Call me a hypocrite if you will, but I'm not a fan of drugs.
I've always been too afraid to try anything, knowing myself too well, to ever let my brain convince me one bit wouldn't be too much.
Rebecca was into pot.
Really, everyone was. Our town was small and boring and there wasn't much else to do but go to other people's house and drink a little and get high.
It was a weekend ritual around Faulkner. Always a different house, but always the same exact night to be had.
I'd go, sometimes, but mostly I stayed at home. Dallas was a lot like me on that. He had so many friends, his phone constantly ringing and ringing from people begging him to come out.
But parties weren't our scene.
We preferred slipping into other worlds with our books, or laying on the living room floor listening to the radio play out the same fifteen or so songs on rotation waiting for our favorite ones to come back around.
I'm not a buzz kill, but I won't do it.
Even now.
I used to say I didn't want anything to alter my mind. And as much as I know it sounds stupid, I still say that I don't.
I'm aware that the pills do the same thing. They take my mind away and drop me off someplace else that's comfortable and safe.
I don't know what other drugs would do.
I felt safe, that first time, taking the pills.
I'd been so depressed after everything unfolded the way that it did. Every single day felt like trudging through water, my limbs weighed down with the weights of my loss.
My heart was hollowed out.
My soul was barely tethered to my body anymore. I'd stopped eating, stopped speaking, stopped doing anything that used to make me happy.
Because why did I deserve to be happy? What gave me the right to keep living and enjoying life when so many others weren't given that chance?
"How could you not have known?"
I felt every bit responsible as the media wanted the world to believe.
So when my foster family insisted I see someone, I did, begrudgingly.
I had sat down in a uncomfortable plastic chair in front of a desk with a white haired man with dirty fingernails waiting for him to ask me all sorts of questions.
I was ready to lay it all down.
Give to him all of the thoughts inside of my mind and allow him to try to untangle the lost girl I was from the tentacles of misery that had begun to grip me so tightly.
I wanted to let it all out.
Maybe if I did, he could tell me it wasn't my fault. He could tell me how I'm supposed to keep living when everyone else is gone. I thought he could help me.
But he didn't.
He hardly asked three or four meaningless questions before those hands with the dirty fingernails pulled out a prescription pad and scribble the names of a few drugs across it, my name at the top.
One for the anxiety.
One for the depression.
One to help me sleep.
One for emergencies when the others couldn't keep the panic at bay.
So many pills...
But he was a doctor. He had a degree. He had his own office in a building full of other patients like me waiting to see him. He knew what was best, didn't he?
This...these drugs...they were safe. They were written on a prescription pad. I wasn't going to a dark alley and passing a few wadded bills to someone as they discretely passed over the pills. I wasn't trying something that some stranger offered me at a party.
I picked these up from a pharmacy.
I didn't want to be better, but I was willing to try.
All I ever searched for was safeness.
And what could be more safe than things handed to you by a medical professional?
"How are you feeling?" He'd asked me the next time I came to sit in his office.
"Mostly the same." I'd told him and he smiled and nodded.
"I've got just the thing." His crooked teeth gleamed at me as he reached for the pad again. "Throw away the other stuff, try this new one instead." I nodded. "How are you sleeping?"
"I'm not." It was my first lie. Of course I was sleeping. The meds he'd already started me on made me so drowsy I could hardly function through the day.
"We will up this one then too." He'd said. "Anything else bothering you?"
"I'm still having the panic attacks." Another lie. How easily they come after the first passes your lips without detection. "And a lot of headaches. Very bad. Migraines I think."
"Ok, we will refill your script for the Ativan for the attacks and I'll send in some pain meds for the headaches. You're probably just adjusting to the medications. They won't last long."
It was that simple.
Tell him what he needed to hear, and away his pen would go. My name scribbled over and over atop medication after medication.
Sometimes I would actually convince myself that they were working. So what that I was nauseous every day. So what that I could no longer reach climax when I'd get in the mood to try. So what that I was spending more hours in a dark dreamless sleep than I was awake.
None of those things mattered because the doctor told me these would work.
"We will get you feeling happy and all better in no time." He'd promised.
The thing is, when you learn you can just avoid the pain all together, it makes chasing happiness seem pointless. Why try to get there, when I can just be nowhere instead?
That's how it started of course. The pills. But when I'd left Faulkner and had to find a new doctor to supply my needs...it got harder.
Other doctors saw right through my pointed requests.
Before long the prescription pads got shorter and shorter and shorter until I started experiencing an entirely new anxiety.
The one that drove me to do things.
Things like lie, and cheat, and steal, and lower myself to do anything it took to get more pills.
It no longer mattered which ones.
In the end, if I took enough, I could reach the desired affect eventually.
But the more and more I took...
The more and more it took to get there.
To reach the place I loved so much now.
To get to oblivion.
The only place that felt welcoming anymore.
The only thing I needed.
I agreed when Kelsea suggested it, smiling conspiratorially as she had left the couch to go and retrieve a small bag of pot.
She'd sat beside me and pulled out a bong she had hidden behind one of the couch cushions.
I'd watched her as she worked, getting it ready and then leaned my head back as she sucked in the dank smoke, the bong gurgling between her fingers.
She leaned her head back and let the smoke roll from her lips slowly, like a dark cloud swirling before the worst of the of the storm.
I'd closed my eyes, picturing the smoke filling the room. I pictured it until there was nothing left but me all alone submerged in the fog, nothing to see, nothing to feel.
I pretended to fall asleep to avoid my turn, and soon the pretending wasn't fake. The pills I'd taken were already working their magic on my body.
I'd found it again.
That little place in the back of my mind where nothing and no one could ever reach me...never hurt me. Never again.
Not there, in my oblivion.
I wake up groggy and confused, a foot pushing into my side, reminding me just how long it's been since I've emptied my bladder.
"Shit." I whisper to myself, attempting to yank myself back into an unwelcoming reality.
Where in the hell am I?
I peel my dry eyes open and let my head fall to the side.
Kelsea is passed out beside me, the bong in one hand and the other hugging one of the throw pillows to her chest.
She's turned onto her side and in her sleep she is trying to stretch out her long limbs but my kidneys must be in her way.
I slide to the side, trying to stand but I slip from the couch instead, landing with a thud as my hip connects with the wooden leg of the couch on the way down.
That's gonna leave a mark.
I look back up at Kelsea but she just stretches, her legs greedily taking the newly vacated space.
Gotta find the pisser.
I balance myself with one hand on the coffee table and the other on the couch and I slowly lift myself back up, swaying for a second as my body gets used to standing on its own again.
My head is still foggy, thick with left over tendrils of sleep.
With a hand to the slowly forming headache beginning to thump thump thump inside the left side of my skull, I stumble out of the room.
There is a large dark wood staircase to my left and the front door to my right.
I could leave, or I could try to find the bathroom here.
The house is large.
Not quite as big as Mrs. Statham's, but it's close.
The layout is entirely different though.
The first two doors I try are closets.
The third is a bedroom.
I can tell it's the one Kelsea is staying in since the massive bed centered on the back wall is unmade and piles of clothes scatter the floors.
I start to close this door too when I mercifully see an open door at the other side of the room with the light on and a part of the counter visible from here.
I stagger into the bathroom, stepping over underwear and bras to get to the toilet positioned at the back of the long bathroom, a separate door to close off the toilet away from the shower and sinks.
When I finally wriggle my pants down and sit onto the toilet seat my whole body screams at me for waiting so long.
When I'm done and turn back to flush I see how dark almost brown my urine is.
As if on demand my lower back aches.
I'm dehydrated as hell.
Literally.
I can't remember the last time I made an actual effort to drink some water that wasn't chasing down pills.
Thinking of the pills reminds me of Mrs. Statham, which in turn, churns a bit of guilt, but mostly reminds me my car is still parked in her driveway.
Has she noticed?
If she had, she'd have called me by now.
I dig into my pockets looking for my phone but it's not there.
Shit.
I turn to leave the bathroom when my eye catches on a row of orange bottles with white lids and full of different colored pills.
My fingers twitch at my sides.
I'll just look.
I pick up the first bottle. It's label reads Aldactone 200 mg prescribed to a Kevin Rochelle.
The bottle is heavy in my hand.
I'd like to say I was about to put it back before I heard the door creak open. But I'm not sure that I was.
"Unless you're trying to go up a cup size, I don't think I have anything in here you'd want." Kelsea is standing in the doorway, her shoulder leaned against the frame as she watches me with a frown.
"Oh, I-." I stammer. "I was just looking for some Tylenol. My head is killing me." It's half truth, but she doesn't buy it. People seldom do anymore. I wonder these days if the word junkie is stamped onto my forehead next to killer's daughter and no comment.
"It's getting late." Kelsea says, giving me the mercy of not calling me out even though I know that she could.
"I really didn't come in here looking for anything."
"Nah, they usually aren't until they are." She pushes the door wider to let me skirt passed her. "I understand." She says to my back. "My mom is an addict too."
"I'm not an addict." I turn on my heels but my legs are still buzzing with pin pricks and I stumble a little before regaining my balance and putting a hand to my head.
"Of course you aren't." Kelsea scoffs, shaking her head.
"I've got to go." I say.
I don't need to stand here and defend myself to some stranger I don't even know. I don't even know why I'm here in the first place.
"You probably shouldn't be driving." She says, following me as I try to leave but apparently make a wrong turn, dead ending at the end of the hall.
"You're not my mom."
I hear how absurdly stupid and childish it sounds coming out of my mouth and the words leave behind a sour taste of embarrassment and shame in their wake. No matter how many times I try to swallow, it's still there.
"I'm not trying to be your parent, but maybe you should try listening." She is watching me with this horrible look of patience and care that I cannot stand.
I don't want her pity.
I don't want her looking at me that way. It's the way the doctors all looked at me as I stormed from their offices.
"Why don't you consider getting some help." They'd said. "There are programs that would be a great fit for someone like you."
Someone like me.
Someone broken.
Someone who needs other people to take all my shattered parts, all of the little fragments of my mind, to take them and find their place again. They want to make me into their project. Like a puzzle to finish at the end of their long days to wind down.
I'm no one else's problem but my own and I'm fine. I'm fucking fine.
"No one said you aren't fine." Kelsea says as I brush passed her again.
I hadn't even realized I said that stuff out loud.
I clamp my jaw shut so tight it aches but I don't care.
I finally find my way back into the living room and yank my coat back onto my body, still shivering from the fact that I don't remember taking it off in the first place.
My pill bottle is on the table and I snatch it, feeling her pity burning a hole into my back right between my shoulders as I tuck them away again. My escape safely in my pocket.
I feel my phone in the other pocket with my keys and I run for the door.
"You can stay here!" Kelsea calls from her porch as I trudge through the snow to cross the street back to my car again.
I don't look back, not once.
I get in, slam the keys into the ignition.
The radio blares to life all around me as I jerk the car into reverse and peel away.
I've been driving for maybe fifteen minutes before I realize what I've been hearing the whole time.
The radio host is talking about the two missing girls. The same age, the same timing. It's all the same.
That's how it went back then too.
The first two girls.
They were back to back.
Before searching could even truly begin for the first, there was already another.
Their faces bleed into my brain.
I no longer see the snow pouring down.
I just see them. A windshield full of faces that were so full of life before the man who gave life to me, snuffed theirs out with his two bare hands.
Hands that held my tiny body close and rocked me as a baby. Those same hands wrapped so tightly around their throats that their windpipes were collapsed. They were both found with their eyes still wide open, staring up at the sky above them while the flies gathered.
I'm so lost in my own head, my fingers thrumming anxiously against the top of the steering wheel, that I didn't even notice where I was driving to.
County Rd 256.
My heart leaps, then seems to stop all together.
It was here.
On this road.
In that ditch.
My head slowly turns to my driver's side window and I see it.
The little glowing white blue cross on the side of the road. It's like a beacon into the darkness, marking the spot forever more with its signal. The signal that evil was there. That beauty was punished in that spot. That a body once laid their, laid bare for the police to find in the early morning light.
That cross marks the first one.
The first of many.
I force my eyes away.
Something moves in the headlights of my car and I scream. Slamming on the brakes, the back end of the car spinning around to the front until the back bumper of my car hits a tree, bouncing off with a crunch of metal meeting bark.
"Oh my god!" I scream, fighting to get off my seatbelt. "Oh my god, please, no."
I couldn't have hit him. I didn't.
I leap from the car, my leg getting caught up and I fall face first into the snow, blinking away the darkness to try to see.
In the distance on the other side of the road is a tiny body.
A body that is still moving.
I begin to cry as I push myself up and run to the other side of the road.
"I'm sorry." The little boy says, sitting on the shoulder of the road shivering in his puffy red jacket and black leather boots.
"Oh my god, are you ok?" I'm pulling him up, turning him left and right looking for blood in the snow.
He looks up at me. His little fur lined hood falling back to reveal his head full of brown curls and big light eyes brimming with tears.
"I'm just looking for my sister." He says, his bottom lip quivering. "No one can find her and I need to find her."
He can't be more than six years old at the most.
I look up and down the road but I see no one.
"Where are your parents?" I ask, still gripping his shoulders. "Are you alone?"
"They won't stop crying." He says, looking away, his eyes cast down the road. Fixated on that glowing cross. "I wanted to bring her home so they can stop."
My heart shatters inside of my chest.
My wet icy hands pluck my phone from my pocket and I try to dial 911, but the screen remains black.
"Fuck!" I shout. My phone is dead.
"You shouldn't curse." The little boy tells me and I sigh.
"You're right, buddy." I say, looking up and down the road just waiting for someone to come. "Come on."
I pick him up and bring him back to my car, getting him buckled into the backseat, checking one more time in the dim light of the car that he isn't hurt.
I had almost hit him.
Had I been distracted for even one second longer...
"I'm gonna get you home, ok?" I tell him as I get back into the drivers seat and turn the weak heat up to full blast.
I'm sure the back end of the car is damaged, but mercifully it still drives.
I pull back out into the road slowly and carefully, windshield wipers on full blast.
"I need to find her." He says again after a second.
"I know you want to find your sister." I tell him, peeking into the rear view mirror at him. "But you've got to wait until morning, it's too dangerous to be out this late all alone. Can you tell me where you live?"
I just want to take him home where I know he's going to be safe. I need to put this boy who's life I could have just ended, back into the arms of the people I know must be worried sick looking for him.
He starts to tell me his address when my back windshield is lit up with blue lights and the sound of the sirens blare over the sound of his voice.
I pull the car to the shoulder again, turning to face the little boy to be sure he's ok.
He's okay. We're okay. It's okay.
I'm so thankful to see a policeman coming to the rescue that nothing else seems to register.
Not until I see that he's coming towards the car with his gun drawn.
"Get out of the car with your hands up." He shouts at me. I'm so stunned that I don't move. Not until he's right at my window, flashlight blinding me with one hand, the end of the gun staring me down with the other. "Get out of the car!" he shouts again as another police car screeches to a stop in front of us.
Two more officers run over as I step out of the car, being turned and shoved up against the hood as soon as I do.
Behind me cops run to the back of my car and yank the little boy free.
"We've got him!" Someone shouts as the other officer rushes away with the boy.
It's in this moment that I realize...
Not only might they think I had something to do with this kid running away...but that pill bottle in my pocket has never felt more heavy.