“It’s okay,” she sighed. “I’ll get over it. I’m getting over it already, look.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “My hand on your chest looks like a flesh shell on a hairy beach.”

“Do you have an alarm clock?” Jesse asked wearily.

She had had relationships before. Well, people had had relationships with her. Eventually, she would always end up on drugs, and there were only two roles you could play with someone doing drugs: you could either do them, too, or you could object to doing them. Or both. In any case, the relationship then became, in part, about drugs, and then it was just a matter of time until the drug part wore away whatever it had been about before.

Jesse had done coke twice and found it wanting. Occasionally he smoked dope, but never around Suzanne. Her only other relationship with a nondruggie—that is, with someone who wasn’t taking drugs while she was involved with him—was her nonrelationship relationship with Jack Burroughs. Suzanne had recently heard Jack had begun free-basing again now that Ziz! II was such a hit, but then, that could just have been a rumor.

She was horrified at the surges of sentiment that rose up in her. She fought the tenderness, kept it down like nausea. When she finally started saying the barest of nice things to Jesse, they were accompanied by facial expressions more appropriate for swallowing cough medicine. It was like a punishment to fit the reward.

She explained to him that she hated “the L word”—that she always felt like she was under some kind of obligation when she heard it. “Why do you tell him these things?” Norma had asked. “One day you might want him to say this terrible phrase.”

To Suzanne’s surprise, that day came. She began watching his mouth, imagining what it would be like if he ever said the sentimental trio. One night while they were kissing, he looked into her eyes, his expression almost sad. After the briefest moment—she hadn’t even realized they were gazing at each other through pounds of air—he cleared his throat and looked away shyly. “I wasn’t going to say, ‘I love you,’ I swear,” he said. “I know it looked like it, but I wasn’t.”

“He’s smart,” Lucy said. “You told him it freaked you out to hear all that mushy, romantic, great stuff, and so now . . .” She shrugged. “Hey, why don’t you tell him? You love him, or at least you do have great big cheerful feelings for him.”

“You think I should tell him I love him?” Suzanne said.

“Why don’t you write him a note?”

“What if he showed it to people and laughed?” Suzanne said.