They always come back so quick.)

Articles come across her socials that relate addiction to trauma. Years before, the articles related addiction to illness, a disease like any other. Before that, she’d hear it emphasized as something that ran in a family, a risk to watch out for like cancer. And before that, she’d hear it was the Devil, and a solution might be prayer. Gemma always feels detached from these explanations. Sure, they all make some sense, but like … put it this way: if you ever asked Gemma to put an origin story on her alcoholism, she would not invoke predictive trauma or inevitable disease or unholy evil—she would simply say she had loved booze from her very first drink, and she knew from the start it was a dangerous love, and there was a point in her young life when the rationales and faith required to not nurture that love—they just all fell away. Sure. Maybe it would’ve shaken out differently in another kind of life. Gemma just isn’t sure that matters.

What Gemma thinks matters: she is an addict, and there are things addicts do. She’d seen it enough growing up. There was Tamara, who summer after grad tried to drink herself to death and was now lucky to be alive. There was Andrew from choir, who came to every practice blitzed, who turned up in the city years later on Portage guzzling God knows what, who didn’t even recognize Gemma once she explained who she used to be. There was a friend of her Opa’s, a sweet grade four teacher, who snapped when Gemma was in high school and now lived in his son’s basement, alternating between AA and boxes of wine. Some people might say it was Menno shit, or small-town shit, but Gemma knows better. None of it’s special. There’s a line in a book by Miriam Toews herself: “It’s just something that happens sometimes, a story as old as time, and this time it happened to me.”

Gemma accepted this about herself long ago. She is who she is. And Ava knows who she is. If Gemma’s fucked it up already, so be it. What Gemma will not do is listen to the whispering weightlessness telling her dark and awful things. She will wait here and talk to Ava and see it through.

Though … the way Ava had pushed past her last night. There’d been something mean about it, something mean in the way she’d touched her. There had been, she isn’t imagining that. (She’s not, right?)

It’s not like you actually know this girl that well.

Gemma can hear terse whispering now behind Ava’s bedroom door and it’s starting to wig her out. Her brain is beginning to play last night in the bathroom over and over and she has Ava’s face in her mind laughing at her and she knows that kind of laugh and she knows what that kind of meanness looks like. Gemma is very familiar with what that looks like and she sees the curtain of red beads and she sees herself hoisting her bag and walking out the door right now, she could do it if she wants to, she could just do it right now and indeed that is part of what her instincts are telling her, gas inside her ribs telling her to get out get out get out you know you won’t have the courage to do it when she’s back—