Getting high, which is hard to accomplish through the methadone (it takes a lot, Roxy has to be careful), gives her a sensation of power and transcendent rightness beyond anything she could have imagined when she uttered those words: make my mark. Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect. No one can say she hasn’t been steady— or, rather, everyone says that, but only because they fail to grasp that her scarred arms and swollen fingers, her gray teeth and thin hair and stooped, halting gait, are testaments to her fierce devotion. She’s outlasted even Jocelyn, whom she used to nod off with at her father’s house. Jocelyn got a social work degree in her forties and settled down with a famous guitarist who’d been in love with her since high school. Not Roxy. She will depart this world empty-handed: a sacrifice that only Kiki, in the religious fervor of her girlhood, might have understood.