I had to get help, he said. I can’t carry you. I love you, he said. But. I can’t carry you. Sometimes, he said, you’re too much. I can’t carry you.

I’m that astronaut, floating away to cowboy music.

I had my first pill with Micah. Summer before junior year. A little over one year ago. We said it would be for special occasions.

But it made me so happy. So we decided: weekends. Only on the weekends. We’d lie on the beach all day after he was done surfing or late at night. Percocet, mostly. Hydrocodone. Vicodin. Whatever he could get from kids at school who had the hookup. But he didn’t really like it. Preferred weed. And he didn’t like when I was on it. Said I was too out of it. And it made me not want to be with him. In that way.

So we stopped taking the pills. He thought we stopped. But I wanted to go back to the moon. I asked around on the boardwalk—you can get anything there—and Priscilla, she got them for me. Percs, usually. Hydro sometimes. Oxy on a really good day. The money wasn’t a problem, since I had a job and whatever I made was for me to do with as I pleased. Plus I had tons of savings from all those big birthday checks from Gram and Papa. If you have two parents with good jobs who love each other and you, then being a junkie is the easiest thing in the world. I knew this. Even before I went to the Circle of Sad and that boy talked about what he had to do to get his pills. And the girl who couldn’t stop crying because she stole from her sister, who was a single mom on benefits. Spend enough time on the boardwalk and you see the kind of bartering people do for their diamonds.

I took the pills at night, when I was alone. Not every night, at first. Usually when Micah had to work and we didn’t hang out and when I felt like I needed to get away from myself.

I felt sad and the pills made me happy. Simple as that.

But then a couple nights became every other night, then every night. By Valentine’s Day, seven months after stealing my grandma’s pills, I was on them all the time. It happened so fast. It’s not like I planned that. It just … happened.

Mom and Dad weren’t idiots. They knew something was up. I’d failed most of my classes the first semester of junior year and stopped hanging out with anyone but Micah, stopped going to the bonfires he would have with the other surfers on the beach, and I lost my job at the coffeehouse because it was so hard to concentrate. To care.