Ben nods. “I speak Winters now.”
“If she’s using…” Drew looks up at me, his eyes too bright, wild with fear. “If she goes back to her old dose—”
“She’ll call Jo,” I say. “I know she will. She’s almost made it to five months. There’s no way she’d go back to day one so quick. She hates day one.”
“Every addict does,” Drew says. “But that doesn’t stop them.”
Hannah is not going to die tonight. This is just a sim. Another death sim.
It’s easier to face things when you’re ready for them. Not even death can blindside you then.
We get to Harvard Square, but there is no Hannah. We talk to messed-up kids outside the train station, where they all congregate, steps from the university. One of them thinks he may have seen someone like her, but he can’t remember. He’s too high. Too gone.
When we get back in the car, Drew’s phone buzzes, and he goes pale as he reads whatever text came in. His fingers fly across the screen.
“What?” I say. “Is that her?”
He shakes his head, brings up GPS. “I know where she is.”
Nate glances at the screen. “Good—we’re already going in that direction.”
“What’d she say?”
“It was my cousin, not her,” Drew bites out. “They ran into each other on the T.”
He swipes through his phone and holds it up to his ear, eyes scanning the passing cars. I can hear it ring. The ringing stops, and someone on the other end starts to say something, but Drew cuts him off, his voice full of fury.
“I am going to fucking kill you for taking her there,” he says. His cousin—I’m guessing it’s his cousin—starts to speak again, and Drew growls, “Shut up. How much?”
The guy on the phone says something, a number I guess, and Drew curses. How much? means: How many milligrams? How many pills? How many chances to die?
Nate and Ben and I sit, silent, as Drew loses his mind on his cousin, anger masking the sheer terror I can see in his eyes. This doesn’t feel like a sim. Not even a little bit.
Mom. Mom, please. Fix this, please.
When Drew hangs up, he falls back against the seat and stares out the window, the phone clutched in his hand. His face is so pale.
“Is she … She’s using? He gave her something?” I can’t breathe.
She’s been sober for so long. It’ll be too easy to overdose if she takes the same amount she used to. It says that in the books, the websites. The pamphlets from all the rehabs and doctors and places that were supposed to make her better.
“Yes. My cousin left the party, so she could have taken more.” Drew grips the back of the driver’s seat. “Faster, Nate.”
“On it,” my cousin says.
I have been here before. A pocket of spacetime that keeps happening, over and over. And I can’t change the outcome. It is not up to me at all. It never has been.
“Creation. Destruction. Creation. Destruction.”
I don’t realize I’m saying this out loud until Nate says, “Buzz, you’re freaking me the fuck out.”
As we race toward Hannah, I feel a quickening, like I’m in the lab and five things have come together all at once, suddenly making sense. Making one thing true.
I close my eyes. Breathe.
Maybe we will get a chance to save her life again tonight. But in the end, Hannah has to save herself. She’s going to have to believe she can do right by the miracle.
Tonight, my sister will live or she will die.
I can’t work this problem.
I am not in control.
A strange peace settles over me. The fear and anxiety and horror of it all is still there. The urgency, too. I’m not giving up, not ever. But it’s like when I’m meditating: That’s all on the surface. Underneath: quiet.
Nonattachment doesn’t mean not loving Nah. But this peace, this stuff under the surface of all the waves—that’s the place I can be, no matter what happens. Death to the waves. Or … not to the waves themselves. Death to letting them sweep me off my feet. I can just … ride them.
This is what River meant.
It’s just a ride.
Nate presses on the gas.
45
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 10 May
Earth Time (EST): 20:06
Ten minutes later, we’re pulling up in front of a house on the other end of Cambridge, and Drew is out of the car before it stops. I run to catch up with him. A few people are smoking on the porch, but he ignores them, just walks right through the front door like he owns the place. He grabs the first guy he sees in the hallway.
“A girl—black hair. Pretty. Where is she?”
The guy holds his hands up. “Whoa, the fuck you—”
“Where. Is. She.”
A girl sitting cross-legged on the couch glances at us after taking a massive hit from a bong. “She’s with Sean. Down the hall. I’d knock if I were you.”
Drew’s face drains of color, and he lets go of the guy. He looks at me.
I shake my head. If she’s with some other guy, then things are so bad. Hannah doesn’t want anyone but Drew.
“Come on,” he growls as he turns and heads down the hall. He stops for just a second in front of a closed door, then pushes it open.
“What the fuck?” a guy yells as Drew storms in.
Terror and misery and a thousand unnameable things flash over Drew’s face, and then he lurches across the room. I run to follow him, barely seeing the shirtless guy who’s fallen off a bed onto the floor.
“Hannah,” Drew’s saying, already on his knees, leaning over the mattress. My sister’s lying on it, topless, and he’s shaking her. “Baby, wake up.”
I am screaming words and she’s not moving. I can’t, she’s—“NO.”
I reach into my bag for the Naloxone, but it’s not there. It’s not there.
“Drew, I don’t have it. The Naloxone. It must have fallen, I don’t know, I don’t have it—”
“911,” Drew says, not looking at me.
“I thought she was sleeping,” the guy says, staring at the bed. “Fuck. She was just—we were—”
Drew starts doing CPR, and I’m trying to unlock my phone, but my hands are shaking too bad. One of Nah’s arms is dangling toward the floor, and everything I ever thought I believed or knew goes out the window because I am praying to who or what I don’t know, but somebody has to be in fucking charge and I am praying praying praying to a God I don’t believe in.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“My sister, she’s … I think she’s overdosed and—”
“Is your sister unconscious?”
“Yes,” I sob. “Yes.”
“Is she breathing?”
“I don’t know. Drew, is she breathing?”
He shakes his head, intent on his work. Ben’s in the room now, and I’m crying too hard to speak or think or hear, so he grabs the phone and talks to the woman on the other end and I fall next to Drew and grab Hannah’s hand, which is cold, the fingers tinged slightly blue, and I know what that means because I researched overdoses and my sister isn’t breathing.