‘Hannah,’ she murmurs, and I say, ‘Sorry, Grandma. It’s late. Go back to sleep.’

‘Okay, love,’ she says, and turns on her side, facing the wall, away from me, so her voice is muffled but I still hear what she says.

‘I’m glad you had fun.’

I lie in bed thinking of Ash. When I sleep at his apartment he brings me a cup of coffee in bed in the morning. He always uses the mug he knows I like best, the speckled blue one. The morning we left to pick up Grandma he brought me my coffee and sat on the edge of the bed, making up a song about Hannah and bananas from Alabama, grinning in that guileless way of his when I hit him with a pillow and told him to shut up. There is something wrong with me that I could do this to him—to us.

•

Sometimes I feel as though my life can be measured in setbacks. Steps backwards rather than forwards. Ground lost instead of gained. The freedom of moving away from home to go to college my freshman year, the scholarship I had to study at the University of Virginia, the grades and SAT scores which had gotten me there were all usurped by the after. The residence hall of other young women, the dining hall where we studied each other’s trays: how much was there, how much was left uneaten. My roommate who shared her caffeine pills and ipecac. I could stay up longer, eat less, drink more, and never had I felt so unencumbered. Those were months of being mere bone and brain. It felt good.

I was light and exceedingly free.

But I was also blacking out at parties and waking up in strange beds, strange couches, on unfamiliar floors, with boys I didn’t know—or maybe I did and couldn’t remember? I had bruises from linoleum, from closet doors, from I didn’t know what. Rug burns on my elbows, the small of my back. I was sore but I could not remember why. Still I sought obliteration. There was nothing, it seemed, my body couldn’t sustain.

Mom took one look at me when I came home for the midyear break and said I couldn’t return.

‘I thought you were better,’ she said.

‘Oh, Hannah,’ Grandma said.

‘What happened?’ Dad asked. He actually cried on the phone. He said he wished that he could help.

I told him not to worry. I told him, all of them, I was sorry for letting them down.

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 18