LOTF: Before and After

Laurie Langley

"You do" Laurie sighed sadly, "but only if you promise me you aren't lying, that you aren't doing anything stupid with that money."

"I promise."

Laurie kept her brother's secret until the secret could no longer keep itself. One day, she and Alison returned from school to find an ambulance parked in front of their house. The girls locked eyes and ran through the front door, an identical urgency and fear in each of their eyes. Immediately, their mother was there in the doorway and turned the girls away, forcing them to go back out onto the porch.

"What's going on?" Alison demanded to know.

"Everything's gonna be okay" their mother answered, but the worry in her voice was apparent to both her daughters.

"Is Daddy hurt? Or Jack?" Laurie asked, her voice shaking urgently like an earthquake as tears formed in her eyes.

"Everything's gonna be okay" Diana continued to repeat each time the girls asked a question.

Later on, Laurie found out that her brother had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance after her father found him passed out in his bedroom in the basement. He overdosed on some yet-to-be identifed street drug. It took fourteen-year-old Laurie a little to connect the money her brother was stealing with the addiction he somehow managed to hide all this time.

Eventually, Jackson recovered and came home after a few days in the hospital. He was surprised to discover that his youngest sister hadn't ratted him out for stealing the money, not even after his trip to the hospital. Jackson was forced to come clean himself, and spent several months in a rehab center kicking the addiction.

Before he left for rehab, Jackson asked Laurie why she didn't tell their parents about the money.

"Because I don't lie" Laurie reminded him, and he realized just how better a job his parents did with her than they did with him. How or why, he didn't know. He didn't understand his addiction any better than they did.

Jackson managed to kick the drug addiction that he first developed at nineteen. Meanwhile, Laurie stayed on a relatively typical path in her teenage years up until her graduation. She didn't have perfect grades, she struggled in math and science, and with social anxiety. She'd been involved in her fair share of drama in high school, and suffered two breakups with boys she hoped to marry at some point in time. But for the most part, Laurie's childhood was free of atypical issues.

Alison, on the other hand, suffered a worse fate than her little sister. By her junior year, she was diagnosed with depression and was on medication for it. Her grades slipped for the remainder of her junior year, and their parents struggled to get her out of bed in the morning. First, it was Jackson's addiction and then a year and a half later it was Alison's mental health crisis. Eventually, Alison too got a bit better after learning ways to cope and manage her mental illness with the help of therapy and after changing and trying new medications. She managed to graduate high school with reasonable grades, and attended community college. Laurie graduated two years later, and was accepted to the University of Georgia to study sociology.

Laurie's brother and sister's battles with addiction and mental illness in their late teen years were substantial factors in Laurie's decision to study sociology. Psychology was something she also considered, but she was turned off by the science of it all. Sociology focused more on the social and emotional aspects of the human condition, and Laurie wanted a career in which she could directly look at ways to understand people better, people who weren't as lucky as she was to make it out of childhood without a mark on her mental health chart.

Laurie's mom had been a major stickler for human decency, honest, goodness, and honor. She taught all three of her kids to be honest people, to stay away from drugs and alcohol, to talk to them if they were feeling suicidal or depressed. Somehow, Laurie was the only one of the three who managed to come out of their identical childhoods unscathed. She wondered why her brother and sister fell victim to mental illness but she hadn't. She wondered why her brother resorted to lying after being drilled his whole life about honesty and integrity. She wondered why her sister suffered in silence and disregarded her parents' concern for her deteriorating health and education in spite of how they emphasized the importance of health and education Alison's whole life.