His mother found him one Tuesday afternoon, not dead but not alive either: slumped in the bathtub, a needle still dangling from his arm like a grotesque insect. His skin was gray, his lips cracked, and his eyes—those bright, curious eyes that had once examined ladybugs on the windowsill—were vacant. They were the eyes of a stranger.
Now he is twenty-two. He sleeps in a storage unit behind a strip mall. His face is gaunt, his teeth are rotting, and his arms are a roadmap of collapsed veins and infected tracks. He does not play guitar. He does not read books. He does not remember the name of his third-grade teacher, the one who told him he could be a writer. the boy who lost himself to drugs
The change was subtle at first, like rust spreading under a car’s paint job. His grades, once a constellation of A’s, dimmed to C’s and then to incompletes. His guitar gathered dust in the corner of his room. The boy who used to walk his neighbor’s dog and hold the door for strangers began to slouch through hallways with his hood up, eyes fixed on the linoleum. His mother found him one Tuesday afternoon, not
By eighteen, the pills had become too expensive and too scarce. That’s when heroin found him—or rather, when he walked into its open arms. The first time he injected, he vomited and wept. The second time, he smiled. The third time, he stopped being Liam altogether. Now he is twenty-two
Somewhere, in a high school auditorium, a boy like Liam is sitting in the back row, already wondering what it would feel like to disappear. And somewhere, a mother is setting the table for a son who will never come home.