Free The Law of Loving Others by Kate Axelrod

closed my eyes, felt the warmth against my skin, my breath slow and heartbeat steady.

    AFTERWARD, I finished getting dressed and went into the bathroom. I rubbed a dot of Neosporin on the spot of my skin that was bubbling up, becoming a blister, and carefully covered it with a plastic Band-Aid. I told myself it was okay for me to go to the party because here was the evidence of my pain, my love for my mother, right there: hidden on my left ankle, a little swollen patch of purple skin, tender and sore.

    I drove the car into the city, sped down the Henry Hudson and then south on the West Side Highway, the river black and choppy alongside me. The radio stations were all playing Christmas music and I sang aloud to the ones I knew—that Nancy Sinatra song, and some old Mariah Carey cover that I loved. There was no traffic; the city felt empty, and I glided off the highway, headed east on 96th Street. Broadway was lit up, the trees on the mall were all studded with yellow lights, bold and bright. I parked easily just off Columbus, turned off the car but sat for a moment before I got up. I rolled up the bottom of my leggings, lifted the plastic bandage to check on my wound, puffy and pink, a little swollen. I stroked it delicately, careful not to pop the blister. In the rearview mirror I applied some eyeliner, which always made my eyes look more green, less brown, and added some lip gloss. I put my hair up and then took it down again. I was always pale, but I looked paler than usual tonight, and I pressed a dot of lipstick on each of my cheeks, smoothed them in circles on my skin.

    UPSTAIRS, the apartment was brimming with people. I headed straight to Daniel’s room to take my jacket off and put my bag down, and one of his friends, Kyle, was sitting at the desk. He was in a big upright leather chair, slicing through some finely ground cocaine with the side of his MetroCard. He gathered it in a single, slim line.
    â€œHey you,” Kyle said. He put the MetroCard down. “Give me a hug, it’s been so long.”
    â€œSo long!” I said. I ruffled his hair a bit. “Cute haircut.”
    â€œYeah? My girlfriend hates it. She’s pissed.”
    â€œOh, it’ll grow back so fast.”
    â€œYeah, we’ll see. You want some?” Kyle asked. He wheeled the chair out from under Daniel’s desk; his baggy corduroy pants dragged on the carpet beneath him.
    â€œMaybe,” I said. “Maybe just a little?”
    Daniel and his city friends used drugs in a way that felt different from my public school friends—they’d casually leave a tidy pile of powder on a counter, or swallow some painkillers with a glass of tap water like it was no big deal. Yes, in Westchester, there had been plenty of weed and beer and maybe a bottle of Robitussin here and there, but it wasn’t the same.
    I had only even
seen
people use coke twice before, each time during the previous year. The first was with Abbe, my roommate in tenth grade. We’d had the kind of relationship that was sort of stiff and polite, but at the same time oddly intimate. During the third or fourth week of school, I walked into our dorm room and she was standing up, naked except for a striped turtleneck—cutting her pubic hair with tiny nail scissors, a pile of dark, wiry hair collecting in the center of my wastepaper basket.
Sorry
, she’d murmured,
. just haven’t gotten a garbage can yet.
    And later that night, while we were both studying quietly on our own extra-long twin beds, she emptied a little baggie of coke on top of her chemistry textbook. (She offered me some in the same manner as if she were handing me a stick of Winterfresh
.
) It was a Wednesday, and we sat on the oatmeal-colored rug in the center of the room. She snorted a couple of lines and I just sat there and watched her, and even though I was totally sober, I was happy to match her enthusiasm, relieved at how talkative and chatty she had suddenly