As I stood at the kiosk trying to decide, an overly cheerful man’s voice came over the PA:
“Got the sniffles? Stop by our twenty-four-hour pharmacy today and pick up some homeopathic remedies, or get your prescription filled!”
I left the phone card hanging on its rack and headed toward the back of the store.
The graveyard-shift pharmacist blinked down at me. “Date of birth?”
“February twenty-second, 2004.”
“Prescription number and insurance card?”
I slid my card across the counter. The Rx number was written on the back so I wouldn’t forget it.
She typed at the register, frowned. “Just a moment.” She went into the back and came out two minutes later with a bearded man whose name tag read: Greg Fredericks, Assistant Manager. He typed, glanced at the screen, looked up.
“I’m sorry, miss. It looks like your coverage has lapsed.”
The weight that had settled on me seemed to multiply, hanging on me like a backpack full of gravel. Dad hadn’t paid our insurance bill. Of course he hadn’t. What would he have paid it with? And how long had it been since he got a refill on his heart pills?
The assistant manager gave me a patronizing smile. “Do you still want your prescription?”
I put my hand in my pocket and felt the two hundred-dollar bills. “How much is it?”
He pushed more keys. “Without insurance, it comes to . . . one hundred ninety-seven dollars and eighty-eight cents.”
I closed my eyes and held in a scream. Food, gas, phone, meds: pick two.
“That’s okay,” I said, backing away from the counter.
“Would you like to apply for a Walmart Visa?” the assistant manager asked. The pharmacist shot him a look.
“No, that’s okay. It’s okay.”
Stop saying okay. Ella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh . . .
My face went numb as I pushed the cart toward the register.
There was another rack of prepaid phone cards at the checkout line. Fuck it. I grabbed a hundred-dollar card and tossed it onto the conveyor.
CHAPTER 4
I COULDN’T STAND THE THOUGHT of returning to my shoe-box bedroom in the RV, so I stepped out of Walmart and into the cool Indiana autumn. I punched the recharge code into my phone, and once the credits were activated, text messages started coming in.
The first was from the prankster in Vegas: Disconnected. Call back.
Sure, jerkoff. I’ll get right on that. The next was from Ripley: Sorry I missed you. Drama ensued. Call when you get this.
Ripley and I had met on Bloglr sophomore year after a week of constantly reposting each other’s Firefly GIFs. Our short DM exchange quickly morphed into daily texts. Ripley had become my best friend—but we’d never met face-to-face. We’d never even seen pictures of each other; we had made a sacred vow not to pollute the purity of our online friendship with anything tangible from the real world. All we had were words and voices—and I liked it that way.
Three and a half semesters of public high school had taught me just how bad I was at keeping friends in real life. During my sophomore year, I’d gotten close with a couple of girls, Hailey and Emma, when our biology teacher assigned us to the same group. They were nice to me at first, inviting me over for study groups, movie nights, and finally to a spring break pool party when Emma’s parents went out of town.
It was the last high school party I ever attended.
I didn’t black out; I remembered everything. But as I watched the videos that circulated the next day, the experience seemed distant. Hazy. As if I’d been drunk or high when it happened, even though I’d been stone-cold sober the whole night.
It’s nighttime in Emma’s parents’ backyard. I’m sitting in some guy’s lap on a pool chair, making out with him hard.
It’s later. I’m standing by the pool, talking to a fully dressed Hailey—and then, unprovoked, I push her into the pool, sending her red Solo cup flying. I laugh wildly as she paddles to the far edge and gets out, her clothes dripping. She looks miserable and furious, but I’m doubled over like it’s the most hilarious thing ever. I’m the only one laughing.
Now it’s later and I’m with a different guy, straddling him on a white leather sofa. My shirt is off. A few people stand around, watching and whispering and taking pictures with their phones. I don’t seem to care.
After the party, I went home and stayed up all night doing our bio project, start to finish, by myself. We got an A.
Hailey and Emma were cold to me at school that Monday. People shot me sideways glances and whispered as they passed me in the hall. Some guy I didn’t even know grabbed my ass and asked for my number. I gaped at him as he walked away, laughing with his friends. Over the span of one weekend, I had ceased to be an unknown theater nerd and become “that crazy chick” instead.
Two weeks later, I dropped out of Eastside and started looking for online programs.
It took months of therapy and reading before I understood that I’d had my first episode of hypomania. It was supposed to be the “upside” of the bipolar experience—but it was worse than any depression I’d ever suffered.
I was terrified that Liam had seen those videos. He’d been a senior on his way out—but he was popular, and the link had more or less gone viral at Eastside. If he had seen them, though, why had he bothered to talk to me tonight? Why had he asked me out?
I hated wondering, hated worrying who knew what about me. It was why I’d left Eastside, and it was why the idea of a phone-and-text-only friendship with Ripley appealed to me on a deep level. From a distance, I could filter out the worst parts of myself.
I tapped Ripley’s number, and it only rang twice before he picked up.
“She lives!”
The sound of his voice sent a wave of relief through me; I hadn’t realized how stressed out I had been. Or how lonely.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”
“Tell me about it.” He paused. “No, seriously. Actually tell me about it. Distract me from the napalm-and-raccoon-hair trash fire that is my life.”
I laughed. “Well, to start with, we got evicted from our trailer park.”
Ripley gasped. “Are you being serious right now? Or is this some weird Indiana country music reference I’m not getting?”
I snorted. “Serious. Apparently, we haven’t paid rent for like three months.”
“Holy shit. Where are you?”
“Walmart.”
“At ten thirty at night?”
I looked at my phone. “It’s one thirty-two a.m. where I . . . Oh, shit!”
“What is it?”
“I forgot my US History test. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“I thought your school was flexible about tests. You can’t just take it now?”
I slapped my hand against my forehead. “I can—it’s just . . . I lose a full a letter grade. And I have to maintain a three point oh to get into Harrison.”
“Right. Nursing school. Shit. What are you going to do?”
I wound a lock of hair around my finger and yanked. “I don’t know.”
I heard a scraping noise on the other end of the line, then some ominous thumps. Ripley liked to talk to me from the privacy of the little roof outside his window; I assumed he was crawling out there right now. I felt a sudden rush of envy that Ripley lived in an actual house.