I barely restrained rolling my eyes. “Really. That’s how you’re gonna play this. Like we’re stupid.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Good,” Otter said. “Since you don’t know what we’re talking about, then you have nothing to worry about. Or nothing to hide. No reason then why you can’t hand me your backpack.”
I thought he’d leave. I really did. I thought he’d walk right out that door and slam it shut behind him. His therapist had warned us of that. That it was a possibility. That he could run and run and run, and that we might not hear from him for days. “He’ll come back,” she’d said sadly. “They usually do.”
But he didn’t. For reasons I could barely begin to grasp, he stayed.
He growled at us, an annoyed sound that was meant to be angry but came out petulant. He all but threw his backpack at Otter, who snagged it out of midair with one hand, regardless of how heavy it probably was.
“Thanks,” Otter said dryly. “Have a seat.”
“I’m tired. You got what you wanted.”
“Sit. Down.”
He gave us a wide berth as he moved toward the opposite couch, a scowl on his face. He sat down, hands clasped in his lap, leg jumping up and down, foot tapping against the hardwood floor. A little bead of sweat trickled down his forehead near his eye.
Otter unzipped the backpack, took out a textbook, and set it on the coffee table, rattling the pill bottles. The laptop came next. The cell phone. A pencil. A notebook. Two pens. A pack of gum. Headphones. A flyer for some campus rally involving PETA. That last one hurt, because it was a ghost that Zombie Tyson had consumed.
And I thought back, again, as I had been all afternoon, to all the signs we’d missed. All the little things that pointed toward what was really going on. We should have seen this sooner. We should have done more. We should have been better. I thought it was possible this whole mess was almost as much our fault—my fault—as it was his.
There was nothing left in the main pocket. Otter zipped it closed.
The Kid wouldn’t look at either of us, glaring off somewhere behind us. “I don’t know what you think you’re gonna find, but it’s not—”
They were in the front pocket. Two unmarked pill bottles that looked exactly like the ones on the table, no labels. There was a major difference, though.
These were halfway filled.
“I don’t know what those are,” the Kid said immediately. “They aren’t mine. It’s not—”
I held up a hand, and he fell silent with a huff.
Otter handed me the pill bottles, and I opened them, spilling their contents on the coffee table. I picked up my phone where it lay next to me and pulled up the picture Corey had taken back at the library. He’d even somehow drawn on the photo, each pill circled with a little line trailing off it with shorthand written identifying each pill.
And yeah. They were all there.
The Xanax, which I recognized.
Klonopin too, though in a higher dosage than the Kid had ever been prescribed.
Valium, which he’d never had before.
Ativan, which had been discussed at one point but never offered.
Adderall, which wasn’t even something ever discussed. It wasn’t a benzo. From some of the kids I’d had in my classes, I knew it was usually prescribed for ADHD.
But here they all were.
And the thing that hit me the hardest was not the fact that we had verifiable proof right here in front of us, and not that he had been doing this in the first place, and not that we had somehow missed all the signs, but the fact that he was obviously taking all of these. That he was mixing them was the thing that hurt the most. I wasn’t an expert on benzos by any means, but I probably knew a bit more than the average person, given the Kid’s history. But even if I hadn’t known what I did, I still would have known that mixing drugs like this was never a good idea.
Otter looked over my shoulder at the phone.
“What are you guys staring at?” the Kid demanded.
“Some other ones too,” Otter muttered under his breath. Which was true. There was a pill or two that wasn’t labeled in the photo. “Looks like the Vicodin I have for my leg. Same dosage.”