Today is my twenty-first birthday.

My relatives are all over for dinner and my grandma is drinking like a fish, if fish drank scotch, and my worst aunt is badgering Dad about crystals and alternative therapies. My cheeks hurt from fake-smiling and my poor parents are doing their very best to keep the celebration from feeling like a wake and I have never been more relieved in my short, doomed life to feel the buzz of my phone on my hip. It’s Charm, of course: happy birthday!!

And then: meet me at the tower, princess.

TOWERS, LIKE WICKED fairies, are pretty rare in Ohio. We mostly have pole barns and Jesus-y billboards and endless squares of soybeans.

Roseville has a tower, though. There’s an old state penitentiary out on Route 32, abandoned in the ’60s or ’70s. Most of it is hulking brick buildings with smashed-out windows and mediocre graffiti, obviously haunted, but there’s an old watchtower standing on one corner. It should be exactly as creepy as the rest of the place, poisoned by decades of human misery and institutional injustice, but instead it looks … lost. Out of time and place, like a landlocked lighthouse. Like a fairy tale tower somehow washed up on the shores of the real world.

It’s where I always planned to die, in my morbid preteen phase. I imagined I would dramatically rip the IVs from my veins and limp down the county road, suffocating in my own treacherous proteins, collapsing Gothic-ly and attractively just as I reached the highest room. My hair would fan into a black halo around the bloodless white of my face and whoever found me would be forced to pause and sigh at the sheer picturesque tragedy of the thing. Eat your heart out, Rackham.

God, middle schoolers are intense. I no longer plan to make anyone discover my wasted body, because I’m not a monster, but I still visit the tower sometimes. It’s where I went after high school to ditch track practice and get high with Charm; it’s where I made out for the first time (also with Charm, before I instituted dying girl rule number #3); it’s where I go when I can’t stand to be in my own house, my own skin, for another second.

I switch off the headlights and coast the last quarter mile down Route 32, because the old penitentiary is technically private property upon which trespassers will be shot, and park in the grass. I pop my eight o’clock handful of pills and make my way down the rutted lane that leads to the old watchtower.

I’m not surprised to see the orange flicker of light in the windows. I figure Charm dragged a few of our friends—her friends, if we’re being honest—out here for a party, rather than hosting it in the hazardous waste zone she calls an apartment. I bet she brought red plastic cups and a half keg because she wants me to have a legit twenty-first-birthday experience, completely ignoring the fact that alcohol interferes with at least three of my meds, because that’s the kind of friend she is.