“Maddy! Stop!” His voice is hoarse, and I won’t pretend not to hear it, but I can’t listen.
Inside the grove, it’ll be darker again. The world will disappear in shades of black and shadows, and maybe once it does, my head will quieten. Maybe the pain will stop. I can’t, cannot, won’t do this anymore.
“Maddy! Wait!”
I have to protect myself. I think I’ll go mad if I don’t, because everything inside me is shouting as hard as Finn is. The constant hum of failure and grief mixes with the heady buzz of fear and the sharp pain from my knee. Every time I close my eyes, I see all the images I’m trying to push away. The drops of blood on the porch. The look of betrayal on Finn’s face. The empty nothingness in Carter’s eyes. The pack of pills. Liva’s proud smile when she showed us the cabin and when she showed it to me every time we visited. Her deft hands, creating.
I hear her scream. I hear Finn call out to Ever—and call out to me. I think I can maybe still hear him calling out to me. I hear Carter’s voice, reassuring me, telling me that he will find my painkillers, that everything will be okay, wait here, I’ll be back as soon as I can. That’s what friends are for, right? Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out.
My feet crash through the grove. My cloak snags and tears on the branches, but I push through. I’m on my way to the lookout spot I showed Ever, and once I realize it, I come to a tumbling halt. I catch myself against one of the tree trunks, to slow my pace, and the suddenness causes my knee to twist and scream.
I scream too. My mouth closed, so I won’t draw attention to myself. Until my throat hurts and I struggle to breathe.
The pain and sorrow only grow—and threaten to drown me.
I move on memory, away from the clearing but to another edge of the grove. Until I reach a point where the ground drops away. There seems to be a tear in the world, between a forest on the one hand, and a moonlit cliff on the other. I used to be afraid of heights, a lifetime ago.
I could simply step down; instead, I sit.
I lean against a tree and stare at the darkest stars and push my hands deep into the pockets of my coat. Then I hiss, pulling them out as if I, too, have been shocked.
The game isn’t done yet. There is no escaping. And maybe there never will be.
Both of my pockets are filled with pills. I empty them out into the moonlit night and light up one of the matches to observe them more closely. They’re exactly like the ones my doctor gave me. Exactly like the ones Carter buys for me. Blue. Round. Simple markings.
I find a small, folded note at the bottom of one of the pockets. It’s folded in four, and on it, in the same handwriting as the other notes, though barely visible here, one word:
Addict.
It may as well have been an Alice in Wonderland–type note, because it’s ever so clear what the subtext is here. Not just that I’m an addict—I am, aren’t I? Or I could be. I never really thought of it in those terms.
But: Eat me.
It may be kinder than being stabbed to death or left to rot in a cabin. This is me. This is personal.
I am an addict, aren’t I?
Huh.
I stare at the pills in my hands. There’re enough of them that some slide from the stack and down the cliff. I tilt my hands a little. What a waste.
When my doctor prescribed me the painkillers for the first time, she gave me a firm talking to on how to use them safely. She told me she’d prescribed me the lowest effective dose and that I could only take them for a limited amount of time, only to deal with the most severe pain. I listened, nodded, and promised to follow the rules. I’d seen Finn with his painkillers; I knew how much they helped and how important it was to be responsible.
I intended to.
But it was so easy to take one. Take another.
She prescribed me enough pills for a week, which I later learned was more than the safety guidelines, especially because we didn’t know yet what the lasting damage would be. But I took the pills for a couple of days and the remaining pain was minor enough that if I didn’t look at the scars, I could almost pretend the accident didn’t happen. I felt like I could breathe again. After that week, it was easy enough to convince her the pain hadn’t decreased and could I please have a refill?
I started to realize that it wasn’t just the pain. Once I took the pills, the world dulled. Everything wasn’t quite so loud anymore, my thoughts weren’t churning. I could spend whole hours just…doing nothing. I hated losing control at first, but the flip side was I didn’t feel like I needed the control either.
I felt like I could fit in.
I felt like I belonged.
I could laugh with Carter whenever he came to visit. I didn’t mind losing games to Sav. I didn’t have to be constantly aware. The pills quieted the part of my brain that was constantly working, constantly interpreting, constantly adjusting—because if I didn’t adjust, others rarely adjusted to me. I didn’t have to think about what it meant to be me.
My doctor should have done something after the third refill, but perhaps she was busy
