Like many teenagers, I have spent a considerable amount of time around dumpsters due to the dark magic known as extra credit. As if by witchy incantation, students’ Saturday mornings vanish from 8:30 to 9:30 at the chanting of biology teachers across the city, and in this time slot habitually used for catching up on sleep, we find ourselves donning orange vests and hefting beer bottles from the back of someone’s van. I reflect spitefully on how I’ve been wronged as I separate piles of paper and plastic into their corresponding bins, hollow bottles clattering in a high-pitched rock slide as they rain from an empty cat litter tub. I will earn those 10 points, I tell myself solemnly, swiping a grocery bag into its rust-stained bin with a flourish.

During the many Saturdays I spent at Wesselman Recycling Center freshman year, idleness and chit-chat between students was reprimanded by the park groundskeeper, who held a half-eaten banana in one hand and brandished the other like a banner as he directed traffic. Nevertheless, I did everything in my power to avoid hard labor as I waited for wheels to skid across the pavement and slow as a pack of 15-year-olds paced round to their trunks like ragged dogs circling a stray cat.

To pass the time, I sifted through the discarded magazine bin to uncover the stale celebrity gossip as I kneaded my frozen, clammy fingers, too grossed out by the Miller Lite residue to slip them into my jeans pockets. I was just recalling the Brangelina breakup of ’06 when I was ordered to get back to work. Begrudgingly, I did, and my world changed.

This is when I discovered Coke points.

I had never before noticed the thin, black letters inked in the guts of a cardboard 12-pack, but as I shoed through truck bed after truck bed of junk, I sometimes noticed a long, rectangular strip had been clipped from the corner of a Coke or Sprite carton. As I would soon discover, these codes were part of an incentive campaign to get people to buy more Coke products by amassing rewards in points with the box codes.

Suddenly I had an idea. If other people weren’t going to use their codes, I could reap the glorious rewards of their points! Eagerly, I researched the prizes, but the only one of interest to me was more Coke.

My family has long wrestled with an addiction to soft drinks, especially me. Considering that I was then newly proclaimed street-legal, working a minimum wage job, and had just cashed my first paycheck, nothing could stop me from satisfying my thirst. For me, a short trip to town would always merit a Polar Pop from the Circle K – a tall Styrofoam cup filled with sweet, bubbly death liquid that flooded the lid when I punched in the straw. Every gas station was a House of Vice. Drinkers get their booze. Gamblers get their lottery tickets. And people like me, we get our Coke.

I realize how dangerous my artificially sweetened addiction can be. In fact, I often imagine my future self 20 years from now, still shackled to my old habit. My face comes into focus as I’m lying on a couch, reaching toward a lofty 44-ounce Coke cup. The table is three feet away, but I can’t reach it because my arms weigh 500 pounds. It is a nightmare grounded in reality that daunts me and my family alike, but I can’t admit my true concern to them for fear they will stage an intervention and take steps to cut back my Coke intake. I’d go through withdrawal.

Just to clarify, I’d deem myself average in body mass. I’m healthy and 17, two facts I assert as my excuse for courting the demon drink. And when Coke points came into my life like a sweet blessing from Jesus, I had all the more reason to keep Coke in my life, and to get it for free through coupons. On Saturday mornings, you could find me at the recycling center, hidden behind a green paint-chipped dumpster with my stash of cardboard boxes, ripping the codes free like a rat attacking a discarded box of chow mein.

In this way, I succeeded in concealing this hobby from my friends to avoid being framed as a thrifty, sociopathic weirdo. It was the high school-world equivalent of a body in the freezer. I could already hear the rumors buzzing violently like wasps in my head. “Did you hear about Valerie?” someone would say in the cafeteria, directing her friend’s eyes to me, unsuspectingly eating a chicken sandwich a few tables over. “She has a collection of cardboard. From dumpsters.”

“That’s not what I heard,” the friend would say. “I heard she takes it home and eats it. Like a goat.” And then a drop of ketchup would land onto the flap of my zipper.

Although I was self-conscious about this new habit, it was not something I could hide from my family. As I amassed more and more points, coupons arrived in the mail, and in turn, my family began saving codes for me. My sister, Jaclyn, would send me texts of upturned bottle caps, and so did her fiancé, Gage. Helping me get my codes became a family rite of passage of sorts. My sister Susan’s new boyfriend began asking his coworkers for their bottle caps, presenting them like a shiny gift with which to win my heart.

However, as the school year wound down and recycling days grew fewer, I hungrily sought more codes to keep the stream of coupons coming. At weddings, I’d frequent the refreshments table, pour a Mello Yello from a two-liter, and “forget” to screw the cap back on, cupping it in my palm and slipping it into the pocket of my pink dress. Gage would assist in the effort by going on brief missions of his own, feigning indecisiveness as he picked up shallowly filled bottles one by one and dropped their caps into his suit jacket pocket. We’d then return to the candlelight of our white, silk-clothed table, passing our little victories to Jaclyn, who would store them for me in her purse.

There was one person not compelled to love me by an everlasting blood bond with whom I did share my secret: my best friend, Erin. Soon after, our moms dropped us off at the West-side Fall Festival. The oil and grease were condensing in the air, so heavy I felt them seeping into my pores as we filed through row after row of parish food booths. With bratwurst in hand, I took in the sights: moms with cumbersome double strollers, children gripping puffy, foil-wrapped pretzels. Suddenly, I dug my rubber heels into the blacktop, swatting Erin on the shoulder as we passed a burn-barrel-sized ice cooler. Folded stacks of cardboard cartons were tucked discreetly beneath it.

I could taste the bubbles.

I turned to Erin. “Would it be wrong?” I asked.

We approached the woman beside the cooler, who was wiping icy water from the cans with a towel as she collected dollar bills. I bought a Cherry Coke and Erin bought a Mello Yello. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I began. “Could I use that cardboard for a school recycling project?”

She skimmed me up and down with her eyes, interrupting the rhythm of her money-taking. “I guess so,” she replied.

“Thank you!” I pulled case after case free and swerved in the opposite direction, laughing feverishly as I handed all but one box to Erin and began to tear.

In May, I found myself at the final Saturday of recycling, my last haul. The air felt fresh and radiated warmth. I quietly scrutinized each car, having learned that older, rickety cars often demonstrated the owner’s disregard for health, thus making them more likely assets to my cause, and also noting that old men were more likely to buy name brands, a characteristic I speculated derives from their sense of comfort in the familiar, the reliable.

I squinted in fixation at the “Proud Vietnam Vet” bumper sticker on a green Grand Am when I noticed a brown paper bag on a pathway directed straight toward the largest dumpster in the lot. In the arms of my bio classmate, Maggie, I could see the gleaming red and white cardboard flicker at me, a bittersweet good-bye smile, and it occurred to me that all this cardboard junk we’ve been collecting is basically reincarnation before our eyes; the image of a Raisin Bran box struck my mind like quivering thunder – this Coke in the next life. The scene rolled frame by frame as I saw it passed along to a boy hanging from the dumpster’s side ladder, preparing to fling it to its doom, its reusable, eco-friendly destiny.

“Wait!” I yelled, sprinting in front of a Buick. “Can I have that one sec?”

Maggie’s eyebrows lifted. She dropped the bag to the ground, holding her hands up as if to surrender. “Why?” She stared at me as I sifted through the rubble, plucking out the Cokes.

“The codes,” I replied. I handed the bag up to the boy. “I wanted the codes.”

As my fingers began bending the cardboard, I heard her laugh.

“Aww! That’s so cute! You’re like a little old lady!”

I laughed shakily, ripping the fold from a Mr. Pibb with the other three flattened cartons pinched under my arm like a clothespin. My pockets bulged with folded cardboard.

I had been reckless. In that fleeting instant, my secret was revealed, my body in the freezer uncovered. I searched myself for the sensations of dread, embarrassment, regret, but now that I had set the truth free, it didn’t feel like I’d imagined. The boy on the ladder was rifling through the top layer in the dumpster. “Here,” he said, passing down a Sunkist box. “Does this help you out?”

It wasn’t even Coke brand – it was Dr. Pepper/Snapple Group Inc. – but I guess normal people wouldn’t know that.

“Thanks,” I said, smiling, and accepted the empty box.