The Adderall Diaries Read Online Free PDF

comes in just before the half and kisses him on the cheek. She presses her side against him. It makes me think of Josie, the way she would sit next to me.
    It was the summer of 1995 when we first got together. She had just graduated college, was drinking heavily and preparing to travel in Europe. While she was away I sent long letters, up to forty pages,
poste restant
to whichever town she was heading to next. They weren’t love letters so much as diaries written by hand.
    Two years later we were living in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. By then I’d overdosed on heroin and Josie was overcoming a cocaine habit. We spent time on our front porch. The neighborhood was changing. Rents were going up, but it wasn’t there yet. It was a long way from there. There was so much concrete and if you looked east, the concrete rose from the ground and became the buildings downtown. We weren’t far from Harpo Studios, where Oprah ran her empire. We were miles from the lake and the city was hot and the Village was all red brick and white cement. I don’t remember there being any parks in that neighborhood. Josie had a job at a recruiting firm downtown but I couldn’t seem to do it. I worked temp assignments but was always getting fired.
    “Why don’t you get me a job?” I asked.
    “I will,” she promised.
    Josie had convinced me to return to Chicago with her. I had been living in Los Angeles for six months working as an assistant on a TV show called
Second Noah,
about adolescents whose parents had died, or whose parents had abandoned them, and who’d been taken in by a family in Florida. It was supposed to be a modern version of
The Brady Bunch
but the producers had no understanding of what happens to children of that age without parents. When the show was canceled I got work as a driver and stole all of the presents out of Leonardo DiCaprio’s fan mail, which I was delivering from his agent to his publicist, and gave them as Christmas presents. One of the presents was sheer silk underwear, which I gave to Josie. But they were cut for men and drooped sadly around her thighs. On the drive back from LA, Josie and I almost got married at a twenty-four-hour chapel in Las Vegas, but didn’t. To make up for it I bought her an engagement ring from a quarter machine at a K-Mart outside Salt Lake City and we slept the night in the parking lot during a snowstorm. We were twenty-four.
    The apartment we ended up with in Chicago was long, with high ceilings. The landlord left threatening, incoherent notes. There was a man on the corner who sold elotes on a stick covered in butter and cheese. We were just two miles, maybe less, north of the United Center where Michael Jordan played.
    What I’m trying to say is that I loved Josie, but things didn’t work out.
    A year later Josie went off to law school in Washington, D.C. She offered to stay in Chicago with me and attend a lesser school but I said I didn’t want to be responsible for her bad decisions. Then I was accepted at the University of Virginia Law School; I’d taken the Law School Admission Test at Josie’s urging and scored well. I could start the next year and Josie and I would be within easy driving distance. We could hike the Blue Ridge Mountains. I broke up with her instead.
    “I just thought we would always be together,” she said. And I know part of me felt good about it, like I had won.
    For two years, more, before we stopped talking altogether, Josie wouldn’t take me back. She met someone else, fairly quickly. Because she was desirable. And I mean not just beautiful, but the kind of woman who smiles a lot, and likes to have a good time, and thinks for herself. She had confidence. She was fun to be around.
    Five years after Josie and I split I met her on a train. It was a coincidence. There were ten cars, so even on the same train the odds were stacked against us. I was spending a weekend in a city I didn’t live in anymore and I thought she had moved away. But there