There was a screw driver drilling slowly into my head and a wad of cotton in my mouth when I woke up on Vanessa's couch the next morning. Slivers of light leaking from the blinds sliced into my eyes and the room rocked slightly from side to side.

I swallowed hard to keep from throwing up and shut my eyes tight. The gritty sand of old mascara made them sting and my skin itch.

"Feeling those last three tequila shots?" asked Vanessa.

She shuffled into the room in ratty pink slippers, boxer shorts, and a tank top, stretching her arms over her head. Despite the dark make-up circles under her eyes and a rat's nest of a bun on top of her head, she looked much better than I felt.

"I had tequila last night?" I croaked.

Vanessa laughed and fell onto the couch next to me. The residual bouncing sent another wave of nausea through my body and my throat burned.

"You had enough tequila for the both of us."

"What happened? The last thing I remember was telling Chris off."

"I don't know how he knew you were here," she said, stretching her long, tanned legs out on the coffee table, "And I didn't see you talking to him until you stomped away looking like you were inches from setting him on fire. You grabbed the tequila bottle I hid in the cabinet and started pounding shots like they were water. It was a thing of beauty."

I groaned, throwing an arm over my eyes and trying to ignore the pounding in my head as my brain tried to reconcile Vanessa's words with the bits of memory crumpled up in my mind. I could imagine the parts I failed to recall, but the missing pieces tasted like bad decisions and regret.

"Are you okay?" asked Vanessa gently.

"No, I think I'm going to throw up, but if I stand to go to the bathroom I will throw up before I get there," I said. Instinct and a lifelong aversion to puking too over and I concentrated on breathing slowly and deeply; in through the nose out through the mouth.

There was a thud as Vanessa set a garbage can on the floor beside the couch.

"I'm talking about Chris," she said. "Kevin kicked him out after you walked away."

"I don't give a rat's ass about Chris."

"The rage you took out on that poor tequila bottle would say otherwise."

I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter and took another deep breath. Acid churned in my stomach. Chris's words were, unfortunately, crystal clear in my otherwise murky recollection of the night before. They tugged at my other memories, using the dark spaces as leverage to once more climb to the center of my conscious mind.

It shouldn't be this easy for him to get to you, I chided myself. But my defenses were weak from alcohol and lack of sleep.

"He means less than nothing to me at this point," I said, a little too loudly, and then I threw up over the side of the couch.

Vanessa leaned over to hold my hair back and sighed. "We don't have to talk about him now if you don't want to. But I don't think he's just going to go away."

I coughed and spit, hating the rawness of my throat and the slimy feeling in my mouth. I straightened up and took the paper towel Vanessa held out to me to wipe my face. Tequila was now at the bottom of my list of preferred alcohols, to be rotated back in only once my system had recovered. She looked at me sympathetically, "Feeling better?"

"I'd feel better if I at least got to throw up on him. Then, he'd have physical proof of how I feel."

Vanessa shook her head, tendrils of brown hair escaping her bun and catching in her eyelashes.

"Whatever you say, Dash. I'll go make breakfast for you."

She got up and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to retch more feelings into the bucket.

*******

I made it back to my room around four in the afternoon, still bearing the weight of the tequila aftermath. Kevin had tried to make me some backwater, home-brewed hang-over cure that his brothers swore by and which had sent me instantly back to the toilet, but at least he tried.

Sticking my key in the lock and turning the handle, I winced as the late afternoon light from the windows stabbed my eyes. It took me a minute to realize the room was occupied. Amber was on her bed, making-out with a shirtless guy, both too busy to notice they were no longer alone. I cleared my throat loudly.

They flinched and broke apart, identical scathing looks on their faces as they took in my bedraggled appearance in the doorway.

"Sorry to interrupt," I deadpanned. I walked over and dropped my keys and sweatshirt on my desk.

"Did knocking ever occur to you?" asked Amber. Several hickeys were blossoming on her neck, trailing from under her left ear down to her collarbone like a smudged tattoo. Was this guy a high schooler or just an idiot? Good luck covering those, I thought. It seemed, contrary to popular belief, social media did not lie.

"No, it actually never occurred to me to knock on my own bedroom door."

I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop with the intent of checking my class schedule for the next day.

"Don't you see we're a little busy here?" shirtless asked.

I didn't bother to look up as I replied, "Yes, next time you don't want to be interrupted leave a sock or hair-tie on the door knob, though to be frank I hope this isn't a regular Sunday afternoon activity."

Amber gave a pathetic little huff, tossing her little blonde head indignantly, while the guy lowered his voice and said, "Let's just go back to my room."

They collected their things, and I gave them a little finger wave as they walked out of the room, "You kids have fun now."

I chuckled as the door slammed behind them. The silence that accompanied their absence was fleeting as my phone began to buzz with an incoming call from my mom. The device danced across the desk like an angry mosquito and I was seized by the urge to swat it away.

Mom would know if I intentionally sent the call to voicemail, so I let it ring. One of her conditions for allowing me to go to school was phone calls every few days, but I wasn't in the mood to fake enthusiasm for the first day of classes. Realistically, who could actually fake excitement for Philosophy 101 at eight o'clock in the morning?

Luckily, according to my online schedule, my course-load was light for the following day. An hour of philosophy followed by an hour of history and done by lunch. I could handle that.

My phone chirped again with an incoming text.

"Can we talk?" It was from Chris.

I deleted the text and went to take a shower, letting the water get hot enough that I could feel my nerve endings vibrate and my chest aching with each breath. The steam tickled my eyes, filling the tiny space and obscuring the grimy tile of the wall so I could pretend I was somewhere I didn't have to wear flip-flops to shower.

What it didn't block was the guilt I felt for ignoring my mom. But I levelled that I'd call her tomorrow. Chris was another, more immediate problem.

Blocking him was an obvious solution, but he would figure it out before long and find another way of contacting me. It was possible that ignoring him might also piss him off enough to do the same thing. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes so colors danced in my vision. Why couldn't he just leave me alone? Why couldn't I just grieve for Danny in peace?

When I couldn't justify wasting anymore water, I wrapped myself in a towel and walked back to my room. There were two missed calls from Chris and another from my mom gleaming in accusation on my home screen. I shut my phone off, threw it in a drawer, and crawled into bed, still wrapped in my towel with my hair soaking into the pillow, and closed my eyes.

********

My philosophy teacher was a stereotype. Large owl-eyes made even bigger by thick, out-of-date glasses, graying hair vaguely reminiscent of Albert Einstein, a wristwatch that didn't work, and an ugly brown suit with a mismatching red tie. His thin voice made me think of high places, and the number of "whys" he used to respond to someone's opinion reminded me of a curious five-year-old.

The topic of our very first class, after breezing through the syllabus, was something uplifting: assisted suicide and a person's right to choose.

My psychological defense kicked in almost immediately and I zoned out of the conversation, willing myself not to throw-up. Danny might have died in a car crash, but suicide was still too close.

"And what do you think?"

I jerked to attention at a tap on my shoulder. The classroom refocused around me like a camera lens compensating for closer objects. A dozen impassive faces back at me from the semi-circle of desks the professor had forced us to make in an attempt to "open the flow of conversation."

My gaze clicked to the professor—I had already forgotten his name—sitting directly across from me. He seemed unperturbed that I wasn't paying attention. Either he was used to it or was simply oblivious.

"We were talking about whether or not terminally ill patients have the right to request physician assisted suicide," the professor said.

I swallowed hard, remembering Danny hooked up to all those machines, a ventilator pushing his chest up in false breath before sucking it all out again in a deep sigh, his parents fighting over his unconscious body about whether or not to pull the plug. Blackness encroached on the edges of my vision.

"I guess it's a quality of life question," I said slowly.

"Good, can you explain further?"

My fingers tapped nervously against my leg, feeling the class's eyes on me, yet unable to see them. A faint beeping was coming from somewhere, keeping time with my heart.

"Well, if you're dying, you know you're dying, and there isn't any hope, then why should you have to suffer through the end?"

"Why indeed?" said the professor, nodding.

It took me a second to realize he wanted me to continue.

"Especially if you know your last few months, weeks, days are going to be painful. You should be allowed to make that choice. If your illness is preventing you from living the life you want, then yes, I think patients should have the right to request physician assisted suicide."

"But what prevents that right from being extended to people who aren't necessarily terminally ill?" said someone.

I looked over my left shoulder to see a boy with close-cropped blonde hair and eyes the color of a summer storm staring back at me pointedly, his mouth pressed into a thin line.

Something about his body language rubbed me the wrong way; he held himself like someone who knew he was right and was only posing the question so he could drive the point further home.

"I believe the condition of the question was that the patient was terminally ill," I replied shrewdly.

"It's a slippery slope isn't it? You extend the right first to terminally ill patients, then slowly to others who can make the same case for wanting to die. What about severely depressed patients who no longer feel their quality of life is up to their standards and believe there is no hope to change it?" he asked, leaning forward slightly in his chair.

"Currently, in the states that allow physician assisted suicide, there are several requirements that must be met. As Megan pointed out, the patient must be terminally ill, two doctors must sign off on it, a verbal request must be made at least fourteen days apart, the patient must be in good mental health, all of which a depressed patient would not qualify for, but it is an interesting thought path. Megan, how would you respond?" said the professor looking eagerly between the two of us.

"I, well," I stuttered, trying to regain mental balance. My mouth felt like a desert, my tongue thick and useless. "I don't think depressed patients have an accurate mindset about quality of life, and they have options terminal patients don't—"

"But, it's their life as you said," interrupted the boy again. "Depression is painful, it just can't be quantified the same way as cancer, and the person that has to live through that might think they have the right to choose what life, if any, to live."

He smiled at me slightly, as though he could sense my faltering unease. His hands were gripping his desk so hard, his knuckles where white. Strange. There was a weird shimmer around his head as well, but that might have been from the pounding in my head I was trying to push down. I dug my finger nails into my knee, the pain clearing the color dancing in the air. Sweat made my palms slick.

"They're not like patients who are brain dead either, hooked up to feeding tubes without any conscious idea of what's going on around them. Why should someone else get to make decisions about their life?" he pressed further. His gray eyes were alight with some kind of intense energy, like the sky just before lightening shattered the ground. I shrank back into my chair as his black pupils grew large enough to swallow me whole. My stomach lurched as though the floor had suddenly given away.

"I'm so sorry, Dash. Danny—he's gone."

"What do you mean gone?"

"They managed to restart his heart, but there's no brain activity—he's brain dead. Sweetie, I'm so sorry."

Tears, hot, burning into my flesh, acid drops on my bandaged hands as they dripped from my cheeks.

"They haven't, I mean, he's gone, but they haven't—"

"He's on life-support while his parents decide what to do."

"Can I see him?"

"Honey, I don't think that's best."

"I need to see him!"

Danny hooked up to machines, incessant beeping, bruises livid in his white face. His mouth slack, no response when I slipped my hand into his. Seeing black.

"Megan, are you all right?" asked my professor.

The tears from my dreams had bridged memory with reality. My breaths were heavy and deep, blood roared in my ears. I saw glass and light exploding in my vision. A scream I wasn't sure was past or present scraped my eardrums. I scrubbed the back of my hand across my face, taking away black lines where my make-up had run.

I'm—I need to go," I gasped. I stooped to grab my bag off the floor, swung it over my shoulder, and all but ran out the door.

_______________________________

Edited: This chapter was edited on February 28, 2017. If you spot anything after this date, please point it out so I can fix it! :)

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