At nine A.M., three hours past the scheduled end of my shift, I still sat charting in Trauma Room Two. Though she awaited an ICU bed, Lara Maxwell was out of the woods. Her lungs had dried out, and the heart damage appeared to have reversed after the amphetamines and cocaine (their presence confirmed on the lab tests) had cleared from her system.

The nurse had stepped out to restock the carts, leaving me alone in the room with Lara. She lay peacefully on her back. Wires, IV lines, and tubes ran to and from her, but medical gadgetry aside, she now looked like a typical fourteen-year-old. Tall and gangly with budding breasts and a few scattered pimples, she teetered at that awkward stage between childhood and adulthood. But her high cheekbones and full lips guaranteed she was going to mature into a beauty, providing she survived adolescence.

Documenting Lara’s rocky drug-induced ride along the brink of death, the frustration welled. Sleep deprived and adrenaline tanks empty, my temper control (shaky at the best of times) failed me. “Fourteen years old!” I snapped at the still-comatose teen. “What the hell were you doing at a rave, Lara?”

I dropped my pen and walked to her bedside. I glanced from the microwave-sized ventilator (that pumped oxygen in and out of her lungs) back to Lara. Staring at her naïve face, I suppressed the urge to shake her. “This the high you were looking for?” My voice rose. “God damn it, Lara, what were you doing there?!?”

I turned at the sound of the glass door sliding behind me. Anne stood at the doorway. She eyed me with an expression that questioned my sanity. Her left arm supported a waiflike girl, whose hair was dyed inhumanly red and whose legs swayed precariously.

“Lara?” the girl choked out before her voice dissolved into sobs. She scrambled to the opposite side of the bed, nearly yanking out two IVs and toppling the ventilator in the process. She grabbed Lara’s flaccid hand and squeezed it with both of hers.

“Dr. Dafoe, this is Isabelle,” Anne said. “Lara’s older sister.”

Isabelle gaped at me. With tears and mascara streaming down her cheeks, she could have passed for an underaged drag queen. “Doctor …,” her voice wavered. “Will my sister be all right?”

I ignored her question. “You’re the one who took Lara to that club?”

“It wasn’t like that,” she sobbed. “Lara wanted to come. I had no idea that—”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen, but—”

“Not even legal yourself! What possessed you to take your little sister there?”

Isabelle held up her hands, helplessly. “She kept pushing. She was desperate to get to a rave. If I went with her, I thought it would be safer …” She dissolved into tears again.

“Safer? Safer?!? She’s your own flesh and blood. She just about died because of you. Your own sister!”