Interview Log: 02
So waking up in the hospital was not a very good move on my part, not that it could be avoided. More to the point, I'd actually woken up several times before, but I was so out of my gourd that the doctors had run a toxicology panel on me, which changed my diagnosis from 'assault victim' to 'tripping balls.'
Yeah, you heard that right. Winslow found out I had drugs in my system, and they jumped on that with both feet. Noooo, they hadn't let a student get shoved into a locker, I'd locked myself in, because I was high! They hadn't turned a blind eye to over a year of harassment and malicious behavior from their students, I'd gotten high and made it up! They hadn't ignored my slipping grades thanks to active sabotage and a hostile learning environment, everyone knew druggies were just dumbasses. They hadn't let a Class 2 Biohazard exist in the school for more than a few hours after someone was shoved inside of it, surely I'd gotten high, raided the girls' toilets all over school, and wrapped the mess around me like a warm, stoner blanket. What's that? Even basic analysis could tell you those pads were more than a week old? Nevermind that, she'd been high!
Motherfuckers, all of them.
It gets even better, though. The hospital staff knew I was a user. You know how they grade pain on a 1-to-10 scale? Being confined in a small space for a few hours and catching a wheelbarrow of infections can cause some amount of pain, it seems, but if I rated it any higher than a 4? Drug seeking behavior! Don't increase her pain management, she'll just get addicted. Sounds illegal as fuck to me, but what do I know, I'm just a dumbass druggie. Only Brockton Bay, man.
So at the end of it, I had a ton of new problems. My credibility at school was more than tanked, I had an active target painted on my forehead; now, not only did Yon Spiteful Bitches get to step up their game, I was a pretty acceptable target overall, and I was being eyed up by teachers so much that Don and the rest didn't want to be seen in the same block as me. My credibility with my dad took a big hit too, since-- y'know, drugs-- and he was pretty butthurt that I'd never told him about all the shit I was wading through at school. Because that's completely his business, and not a private matter that I didn't want him involved in. Why would I ever want someone to look at me and only see Taylor, and not know I was a shitstain on the bottom of Emma and Sophia's boots, right? Who needs pride or dignity, they're useless.
I walked out of the hospital with a bottle of Tylenol-3 to take the edge off the lingering pain and weakness, a maxed-out deductible on our health insurance that Dad was going to be stacking overtime to pay, and a little bit of an axe to grind. Lots of little axes. The kind they use to scalp people.
And you wanna know the fucked up part? I wasn't all that bothered by it. Not at first.
Part of it, I'm sure, was that it was a return to the status quo; school was hell, and a handful of girls had made it their life mission to ruin mine. That's familiar, easy. It was going to be painful as all hell to live through, especially without easy access to any crutches, but the fact of it didn't really wreck me. It just made me feel kind of numb. Now, Dad? Dad was another story. For one, he was pretty wrecked, that was clear as goddamn day. The cock and bull story they'd fed him was obviously fishy and he knew it, and he did ask me for the details, but it still meant he'd been presented with two incredibly shitty options: either his little girl had been tortured by her unnamed peers for over a year and he hadn't noticed, or his little girl had developed a drug problem severe enough she'd tried a very involved and illogical suicide stunt.
I did correct him on that, by the way. It, uh… I don't think it helped. I think he was glad to hear me say I'd only been smoking pot, and not running around on heroin or something, because he had been alive in the 70's and all, but that just gave him impotent anger at the school to shoulder around as well. So now he wanted to fix things, make everything better, but about the only thing he knew to do was his job with the Dockworkers' Union. So Dad sat me down at the table, put his hands over mine, and begged me to be good and take care of myself. To not go down a dark path. Think about what Mom would have wanted for me. Kinda a heavy thing to put on a 15-year-old, huh?
So, yeah. I might have simultaneously really wanted to humor my father and make him proud, but also gotten really pissed at him. Because he was giving up, and I was just getting started.
The world's different when you're a parahuman, you know? There's this urgency and agency all tangled up together that you didn't have before, am I right? Knowing that you can do things, that you can know things, that you have options that you didn't a minute before. I'd stared hazy-eyed around at my hospital bed, eyeing up the IVs and the syringes, hearing the clatter of pills as nurses walked by, and it was like-- I just knew. I could use these. For what, I had no goddamn idea, but it was now a fact. I kept a lid on it for like a week, went back to school, saw how much of a shitstorm that was gonna be. Wandered around the house while Dad was at work, and just… took inventory. You'd be amazed at the kind of bullshit you can pull off with everyday household cleaners. A lot of it was kinda a vague sense that if I started playing around with this bottle and this half-empty spray can, I could make shit.
Except… you remember how I said I don't do things by half? Well that still applied. I had a mountain of problems with no solution, and options that amounted to fuck all if I didn't know what to do with them. So I took Dad's advice, though maybe not in the way he wanted me to, because I'm sure it made Mom proud when my first move was to check out the Library.
Started the same routine at school and out of it. I'd go to the Library, check out a fiction book to read, then actually stay between the shelves and pour over as many chemistry texts as I could get my greedy hands on. And wouldn't you know it, I was right. Everything I read, it was like I was remembering something I already knew, and it didn't work on shit like geometry or social studies. And all that vague "I can use this" got specific, real quick. You know the Tinker Cycle? Start by banging pots and pans around until you get a crude tool, then use that tool to make a better tool, and so on? Yeah?
Fuck the Tinker Cycle. I didn't have time for that shit. I wanted results.
* * *
Winslow is a shithole. It really is. Water damage in every third ceiling tile, a permanent layer of graffiti and chewed gum all over everything with a flat surface. Perfect backdrop for this kinda thing. There's cameras at Winslow, but only about half of them work, so I kept an eye out for which ones had the little red light and which didn't, and when I found the latter? I bought some cheap tupperware, and used a bathroom pass as an excuse to slip into an unguarded Janitor's Closet. Mooched some cleaners and chemicals, stashed the containers behind a ceiling tile in the gym locker room. Took those home with me next chance I got, and boom, raw materials.
It's funny, I kind of thought stealing for the first time would be harder. Like, not just the act of it. I thought there'd be more impact, like I'd feel that line being crossed. Like there was a clearer divide between being a criminal and not. Not that simple, huh? After that, shoplifting a few things didn't even seem like a steep step. That did almost get me caught, though. Did she tell you about it? Didn't think so.
So I was standing in a 7-11, eyeing the painkillers and pretending to choose which would be the best for a backache while I was actually keeping an eye on the cold meds to my left and the register to my right. I did have some ideas for those pain meds, kept thinking that the anti-inflammatory properties of the ibuprofen expy could come in real handy, but my goal was the cold meds. I'd found out that Don wouldn't sell to me at school anymore and wouldn't give me any courier work until heat died down at least a bit, so money was going to be an issue sooner than later. Don had promised to get me the numbers of a couple new contacts, at least, but now I wanted pot for science as well as the weekends. That was gonna get expensive, especially with some of the other ideas rattling around in my brain, so I'd made an executive decision to, uh… barter, we'll say.
So anyway, getting ready to snatch the cold meds and buy the OTC painkillers as a cover, when all of a sudden a hand comes down on my shoulder and makes me about jump out of my goddamn skin.
"Hebert," the hand's owner hissed as she spun me around. Because of fucking course, it'd be Sophia Hess riding my ass once again. Goddamn, she needed a hobby that didn't involve stalking me.
"Hess. What."
"I should ask you that. This isn't on your way home. What are you up to, trying to feed your habit?" I heard a rustle off near the register, as the clerk on duty stopped wallowing in ennui and started paying attention. Fuckdamnit, Hess, ruining my plans without even trying. I did my best Don impression and rolled my eyes like an asshole.
"I'm getting a bottle of tylenol, what's it look like? My ankle hurts ever since you tripped me earlier and shoved me into the stair railing."
"Like hell, Hebert, stop trying to blame others for your problems like a bitch." You are my problem, and you are a bitch. What a coincidence, I didn't say but very very loudly thought. "Maybe you shouldn't be so clumsy."
Okay, yes, maybe I thought about poisoning her by aerosolizing a nice mixture from under the sink. Just a little bit of poison. Enough to ruin her next track meet. But I only thought about it, so that doesn't count. I sighed. My most practiced defense was sullen silence, so I retreated into that until she released me and stalked off. Hess was probably the most proactive of the three girls with a blood feud on me, and if she was keeping an eye on me that was going to make everything harder. I needed to get a few things ironed out first, but Operation: Blackula Hunter clearly wasn't going to be pushed aside forever, and--
What?
Well, it's-- I mean, she's black, and she's a vicious, remorseless parasite that sucks the life out of everyone she meets. Not rocket surgery, here.
Wh-- how is that racist?! Fuck it, just-- let's move on.
* * *
There's a couple of abandoned houses in my neighborhood, and I knew better than to think I could start a science lab in my own basement and get away with it, so having a small selection of basements other than mine to choose from was quite convenient. After careful consideration, I chose the obvious fire hazard as my first base of highly flammable operations. It wasn't so much that the house itself was begging to be set light-- it was pretty worn down and had some missing siding, but hey, Brockton Bay-- but the basement didn't have any windows. Bad news in case of needing to escape, good news in that I could have some lights on down there and nobody would know about it. I searched through our garage until I found the old camping equipment, and nicked the gas stove and a couple of battery-powered lamps, then stashed them in my new lair. I stacked labeled tupperware full of chemicals on some rusted laundry shelves, and the few bottles and cans of things I didn't think Dad would notice missing.
Buying a new propane tank was kind of nerve-wracking. The fear and evil fanfare I'd expected for my first forays into petty theft had apparently decided to lie in ambush for when I needed to do legitimate business transactions. I could see confetti as black as my villainous heart behind the eyes of the gas station clerk as he handed me my change.
I really needed a toke. I expected to be strung tight as piano wire at school, but this was getting to be a bit much. Stress is a good motivator for risk-taking, as any college student with a deadline will tell you, so I pretty much immediately tossed aside my remaining caution in favor of a hand-written set of instructions and a pair of disposable latex gloves, and got to cookin'.
It's probably because my power lets me cheat, but making meth? Way easier than I thought it'd be. The fumes were a bit of a scramble, but some desk fans mostly took care of it, and I had a good supply of cough drops now that I could take a few from, so I was probably going to be fine. Just making ordinary street drugs is about the lowest level of Tinkering possible, but it was enough to put me in a sweet zen sort of state. I wasn't much interested in the meth itself, but the act of making it was something I could see myself craving. I couldn't wait to pair cooking with a blunt, combining my favorite mellow with my new favorite focus sounded like having cake and eating it, which… which that is the stupidest fucking metaphor, if I have cake of course I'm going to eat it, fuck.
For a first try, I'd say it came out pretty well. Mild occlusion, but a decent quantity for the relatively small amount of raw materials I'd managed to scavenge. Once I'd actually started it, I'd started tweaking the methods I was using on the fly, almost automatically. You know, adjusting temperature by a couple degrees, more precise timing, that sort of thing. Not exactly the most prestigious first use for a superpower, right? Useful, though. I doubt there's anyone alive who hasn't daydreamed about getting powers, about what they'd like to use them for. Things or even people they'd like to change. Cooking meth was definitely never a feature in mine, I wanted to be like Alexandria. Untouchable by evil, unwavering in pursuit of justice, that kind of thing. Surprising, huh?
I still wanted to be like Alexandria, still daydreamed a bit about joining the Protectorate and standing in one of those promotional posters, even as I broke up the sheet of ice I'd made and packed it into an empty Cool-Whip container, only now my fantasy had high-tech goggles and a lab coat instead of a cape. If you're wondering how that fantasy is at all compatible with selling drugs to buy more drugs, it's actually pretty easy to justify: when it came down to it, I didn't want to feel like shit anymore. That's all.
When you're being persecuted, pushed down, shoved aside, day after day, you can start to feel like a martyr. It's hard to handle the idea that some people are just evil, just hateful for no goddamned reason, so there had to be a reason I was being picked on, right? It had to be something about me, not about them. And I wasn't a bad person-- so maybe I was special, instead. Maybe I was hated for it. Maybe I was better than they were, and that's why they were awful and I was a hero-- or would be a hero, if I ever got powers. Same fantasy, different gloss. I imagined that there was something about me that was intrinsically good, or just, and that made me feel better. That crutch was getting old though, getting cracked, so I think it's a good thing I took up smoking when I did. I'm not sure what I might have done if I'd gotten put in that locker, and didn't have something outside of me I could turn to. Some promise of feeling better, even if it wasn't from a noble source.
Call it pathetic if you want. I call it realistic.
So I put the container of meth inside a pie tin, then carefully layered the actual Cool-Whip on top, cleverly disguising my bartering chip as a real pie. Then it was off to the bus stop, to go check that contact Don said he'd set up for me. Spent the whole ride nervous as hell, even if my package disguise was ingenious. Pretty sure I was losing weight, spending all my time at the library and not eating, or at school and not eating. Probably just shedding the pounds I'd added from a couple months of munchies, but…
Don's contact was a couple miles north of Winslow, in a neighborhood I'd never been before. Had the same early decay signs as mine, though. Most places in Brockton Bay do, especially the further you get from the Heights or the Boardwalk. When I finally found the address, I stepped over empty beer cans along the broken sidewalk leading from the mailbox to the door, then sort of stared at the doorbell for a minute. My hands were full of my Smuggler's Pie, you see. It was a dilemma. Didn't want to risk pissing off a potential dealer, but also didn't want to just keep standing there. I kicked low on the door a couple times, in compromise. That way any shoe scuffs would blend in with the dirt. I stopped "knocking" when I heard shuffling inside the house, footsteps getting closer and turning my stomach inside-out. How are you supposed to introduce yourself to a drug dealer? There's no For Dummies guide on the etiquette of soliciting narcotics. I checked. But I needed to make a decision quick, because a shadow moved behind the peephole, then the door unlatched, and--
An asshole grinned at me. It was Don.
Two weeks of constant stress and gearing up for this. Two weeks of huddling in a hoodie against Emma and Sophia and Madison and their hangers-on, feeling every jibe and cut and insult and trip and kick and half-pulled punch. Two weeks of trying not to look at my dad's strained expression and abandon my plans, of shoplifting, of lowering my standards so I could made the decisions I had to make, because Don didn't want to risk the heat and wouldn't sell to me. And the dealer he set me up with… was Don. Was FUCKING. DON.
Something to keep in mind when dealing with Merchants: it's assholes all the way down.
