Mom thought it was depression, and she found weed and booze in my room around New Year’s, so that’s the stuff she thought I was into. I don’t think they imagined I could be such a loser. To pop pills after all those assemblies at school, all those years of drinking Mom’s homemade kombucha. I let her believe it was just booze and weed, just too much partying. I started going to Dr. Brown, who is about as fun as her name sounds. But after what happened at the clinic in March, I told Mom and Dad everything. There was detox, group after school, random drug testing, and Dr. Fucking Brown. I got sober. Got good. Even though I didn’t feel normal without the pills. Not right. Fuzzy.

I did summer school so I could still start my senior year, graduate on time. Smudged myself with sage and went to Mom’s yoga classes. Told her to go to Malaysia because I promise I’m fine, it’s all good, and yes I’ll go to meetings and yes Cynthia can check on me and we all know Mae will watch me like a hawk even though she pretends not to. So Mom went. To Malaysia.

You should totally go, Mom. I’m fine. I want you to go. You deserve a break.

And now I’m sitting on my maybe-dead parents’ bathroom floor, thinking about stealing my maybe-dead dad’s Vicodin.

I can see myself in Mom’s makeup mirror on the counter, and I tell that waste of space in the glass, “You don’t deserve them, you fucking piece of shit.”

It is so hard to do what I do next, but I do it because I deserve to hurt. I deserve to have my bones grind and scream against one another.

I told her to go. I deserve whatever’s coming to me.

So I put the pills back under the counter, behind the cleaner. Where Mom and Dad will find them, all there, when they come home.

I walk into the bedroom and I scream, loud and long and oh my God, oh my God—

“Mom!”

She is on the floor, wearing her favorite pale green yoga outfit, and she is in fish pose. She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak.

“Mommy—”

I stop halfway through my rush to her.

My mother, my beautiful mother, is lying on the ground, just her back arched so that the crown of her head is resting on the blue rug we bought together two weeks ago, her upside-down eyes staring at the wall behind her. Her chest is still.

I take a deep breath and I smell her, smell the roses. I smell the ocean.

“Hannah?” Mae is pounding up the stairs and she bursts into the room, a meteor. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

Mom sinks into the floor. Disappears. A fish, swimming to the bottom of a sapphire sea.

“Nah?”