“Why’s your name Georgia if you’re from Pennsylvania?” the receptionist asks. She pictures the photograph on her mother’s mantel. The stern-lipped great-grandmother in the black velvet dress, a starched white collar tight around her neck. Georgia Maxine Standish, in little black leather shoes peeking out from under her hem, the ones that looked like they pinched her feet into hooves. The original Georgia’s disapproval filled the room, even when she was a little girl. By the time she met Josh, Georgia asked him to call her Peaches. The only way she knew how to free herself from her great-grandmother’s legacy was to make herself into a joke.

A nurse takes her to her room, starts to explain how things will work. Dizzy already, Peaches tries to think of a mantra, a phrase she can cling to when the sweats get worse and her muscles start to seize and her heart feels like it’s trying to punch its way out of her chest.

The first time she shot up was with Josh. She went first, as he helped her tighten the strap, find the vein. When she pushed the plunger she felt her nerves sing. Josh, though, for no reason she knew, decided not to get high that day. Looking back now, it’s like he led her to a cliff, wanting her to see the view, then shoved her off the edge. Last time she heard from him, he was living down in Tampa, working at some marina where rich people spilled champagne all over the decks of their boats. The nurse is still talking, but Peaches only catches every other word. Doctors, therapy, seizures. The blinds are half-open, making stripes of sunlight on her bed. In the photograph on the opposite wall, a sunrise’s beams of light reaches toward the earth like fingers. She knows it is supposed to be inspirational, but she finds it insulting. Even after she detoxed, after she wrung her guts of the drugs and talked her mouth dry in therapy, her future was not a fucking sunrise. Every day, she’d grit her teeth against the desire to use herself up. To fail just like her namesake great-grandmother had known she would.