I open the cabinet, grab the bottle of Advil, but I’m crying again, the smell of them all around me, and the bottle slips from my hands and the pills go everywhere.
I get on my knees, start picking them up, when I see it. Wedged under the sink, behind the toilet bowl cleaner.
My mouth waters at the sight of that little orange bottle.
Vicodin from when Dad got his knee surgery a few months ago, hidden so I’d never find it.
My mind—it doesn’t think. It has no say as my body, as my hands, reach for that bottle, twist off the child safety cover: thirty pills—a whole month’s supply.
This is almost like how it all started.
Gram had left some Vicodin at the house after a visit. A year and a half ago. Weed wasn’t doing the trick anymore, making the sad go away, so I grabbed the bottle. Just to see if there was something that could help me feel better. About life. About being me.
Because it feels like the universe keeps telling me to step aside.
Mom’s always saying to read the signs, and I’m telling you, they are loud and fucking clear.
People don’t want me. They don’t see me. Like, literally, I am invisible.
When I stand in line, the cashier actually looks past me to the person behind me. When teachers pair everyone up, I’m always out in the cold and, later, when we’re halfway through the assignment, they’re like, Who’s your partner, Hannah? And I’m like, You tell me, bitch.
Back when I had friends, when I cared about that sort of thing, I’d be sitting at a table in the caf and they’d walk right by—not to be mean. There was always a moment when one of them would sit down and kind of look around and then shrug. After, they’d be all, Where were you at lunch?
Back when I was online, I’d post things and get, like, two likes. Cool things—found poetry and the beach and Priscilla’s circus tats—but no one cared. It’s like everyone had cracked some code, some code of being seen, and I just couldn’t.
There’s no place for a zero-followers person in this world. If you don’t exist on the internet, you don’t exist at all.
Add that to real life, with Dad’s colleagues at every party being all, Oh, you’re the other daughter. I don’t know shit about astro-whatever, but I know this: Mae is this crazy-cool star like what you see on posters in science class, and I’m space debris orbiting her. You don’t see the debris. You can’t. All that light.
And, okay, boo-hoo or whatever, privilege, first-world problems, all the things I’m supposed to say, but here’s the point: I’m fucking sad and I feel like a goddamn ghost, okay, and I’m sorry if that’s politically incorrect, I’m sorry if my invisibility comes with my own savings account and matcha lattes, but it’s mine, okay, it’s mine and it’s real to me, so just let me freaking have it. I know, I know that other people, so many other people, are invisible in ways that can get them killed or never have a good job or a seat at any table. I know this. But invisibility is a spectrum, like anything else. And I’m on it. So when some white kid in my Circle of Sad was all, white fragility, white tears, check your privilege after my turn, I was like, DUDE. Really? Really? So sad is just off the table for me. Like I can’t feel it. Or express it. I’m in a freaking therapy group, what the fuck? I’m just trying to explain, to explain how the entire cosmos is like flashing these neon signs about how I’m a worthless piece of shit and don’t you ever wonder what’s the point of you and maybe there’s no point at all?
And I hear Micah tell me in March, when things were so bad: I can’t carry you.
I had to get help, he said. I can’t carry you. I love you, he said. But. I can’t carry you. Sometimes, he said, you’re too much. I can’t carry you.
I’m that astronaut, floating away to cowboy music.
I had my first pill with Micah. Summer before junior year. A little over one year ago. We said it would be for special occasions.
But it made me so happy. So we decided: weekends. Only on the weekends. We’d lie on the beach all day after he was done surfing or late at night. Percocet, mostly. Hydrocodone. Vicodin. Whatever he could get from kids at school who had the hookup. But he didn’t really like it. Preferred weed. And he didn’t like when I was on it. Said I was too out of it. And it made me not want to be with him. In that way.
So we stopped taking the pills. He thought we stopped. But I wanted to go back to the moon. I asked around on the boardwalk—you can get anything there—and Priscilla, she got them for me. Percs, usually. Hydro sometimes. Oxy on a really good day. The money wasn’t a problem, since I had a job and whatever I made was for me to do with as I pleased. Plus I had tons of savings from all those big birthday checks from Gram and Papa. If you have two parents with good jobs who love each other and you, then being a junkie is the easiest thing in the world. I knew this. Even before I went to the Circle of Sad and that boy talked about what he had to do to get his pills. And the girl who couldn’t stop crying because she stole from her sister, who was a single mom on benefits. Spend enough time on the boardwalk and you see the kind of bartering people do for their diamonds.
I took the pills at night, when I was alone. Not every night, at first. Usually when Micah had to work and we didn’t hang out and when I felt like I needed to get away from myself.
I felt sad and the pills made me happy. Simple as that.
But then a couple nights became every other night, then every night. By Valentine’s Day, seven months after stealing my grandma’s pills, I was on them all the time. It happened so fast. It’s not like I planned that. It just … happened.
Mom and Dad weren’t idiots. They knew something was up. I’d failed most of my classes the first semester of junior year and stopped hanging out with anyone but Micah, stopped going to the bonfires he would have with the other surfers on the beach, and I lost my job at the coffeehouse because it was so hard to concentrate. To care.
Mom thought it was depression, and she found weed and booze in my room around New Year’s, so that’s the stuff she thought I was into. I don’t think they imagined I could be such a loser. To pop pills after all those assemblies at school, all those years of drinking Mom’s homemade kombucha. I let her believe it was just booze and weed, just too much partying. I started going to Dr. Brown, who is about as fun as her name sounds. But after what happened at the clinic in March, I told Mom and Dad everything. There was detox, group after school, random drug testing, and Dr. Fucking Brown. I got sober. Got good. Even though I didn’t feel normal without the pills. Not right. Fuzzy.
I did summer school so I could still start my senior year, graduate on time. Smudged myself with sage and went to Mom’s yoga classes. Told her to go to Malaysia because I promise I’m fine, it’s all good, and yes I’ll go to meetings and yes Cynthia can check on me and we all know Mae will watch me like a hawk even though she pretends not to. So Mom went. To Malaysia.
You should totally go, Mom. I’m fine. I want you to go. You deserve a break.
And now I’m sitting on my maybe-dead parents’ bathroom floor, thinking about stealing my maybe-dead dad’s Vicodin.
I can see myself in Mom’s makeup mirror on the counter, and I tell that waste of space in the glass, “You don’t deserve them, you fucking piece of shit.”