Page 7 of Escaping Our Reality

He shakes his head and quickly downs the rest of his beer, anger and frustration consuming his every feature. He raises his arm over his head and throws the beer bottle from the second-story balcony like he’s pitching in the last inning of the World Series. A small scream rushes my lips as I rise forward in my seat, just in time to see the brown bottle crash into the open mouth of a large dumpster below. The explosive shatter echoes through the night, and I sigh, just glad Caleb didn’t hit some straggling pedestrian or animal.

“A drug addict. She’s addicted to drugs. Prescription drugs. Well, notlegalprescriptions,” he clarifies.

“I don’t understand. Carrie doesn’t do drugs.”

Caleb glances over and looks at me with complete and utter sympathy. He stares at me like I’m nothing more than a naïve adolescent with ‘sunshine and rainbows’ syndrome.

He should know better. Carrie should have taught him better.

I stopped believing in sunshine and rainbows a long time ago.

“She does. You name it, she does it. Oxy, Vicodin, Percocet. Hell, even fucking Ritalin.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “It can’t be. I would know. I would see the signs. We’re togetherallthe time.” It hurts to even talk. It feels like I just drank hot tar. “How? When?”

“After her surgery.”

My mind churns. About a year and a half before she vanished, Carrie had a terrible fall from her bicycle and completely shredded her knee. She broke her patella and tore her ACL and had to have surgery with extensive physical therapy afterward. The surgery that Phillip did. Carrie, Phillip, and Dad had been out riding together with their normal cycling club when it happened.

“She got addicted to the pain medication and she can’t stop.” He tosses his hands in the air, not sure what tense to use. “Couldn’t stop.” He sighs deeply. “She wouldn’t stop.”

I find myself rubbing my scar again, lost in thought. I quickly pull my hands into my lap. Carrie’s always trying to break me of that bad habit. I’m surprised I even realized I was doing it.

“You have to be mistaken, Caleb. She had pain killers after surgery, sure, but she stopped taking them all within a month after surgery.”

“You’re wrong. That’s when the doctor stopped prescribing them. That’s not when she stopped taking them.”

I simmer on his words, letting them seep into my subconscious. Is that right? Is my sister a druggie? “Carrie doesn’t act like a drug addict. She doesn’t look all strung out and dirty and nasty. She takes care of me.”

Caleb stares at nothing in particular. “Of course, she doesn’t look like an addict.” He closes his eyes and sighs softly. “She’s fucking gorgeous.” His voice cracks with emotion, and I find myself involuntarily consoling him.

I give his forearm a gentle squeeze, giving him just a moment before I pepper him with questions. “I don’t understand. How’d she get them? She’d never ask Dad, and no one else at the practice would risk their medical license for that kind of stuff. There’s like...a thousand forms to sign where you promise not to go against doctor’s orders on your meds.”

“At first, I wasn’t sure where she got them. Or if she got them at all. I’d see her taking one, and she’d just say, ‘Oh, I had a few left in the bottle.’ That went on for months. I think her addiction started slow. Like only getting high once or twice a week. But, that one bottle was like a clown pulling scarves out of his sleeve. It just kept going and going. One night, I found a stash of pills in her purse. She had them in that tin mint container.” He points to me. “What’s the one you hate?”

“Altoids.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, I confronted her about them. She told me that she was still having pain so she got some pills from a friend. She promised she wouldn’t do it again. A few months later, I walked in on her buying pills from one of my fraternity brothers. I beat the shit out of him and told Carrie that she had to stop or I would go to your parents. Everything was good after that, or so I thought. I thought I had her back. But I was wrong. She just got better at hiding it.”

He stops and doesn’t say anything, but I can tell there’s more to the story, so I don’t interrupt. Eventually, he starts again. “There’s more, Ella.” He shakes his head. “She’s not just a user, she’s a dealer too.”

“What!”

“That’s why I broke up with her. I found out she was selling.”

“Selling? Selling to who?”

“Just some people at school,” he says with a shrug. “I’m not sure who all it was, but I do know at least to Catie, Hannah, and Dakota.”

“What! Are you serious?”

“Yep. That’s how I found out. Catie apparently couldn’t pay one day so she made a pass at me. Said she’d sleep with me in exchange for me stealing some Oxy and Ritalin from Carrie.”

“Are you kidding?”

He drags his hand over his face. “I wish I was.”

My body feels like it’s on fire. A burning, scorching mess of confusion, anger, and denial. I put the cool water bottle against my sizzling forehead and rub it around. “And the gas station is where she can get drugs?”

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