Addiction (Book One of the Addiction Series)

Chapter 1

The sun is too bright as I step out into the parking lot of the St. Kolbe Rehabilitation Center. It hurts my eyes. It makes me curl in on myself like a shriveled old prune. I feel like I'm dying, but this is just the beginning. Next comes my parents picking me up and telling me I look great, without ever once asking how I feel because they don't want to have to acknowledge that something is terribly wrong with me. Then comes school, where I will be a pariah, being mocked openly and behind my back by people I don't even know and avoided like the plague by people who I once called my friends. After that will come everything else, but I just can't see myself getting there quite yet.

So I just put one foot in front of the other until I make it to a bench in front of the building. I make an "oof" sound as I sit down. Everything hurts. I have been detoxing for a week and now I feel weak and fragile, like I'm about to crumble into dust and blow away. But maybe that would be better. That way I wouldn't have to face everything else.

My parents arrive their usual five minutes late, and my bones make a series of crackles and pops as I stand up to go to the car. I sound like a ninety-year-old, but I am just sixteen. I feel much, much older, though, even older than my parents, who are smiling at me like they're picking me up from camp instead of an addiction clinic. But I can still see the worry behind their eyes. Is she really better?, they wonder. Are we safe?

I get in the backseat and shut the door.

When we get home, my younger sister, Lily, is waiting on the front porch. She is smiling too, but more nervously. She waits until I reach the porch to greet me; she gives me the stiff, obligatory hug of a relative you haven't seen since the last family reunion ten years ago. I've only been gone seven days, but she doesn't know me anymore. She tells me that she cleaned my room while I was gone. I tell her thanks. Later I will feel guilty again about what I did to her, but right now all I feel is numb.

I just want to go to my room and sleep for ten years, but we have to have a family dinner first. We all sit around the table in awkward silence, broken only by a few strained attempts at polite conversation by the others, especially Mom. She comments on the weather, about how I couldn't have picked a nicer day to come home, as if I had a choice in the matter. As we settle into silence again, I look at Lily across the table. She has been sitting there all her life: ten years as my kitchen table counterpart. She is eating a roll in tiny bites, tearing it into itty bitty pieces and placing each of them, one by one, into her mouth like a little bird. I try not to look at the scar on her cheek, or the crack going up the wall behind her. They are both shaped like lightning.

I pick at my steak and potatoes until they are about half gone, then I ask to be excused. Pain and disappointment flash through my parents' eyes, but they say I can go. I head to my room down the hall and close the door as I let out the breath I have been holding for over an hour. Finally, I am alone.

Lily did a great job cleaning my room. All the food wrappers and crumpled papers on the floor have been cleared away, exposing a faded purple carpet and a freshly-made twin-sized bed. My school backpack is sitting neatly atop my now-neat desk beside my freshly Windexed laptop, and my shoes are all lined up against the wall on the far side of the room. Even those have been cleaned.

There is a card on top of my pillow. It's homemade. I pick it up and read it. Then I sit down on the bed and cry.