we were talking and then she said her face felt funny and then her eyes started to droop she started talking like she was drunk and then she fell down she fell down and her head hit the carpet and it made a weird noise i called 911 and the ambulance came but she wouldn’t wake up i yelled at her and i screamed at her but she wouldn’t get up

—things that no kid his age should ever have to say.

This wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. After all the things we’d been through, it couldn’t have come to this.

“When did it start?” I asked him, and he must have heard something in my voice, something different, because he looked at me like he was actually seeing me.

He struggled with what he was going to say, mouth opening and closing again, frowning and shaking his head slightly. “I don’t….”

We waited.

He looked at the evidence spread out before him for a long time. I wondered what that felt like, seeing it all there, all those empty bottles. I thought maybe he had wanted to get caught, that he’d wanted to be found out. Why else wouldn’t he have just thrown all of them away? If he had, we’d be sitting here with nothing to go on but Corey’s word, a stranger who could have just been making all this up for some unknown reason.

“Shit,” he muttered, and he buried his face in his hands.

We didn’t speak.

“It’s not as bad as you think it is,” he said, voice muffled.

“Pretty sure that’s not true,” Otter said quietly. “Especially from where we’re sitting.”

He dropped his hands. I watched as he picked at the frayed knees of his jeans, something that was supposed to be stylish but that I never understood. What was the point of buying pants that already had holes in them? The Kid had laughed at me when I’d told him as much, that little smile on his face that he got when he thought I was being a grumpy old Bear, as he called it.

“Do you know how dangerous this is?” I asked him. “What you could have done to yourself? What you have done to yourself? Mixing these drugs. Tyson. That’s not—that’s not healthy. For you. For your body. Christ. What if you’d…?” I shook my head, refusing to follow that train of thought.

“I’m not stupid,” he said, a little anger returning.

“This suggests otherwise,” I said, nodding toward the table. “In fact, this suggests you’re the stupidest you’ve ever been.”

“All right,” Otter said, over the Kid’s squawk of outrage. “Let’s not get off track. Kid. When did this start?”