He offers me another tight smile, then looks away and starts toward the parking lot at the side of the building. I trail behind him, grasping the handle of my bag slung over my shoulder, the wind grazing my cheeks, and I note how unnatural it feels. Just like the cars driving up and down the highway that seem way too loud. Everything seems extremely intense, even the fresh air that fills my lungs.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, I make it to the car and get my seat belt secured over my shoulder. It grows quiet as my father turns on the ignition and the engine rumbles to life. Then we’re driving up the gravel path toward the highway, leaving the rehab center behind in the distance, the place that for the last couple of months protected me from the world and the pain linked to it.

I stay quiet for most of the drive home and my dad seems pretty at ease with that at first, but then abruptly he starts slamming me with simple questions like if the heat is up enough or too much, and am I hungry, because he can stop and get me something to eat if I need him to.

I shake my head, picking at a hole in the knee of my jeans. “Dad, I promise I’m okay. You don’t need to keep checking on me.”

“Yeah, but…” He struggles for what to say as he grips the steering wheel, his knuckles whitening. “But you always said you were okay in the past but then after talking to you with Charles… it just seems like you needed to talk to me but you didn’t.”

He’s probably thinking about how I told him, during one of our sessions, that I felt sort of responsible for my mother’s death because he never seemed to want to have anything to do with me. He was shocked by my revelation and I was equally shocked that he didn’t seem to have realized that’s how I felt—at how differently we saw things.

“But I promise I’m okay right now.” I ball my hands more tightly into fists the closer we get to the house. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. I can do this. The scary part is over, right? I’m sober now. “I just ate before we left and I’m warm, not hot or cold. Everything’s good. I’m good.” Which I am, for the most part.

He nods, satisfied, as he concentrates on the road. “Well, let me know if you need anything.”

“Okay, I will.” I direct my attention to the side window and watch the landscape blur by, gradually changing from trees to a field, then ultimately to houses as we pass through the outskirts of the city. Before I know it, we’re entering my old neighborhood made up of cul-de-sacs and modest homes. It’s where everything started, where everything changed, where I grew up and where I decided I was going to slowly kill myself with drugs. Each house I’ve passed a thousand times on foot, on bike, in the car, yet the surroundings feel so foreign to me and I feel so off-balance. The feeling only intensifies when we pass one of the houses I used to buy drugs from. I start wondering if they still deal or if that’s changed. What if they do? What if I have drugs right on hand? Right there? Just blocks away from where I’m living? Can I handle it? I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything at the moment, because I can’t see five minutes into the future.

My adrenaline starts pumping relentlessly and no matter how hard I try to get my heart to settle down, I can’t. It only beats faster when we pull into the driveway of my two-story home with blue shutters and white siding. I’ve been in this house more times than anywhere else in the world, yet it feels like I’ve never been here before. I’m not even sure that it ever really was my home, though, more simply a roof over my head. I’m not sure about anything anymore. Where I belong. What I should feel. Who I am.

Reborn.

But what am I going to be reborn into?

“Welcome home,” my dad says, again with a taut smile. He parks the car in front of the shut garage and silences the engine.

“Thanks.” I return his forced smile, hoping we’re not going to pretend that everything is okay to each other all the time because it’s going to drive me crazy.

He takes the keys out of the ignition while I get my bag out of the backseat, then we get out of the car and walk up the path to the front door, where he unlocks it and we step into the foyer. It hits me like a bag of bricks, slamming against my chest and knocking the wind out of me. This is bad. So bad. I needed more preparation for this. The memories, swirling in torturous circles inside my head. The good ones. The bad ones. The ones connected to my childhood. Lexi. It’s too much and I want to run out the door and track down one of my old pothead friends, see if they’re still into drugs, and if I can get something—anything—to take away the emotions swirling around inside me.

Need.

Want.

Need.

Now.

I suck in a sharp breath and then turn for the stairs, telling myself to be stronger than this. “I’m going to go unpack,” I say as I head up the stairs.

“Okay.” My dad drops the keys down on the table by the front door, below a picture hanging on the wall of my mother and him on their wedding day. He looks happy in it, an emotion I’ve rarely seen from him. “Do you want anything in particular for dinner?”

“Anything sounds good.” I remember how many days I could go without eating dinner when I was fueling my body with crystal and smack. Getting healthy was actually part of my recovery over the last two months. Exercising. Eating. Thinking healthy. I actually chose to get some tests done just to see how bad my health was, if I’d done any permanent damage to my body with the use of needles. Like HIV or hepatitis. Everything came up negative and I guess I’m grateful for it now, but at the time I felt upset because disease seemed like the easy ticket out of the hellhole coming off of heroin and meth created. I’d hoped that maybe I’d have something deadly and it’d kill me. Then I wouldn’t have to face the world and my future. My guilt. The decision between going back to a world full of drugs and living.

When I reach the top of the stairs, I veer down the hallway, walking to the end of it to my room. I enter gradually, knowing that when I get in there a lot of stuff I’ve been running from is going to emerge. I thought about asking my dad to clean everything out for me: the photos, my drawings, anything related to the past. But my therapist said it might be good for me to do it because it could be the start of giving myself closure. I hope he’s right. I hope he’s right about a lot of things, otherwise I’m going to break apart.

I hold on to the doorknob for probably about ten minutes before I get the courage to turn it and open the door. As I enter and step over the threshold, I want to run away. I’d forgotten how many pictures I had of Lexi on the walls. Not just ones I drew. Actually photos of her laughing, smiling, hugging me. The ones I’m in with her, I look so happy, so different, so free. So unfamiliar. Less scarred. I don’t even know who that person is anymore or if I’ll ever be him again.

There’s also a few pictures of my mother, ones my grandmother gave me before she passed away. Some of them were taken when my dad and mom first married, and I even have one from when she was pregnant with me, her last few months alive before she’d pass away bringing me into this world. The only pictures of her and me together. She looks a lot like me: brown hair and the same brown eyes. I was told a lot by my grandmother that we shared the same smile, but I haven’t smiled for real in ages so I’m not sure if it still looks like hers.

I manage to get a smile on my mouth as I look at a photo of her giving an exaggerated grin to the camera. It makes me feel kind of happy, which makes me sad that I’m supposed to take them down. It’s what I’ve been taught over the last few months, let go of the past. But I need just a few more minutes with them.

After I take each one in, breathing through the immense amount of emotional pain crushing me, I drop my bag onto the floor and wander over to a stack of sketches on my dresser. I lost my most recent drawings when the apartment burned down, and this is pretty much all that’s left. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. One thing’s for sure, I’m glad I don’t have any of my self-portraits. In fact, I hope I never have to see myself look the way I did two months ago. I remember when I first looked in the mirror right after I got to rehab. Skeletal. The walking dead. That’s what I looked like.

There’s a mirror on the wall to the side of me and I step up to it. I look so different now, my skin has more color to it, my brown eyes aren’t bloodshot or dazed. My cheeks are filled out instead of sunken in, my arms are lean, my whole body more in shape. My brown hair is cropped short and my face is shaven. I look alive instead of like a ghost. I look like someone I used to know and am afraid to be again. I look like Quinton.

I swallow hard and turn away from my reflection and back toward my sketches. I fan through a few of the top ones, which turn out to be of Lexi. I remember how much I used to draw her, even after she died. But during the last few months of tumbling toward rock bottom, I started drawing someone else. A person I haven’t seen in two months or talked to. Nova Reed. I haven’t talked to her since I got on a plane to go to rehab. I wrote her a few times, but then never sent the letters, too afraid to tell her everything I have to say, too terrified to express emotions I’m pretty sure I’m not ready to deal with just yet. She tried to call me a few times at the facility, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her. A month ago she wrote me a letter and it’s in the back of my notebook, waiting to be opened. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do it. Face her. Be forced to let her go if that’s what she wants. I wouldn’t blame her if she did. After everything that I put her through—having to visit me in that shithole I called home, my mood swings, the drug dealers threatening her.

Blowing out a heavy sigh, I get my notebook and a pencil out of my bag, then flop down on the bed. I open the notebook up to a clean sheet of paper and decide which I want to do more, write or draw. They’re both therapeutic, although I’m way better at drawing. After some debating, I put the pencil to the paper and start drawing. I know where it’s headed the moment I form the first line. I lost all my drawings of Nova when the apartment burned down. Not a single one remains. It’s like the memory of her is gone. But I don’t want it to be gone—I don’t want her to be gone. I want to remember her. How good she was to me. How she made me feel alive, even when I fought it. How I’m pretty sure I love her, but I’m still trying to figure that out for sure, just like I’m trying to figure out everything else, like where I belong in this world and if I belong in this world. Everyone keeps telling me yes—that I belong here. That what happened in the accident wasn’t my fault. That yes, I was driving too fast, but the other car was, too, and took the turn too wide. And that Lexi shouldn’t have been hanging out the window. And I want to believe that’s true, that perhaps it wasn’t my fault entirely. That’s the difference between now and a couple of months ago, but it’s hard to let go of something I’ve been clutching for the last two years—my guilt. I need to find a reason to let it go and to make life worth living in such a way that I don’t have to dope my body up just to make it through the day.

I need something to live for, but at the moment I’m not sure what the hell that is or if it even exists.

Chapter 2

Nova

“I sometimes sit in the quad and watch the people walk by. It probably sounds creepy but it’s not. I’m just observing. Human nature. What people do. How they act. But it’s more than that. If I look close enough, I can sometimes tell when someone is going through something painful. Maybe a breakup. Perhaps they just lost their job. Or maybe they’ve lost a loved one. Perhaps they’re suffering in silence, lost in a sea of questions, of what-ifs. Pain. Loss. Remorse.” I shift in the bench that’s centered in the quad yard as my back starts to hurt. I’ve been sitting out here for hours, recording myself, watching the people walk by. What I really want to do is run out there and stop each one. Ask them their story. Listen. Hear it. If they need consoling, I could do it. In fact, that’s what I want to do. Be able to help people. I just wish I could somehow figure out a way to do it through filming.

“Death. It’s around more than people realize. Because no one ever wants to talk about it or hear about it. It’s too sad. Too painful. Too hard. The list of reasons is endless.” The wind gusts up from behind me, causing leaves to circle around my head and strands of my hair to veil my face. The fall air gets chilly in Idaho during this time of year and I forgot to bring my jacket.

Shivering, I get to my feet and collect my bag. After putting my camera away, I start back to the apartment, picking up the pace when I realize how late it is and that I should have been home already. Today is actually a very big and important day. Not because I have a calculus test or had to turn in one of my mini video clips for my film class. Nope. Today is important because Quinton was released from the drug facility. It’s not information I learned directly from him. Sadly, I haven’t even spoken to him since the day he got on the plane with his father and headed back to Seattle to get help. But I have other sources to get me information. Tristan sources, to be exact.

Tristan is Quinton’s cousin and he just happens to be my roommate. They talk occasionally on the phone and I think he hears stuff from his parents, but that’s mainly negative stuff, since Tristan’s parents still blame Quinton for the car accident that killed their daughter, Ryder. It’s a messed-up situation, but I don’t think it’s ever going to change. Tristan agrees. He told me once that he doesn’t believe his parents will ever let their blame go, that they have to hold on to it in order to live each day, no matter how f**ked up it is. But thankfully, Tristan is a good guy and tries to make up for it by being Quinton’s friend and forgiving him.