Free Disconnected by Jennifer Weiner Page B

happened to their boyfriends or their best friends or their little sisters or their moms, they thought they were special, untouchable, immune. Addiction is the only disease that tells you that you don’t have a disease , the counselors would lecture. Maybe that was why the addicts she'd known all acted like they would live forever, like bad things would happen, but never to them.
    ***
    At the phone store, it took forever for Shannon to get someone’s attention. Finally one of the guys behind the counter—young, black, dreadlocked, with a gold tooth that flashed when he talked—wandered over and lifted Shannon’s phone in his hands. Its once-white plastic casing was a dingy yellow. The screen had shattered and was bound with loops of fraying tape. “Man, how many years you had this poor thing?”
    “Six?” she’d guessed. “Seven?” She’d lost boyfriends, best friends, money, jobs. She’d lost jewelry and eyeglasses and once even a pair of shoes. Through it all, she had managed to hang on to her telephone. Probably because her dealer’s number was in there.
    The guy said that she was eligible for an upgrade. Shannon didn’t understand how she could be eligible for anything good until she remembered that her parents paid the phone bill. She guessed they saw the phone as a lifeline, their last remaining connection to their wayward daughter. As long as she was using it, as long as the bills came every month, they would know she was alive.
    “Nothing fancy,” she’d said. “Whatever’s free.” That turned out to be a touch-screen phone with all kinds of new features. You could shake it to change the music you were listening to; you could watch TV shows and music videos on its tiny square screen. You could set special ring tones for your friends.
    “I don’t have friends,” Shannon said. This whole production was making her feel sad and very old.
    “That so?” said the guy, uninterested. “So you wanna keep your old number?”
    “No!” A new number was the point. She had to leave her old life, her old friends (“They’re not really your friends”) behind her. Cut the cords. Erase the board. Begin again.
    “Fresh start?”
    She ducked her head. “Something like that.” She watched his face as he took in how thin she was, how her complexion was gray and pocked from where she’d scratched herself when she’d been dope-sick. He noted her fingernails, bitten to bloody nubs, and her brown hair, which hung lank to the small of her back. In rehab, there had been a mirror in the bathroom she’d shared with three other girls, but she’d tried never to look into it.
    Quickly the man walked her through the phone’s features. She scribbled her name on the contract, turned down the offer of a car charger, then slipped the phone into her back pocket and went to another meeting, this one in Carroll Gardens, where one of the old-timers, a guy who’d told Shannon on more than one occasion that he’d been sober longer than she’d been alive, sometimes brought pastries from the Italian bakery, triangles of airy fried dough dusted with sugar. They had some kind of Italian name. In English, they were angel wings. “A treat!” the man would say, opening the box so she could have first pick. It reminded her of the notes her mother used to put in her lunch bag on her birthday, when she’d been a little girl, three quarters wrapped in a piece of notebook paper that, when unfolded, read Have a treat on me .
    ***
    After rehab number five, the one where her parents had declined to come for a family counseling session or to pick her up when her twenty-eight days were over, Shannon had downsized to an illegal sublet in an ungentrified corner of Williamsburg, a former bedroom with a toilet and a sink in the corner behind Japanese screens. The place was just as she’d left it, a stage set waiting for the actors to appear. There was a futon in the middle of the floor with a small stack of books beside it. An empty