Free Nicotine by Nell Zink

ridiculous. Her ears poke out through her long black hair. She faces Rob and grins, pushing its greasy strands back behind her ears without putting down the peeler.
    â€œHey, Sorry,” he says. “We have a visitor.”
    â€œMy name is Penny,” Penny says. “I like your house!”
    Rob picks up a bright red coffee cup promoting the anticholesterol drug Lipitor and spits in it. Sorry winces and shakes her head. She discards her carrot and peeler and asks Penny whether shewould like some Turkish coffee. Penny says yes, please, and Sorry requests that she and Rob take seats in the dining room, back across the hall and through the double doors.
    â€œThis room looks like you never use it,” Penny says to him. They sit down at a long wooden table that could easily seat fourteen. The veneer bubbles upward as though it had been left out in the rain. What once was a cut-glass chandelier, now missing all its glass elements, hangs overhead, three mismatched bulbs in its six sockets. The wallpaper is greenish, marbled in silver that echoes the black marbling on the smoked-glass mirror over the empty fireplace. On the mantelpiece are two statues: the Blessed Virgin Mary in latex (a fund-raising dildo for a feminist collective in Chicago, Rob tells her) and a similarly pliant My Little Pony in yellow with dirty hair. On the wall is a curling black poster: T EST D EPT . Beyond a broad archway that leads around the corner of the house, the room is dedicated to storage, filled with cardboard boxes, plastic containers, newspapers and magazines, and bicycles.
    On the table, a pack of American Spirit cigarettes—a British American Tobacco brand boasting all-natural poisonous alkaloids—lies next to a thirties-vintage tabletop lighter and matching ashtray.
    Sorry joins them, carrying a hanging brass tray with the coffee cups, Turkish-style. She takes a cigarette and taps it on the table many times. She leans forward to light it, inhaling deeply. The stoner-like concentration with which she does this impresses Penny.
    Like her housemate, she seems to assume their visitor is bright and curious. On exhaling, she says, “Here’s why I live at Nicotine. I got fucked over in my first drug trial. It was an antihistamine-SSRI phase one interaction thing supposed to run a month and pay eight thousand dollars. They had to let me go after four days . They gave me the whole eight thousand, but I was never the same. The drug interaction caused what you might call the onset of mania.”
    â€œShe was clinical,” Rob says. “She was living at this feminist house,Stayfree, and let’s just say they’re not heavy into command and control, so they didn’t know how to deal with it. They called the cops. That was their creative way of getting her back into medical custody.”
    â€œFirst and last trial I ever did,” Sorry says. “Never again.”
    â€œI never did a drug trial, but I heard about them,” Penny says. “It’s supposed to be easy money.”
    â€œMassively easy,” Sorry says. “I left the ER and spent the night skulking around this vacant lot like I was in the partisan resistance. In the morning I took all my money out of the bank to go to Afghanistan. I know exactly what I was thinking, too. I was going to lead the revolution in Afghanistan. But thank God, I didn’t have a visa, so I got stuck at the airport and ended up back in the hospital. I came this close to being deported to Jordan.”
    â€œWhy Jordan?”
    â€œThat’s where I’m a citizen. Anyway, they put me on lithium. And I took that shit, for a while. But I found out there’s a less toxic substance that cools me down and lets me concentrate.” She glances at Rob over her cigarette. “Though I still don’t know how you can put wads of tobacco in your mouth and spit . Like constantly holding tobacco soup in your mouth .” She shakes her head.