freeze,” said Astrid. “Who’d believe it?”
    “Fuck off.”
    For the most part I didn’t indulge. My own bureau-top was
    Ozium-free, my closet filled with nothing but dirty clothes. I valued my scholarship far too much to mess around, profoundly
     grateful to have escaped my then-stepfather Pierce’s needling daily assholery.
    Besides which, both my parents were stoners, so bong hits had never felt like much in the way of rebellion.
    Coke, I reasoned, was different. It wasn’t like there was ever a ton of it on offer, and it was so easy to hide, so hard to
     detect once ingested. No harm, no foul.
    Who’d believe it, indeed?
    Not the dorm parents, nor even the Disciplinary Committee. Lucky me.
    I gave Astrid the mirror back, then opened
Understanding Poetry
at a random page while she laid out a fresh brace of lines for herself.
    Maybe we’d bonded because she had even less of a home to count on than I did, and effectively the same lack of cash. My parents