What She Found in the Woods

‘Yeah . . . no,’ I sputter defensively as pushes on.

‘I was trying to get her to quit with me. She told me later that the two of you talked about it, and that you said it was just a summer thing, and she shouldn’t worry. She figured you’d know because you used to be a big party girl and you were able to quit.’

Liam stands up stiffly and has to walk around.

‘No. That conversation was about . . .’ I gesture to Liam, and my hand drops. ‘She used the word “stray”. Then she said sometimes she needed something extra. I thought she was talking about guys . . . Oh my God.’ I drop my head in my hands. ‘I swear she never said anything about drugs.’

‘She’d never say it,’ Liam growls from the other side of the room. ‘Mila never really says what she means. That would be too ordinary.’

I just sit there, overwhelmed.

‘She kept promising she would quit before school started. It was just a summer thing. Like you said,’ Aura-Blue adds quietly. ‘Then she ran out of money and started going out with guests from the shelter. She was going to parties with the dealers. She tried to get me to come, but I wouldn’t because I know what that means.’

I nod, still taking it in. I remember Gina in the kitchen, warning me off Mila. Saying Mila needed to bring pretty girls to parties. It was because Mila needed fresh meat for the dealers to get free drugs now that she was out of cash. She kept borrowing money and stopped wearing jewellery, probably because she’d pawned it all. She’d lost weight and she looked like she wasn’t sleeping. I noticed all this stuff, but I never put it together. I can’t believe I didn’t see the truth.

‘That’s why we think she went hiking last night,’ Taylor says. ‘She must have run out, and we think she went looking for the source.’

‘No,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘She was too scared.’

‘You don’t know what she would have done to get more,’ Liam says darkly.

Aura-Blue sniffs, and I realize she’s crying. ‘It feels like it happened overnight. One day she was just buying oxy for the weekend, and the next . . .’ She trails off.

If I had stopped to think about it – actually think about Mila – it would have been blindingly obvious. The way she ran her hands over the steering wheel sensually and tilted her face into the light. The fact that she kissed me. She was so high. I noticed the details, but I didn’t want to look harder at the whole picture. I didn’t bother to ask her what the fight with Aura-Blue was really about because I didn’t want to get dragged into it.

I didn’t want to read past those three little dots.

And that day in Mila’s Mini, after Aura-Blue had tried to get her to stop, I told Mila to have fun. Of course she listened to me, not her best friend Aura-Blue, because I used to party with legit celebrities. Look at my Instagram. I’m an expert at this shit.

I told Mila to do more this summer.

I told her, Go ahead.

‘This can’t be happening again,’ I say, shaking my head. I think I stand up. ‘It can’t.’

I’m drowning. I need to get out. Death goes everywhere I do. I should be as far away from people as possible.

I see the stars and feel my lungs fill with night air for a brief moment before I feel hands catching me, trying to get me to sit or stay or stop.

I see my grandparents’ faces and hear them scolding. Someone’s yelling something about how they shouldn’t upset me. That I have suffered tragic losses. That I came here to get away from it all, and why can’t they just leave me alone?

The hands don’t let me go. I see Taylor’s worried face as he carries me upstairs and lays me on my bed. He tucks the covers around me. He’s a sweet guy.

‘It’s OK,’ he whispers. ‘It’s not your fault.’

Sweet, but so very wrong.

When your room is silent and still, the single object that creates noise and motion becomes a point of fixation.

The fan went woop-woop, and it filled many hours of my day. It was the whirring pinwheel around which I rotated between therapy sessions. I was always spinning, even lying down.

One day, after group therapy, they shuffled us into the common room, ostensibly for our daily allotment of supervised socialization, but really it was to give us our second dose of medication. Before mine kicked in, I noticed something. I noticed that one of the boys in my group was looking out the window. He was smiling.

David was his name. OCD. Manic depression. He’d lost his marbles when his girlfriend dumped him, and he’d tried to kill himself.

I’d like to say I knew him well, seeing as how every day I listened to him spill his guts, but the truth is, when you’re sunk so deep that you’re in a hospital, other people glance off you like rocks skimming the top of a pond.

I could give you a list of all David’s triggers. I could tell you everything about his family and about his friends on the volleyball team. But I never knew him. I never interacted with him. I never invested myself enough to decide if I even liked him or not. I watched him and wrote down the details. Just the details. Never the whole picture.