My fingers are numb and it’s impossible to get my coat on and I drop my purse and now everything’s on the floor fuck and I get on my knees and then Drew is there, surrounded by lipstick and tissues and pens and gum wrappers, and his arms are around me and he is holding me together.

“I wish you could see what I can,” he whispers. “You’re great. Just Hannah is my favorite Hannah.”

“That makes zero sense. All you’ve seen me do is get high and ditch school and buy drugs.”

“No. That’s all you see. I see someone who’s keeping a horrible secret about her dead father so that her sister doesn’t have to hold that. Someone who is delighted by the world, when she lets herself enjoy it—who sees how beautiful a leaf or an old statue can be. Who isn’t afraid to say a party is lame. Who is like some tarot sorceress. You don’t pretend to be someone you’re not and couldn’t care less about your fucking brand on social or what anyone thinks of you. You’re basically a revolutionary in the making! Do you know you’re the only person I sell to who actually talks to me? Sees me as a person?” He tips my jaw up with his fingers and I look into his eyes and I know he’s telling me the truth. “You’re fucking awesome.”

I never knew a dirty kitchen floor could feel like a temple or that a boy wearing a faded Dropkick Murphys shirt could be its high priest.

I tighten my hands around his shoulders because it feels like the planet is off balance, which Mae would say is impossible, but I can feel it, I can feel the center sliding away. “I don’t know what to say.”

I think he really means what he said. But that doesn’t sound like me at all.

“You don’t have to say anything. It’s bullshit that you had to wait seventeen years to hear it. From me, of all people.”

“Right now, you’re all the people.” I swallow, the right words stuck in my throat. “I think you might be the only friend I have, Drew.”

He sucks in a breath, and I sag against him, and I say the thing I haven’t been able to say to anyone, not ever. Not even to myself.

“I had an abortion in March, and I didn’t want to.”

Drew looks down, his eyes dark, like what I said has filled them with midnight-blue ink.

He looks in me. Not at me or through me. He sees all of me, and he doesn’t turn away.

He keeps looking.

And that look is medicine.

Not a pill. So much better.

He sees me.