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But none of that matters. Because the Crash is here.
I pinch the corner of the slick plastic bag like I’m picking up a dead mouse. I don’t bother with the Advil, don’t fake-flush the toilet, don’t do any of the things I meant to do in the bathroom. I leave the medicine cabinet door open like it needs to be fumigated.
Leo’s getting himself another Coke when I walk into the kitchen. “Ready for ano—” He sees what I’m holding. “What the fuck, Al?”
“You’re using.”
He looks like a rat trapped in a cage. “I’m not!”
“Don’t lie to me.”
I see him start to make up a story. I can read it in every line of his body, in the set of his jaw, in the way his eyes refuse to meet mine.
“Don’t. Lie. To. Me,” I repeat, pounding each syllable hard.
He deflates. “You don’t understand.”
“Where did you even get this stuff?” My voice is an octave too high.
“From one of the orderlies, at the hospital. I’m just maintaining, you know? Only a tab a day.”
“A tab a…” I want to scream. I want to scratch his eyes out. I want to rip the shirt off his back and smash his phone on the floor and drag him through the woods to the freeport’s front gate.
I want to cry.
“How did you afford it?” I ask. He doesn’t have any money. That’s one way I knew he was safe.
His face flushes. He’s embarrassed. “I traded some of that shit in the hospital room. The Xbox. That crystal clock.”
“Leo…” I can’t think of anything else to say.
“Crash just makes sense,” he says. “It’s the only thing that makes me right.”
“Makes youright?” I shout in disbelief.
And that shuts him down. His face locks into a too-familiar glare. His lips thin. His chin juts.
This is the Leo who refused to talk to our father. The one who ignored my friends’ good-intentioned efforts to intervene. The liar who denied, over and over and over again, that he ever needed rehab.
“It’s poison,” I say, barely keeping my voice even.
“Youtook it,” he says, sounding like a child.
“Herzogforcedme to. You know—Klaus Herzog? The man you sold me to? The man who made me his slave?”
“I made a mistake!” he shouts. “I’m sorry!”
“Sorry,” I snort.
“What do you want me to say, Al? He gave me a choice, and I believed him. He’d keep you three days or he’d kill me. I’d give anything to go back to that night! I’d give anything to keep you safe. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that every single morning, I wake up wishing I wasdead?”
“Keep using this crap, and you will be,” I say.
“Fine,” he says, swiping for the bag, which I hold just out of his reach. “Give it to me. I’ll take it all now. I’ll OD on your precious boyfriend’s hardwood floor, and then you’ll never have to worry about me again.”
“Shut up,” I say, like we’re five years old and fighting over who gets to push the button on the elevator.
“That’s what you want,” he sulks.
