**My Entry for AMLKoski's Give Back Contest: Bitter Winter**
Alexandra Winters didn't have a problem --she had a diagnosis. It just so happened that her ADHD made it necessary for her to take amphetamines, and it just so happened that her school...
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It's shocking -that is, if Alex could feel anything besides numb- how much someone can accumulate in a year. It's not like her side of the room is cluttered or anything, but now that it has all been pulled together into a pile on her bed, there's just no way it will fit into the two measly suitcases she had arrived with Freshman year. She should probably throw most of it away, but nearly everything has some memory attached to it — one that she is desperate to cling on to.
This is what Annabel walks in on; Alex sitting cross-legged on the floor under the mountain that her bed used to be, staring intently at a handful of small Happy Meal toys, and trying to define the value of their existence. When she was a kid, these were the first things to go during the annual Toy Box Purge, her mom was ruthless about it. Alex almost wishes she could be as emotionally detached as her mother, it would make things so much easier.
"Holy fuck," Annabel exclaims from the doorway, "so it's true." It isn't a question, just an affirmation of whatever she has already heard. Did she find out from Matt? Or was it one of the peanut-gallery that bore witness to Alex's heartbreak? Annabel slides down the doorjamb to sit on the floor and asks the only question that has been repeating like a broken record in Alex's mind, "why?"
Why? Why, why, whywhywhy why why.
Alex shakes her head, unwilling to speak. Annabel was having none of it.
"Fuck that, Alex," she growls, and instead of pointing an accusing finger at Alex, she turns it on herself, "I deserve to fucking know!"
Alex can't argue with that, and cant fight the pleading look on Annabel's doll-like face. So, she starts at the beginning: High school, her diagnosis, how different everything became when she started taking the medication. But when the words come, she can't stop. Suddenly she's purging her soul, confessing all the things she had hidden away. Annabel's eyes grow wide as Alex admits to going from one extra pill a day, to three...and then four...and then she lost count the night she stayed up to finish her painting.
When Alex looks up, Annabel is seething. She scrambles to her feet and yells, "you could have fucking killed yourself!! I-I," her whole body is shaking, her fists are curled in tight to her sides. Alex has always thought of her fondly as a firecracker, but now she's a bundle of fucking dynamite.
"I can't even!!" She explodes before she slams the front door behind her, hard enough to make the coffee mugs rattle on their little hooks above the coffee-maker. Alex spends the rest of the night alone and sifting through the rubble.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Alex ends up buying some boxes at the mail center early the next morning. After her fight with Annabel, she knows that her memories are all that she will have left of her time here, and she's not willing to purge a single one. She packs the boxes carefully, tapes them closed, and addresses them to her parents house in Las Vegas. It took a painfully terse conversation on the phone with her mom to find out if she was even welcome back home. She was, at least, just until she left for rehab. After that, her mother made it clear that she was on her own.
