Rolling by Clea Bierman

On New Year’s Eve 2011 I almost killed a friend. I was twenty-three and for the previous three months I’d been helping my boyfriend sell drugs in San Diego. He’d been a college football star who’d fallen just short of the NFL and found himself in identity limbo, selling “Molly”—the street name for MDMA—as he searched for a full-time job. While he handled the cash, I became the pusher: chatting up strangers and even convincing my strait-laced friends of the euphoric effects. I’d also begun using: twirling my fingers through my long, blonde hair every time the tactile joy washed over me, relinquishing control and riding the wave. Rolling. In three months I’d gone from feeling out-of-body after one pill, to requiring two or three.

I’d known Marissa, my almost-victim, since eighth grade. At thirteen, I was eager to be her friend. She was beautiful and graceful, with gently curling hair and the type of bronze skin I tried to imitate with tanning beds and drug-store make up. While I was timid, she was confident and cool and talked smoothly to the boys who gave me butterflies.

In college I started experimenting, attending the type of parties I’d passed on all through high school. Before long, I was going out five nights a week. I tried mixing Vicodin with alcohol, did a couple lines of cocaine, inhaled from a Volcano vaporizer, and smoked weed on the weekends. Losing control was freeing.

On New Year’s Eve 2011, Marissa and I were both two years out of college, and we’d reunited to celebrate. As we sat together on the floor of her room, gluing on fake eyelashes and styling our hair in front of her mirrored wall, I asked if she was going to roll with us.

“I don’t think so,” she said, our eyes meeting in the glass. The previous week she’d gone to the emergency room for stomach pains and was diagnosed with an ulcer.

“Do you know how Molly works?” I replied, as I stepped into my sequined mini-dress.

She shook her head as she watched me tug the bodice around my padded bra.

“Molly just tells your brain to release huge doses of serotonin,” I said. “So it’s not the drug itself that makes you all happy and horny…” Marissa laughed. “It’s really just your body’s own natural chemicals. I don’t think it’ll hurt you.”

In truth, I had never actually looked up the rumors I’d heard about how Molly works. What I did know for sure was that Molly had rehabilitated my belief in love—a belief that had faded with my parents’ divorce and a series of failed relationships. Rolling, I felt love as if it were as real as water and air.

“I guess that changes things,” Marissa said, looking at me as though I was the authority. I’d been selling Molly for three months now. Maybe I was.

A part of me did feel like an authority on drugs. My parents—hippies who smoked weed and talked openly about the positive effects of hallucinogens—had always preached moderation rather than avoidance. My childhood neighbors now owned a multi-million dollar weed ranch in Northern California and credited their License to Grow to my father, who had allowed them to cultivate a single plant in my backyard shed when we were only 17.

I often think that it was because of this inherited comfort that I didn’t flinch when my boyfriend first told me how he made his living, and why I insisted on helping him sell even when he tried to stop me. And why, ultimately, he gave in to my persistence. I was good at this. And the truth was, I loved it. Rolling and falling in love and making money. I was happier in those three months than I had ever been.

“So roll with us,” I said to Marissa. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”

§

The W Hotel in The Gaslamp, our venue for the night, was ornately decorated with a different DJ on each of the five floors. Purple balloons bobbed against ceiling and silver tinsel lined the railing of a grand staircase. Marissa and I made a stop at the lobby bar where we ordered drinks and swallowed our Molly pills with the first sip.

For the occasion, my boyfriend had set aside a specific handful of pills. Usually we diluted the tan, crystalline powder with store-bought supplements to increase profits. I’d sit with him, leaning over the coffee table of my father’s guest house, pulling apart vitamins from CVS, mixing the contents with our bag of Molly, then refilling empty gel capsules and weighing the finished product so that they were ready for distribution. But tonight’s pills were straight MDMA. As I felt the gel capsule slide down my throat, it dawned on me that this would be my first experience with the untainted drug.

The next thing I knew I was halfway up the wide staircase, dizzy and uneasy. I didn’t remember leaving the bar. The capsules were designed to time-release over 45 minutes, but my disorientation was so severe it felt like only seconds had passed.

I made my way to the bathroom. I was already rolling, swaying back and forth as I stood in line, running my fingers through my hair, my usual tell. On Molly, I felt texture in a way I never could sober—everything was pleasurable, but it was mental and emotional too, as if I could feel the soul of things, and this unique connectivity birthed consuming joy.

But standing in the bathroom line I didn’t feel good. I’d lost control in a way I didn’t like. My body and my mind were not my own.

In a stall, I turned my back to the door and vomited into the toilet. Immediately, I felt relief—rolling but conscious and aware. As I washed my hands I stared at myself in the mirror. The harder I rolled, the more dilated my pupils became. My eyes were glassy in my reflection, but I had regained focus and I could see the brown of my iris.

I had to find Marissa.

On the second floor, I found her sitting on a stool near a long window, her body hunched and limp, arms hanging at her sides. Face to face, I could see the beads of sweat gathering at her hairline. The complexion I’d envied for so many years looked uneven and grey. Dark circles had developed under her eyes. It was as though her skin was thinning, showing the skeleton underneath.

The guilt hit me deep in my chest like a pedal striking a base drum.

“I don’t feel so good,” she said. I put the back of my hand against her forehead. Her skin was boiling.

I slurped the last sips of my drink and turned the glass on its side to dig out an ice cube, which I ran along her forehead. It melted too quickly, streams of water trickling down her face, falling over her eyes. It was only a few seconds before I had to get another. And another, until the ice was gone. My heart was pounding. I looked around.

“Is she overdosing?” someone asked.

§

Years later I read an article about a Molly overdose that occurred at a New York City rave: the body overheating, blood pressure rising, until the heart couldn’t take it anymore.

Marissa lived. I sent her home in a cab, accompanied by another friend, where she took a cold shower, hydrated and threw up. But when I read the article, I saw her sunken face. She had been overdosing. Because of me.

§

I didn’t do Molly for a long time after that night, and I didn’t sell it either. I hadn’t exactly been scared off, the love still outweighed the fear. But my boyfriend got a job a few weeks later, and we didn’t need Molly anymore.

I missed it, though. Without the high, the rush, it felt like there was something lacking in my relationship. We disagreed, we made love less and eventually we broke up.

Marissa and I lost touch too—our lives and careers taking us in opposite directions. I moved to New York to pursue an MFA while she stayed in our hometown.

§

A few days before New Year’s Eve 2017, I ran into Marissa at a bar. I’d flown home to San Diego to spend the holidays with my family. She was married, thinking about having kids, healthy and full of color. I was on my third vodka soda. I talked too much. I felt like I missed her. Really, I felt all of it—the person I was when I first met Marissa, when I nearly killed her, the person I’d become. The person I hadn’t become.

I stirred the half-full drink with two thin black straws, watched the ice spin, and set it down.

Clea Bierman is a fashion and lifestyle journalist from San Diego. She has earned bylines in international editions of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and more. In 2016, she completed a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing and is currently shopping her memoir. She lives and writes in New York City.