The wheelchair was overkill. A dramatic flourish, whether intended as a final act to flaunt the hospital’s commitment to patient care, or else one last uppercut of deprivation—in this case, the simple dignity of walking—sixteen-year-old Henry wasn’t sure.

The nurse barely looked up to tell him, “Hospital policy.” Not that Henry had the energy to do anything besides comply, but still. With all the other inpatient kids gawking from the TV room, he would have liked to turn his back on them and march away on his own two feet.

Whatever. Any spit-in-their-face, teenage tough-guy resistance to authority had been smothered out of him by the end of the very first group session anyway. The fuse to his self-destructive streak had been extinguished, pissed on by all the horror stories of abuse, abandonment, rape, and incest that his circle mates shared. In that ring of junkies, survivors, psychotics, and the mousy girl with the shadow teeth, Henry’s own grief shrank down to pettiness. A black marble, a child’s plaything. His rebel veneer had stretched and ripped like cheap cellophane, exposing nothing but a lonely, bitter kernel.

Even the pretext for his two-week incarceration had been infantilized, sugarcoated in cliché. Rather than the accidental overdose of a tortured artist or feral rock star, the counselors had downgraded his brush with death to a cry for help. Henry’d been too exhausted to indignantly uphold his commitment to oblivion. Or maybe he’d kept his mouth shut because the demotion wasn’t that far from the truth. He’d always had something to prove. All his partying—the chugging, snorting, freebasing—had been zealous to the point of theatrics. Maybe all his hammy thunder had simply been an attempt to dislodge that bitter kernel. Either way, it had certainly been bound to catch up with him.

Which it did, two weeks ago. A forty-eight-hour meth bender with the skinnies. After a pint of vodka had failed to steady, let alone slow, his marrow-deep tremors and molar grinding, a mix-and-match palmful of whatever painkillers and benzos the others were willing to part with seemed like a swell idea. A gulp. A wink. A minute, and after thirty more, the shivers went still and Henry went under.