Say My Name and His in the Same Breath. I Dare You to Say they Taste the Same.

The cruelty of small talk with someone you used to love was that everything was about them. It was like listening to one record and knowing that all the songs about happiness and heartache were from and for just one girl.

That's how he got her back. After all the shit he put her through that was how the boy got her back: at one time she'd truly loved him.

The boy who'd broken her heart by dumping her when she wouldn't sleep with him walked back into her life like the summer heat, sticking to her skin like sweat. It was almost funny to think that he'd try to use it as an excuse to talk her out of her clothes, but for the first time in months, Ava seemed really happy.

So I let it slide. I wasn't going to make her choose between her new boyfriend and her old best friend, because if she was smart, she would have chosen him.

More than anything, Ava was desperate for affection—the kind she showed me. When I was away, her world revolved around him. When I came back, her fondness swung back to me and from the way I treated her when we were alone, she thought my attention belonged only to her.

That was because she was always by my side. We had ropes around our neck and if one of us slipped, the other would hang. Reflections were always tethered to the mirror and we were always tethered to each other.

That's what made him special: he was her own creation. She'd written that part of the story on her own. While I was in rehab, she'd penned a romance of star crossed tragedy and envious affection. It was one of the first things she'd accomplished without my direction and when their paths crossed again, she ran after him, desperate to unravel the character she was creating along the way.

I wish I'd known how much she loved me before it came to him. Maybe then I would have followed her down that road.

But at the time, I was too busy paying her back for the time she spent at her grandmother's when we were kids. It was like abandoning me then had put her in debt and the bill had come due.

When I wasn't doing heroin, I was thinking about it. And after I got clean, I was craving it. They told me in rehab that after the withdrawals subsided, the hardest part was over, but they were wrong.

It was a lot like stumbling through the dark and constantly tripping over your own feet. Then, when you finally found a foothold, it would slip out from under you before you even realized you were climbing a wall.

Every morning, if you were lucky enough to have fallen asleep, you woke up in yesterday's clothes and tomorrows dreams. Waiting for one moment of freedom was like praying for rain in the desert. No matter how many matches you struck, the memories wouldn't burn; all the bottles you broke never felt as broken as you; all the alcohol couldn't drown you the way the cravings did.

You couldn't outrun a problem like heroin. It was always going to be burning your veins.

There were holes spotting your insides, but you couldn't ever remember if they'd always been empty or there had once been something there. You just spent hour after hour looking for something to fill them—to make yourself a little more complete. Distractions became your friends the way heroin had once been and Ava paid me back by being my biggest one.

Of course, my dad started that. The only thing he ever taught me was that when you look at people, you look for what you know.

If you knew depression, you saw sadness behind the smiles of all the people you met. If you knew divorce, you saw a broken family in every home of every happy little neighborhood. If you knew addiction, you saw cravings and withdrawals crawling across the skin of everyone who passed you in the street.

But it worked in two ways. What my dad saw in me wasn't what he saw in my brothers. They lived with other family members, the older one living with his mother, and the younger one living with my grandmother. It always made me feel stretched and strained that they were always so far away. Like pieces of me were scattered everywhere and I couldn't read the map that led to where they were.

It was like being next to someone, their blood in your veins, and not knowing them as well as your body told you you should. We were supposed to be alike, but we were different. And my dad looked for different things.

What he saw in me was what he saw in himself, because we'd both been raised in a house with his father. He knew exactly why I acted the way I did. Why I acted a lot like him.

But what he saw in Ava wasn't firsthand; it was something he projected on to her. He only thought she had personality issues, because he knew personality issues almost as well as he knew abuse. Seeing abuse in Ava had made him take her to the hospital when she was seven.

Seeing personality disorders made him constantly ask me about her behavior.

It felt like he was looking too hard for problems. Or, at least I thought it did until I started looking for them too.

That's when all the nights she'd taken her jacket off for me and all he afternoons in the yard seemed to get more twisted. Ava was known for acting on impulse, but I'd never given any thought to where those impulses had originated.

Surely there was motive behind the way she made pills her game and jokes her plays.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was trying to break Ava apart just like my dad. I was trying to make her into something I understood and not the complex, mysterious girl I'd known so well without knowing her at all.

I couldn't help it. It's human nature to look for what you know.

I was happy to see her so thrilled about getting the guy, but I was even happier to know that it was a rocky relationship. As horrible and terrible as that made me, I was glad that she went back to someone who hadn't been the best to her. It gave me something to worry about. I had something new to look for.

The relapse had made me feel inferior to her and had left me bitter. It was nice to see her fail for a change. I hated myself for thinking that, but it was true. I liked that her relationship was toxic.

But had I known just how poisonous he was I like to think I would have stopped the story where it began.

When she started spending all her time with him, there were fleeting moments when I thought about driving to her house in the middle of the night, climbing through her window, and kissing her just to rattle her cage with a tender touch.

I missed my shotgun rider. I missed my little confidant, hot mess, dreamer. I missed giving into her impulses. I missed snapping back and forth between her personalities.

I missed my best friend.

She was my favorite "what if" and my finest "we'll never know".

He didn't know her the way I did. He couldn't make her smile with those gray eyes and say nasty things with those pretty pink lips.

The hairbands and mint gum didn't mean anything to anyone but me. If she took her jacket off for him, he wouldn't have been proud.

He didn't know what it meant to have her attention.

It meant having the most beautiful record spinning round and around and around just for you.