Disconnected by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online Page A

until she had slept through the pickup at her granddaughter’s preschool. That, she said, was her rock bottom. That was when she decided to get help. Shannon licked cinnamon off her fingers while the woman dug tissues out of her bag. She wondered what would happen if she told them the things that she’d done, the things that had been done to her. There was a line she’d read in a book somewhere, about how if a woman told the truth about her life, the world would crack open. She wasn’t sure about the world, but she suspected that such truth-telling could prove mightily disruptive at an AA meeting.
    She was thinking about getting another doughnut when she saw a man with a spiderweb tattooed on his neck squinting through the dusty church light like he wasn’t quite sure he was seeing her or not. Shannon didn’t recognize him, but that meant nothing. He could have been someone she’d dated or someone she’d fucked for drugs, or maybe even someone she had known in college, the good old days when she’d been young and bright and full of promise, when her short stories had won prizes, when drugs were just something that appeared—or did not appear—at a party on a Saturday night, and Shannon rarely thought of them between one party and the next.
    She dropped a dollar in the basket for the Seventh Tradition, and when she turned she was unsurprised to see the spiderweb guy sitting next to her. “You new?” he whispered. Shannon considered the question. New to the program? New to this meeting? Of course, big surprise, the guy didn’t want to hear her story. He wanted to tell her his own, which was a variation on every junkie’s story that she’d heard. Shannon tuned it out as the guy recited the particulars: “. . . and then he’s like, ‘You aren’t gonna believe this stuff,’ and I was all, ‘Hey, wasn’t this on the news last week? Aren’t people dying from it?’ It was fucked up, I know, but all I thought was, okay, this is gonna be super-strong, so I’m gonna get super-high, and the next thing you know . . .” He pursed his lips, an endearing little-boy-ish gesture, and made a popping sound. “Next thing you know, you’re, like, flat-lining in the ambulance.”
    Shannon gave him a distracted smile. “Yeah, they Narcanned me,” she said. The guy tipped an imaginary hat.
    “Respect,” he said. Shannon smiled and tried not to think about how she’d once gotten an A plus in a class on modern British poets, how the professor had written her a letter of recommendation saying that in his decade of teaching, she’d been his most promising student.
    At the center of the circle, the leader cleared his throat. Shannon bent her head and closed her eyes as the guy at her side finally subsided, then spoke the words of the Serenity Prayer.
    ***
    Two blocks away from the meeting was a T-Mobile store. Shannon walked toward it, past the Italian bakery and the coffee shop where she used to take her laptop to work. She’d left the hospital in a waffle-knit thermal undershirt and jeans that kept slipping off her hips. The clothing did not smell entirely fresh. Her guess was that it had come from a lost-and-found bin, and that the girl who’d bought and paid for the clothes was no longer among the living. At rehab, nothing made them happier than when someone died . . . and if the dead person was a dead celebrity, a dead young celebrity who’d overdosed, well, that would send the counselors into a collective orgasm. “This disease will kill you,” they would say, holding up People or Us Weekly as evidence, brandishing the face of the handsome or beautiful young star on the glossy cover. The girls would squirm and fidget. They’d write notes to the guys, whom they were forbidden from speaking to, or they would swap the names of their dealers or braid each other’s hair. Drug addicts died, this wasn’t exactly a news flash, but none of the girls thought it would happen to them. Even if it had already