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OUT OF HABIT, Sawyer finds herself rising before the sun, like she used to, back in fifth year. In the moonlit dawn, the darkness oozes, shadows pulsing in corners, gnarled fingers creeping around the fluttering curtains and soaking into the floorboards like oil stains. With the motorised movements of an automated robot, she untangles herself from the sheets, slips her grey hoodie over her head, slips a sports bra on underneath and replaces her hoodie and slides her feet into trainers. All without waking a single one of her slumbering roommates. It's with the rattle of pills in their little plastic container and the cap half-unscrewed in her fingers in the midst of this routine that she's managed to perfect that she realises what she's doing.
Staring down at the prescription bottle, Sawyer pauses, half-in, half-out, blinking out of the haze. She didn't have to be up at this hour. She didn't have practice to get to. But sleep was miles away and there was mint on her breath—she must've brushed her teeth at some point—as her teeth chilled against the frigid air and a sharp ache staked into her gums. Most of all, she didn't have to take the pills. Not yet. Not while the sun wasn't up and there was no one to see her, no one to be a menace to besides herself and she still had her brain in her head. Sawyer pursed her lips. Two pills a day sent her into oblivion. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't a pleasant experience, drifting about the corridors, watching the world go by behind a cloudy screen.
If she didn't take them now, Jeremy would always remind her later during breakfast. He kept a prescription bottle on him. Just in case she forgot. Somehow, he always knew when she forgot.
In her hands, the pills mock her. Two shiny, pristine capsules flashing in the meagre moonlight streaming in through the window like pixie teeth. Mocking her. Sawyer clenched her jaw. She pressed the nail of her thumb against the centre of one of them until her hands shook. Until the pill cracked and two imperfect halves lay beside a whole.
And then a sudden, shameful thought struck her. She wouldn't be lying to Jeremy if she took one and a half. It'd still be plural if she left out one tiny half.
No. Two pills. That was the promise she'd made. Two pills to keep her mother off her back, and she'd honour it because if anyone were to cross that line, it sure as hell wouldn't be Sawyer. She couldn't let her mother have the upper hand on this one. Especially this one.
Without a second thought, Sawyer knocks back all of it—one whole and two halves—and swallows it dry.
And then Sawyer leaves, letting her feet guide her body, away, away, away, before the drugs can melt her brain down to the barest of its functions and the haze can take her, less alive but not dead. Not yet. Death, Sawyer thinks, musingly. Once an ink-dark familiar perched over her shoulder breathing down her neck, and now a distant complex shadowed by the everyday musings. Strange how quickly things can change around here.
