You can ingest it, snort it, spike it, or shove it up your ass. Whatever your preference. Rapture swoops into the bloodstream like a hurricane making landfall. The rush starts with a tingling along the soles of the feet before it climbs up the shinbones, sweeps over the kneecaps, explores like lustful fingers the inside of the thighs. Then it creeps up the torso and branches off to the arms, the fingertips, to the raw lining of the throat. When it reaches the scalp, there being no place else to go, R delivers a wallop to the cerebral cortex that can trigger a convulsion. Good shit can make a grown man whimper.

Sweet’s parents once persuaded her to check into rehab, some five-star facility. She said it was like walking through the pages of People magazine, all the surgically altered faces. When she’s sprung, the first call she makes is to Lonnie. You holding, babe?

When he got busted the first time, intent to traffic, the judge sentenced Lonnie to three months. His first day inside a con says to him, Whattya need, fish? Ain’t nothin’ we don’t get, and he wasn’t lyin’. The second time he got busted, a possession rap, the magistrate sent Lonnie to a rehab facility for 28 days. A few weeks into the program Lonnie says to his caseworker, No more, I swear, man, and the next thing he knows they’ve reduced his sentence by 10 days, good behaviour. Tell the do-gooders you’re going to finish high school, that you’ve got a job lined up, they swoon. It don’t matter that it’s all bullshit.

The thing about rehab is that those running the place don’t know Rapture. They might know the other stuff out there – ac/dc, bang, blue devils – and some might even be ex-users, but of R, most know only what they were told at a seminar or what they’ve read. Drug counsellors are like Sunday school teachers: they go by the book, no questions asked. If you don’t change your ways, they say, you’ll die. Do you want to die? They just don’t get it. The people they’re talking to, people like Lonnie James, already have.