Page 63 of The Narrow

I shake my head violently and immediately feel dizzy. “Don’t let it in. If you let it in, she gets in too.” I grip her arm. She needs to understand. I can’t see Maeve again, not tonight. I don’t know if I’ll survive it.

“Okay. Everybody shower, I guess,” Veronica says.

She helps me strip down, then gets undressed herself. She has to step into the shower with me to help me wash my hair, and my face goes bright red. “I used to be in love with you,” I tell her as she kneads shampoo through my hair. When her fingers touch my scalp, they set off pulses of pain.

“I know,” Veronica says lightly. “You fall in love with all your friends. It’s kind of a beautiful thing about you.”

I make a noise of protest, but she’s right. How could I not be in love with them a little? They’re all so incredible.

“It’s tragic that I’m so completely straight. We’d be an amazing couple,” she says.

“You’re an amazing couple,” I mutter, and give a snort-laugh. “That didn’t make sense.”

“That’s because you are epically out-of-your-mind drunk for some ungodly reason. You’re supposed to be the sensible one.”

“I thought I was the sneaky one.”

“You can be both,” she tells me, and then she’s shutting off the water and wrapping me up in a towel.

I whimper as my head throbs, and she moves more gently as she helps me into sweats. The three of them herd me down the hall and into my room.

“This is actually pretty nice,” Ruth notes.

“Is the Fournier girl up there?” Zoya half whispers.

“Where the hell else would she be? She can’t leave,” Ruth says at full volume, and Zoya hushes her.

Veronica ignores them. She walks me straight to bed and makes me lie down while I am still slurring my apologies. The roomspins insistently around me. Their voices murmur in the living space, and then Veronica appears again with a glass of water. “Sit up.”

I obey. She pushes the water into my hand and then looks over toward the door.

“Did you find any ibuprofen?”

“Not exactly.” Ruth comes in and hands Veronica something. I squint. It’s the ibuprofen bottle. The one I stored the pills in.

Crap.

“What are these?” Veronica asks. She has a pill in her palm.

“Nothing,” I say, shaking my head, but Ruth is holding out her phone with a matching image on it. Trust her to know how to quickly look up a pill by its appearance. Stupid brilliant premed friends.

“Why do you have these?” Veronica asks.

I don’t answer.

“Did you take one of these? And then get drunk?”

“I didn’t take one,” I say. Or did I? I have a sudden memory of downing a pill before I left, but that was yesterday, right? “How many are there?”

“Two,” Ruth says.

That’s not right. I had six. I’ve taken three. Right? “I can’t remember.”

“Fuck, Eden,” Veronica says. “What were you thinking? Why do you evenhavethese?”

A wild laugh bubbles up in the back of my throat. I hold it in, and it turns into a horrible kind of whine.

“She’s completely out of it,” Ruth says, equal parts disgusted and concerned.

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