WHEN I WAS A KID, I thought getting away from the trailer park would be the key to my eternal happiness. It wasn't. As I drive down the bumpy dirt road, stones pop up from beneath my tires and ting against the windshield. The rain has cleared up. My headlights beam through the night and gleam into the eyes of a raccoon as it scurries away.

Somehow, I always end up back here.

I've had an awful feeling in my gut from the moment I got off the phone with Carson's mom. Maybe it was the quivery tone of her voice, or the erratic way she'd begged me to come, but something tells me she's hiding something. The lights are on in her trailer when I park. As soon as I see Carson's bedroom window is dark, my suspicion heightens. I hurry out of the car anyway and get to the door in seconds. When I bang my fist against the metal, Dorothy whips it open wearing a thin brown housecoat.

"Jillian! Come on in!"

I step inside, and the warm smell of cooking food fills my nostrils. Carson's favorite chili. The crockpot bubbles from the kitchen, but his shoes aren't on the mat by the door.

"I'm so glad you're here." Dorothy's eyes are bugged-out and her pupils are huge in the half-light of the trailer's den.

"I'm sorry"—I slip past her—"but I have to see Carson."

Dorothy rides my ass the whole time I rush through the dark, narrow hall to Carson's room at the end. The door is closed, so I open it and take a brisk step inside, swallowed by his blisteringly familiar smell. The porchlight leaks through the curtains and creates a line through the darkness across the floor, littered with a few articles of Carson's laundry: his favorite red hoodie, a sock with a hole in it, his best jeans without rips in them. His guitar is propped against the bed.

His empty bed.

He isn't here.

My heart wrenches with despair. I can't breathe, can't think, but defeat slams on my shoulders. I don't understand why I'm here if he isn't. Why would Dorothy lie? Or did he just leave? I sit on his unmade bed and try to keep it together. Dorothy sits next to me.

"Was he ever here?" is all I can think to ask.

Dorothy adjusts the band of her housecoat and blinks at me. "Well..."

It's written all over her face: she's a liar. And that sick feeling I had before is starting to make painful sense. Something is wrong with this woman; Carson did say she has issues, but they're issues I know nothing about. I should be patient with her, like Carson is. I take out my phone and squint at the light. Clarissa texted me five minutes ago and said they still haven't found him.

"Dorothy, Carson is missing."

I wait for any flicker of emotion to cross her, but she just stares at me with glossy, unblinking eyes. A tiny smile makes the apples of her cheeks firm and rosy.

"Did you hear me?" I say. "Carson is missing, Dorothy."

That snaps her out of it. A frown darts over her face. "My boy is missing?"

"Do you have any idea where he might be? He vanished from Shae's house and they can't find him."

"My Carse likes to disappear sometimes, sweetheart. Gone for days, leaves his poor mother to worry alone..."

"Do you know where he goes? Anywhere other than Shae's? Is he seeing another girl?"

"Oh sweetie, you were the last one to step foot in this trailer. How could he ever find a girl prettier than you?" Dorothy grabs both my hands, and I instinctively recoil. Cold, thin fingers grip me with more strength than I knew she possessed. "Come on out into the kitchen and I'll tell you all about Carse. I found some of our old photo albums and I really need to show you them. Jillian, I have photos of me when I was your age, when I was young and pretty like you. Come have some chili."

This is freaking me out. I'm almost too scared to move, but I swallow the lump in my throat and put one of my hands on top of hers. "Dorothy, I'm really, really worried about Carson. He was acting strange when I saw him today. Do you have any idea where he could be?"

"Well, I was so worried about him this morning because he was very sick and he kept throwing up, so I was bringing him water all day. I tell you, it was just like when he was a little boy again."

I narrow my eyes and think back to what Mom said that time I asked her if she knew Dorothy: "Sometimes she would tell me Carson was sick and she was so worried about him, so I'd feel bad and let her in."

Shifting away from her, tingles of fear crawl all the way up the back of my skull. "What do you mean by sick? What sickness? Carson was healthy when he was a kid. I remember it. He played sports and he loved the monkey bars."

"Oh no, he was sick all the time. I'm sure you can imagine how hard that was on me..."

"Sick with what? Does he have cancer?"

"It's an autoimmune illness, which means he catches all sorts of bugs all the time very easily."

I've never seen him with so much as a runny nose, unless it was blood from snorting coke. "But he never gets sick like that," I say. "He just gets tired. If Carson has an autoimmune disorder, why didn't he tell me?"

"Come into the kitchen and we'll talk all about it!"

Nothing Dorothy says is trustworthy, not after she wasted my time and lied to get me here. Still, she's the best lead I've got. His own mother. She knows a lot more about what's going on with him than she's letting on. Even if Carson does have a secret illness—there's more to this. I can feel it in every fiber of my being.

"Okay," I say. "Just... give me a minute, please."

Dorothy nods and leaves the room. As soon as she's gone, I allow my shoulders to drop and the tears to come out. Everything smells like Carson, and everything in this room has a memory attached to it. The toy fire truck, the Labatt Blue flag, the bed we had sex in for the first time. His guitar, which he played me so many songs on. I wish I could hear him sing now.

My mind sinks into a deep pit of hopelessness.

He could overdose.

He could kill himself.

He could already be dead.

I need to keep looking for him, but I can't move. All I can think about is how long it would take for his smell to disappear from this room if he never came back to it.

Pushing the thoughts out of my head, I stop in the bathroom on the way to the kitchen. The light is dull and flickering and the striped yellow wallpaper is peeling. I splash cold water on my face. In order to find out what's in Dorothy's head, I need to keep my composure; lord knows how she'll react if she sees me cry. The mirror shows me pale with mascara smudged beneath my puffy eyes. The cabinet built behind the mirror is open a crack, filled with bottles.

A knock raps at the door and startles me. "Jillian? Are you okay in there?"

"Fine! Just give me a second."

"Don't let the chili get cold!"

Chili.

The first time I came here, Dorothy ranted to me about how sick Carson was as a child, all after he'd suddenly gone to bed. He'd been fine before he ate. My mouth is dry as I slowly creak open the medicine cabinet. Tylenol, Band-Aids, rubbing alcohol. Cough syrup, a roll of gauze, hydrogen peroxide. The bottom row is lined with orange prescription bottles. The labels all say Blue, Dorothy, and they're mostly filled to the brim—but one bottle of rectangular shaped pills is nearly empty. I pick it up. Alprazolam.

My blood runs cold.

I've seen this bar-shaped pill before. They taught us about the abuse of prescription meds in school briefly. Some people crush them up to snort them and get a stronger high.

Xanax.

That time we had breakfast. Pancakes and orange juice. The white powder on the counter—I'd thought it was strange, but I passed it off. Then Carson fell asleep at school later.

I take out my phone and open Google. Signs of Xanax use: nausea, disorientation, sleeping for extended periods of time. Headaches, delirium, impaired coordination.

Head spinning, I lean against the wall.

That time on the beach, Carson asked me if I'd felt sick after breakfast. If he'd known he was high on Xanax, he never would've been confused about the side effects. If he'd been doing it willingly, he wouldn't have asked that question.

But none of this makes sense. I can't wrap my mind around it. My brain throbs as I stumble out of the bathroom, still clutching the pill bottle. When I get to the kitchen, Dorothy already has two steaming bowls of chili out and a photo album splayed on the table. She stares at me with starry eyes and a huge smile, like a grinning owl.

"Dorothy, what is this?" I ask, but I'm as scared of the answer as I am of her.

Her face drops, and she tries to pry the bottle from my hand. "Oh honey, give me that. That's just for my back pain."

"No." I'm way taller than her, so I hold the bottle up. "Dorothy. Please, you have to tell me. Have you been putting this in Carson's food?"

"No! I would never, I..." Her eyes are all over the place. The ceiling, the floor, the wall. But not on me. "Sweetie, those are pills for my back pain..."

"It's a psychoactive drug! It's addictive!" My voice crackles out with pain, and something in me breaks. "Why? Why would you do this to him? I don't understand!"

"Jillian, please, just sit down and stay with me." She grabs onto the chair and holds it out, tears welling in her bloodshot eyes. "Come on, sit down, have some chili."

"Have you been drugging him with this? Please, tell me the truth!"

"Oh Jillian, you don't understand." She wrings her hands together over and over. Blue veins are clear through her papery white skin. "He's—he's sick!" Dorothy exclaims. "He's sick and I'm his mother, so it's up to me to make sure he feels better. It's hard being a mother, Jillian. Your mom knows. Ask your mom, ask Sharon!"

"He isn't sick, Dorothy! You made him sick—you poisoned him!"

"No, I didn't. Jillian, I didn't. He's my baby. I only help him."

I can't believe what I'm hearing. Can't believe all the horrors that happened in this trailer. In this kitchen. Has she been drugging him his whole life? How long has he known? I run into the hallway, but crash into the corner of the room. A picture of Carson when he was a child hangs on the wall. The child whose mother told everyone he was sick, even though he was healthy.

"Jillian, wait!"

"Stay away from me!"

As soon as I'm out the front door, Dorothy is right behind me. She grabs at my wrist, but I yank it from her grasp.

"Jillian, don't go. Don't leave me here alone. Please, don't go!"

I shove her away from me and get into the car. When I slam the door and lock it, Dorothy bangs on the window. Even as I start the car and begin backing out, she pounds her fist on the hood. My wheels screech as I turn around, leaving Dorothy Blue in a cloud of dirt and dust.

There were so many signs. I knew something was going on in that trailer—but I never imagined this.

Oh God, Carson, where are you?

I need to find him. I need to tell him how sorry I am. I'm sorry I didn't listen. I'm sorry I was so quick to judge. I'm sorry I wasn't someone he felt he could trust to help him. More than anything, I'm sorry he had to go through this alone. It was never as simple as Carson getting over one addiction—he had another one in his system all this time that he wasn't even aware of.

By the time I get out of the park, my body is shaking so much I'm sure I'll crash into a tree if I don't get it together. I pull over at the side of the road and cry. Every sweet and broken smile he ever gave me flashes in my mind, and it just makes me sob more.

Then it hits me: the cottages he brought Nolan and me to that one time. But it's pitch black outside and I'm completely alone. I could ask Clarissa and them to come with me but I don't even remember how to get there. The hope evaporates, replaced by frustration.

"Damn it!" I punch the steering wheel and accidentally hit the horn. I keep crying, frozen in place, because I don't know what else to do.

Then my phone lights up from the center console like a ray of hope. I open it to a text from Clarissa.

We found him.

***

Everything from the trailer park to Shae's house is a blur.

There are too many people here—at least twenty kids from school scatter Shae's living room, the party in full swing.

"As soon as he got back, he stole some of my blow and locked himself up in my room," Shae says as I follow him through the house. "I think you're the only person he'll talk to now."

We reach Shae's bedroom door. My heart races at the thought of seeing Carson again—alive—but I take a moment to look at Shae. "Did you know about his mom?"

He pauses. "I knew something was up for a long time, but I didn't know what. Neither did Blue. He only figured it out around the time your dad was in town, and I think he's still processing it. You gotta go easy on the guy."

"I only want to help."

I'm about to knock on the door when Clarissa comes over, out of breath. "Shae, get over here, something's up with Ethan."

Shae's pale eyes meet mine. "You good?"

I nod. Shae and Clarissa disappear around the corner. I take a deep breath and knock on the door.

"Leave me alone, Shae," Carson says. His voice is panicked, and I press my forehead to the white paint of the door. I could die right here from the relief of hearing his voice.

"Carson, it's me."

Silence. A beat later, the door opens a crack, and Carson's shattered brown eyes meet mine through it. "Jill?" he croaks out.

"Please let me in," I say.

Slowly, Carson opens the door. I slip inside, and he shuts and locks it behind us. The music thumps through the walls, but Carson and I face each other in a tense silence. His hair is a mess and he has dark bags under his bulging eyes. He looks like shit, but he's breathing. And that's all that matters.

Shae's room is barren other than a Slipknot poster, a double bed, a grey couch, and a short coffee table. Lines of blow are set up next to a razor blade and a rolled twenty-dollar bill. Carson paces back and forth with his hands on his head, and he's covered in dirt and sticks.

"What are you doing here, Jill? Did they call you? Did they tell you I was talking about you? I'm so pathetic. You dumped me, you shouldn't be dealing with my shit anymore. Please just go. You should go. You shouldn't see me like this."

I've never heard him speak so quickly, like a rapid fire of bullets. But I'm not angry at him for doing drugs right now. That isn't what he needs.

"I was looking for you," I tell him. "I went to your trailer. I saw your mom."

He stiffens, but doesn't look at me. "What'd she say?"

"Carson..." A knot forms in my throat, and I take a hesitant step toward him. "I know what she was doing to you."

All at once, tears fall down Carson's face. He bawls into this forearm and collapses on the couch, and seeing him cry is like a searing hot knife through my heart. I sit next to him and place my hand on his back, but it only makes him cry more.

"How could she do this to me?" he says. "I don't know if I've ever felt a single emotion that wasn't dumbed down by the food I was eating. It's so messed up, Jill. I don't know what to do."

"When did you find out?"

"I don't know. I'd known something was wrong for a while but I thought it was all in my head. I thought I was actually sick and kind of stupid, which was why I couldn't really think sometimes. But it started getting worse when you and me were together. My mom was obsessed with you, she always wanted me to bring you over. She's agoraphobic so she won't go anywhere, but she gets lonely. I think she thought if I was sicker, you'd feel bad for me and come over."

The hairs on my arms raise, and nausea churns inside my stomach. "That one day, after breakfast... that was why she wanted you to stay home from school. So I would stay with her."

"Yeah. Shit like that kept happening, and I kept feeling so empty inside, so I did more coke 'cause I needed to feel something. Then one day, Mom didn't know I was home, and—" Tears drip down his cheeks, but he swipes them with his sleeves. "I walked in on her in the kitchen, crushing a bar of Xanax into a bottle of soda I'd left in the fridge."

Carson's hands tremble as he snorts a quick line from off the table. I hate it, but say nothing.

"So what did you do?" I ask. "Did you confront her?"

"No. No, I didn't know what to do. I froze up. I pretended like I didn't see. Part of me thought I'd imagined it. But then on prom night, Mom wouldn't shut up about seeing you in your dress. She wanted you to come get me. She'd set a cup of water next to my bed, and I didn't even think about it—I just drank it, and the next thing I knew, I was too tired to move. I fell asleep, and when I came to it was too late. I couldn't tell you the truth. It would've just sounded like a lie to excuse me doing other drugs."

I think back to that night, how pissed off and hurt I'd been. I took it all so personally. But he came, he tried to explain himself, and I wouldn't listen. "I'm so sorry, Carson. I had no idea..."

Carson leans over the coffee table and snorts another line. When he pulls back up, he has white powder all over his nostril. I despise seeing him like this, because he can be so much more. His eyes are red, but his pupils aren't big like saucers—no, this time, they're pinholes. It terrifies me just the same.

"You have to let me help you," I say.

"How can you help me, Jill? What can you do?"

"Move in with us. Sleep in the sunroom, the basement, the couch, I don't care—just don't go back there. Don't go back to your mom."

"Fuck. But she's my mom."

"I get it. She's family, just like my dad is my family. But you're not a bad person if you cut her out. You have to protect yourself first—you're more important than anybody who would do that to you. This is really serious, Carson."

"I have no one else. My brothers are assholes. My friends barely care about me. She's all I've got."

"That's not true. You have me. I love you, I want you to be okay."

Carson doesn't reply. The moments tick on as he shivers and stares blankly at the wall, arms crossed over his lap. With my brows pinched, I take a closer look at him.

"Carson, your lips are blue."

"What?"

I've never seen him so pale. His lips look like he sucked on a blue Freezie or something. They didn't look like that before.

"Your lips are really blue," I repeat. Something isn't right. I reach out and touch his face. His skin is so cold it makes me flinch. "And you're freezing..."

"I'm fine." He stands and clenches his eyes shut, balancing himself on wobbly feet. "I just—I need to lie down."

Carson's knees buckle, and he falls into the wall. I rush over and hold up his weight, but he's so heavy I can barely take it.

"Whoa, okay, let's get you to the bed," I say.

"Jill, I don't feel good."

"You're okay. You're just high, you're—"

Carson goes deadweight. His body slams to the floor with a resounding thud. A scream grates my throat as I get down next to him, but my hands shake as I hover them over his shoulders, having no idea what to do. His eyes are closed, and the blue on his lips has deepened. I roll him on his side anyway in case he throws up, but this isn't like when Dad OD'd. This is different. When I press my fingers to Carson's throat, a weak heartbeat patters against me, but he's barely breathing. I scream again, louder this time. I scream help over and over and over again. My throat becomes raw, but still no one comes through the door.

"Carson, wake up." I gently slap his cheek. "Please, wake up."

He doesn't budge, not so much as a flicker of his eyelashes. The thought of leaving him like this kills me, but I can't help him on my own. I scramble into the living room, but I'm met with emptiness. The music isn't even on anymore. And through the windows to the front yard are flashing lights and several ambulances. Shae is being lifted into one of them in an oxygen mask. Paramedics flood the area while a few cops talk to people I recognize from the party.

What the hell is going on? I have no idea—Carson and I must not have heard the commotion. I run outside and beg for help. Three paramedics charge inside and follow me to Shae's bedroom. Two of the medics crouch beside Carson, who's so pale now he could be a corpse. They roll him onto his back and check his pupils before they put some kind of device on his nose.

"What's going on?" I say, sobbing uncontrollably. "What's happening to him? Is he okay?"

They talk around me. Sentences spiral around my head, gibberish in my ears. But I make out two words: opiate and overdose.

"What?" I stammer. "How? No, he did cocaine, it's not an opiate, it's—"

"Get her out of here!" a paramedic yells, and I'm grabbed by a man who's way stronger than me. He pulls me away, but I kick and flail. I scream Carson's name at his body through the doorway until I can't see him anymore.