To Wolf, EJ was a lost brother that he had taken it upon himself to rescue. He knew that EJ had lost his way. He wasn’t always this way. EJ used to be a catcher on his high school baseball team. He had lived with the nagging pain of his parents’ divorce and the pain of never really feeling understood. It was pain that no one ever saw to begin with. He hid it beneath the bark of his popularity until he had suffered a sprain and labral tear in his shoulder. The doctor prescribed him OxyContin and when he took it, he noticed that it didn’t only take away the pain of his shoulder, it also numbed the emotional pain that he had grown accustomed to living with. For a while, he faked still being in pain and took to doctor-shopping so he could keep being prescribed his medication until he had to find another way to fuel his addiction. He bought painkillers off of other kids at school, and then he fell in with a group of other addicts who knew a dealer who could supposedly get him anything.

Once he had touched the euphoria of fentanyl, there was no going back. EJ had thrown his entire life away for the haze of opioid addiction, using again and again to avoid the agony of withdrawal.

EJ had run away from home years ago and couch-surfed before his first night on the streets. The night he ran away, he took three of his mother’s sleeping pills to try to hold him over long enough get his hands on a fix. Instead of sending him to sleep, they had put him in an altered state of mind. He put a pot of macaroni and cheese on the stove for two hours and nearly burned the house down. His girlfriend, who lived with him in his parents’ house, had woken up to the sound of the smoke alarm. When she confronted him, he found his father’s handgun and because of his inebriation, was lucky enough to shoot a bullet into the wall instead of through her. His father came downstairs before his mother did. He tackled EJ and called the police on his own son. When EJ was released from the police station, forcibly sobered up, he had no memory of the incident. He didn’t trust himself to be around people anymore. So he came back to his parents’ house just long enough to break up with his girlfriend and to collect a few of his things.

The sound of the double doors being closed when the stretcher was loaded inside the ambulance was inaudible from where Aria was standing. The flashing lights, unaccompanied by the wail of the siren, felt eerie. Aria missed the sense of urgency in the sound.