Free The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott Page B

for six more weeks, presuming it’s not continued, and Sean is still missing. I wonder who else Sean is hiding from, how far he is in over his head. I study the pictures I posed for inside Sean’s apartment. I have them in a file on my computer. There are large black tiles on the floor, a plaster angel on the wall in what looks like the entryway, a standing brass lamp and dark wood dresser. I’m tied into a body harness, wearing a blindfold and a spiked collar. A woman in a latex catsuit is posing to look as if she is digging her nails into my face. It was the summer of 1999, right around the time Hans and Nina were getting married on an Oakland hilltop. In the wedding video they dance behind a minotaur and Hans cannot keep his hands off Nina. He grasps for her like a greedy child, the way I grasped for Lissette. Sean was there dressed in drag, the maid of honor, witnessing for his friend. While I was chained up in his apartment was he already coveting his best friend’s wife?

    Before I leave Los Angeles I meet a music producer. She asks what I’m working on and I say I am kind of writing a book about murder and kind of not doing anything. She says she tried to kill her stepfather once. She was sixteen and working in a pharmacy and she found a type of pill and figured out how many pills it would take to kill a person. She stole the pills, slipping a couple in her pockets every day, careful to cover her tracks. The night she decided she’d had enough she ground the pills and put them in her stepfather’s food.
    “Nothing happened,” she says. “He was too fat. It went right through his system. He didn’t even notice.”

Chapter 4
    July; Scooter and Eva; Miranda Leaves; The Stranger; Clues, Rumors, and Observations; What’s in Portland; Kay’s Advice; Norman Mailer; The Situation and the Story; Sean Sturgeon Returns with a Message
    In the beginning of July, George Bush commutes Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence of thirty months for perjury. He doesn’t pardon Libby, who served as the vice president’s chief of staff, just changes the sentence so he doesn’t serve any time. He says the penalty was too severe but makes no move to change the mandatory sentencing for everyone else. Below the article is a story about Eva Daley, who drove her son and six of his friends to a gang fight in Long Beach where they stabbed a boy to death. It must have looked like a circus trick, all those children piling out of the car toward the playground.
    When I get home from Los Angeles I see Miranda in the afternoon and we make a large pot of curried vegetables. I don’t see her again until a week later when her roommates are having a party and she asks to sleep over. She has to be up at four in the morning to go to work. She says she’s been busy. She says she’s having an existential crisis. She met a boy at a rock show and thinks maybe she’s in love. She’s wearing tennis shoes, a sweatshirt, and yellow running shorts. We walk down Cortland looking for ice cream but all the shops are closed.
    Miranda is tired. The work she’s doing is secret, possibly illegal, and justified by the causes she represents. She doesn’t go to movies or watch television. She reads essays to support her desires, reinforces her beliefs with books like
Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
At night she closes herself around me while I lean over the side of the bed with the covers pushed back, sweating. Miranda’s legs pressed behind my legs feel like they’re a hundred degrees. I’m trying not to panic. I wake up startled in the middle of the night and she lays her hand over my face, spreading her fingers across my eyes.
    “Go back to sleep,” she says. “You belong to me.”
    In the morning her clothes are gone, along with her bag of books, her bicycle. I put on the mix CD she made while I cook eggs and make coffee.
    I’m moving soon. Just a little more than a mile away into a one-bedroom apartment with a twenty-six-year-old kid who