In the wind of a coming storm, stoplights swung like they might let go, jump. I pulled in the driveway just before the rain. The house was lit up and unlocked. Men’s boot prints over the threshold, and all around her bed. Her bed where she had slept too deep. Her water glass. Her pills, the patch, which had not killed her. Her pumice stone and nail polish. I had imagined I would slough dead skin from her heels, shave her legs, brush her hair. I thought I would make up for how I’d left her by measuring meds, counting every forward step she made, using my Blaze money to pay off her hospital stay and take her somewhere new, somewhere she had always wanted to travel. I had imagined this would salvage something, the start of a new story. Instead, I had slapped her. Did you take anything? I had yelled. It was the last thing I said before the men came and took her, wasn’t it?

I peed and thought, I’m peeing and she’s dead. I washed my hands and the thought repeated. Every surface I touched, every room I checked, echoed without her. Rain hit the windows in streaks. I took off my shoes and climbed into her bed, put myself where she had been, put my phone on her nightstand, reached for her pills. I shook out two Dilaudid, swallowed with her water, listened to the storm until the pills dissolved and I slept.

TO THE SAME impossible world, I woke. I was alone. I was 100,000 followers. I was 30,000 hearts, two hundred and eighty-eight DMs. I watched the screen where they lived, but I didn’t read the messages they left there. Instead, I killed my mother’s water, googled her pills, shook out an Ativan, and swallowed. And waited, scrolling my photos folder to get back to Leah, her candy aisle smile, stripped and open; in the last image, her guarded, sexy pout. I remembered how it had angered me, to see her find the expression, and wear it.

I opened Facetune and went to work on her picture. I left her waist as it was but developed her hips. I snatched her jawline, made her skin matte, her lips fuller, her eyes fox-wide and whiter. I arranged the final image in the square of a fresh Instagram post. For a caption I wrote: “BEST FRIEND FOREVER! Follow @LeahReid #bestie.” I shared. The Ativan kicked in and I slept. When I woke, Leah’s account, chosen by mine, had grown from 365 followers, to 2,700. “Dude, my Instagram is blowing up,” she had texted. “My gift to you,” I typed but didn’t send. I couldn’t bear to omit the truth or to tell it. Instead, I composed a message to Jake. “Hey,” is all I wrote. “Baby,” he replied, “come back.”

That was how I left again.

25.