Love, Hate, Love

Kasha stands before Justin with her hands on her hips. What'd you do with it? she asks, pointing to the empty slot where the toaster oven used to sit. She'd brought it to him last week, after he told her he would eat if he could have sourdough bread with Swiss cheese melted on it.

Justin shrugs. He wants to tell her it burned up, caught fire just like that. But Justin won't lie to her, even though he knows Kasha wouldn't ask him for the truth if he did. She is the only one who visits now. His aunt quit checking in two years ago, his mom, five. Now it's only Kasha. Kasha and his mental health physician. She, too, makes house calls. Justin doesn't know who arranges the sessions, or pays her fees, but she comes. Every week, she comes.

The truth is, Justin took the toaster oven down to the apartment's mailboxes and left a note on top that read: Free to good home. Lord knows he doesn't deserve the toaster oven. It'd be better off in a house infested with fleas and silverfish.

What have you been eating, then? Kasha asks. Though she's twenty-two, Justin still pictures her as a high school sophomore.

Kasha had her eyebrow pierced back then. She did the deed herself. With a surgical needle, on her living room floor, with a compact mirror propped against the television set. Her dad was out of town. Running the Boston marathon or some shit, she'd told Justin.

He still remembers the day Kasha showed up to school with a silver hoop above her right eye. Almost as well as the look on Purisa's face when he found her dead of an overdose. Like two sides of a coin, he sits in his bed at night and flips those images back and forth—love, hate, love, never quite knowing which is which.

Justin hands Kasha a bag of dried macaroni.

This? she says. Really?

It's the closest she'll come to calling bullshit, and Justin feels something like wings lifting inside. Truly, he says.

She doesn't ask anymore, so Justin explains. I soak them, he says. Overnight .

You need citrus, Kasha tells him. You don't want to get scurvy .

Would that make for a slow death?

He thinks again of Purisa, gasping for a final breath. His therapist tells him it wasn't his fault, that Justin didn't force her to use the drugs, even if he did provide them.

Kasha doesn't answer. She runs her finger over the dust on the kitchen windowsill. In high school, they used to spend afternoons together. They'd sit in the grass and talk about music and travel, books and baseball. And then, before his Sophomore year was even over, Justin was introduced to heroin. It made life feel easier and soon, Justin had left snug life with Mom in small-town America for the road, for dealing and getting high and living large in high-rise condos. Which is how he met Purisa.

On second thought , Justin says, an orange does sound nice.

I'll go get you one, Kasha says. Anything else?

Shampoo. And a pack of smokes.

The shampoo I can do. But I'm not buying you cigarettes.

When she returns, however, Kasha hands him a pick of Marlboros.

I thought you were opposed to my smoking, Justin says.

It's your life, Kasha tells him.

Justin removes the cellophane wrapper and flips open the top. He slides a cigarette out, holds it under his nose, inhales.

I mean, you could just as easily throw the pack in the garbage, Kasha says.

The coin flips and it is no longer Kasha there before him but Purisa. Purisa in black silk. Purisa all smiles. Oh, my baby, she is saying. I'd be nothing without you, baby. But she isn't talking to him. She's curled like a rind on the floor, the tourniquet still strangling her arm.

I'm not forcing you into anything, Kasha says, and the coin flips again. The choice is yours.

Justin stands still, the unlit cigarette wavering between his lips, and watches Kasha peel his orange.