“Ethan, please just take me home,” I plead, wrapping my arms around myself. “I just need to go home.”

“No,” he responds stubbornly. “I’m not going to just let you run home and pop a pill. You need help.”

My body and mind are yearning for a pill and only one thing is going to make it better. I keep running my fingers through my hair, trying to subdue the anxiety overcoming me. When I raise my head back up, I force a neutral expression on my face. “Look, Ethan, I appreciate your help and everything last night, but seriously I’m okay. I just need to go home and get something to eat and shower and I’ll be better.”

“Pftt, don’t try to bullshit me,” he says callously, folding his arms and leaning against the footboard. “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

“You’re not a bullshitter,” I argue, slamming my hands down on the mattress, wanting to scream at him. “At all.”

“I was once,” he reminds me. “Over stuff just like this. It’s what people with addictions do. You’ll do whatever you can—say whatever it takes—to get to the next high.”

My mouth plummets to a frown and I clasp my hands out in front of me, desperation coursing through my body more toxically than the pills do. “Ethan, please, pretty please just take me home and forget about this.” My voice is high and pleading. “Then you don’t have to deal with it.”

He considers what I said, then gets to his feet, and I think I’ve won. “No, I’m not going to just forget.” He backs for the door and grabs the doorknob as he steps out of the room. “You know where the shower is when you’re ready to take one.”

“I don’t have any clothes!” I shout and then throw a pillow at him, feeling the angry monster inside of me surfacing. I’m plummeting into a dark hole filled with every negative thing that makes up my life and I don’t have any pills on me to bring me back up to the light. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I care about you,” he says matter-of-factly and then he shuts the door.

No one’s ever said they care about me, not even my sister, Abby, and his words should make me feel better. But they don’t. If anything, the craving and hunger for another pill amplifies, ripping through my body, leaving abrasions that only a dose will heal. Because I don’t deserve for him to care about me. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to myself. Everything—where I am and who I am—is all my fault.

I sit on the bed for a while, stewing in my own anger as I stare out the window, rocking my body, trying to still the nervous energy inside me. It’s a sunny day, the sky blue and clear and breathtaking. I should be out suntanning by the pool, but no, I’m stuck in here, feeling like I’m going to rip my hair out. And the longer I sit, the more desperate I become until finally I get up from the bed. Fighting the pain in my stomach, legs, and head, I search his room for my clothes. I find them draped over the stool in back of the drum set.

“Jackpot,” I say and wind around the drums, picking up my white dress, and then I frown. It’s caked in mud and some sort of gross green stuff and it smells like puke. I tap my fingers on the sides of my legs, trying to figure out what to do. Half my instincts are screeching at me not to put the filthy dress on and go out into public looking so disheveled, but the other half of my instincts, the ones connected to the pills, are conflicting with how I was brought up.

I ball my hands into fists, gritting my teeth, constraining a scream, and then slip Ethan’s shirt off. I put the dress on, and then pull the shirt back on. I comb my fingers through my hair and then glance in the mirror. I look like death: pale skin, bloodshot eyes, and makeup smeared everywhere. Again, I’m torn. Run to what I need or hide what I am?

Turning in a circle, I search the floor for my shoes. I look under the bed, in the closet, near the dresser, but they’re nowhere to be found. I give up and head for the door. There’s only one way to get out of Ethan’s house without jumping out a window or off a balcony and that’s to walk through the living and out the front door. I wonder if he’s in there, if he’ll argue with me again. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m a grown woman and I can walk out of a house if I want to.

I straighten my shoulders, open the door, and step out into the hall. There’s music playing from the stereo in the living room, so I’m surprised when I walk in the room and he’s not in there. He isn’t in the kitchen either. For a second I wonder where he is, but then I realize it doesn’t really matter. All that does matter is that I’m free to leave without further confrontation.

I open the door, step outside, and blink fiercely against the sunlight. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I hurry down the stairs and walk swiftly for the bus stop. I know I look crazy, with no shoes on, a baggy T-shirt over my dress, and my hair and makeup all ratty. But for the first time in my life I don’t care about my looks. All I care about is getting home, so I can sedate the hungry beast waking up inside my chest.

Ethan

I’m wondering if I’m seriously in over my head. I realized this when she admitted to me last night while she was in the hospital waiting to get her stomach pumped that she’s been taking the pills since she was fourteen to numb her pain from something. I probably should have just told the doctors the truth and that she was an addict or even that she was suicidal, but I was afraid she’d get in trouble. Plus, she’d thrown up quite a few times by the time we got there, so there was little proof of what happened left in her. All she had to do was dazzle them with a smile and feed them a bullshit lie of mixing too much wine with a little too many pills and they let her go. Although, I wonder if they really believed her, or if the insanely busy emergency room aided her easy release.

Part of me wishes I would have spoken up. Then maybe they could have assisted her with the approaching withdrawals. When my dad came off of them things got really intense and the medication he’d been taking was dangerous to quit cold turkey so he had to come off it in low doses. My mom helped him through it, battling with him every single God damn day when he’d ask for more, and only giving him a little, slowing weaning him off them. And I start to wonder if that’s what I’m facing—if this is how it’ll be when Lila comes off the pills she’s been taking. If so, can I do it? Can I help her get better? Especially if she doesn’t want to? Part of me wants to just walk away and leave the drama behind, but the feelings I have for Lila, the ones I realized I had when I saw her on the ground like that, beg me to help her.

But I’m not a fan of drama and helping with other people’s problems, partly because it’s overwhelming and partly because I’m worried I’ll mess up, like I did with London. And Lila’s is an addiction. I’ve seen it many times. Felt it. Had it consume every single cell in my body, mind, and fucking soul. I had to get over it myself and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And I did drugs for only a year. Lila’s been popping pills for over six years. That’s a fucking deep addiction. Plus, I know nothing about what’s even behind her addiction. What I do know is the wounds behind the addiction are even harder to heal.

After I walk out of her room, I crank up some music and sit down at my computer in the living room. Then I start researching opiate addiction and find the name of the one she told me she was taking when she was barely awake. What I find out pretty much describes what I saw with my dad. Anxiety. Irritability. Vomiting. Tremors. Confusion. The list is pretty long. And it says for long-term drug abusers either medication should be used during detox or the user should gradually be weaned off from it, like my dad was.

Jesus, it would be so much easier to check her into a facility. Although I’d have to convince her to check herself in and that seems fucking complicated, too. Everything does at the moment. I’m not sure if I can do this.

I try to figure out what to do—what kind of person I really am, the kind who can just walk away from a situation like this and not help her or the kind who wants to do the right thing and help her overcome the very hard obstacle of quitting. I think about the last time I walked away and what resulted from it. I don’t want to go down that road again, but I also don’t want to help her and fuck up her recovery because I did something wrong. What I need is some advice from someone who’s helped someone get through a tough time in their life.

I crank up some music and then wander back to Micha’s old room and lie down on the floor. I retrieve my cell phone from my pocket and delete all the text messages Rae has sent me over the last three days—the ones I’ve refused to read—before I open up the dial screen. I hesitate for probably ten minutes before I finally dial Micha’s number. It’s weird to be asking advice from him—usually it’s the other way around. But he’s been through something like this with Ella, who’d run away and completely changed her identity after her mom committed suicide. She had a lot of psychological problem, but Micha stuck by her side and never gave up on her even when things got hard.

“What the fuck?” he answers with a laugh. “You hardly ever call me.”

“Yeah, I know.” I rub my forehead with my hand, totally out of my comfort zone. Normally, I’m the one listening to his problems. “I have a question… about Ella.”

“Okay…” He sounds really lost and I don’t blame him. I’m acting like a weirdo right now.

“All those problems that you went through with her… was it hard?”

“Um, yeah. Problems usually are.”

I know I’m not verbalizing myself very well. I do better with a pen and paper. “Yeah, I know that, but was it hard to help her out with stuff when you knew it was going to be hard?”

It takes him a second. “Are you asking if I ever considered bailing out and not helping her?”

“Kind of,” I say. “But not bailing out so much as worrying about even getting into it with her because you knew it was going to be a pain in the ass to help her get past her problems and you weren’t sure if you could handle it or even really help her.”