Lifeline

by Abbey Lee Nash

  Savannah fixes me with one of her are-you-lying stares that makes it hard to hold her gaze. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I guess you do look pretty tired.” Savannah relaxes in my arms. “You have sleep lines on your cheek.”

  I stifle a yawn, and she giggles. “I’m still mad at you,” she says, but her eyes tell me otherwise.

  I press my mouth to her ear, breathing in her smell, starburst sweet, and whisper that I’ll make it up to her. She sighs, but pushes me off. “C’mon,” she says, grabbing my hand and tugging me toward the steps. “Everybody’s inside. I can’t leave Katie by herself.”

  Katie is Savannah’s latest project, a freckle-spattered strawberry blonde she’s been trying to set up with Chase since Winter Formal.

  I groan. “Freckles is a big girl. Can’t she take care of herself?”

  “It’s Katie,” Savannah snaps, shooting me a look.

  I let her pull me inside.

  There are at least fifty kids in the house. Bodies press together in corners and sprawl on couches. A beer pong tournament is in full swing. Chase is already up to bat, draining a red plastic cup. Freckles hangs off his arm. In the kitchen, the granite countertops are lined with empty glass bottles, and Alex is going ape-shit because somebody drank his dad’s beers from Hong Kong.

  “Gimme that!” he yells at some random girl I vaguely recognize from Pre-Calc. He snatches a half-empty bottle from her hand and shoves her out of the kitchen. “Cans, not bottles, people! Cans, not bottles!”

  I start to inch backward out of the kitchen, but Savannah’s fingers snake around my wrist and hold tight. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she teases. “I’m not letting you out of my sight tonight.”

  “There he is!” Alex shouts, noticing me for the first time. “The man of the hour!” He scrambles up onto the kitchen island, clapping his hands together until everybody’s looking at him. “Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight we celebrate our first win of the season, against none other than the muthafucking Wolves!”

  The crowd in the kitchen roars.

  “And who do we have to thank for that?” Alex bellows.

  The tips of my ears are on fire. Savannah leans in, tucks her arm around my waist.

  “Raise your drink with me,” Alex continues, “as we celebrate the man . . . the legend . . . Eli Ross!” He spins around to face me, almost falling off the island. Somebody hands him a red cup, and he holds it up, beer sloshing over the lip. “To Eli!”

  “To Eli!” the crowd in the kitchen echoes.

  Alex jumps down. He slides a beer down the counter toward me. “E-li!” He claps his hands against the counter, urging the crowd to follow suit. “E-li, E-li . . .”

  Savannah gives me an apologetic smile, and I crack open the can.

  The chant quickly changes. “Chug! Chug! Chug!”

  I slam three beers, one after the other, until the chorus changes into cheers and applause, and the room tips slightly out of focus. Savannah tugs on my arm. “Alright, alright,” she says, pushing back the fourth beer that Alex places in front of me. “That’s enough.”

  The crowd groans, but they let me go, clapping me on the back as Savannah pulls me out of the kitchen. Somebody hands me a red cup. It’s cheap piss-water keg beer, but I toss it back and ask for another.

  Savannah leads me into the crowded living room. It’s commercial-perfect, with white couches and glass-topped tables. It wouldn’t last ten minutes with Benny around. And judging from the swaying brunette waving around a red wine cooler, it might not last the night.

  Guys from the team shout my name, punch my shoulder as they pass. Across the room, Freckles is sucking on Chase’s neck, and he lifts his vodka bottle to salute me. I’m the man of the hour, the fucking king of LionsHeart. So why do I feel like a fraud?

  Alex’s family portrait hangs above the fireplace. His mom and two older sisters. Alex and his dad wearing the same deep tan, the same starched blue button-down. All of them shooting Crest-white smiles at the camera. The picture-perfect family.

  My family doesn’t have any pictures like that, all four of us smiling together. Steven’s living room is a Benny Museum. There’s a picture of the day Benny was born, another of his first day of preschool. There’s even a snapshot memorializing the one day he played soccer before he decided he didn’t like it anymore. The only pictures of me are from before Steven, back when it was just Mom and me, and I was all the family she needed. The rest are boxed up in the attic somewhere, along with anything else that might remind her of my father. His old lacrosse stick. A weathered baseball glove. Everything’s hidden away, like he never existed at all.

  Somebody bumps into me and I stumble, sloshing beer on the hardwood. Suddenly I’m suffocating. There are too many people, too many bodies to move through, too many faces getting in mine. I’m fucking drowning in bodies.

  “I need some air,” I tell Savannah.

  Cigarette smoke hovers over the deck like storm clouds.

  I lean against the wooden railing, sucking cold air into my lungs.

  Savannah presses a cool palm against my clammy cheek. “Are you okay?”

  I shake my head. I’m not okay. Not even a little bit.

  She leans against me, and I love the way her chin fits right in the spot below my collar bone. I kiss her on the forehead, I’m sorry. Because she can’t make me feel better, but I know exactly what will.

  “I’ll be right back,” I whisper.

  She pulls me closer, because she knows what I’m going to do, and she doesn’t want me to. “Stay with me,” she says, her fingers trailing the waistband of my jeans. “We can go upstairs for a little bit, okay?”

  I hesitate, but then the glass door to the patio slides open so hard it rattles the frame. Freckles is a dark shadow in the doorway, twin black lines streaking down her face like train tracks.

  “Katie,” Savannah gasps. She starts toward the door, then turns and holds out a hand like a crossing guard. “Stay there,” she commands. “I’ll be right back.”

  I nod, because you can’t lie when you don’t say anything. And because a few minutes alone is all I need. Savannah wraps her arms around Freckles, and they disappear together into the haunted fun house of lights and smoke and music. I slip down the deck steps and through the bushes to the front of the house.

  2:30 AM

  The air outside hums with music. All the lights in the house are on. If Alex’s parents have gotten any smarter since the infamous rager we threw after Winter Formal, the neighbors are on the lookout for suspicious activity. Everything inside me says we’re going to get busted any minute, and I have the worst possible timing in the world.

  But right now, I don’t care about the neighbors or the cops or even Savannah. I just . . . WANT.

  A couple of minutes are all I need. And then I’ll get Savannah out of the house, tell her to get home before the shit hits the fan. Just a couple of minutes.

  I scrounge under my seat for the empty CD case, then reach into the glove compartment for the Burger King straw I’ve cut down to size. I hook a finger under the mat and feel around for the baggie. My phone buzzes in my pocket, but I ignore it. Sweat beads on my upper lip.

  I crack open a pill, sprinkle it onto the plastic case. It doesn’t look like very much, definitely not enough, so fuck it, I crack open another.

  My hands shake as I cut the powder with my driver’s license, scrape it into twin tracks.

  A distant siren sounds.

  Hurry, hurry.

  There’s yelling from the house, and somebody’s turned off the music.

  I prop the case on my knee, duck my head, and snort the powder through the straw.

  One line. Then the other.

  I squeeze my eyes shut until the burn in my nostrils fades to a steady chemical drip at the back of my throat, and the surge of heat spreads through my frozen body like liquid sunshine.

  A siren screams; blue and red stars
light up the night. Bodies flood out of Alex’s house like it’s on fire.

  I shut my eyes and lean back against my seat.

  The noise from the house fades. My body melts like crayons in the sun, colors merging in a puddle of rainbow wax. And I . . .

  . . . can’t . . .

  . . . feel . . .

  . . . anything.

  3:00 AM

  4:00 AM

  5:00 AM

  My eyes crack open, just slits, but the light that comes in is a fluorescent torch. Everything hurts. My chest burns like I’m breathing pool water. Every inhale is agony. A noise comes out of my mouth, something like a groan, and then all of a sudden this face is hovering over me—purple eye shadow and a shock of shorn blue hair.

  “Well, look who’s starting to wake up!” she says, way too loud, like I’m 90,000 years old and deaf. “Are you gonna be nice this time?”

  This time?

  “Eli?” The voice that calls my name is so familiar it hurts, but the sound is lost in the lights and the pain and the little blue-haired fairy that’s flitting back and forth around me, her mouth running 1000 mph.

  “You were a real beast when the naloxone kicked in, I tell you what. I know how bad it can hurt, but you put up the biggest fight I’ve seen in a while. Gave your last nurse a black eye. That’s when we had to put you in restraints. If you’re gonna be good now, I’ll take ‘em off.”

  Restraints? I flex my fingers, try to move my arms, but they’re buried under a mountain of sand. My legs don’t move either, and suddenly I can’t breathe at all. I twist and strain until my wrists and ankles are on fire, and the blue fairy is freaking out, but I don’t care, I’m not listening.

  The fairy grips my arm with tiny talons and bites down hard. Venom rushes through me, warm and fuzzy, dragging me under.

  9:00 AM

  There’s something sticking out of my dick.

  I feel it in the way you feel somebody trying to wake you up when it’s 6:30, and your alarm was set for 5:45, and all you want to do is sleep for five more minutes.

  Just five more minutes.

  But this thing in my dick is persistent. It pinches, and I wonder how it got there, and who the hell was down there anyway?

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  The air is an acrid mixture of chlorine and piss, like the locker room at the pool. I’m afraid to open my eyes.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  “His EKG is the best I’ve seen after a code in a long time.” There’s a man in the room, and he’s talking, but not to me. “Still, don’t let that crash cart wander too far. Never know with narcotics.”

  Beep.

  Footsteps. A door clicks closed. I crack open my eyes. The light burns, and my vision floods with water. I blink, and slowly the room comes into blurry focus.

  The man who’s talking stands at the foot of my bed. He’s wearing a white coat and a stethoscope. A doctor. But why is there a doctor in my room, and why does my room smell like chlorine, and where the hell is that awful beeping coming from?

  “Can somebody shut off my alarm?” I ask, but my voice doesn’t sound like me. It comes out scratched and croaky like I’m floating belly up. Which is actually a pretty good description of how I’m feeling at the moment, like a truck backed over my ribcage.

  The doctor’s face is suddenly hovering too close to mine. “Eli, can you hear me?” he asks. “Do you know where you are?”

  My heart starts to pound. I scan the part of the room I can see over the doctor’s head. Curtains where a wall should be. And a TV screwed to a metal frame. “Am I . . . in the hospital?”

  “Yes,” the doctor says, like I just aced the oral part of the exam. “You’re in our ICU. Do you know why you’re here?”

  I’m sweating now, and my heart is racing for real, because all at once the pieces are coming back to me. The game. The party at Alex’s. Savannah leaving me on the deck. Getting into my car. The pills. The sirens . . .

  And then it doesn’t matter that I’m in the hospital because I may or may not have been unconscious. The only thing that matters this second, the single most important thought that explodes in my brain like fireworks is this:

  I. Am. Busted.

  “Please,” I say, because it’s very, very important that this dude listens to me. I grip his coat, straining to lift my head from my pillow, but there’s a screaming pain in my chest, and the water in my eyes isn’t because of the light anymore. “Please, no matter what you do, please don’t tell my mom. Oh, god, don’t tell my mom.”

  The doctor doesn’t say anything. He gives me a pitying look and pats my chest real soft.

  Another face hovers over mine. And I realize why the doctor looked at me like that. It’s too late. My mom’s here, but she’s not yelling. She’s crying. She’s touching my face and my hair, and then she lays her head on my chest, forehead to sternum, and she’s crying so hard. And that’s when I know, oh, god, I know. My mom’s been here the whole time.

  My wrists are red and sore, and my hands land heavily on the back of Mom’s head. Her hair’s matted at the back like she just woke up, and then I realize she’s wearing pajamas. I am the worst son in the world.

  “Mom,” I say in a horrible, sandpaper voice that I’m still not sure belongs to me.

  She peers up at me, the skin around her eyes all blotchy and red, and her cheeks streaked with tears.

  “Mom, I fucked up. I fucked up so bad.”

  Mom wraps my hands in hers and kisses them until my fingers are all wet. The doctor clears his throat. “I’m going to need to ask you a few questions, Eli,” he says. “Would you like your mom to leave the room?”

  Mom straightens, snuffles, wipes her cheeks with her open palms.

  “She can stay,” I say, dreading what’s coming next.

  “Are you aware of what’s happened, son?” The doctor’s an older guy, with heavy gray streaks through what’s left of his brown hair. His collar’s open, and a frond of gray chest hair peeks out.

  I nod. “I think so.”

  “So you’re aware that you experienced an overdose?”

  Mom makes a pitiful sound, something between a sob and a cough, and she grabs my hand and squeezes.

  “Yes,” I say, because I am now.

  “What do you remember about last night?”

  I close my eyes, because what I remember and what I’m going to say to this dude are two entirely different things, especially with my mom sitting right here next to me. “Not much,” I tell him.

  Doc clears his throat again, commanding my full attention. My knuckles are scratched, nearly white from how hard I’m squeezing Mom’s hand. Or how hard she’s squeezing mine.

  “Were you, or have you ever considered, attempting suicide?”

  A sound comes out of me, almost a laugh. “What, like killing myself? You think that’s what happened last night?”

  Doc’s face is a mask of seasoned indifference. “Is it?”

  What’s with this guy? Not everybody gets high because they secretly want to off themselves. I mean, sure, the thought had crossed my mind a time or two, in the really dark days after Dad died. But that’s normal, right? Plus, it was a long time ago. Before LionsHeart and Savannah. I use because I like how it makes me feel, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have boundaries. Needles never touch my skin—that’s how you end up dead or in the hospital. Not from snorting every now and then. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  I meet Doc’s tired eyes. “Absolutely not,” I say, and Mom’s whole body exhales.

  “How often would you say you use?” Doc asks.

  The answer flies out of my mouth without an ounce of hesitation. “This was the first time. It was stupid, I know. I fucked up.”

  Doc’s mouth presses into a thin line. “Is that really the answer you want to stick with?”

  The only thing I want is to get the hell out of here. I want a h
andful of Advil and a gallon of Gatorade. I want my car, my phone. I want to call Chase. “I promise,” I tell him. “This was the first time.”

  Doc and Mom exchange a look that’s filled with silent conversation.

  “I swear, Mom.” I sandwich her hands between mine. “I learned my lesson, and I’ll never do it again, I swear.”

  Mom lifts her free hand to my face. She pushes back my hair, and her fingers trace the scar on my eyebrow, the way she used to when I was little and wanted my dad. She’d sit beside my bed and stroke my hair and touch my scar with feather fingers. She’d tell me that we had each other no matter what, and that everything was going to be okay. I can’t remember the last time she touched me like that.

  “Eli, honey,” she begins, but she’s interrupted when a nurse slides open the glass door. “Dr. Henderson,” he says, “there’s a girl in the waiting room, and she’s near hysterics. Says she’s not leaving until she sees the patient. Is it okay if I send her back?”

  Savannah.

  I don’t wait for the doctor to answer. “Yes,” I say. “Now.”

  The nurse ignores me, waits for the doctor to tip his head in agreement. “We’re almost done here,” he says.

  The nurse steps back into the hall, and the door slides closed.

  “Just a few more questions,” Dr. Henderson continues, but now all I can think about is Savannah. Was she the one who brought me here? Has she been here all night? Does her dad know?

  “Eli,” Dr. Henderson says my name impatiently. “Could you answer the question please?”

  I squint at him, because I didn’t hear the question.

  He sighs. “Is there a family history of drug or alcohol abuse?”

  I brush off his question with a shake of my head. My only family is Mom. And Benny, I guess, but he doesn’t count. “No.” What’s taking Savannah so long?