I rap the door to her bathroom a few times, this time growling.
“Gwen, open up for God’s sake. I don’t have all day. I’m on my lunch break. I need to teach third period in twenty minutes, and traffic is insane.”
She doesn’t answer. I feel full to the brim with discontent and annoyance. The whole Gwen situation grinds on my nerves. She is going to get help even if I have to drag her by the hair and throw her into the nearest rehab center with a room for a new tenant. Just a week ago, I spoke to Mother Dearest, who had agreed to shell out some money for a Santa Barbara resort where Gwen could get clean. We’d decided to split it halfway, me with my teacher salary and her with her indefinite amount of millions in the bank. I don’t care. I just want Gwen to get better.
“Goddammit, Gwen, the water is leaking.” I lift one foot upward and stare down at the water crawling from underneath her bathroom door. “I swear to God, if you don’t open up right now I’m going in.”
Nothing.
Up until now I didn’t feel it. The fear that grips you by the throat and squeezes hard. I kick the locked door open and find her in the bathtub, naked, her head under the water. I run toward her, slipping a few times on the wet floor. Her
whole body has sunk into the water.
And there are no bubbles.
No bubbles.
She isn’t breathing.
“Gwen, Gwen, Gwen, sweetheart.” My voice is foreign to my ears. I sound…frantic. “You’re okay. Come on. Let’s get you out of here. Come on.” I grab her by the hair before dragging her out. I lay her on the floor and am actually stupid enough to worry about how cold it must feel against her skin before I dial 911. My fingers are shaking. I can’t look at her. Not because she is naked. Because she is blue.
After I hang up on the girl from the emergency center, I roll my older sister to the side, trying to get her to throw up some of the water she’s swallowed. Then I roll her back onto her back and try to administer CPR to her dead body. I don’t cry. I’m not even all that sad at this point. I am mad. Fucking furious, to be honest.
“What the hell did you do that for? Fuck!” I roar.
“Shit, Gwen. You don’t look hurt. You’ll be okay.”
“Gwen. Gwen. Gwen. Gwen.”
The ambulance arrives a few minutes later. I watch from the corner of the living room as they zip her into a body bag. It dawns on me that I have no one to call. No one to share this with. I bet my parents won’t be surprised if I call them.
“She looked…fine,” I say to one of the paramedics.
Even to my own ears, this sounded crazy. My sister wasn’t fine. My sister was a heroin addict. She was a junkie. She’d been looking gaunt, malnourished, and wild-eyed for a long time now. From about three months after she followed me to Sin City, to be exact.
“Looks like an overdose,” the young, pimple-suffering man says, his voice apologetic. “I think she suffered from cardiac arrest, but you’ll know more after they send you the report. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Yeah.” I scrub my face with my palm. “Me too.”
I go back home, get into my own bathtub, and stare at the tiles. I thought I had processed it, but I was wrong.
The penny drops two weeks later. I do well in those weeks. So well. Make all the necessary funeral arrangements, notify my parents and our friends, have people come over—colleagues, friends, ex-lovers—and help me set everything up.
It’s two weeks later when I drive down the strip when it finally hits me.
The light is red. I look out the window of my car and see Ryan Anderson crossing the street with a random chick that looks like a typical drug addict. Smeared makeup, swollen eyes, and scrawny body wrapped in a mini skirt.
His arm is flung over her shoulder, and he is laughing and whispering something into her ear.
He did it.
He did it to Gwen, and now he is going to do it to this girl.
She is so out of it, she would let him get away with anything, I know.
The next morning, I hand my resignation to Headmaster Charles and decide to dedicate the upcoming months to making sure Ryan Anderson will never ruin another life again.
“Keep your resignation to yourself.” Headmaster Charles pushes the letter I wrote across his desk. “Let’s talk about it next year. You might feel differently.”