Vitamins and Bullshit

Mara stared at the orange prescription bottle on her desk — vitamin D supplements, her doctor's answer to everything now that she'd turned forty. The irony wasn't lost on her. She worked in pharmaceutical sales, pushing products that promised to fix what life had broken.

"You okay?" Elena asked, sliding into the chair across from hers. They'd been friends since junior year, twenty-three years of shared secrets, failed relationships, and now, shared mortgages on this falling-apart Victorian they'd renovated together.

"Fine," Mara said, popping the vitamin capsule without water. "Just Rick being Rick."

"What did he do now?"

Mara hesitated. The thing about long friendships was that you learned which truths to tell. "Nothing. Just the usual corporate bullshit."

That night, Rick, Elena's boyfriend of three years, showed up with a bottle of wine and that smile that never reached his eyes. He was charming, successful — a venture capitalist who'd made his fortune in cattle futures, of all things. "Bull market," he'd joke, lifting his glass.

Mara found herself at the kitchen counter, refilling her wine, when Rick's phone buzzed where he'd left it. A text message lit up the screen: *She doesn't suspect a thing about the vitamins. Should I switch suppliers?*

The room tilted. Mara had been complaining for months about her vitamins making her feel worse, not better. Rick had offered to get her "better quality" ones from his "guy in the city." She'd been taking them for weeks.

Her hands trembled. Not from the wine. From the realization that her best friend's boyfriend was drugging her, slowly, invisibly, and Elena had no idea.

The next morning, Mara pretended everything was normal. She took her usual vitamin — and immediately threw it up when she reached the bathroom. She called in sick, then drove to the pharmacy with the bottle Rick had given her.

"These aren't vitamin D," the pharmacist said, frowning. "They're generic sedatives. Someone ground them up and put them in this container."

Mara walked home in a daze. Elena was at work. Rick was supposed to come over tonight.

She sat at the kitchen table with the bull whip she'd bought on impulse at a flea market years ago, some kitschy decoration from their renovation phase. Outside, Elena's car pulled into the driveway.

Some friendships survive everything. Others shatter at the first gust of truth.

Elena walked in, laughing at something on her phone, and stopped cold when she saw Mara's face.

"We need to talk," Mara said. "About Rick. About the vitamins. About everything."

The story wasn't over. It was just beginning. But for the first time in months, Mara felt something besides the fog the pills had wrapped around her.

She felt angry. And anger, she knew, was something she could work with.