Here Lies Daniel Tate by Cristin Terrill

Author:Cristin Terrill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

“Goddammit,” he said when he reached an open doorway. I came up behind him and saw Lex in her bedroom, passed out on top of the covers, a bottle of wine on the nightstand.

It looked to me like she’d just had a little too much to drink and fallen asleep—not exactly an emergency—but Nicholas rushed to her side and began to shake her.

“Lex, wake up!”

She roused slightly and moaned, but she didn’t open her eyes. Nicholas bent over her and lifted one of her eyelids with his fingers. The eye underneath was shockingly blue, her pinprick sized pupil almost swallowed up completely. I knew that look.

My heart seized in my chest.

“Fuck,” Nicholas said. He knew it too. “Go into her bathroom. Grab any pill bottles you find in the medicine cabinet and then come back here.”

The bathroom was next door, and behind the mirror I found a half a dozen prescription bottles. I grabbed all of them with unsteady hands and shoved them into the pockets of my jeans. There was no way to know which she had taken. In the next room I could hear Nicholas saying Lex’s name, trying to get her up.

When I came back in, he had her sitting up, all of her weight flopped forward on his shoulders.

“I can’t get her up,” he said.

“We’ll carry her,” I said.

Together we got Lex to her feet. She wasn’t totally unconscious, but she wasn’t exactly awake, either, and she did little more than hang limply between us as we carried her out to the car. I sat in the back with her as Nicholas got into the driver’s seat.

“Should we call an ambulance?” I said.

He shook his head and gunned the car to life. “This will be faster. Tell me if she stops breathing.”

I shook Lex whenever she started to drift off. “Stay awake!”

In the front seat Nicholas honked at a slow moving car in front of us and cursed when we hit a red light.

“Look at me, Lex,” I said, slapping her cheek just hard enough to focus her. “Keep your fucking eyes open!”

When we reached the emergency room, Nicholas ran inside and came back out with an orderly and a nurse with a wheelchair, who took Lex away. I gave the medications I’d found in her bathroom to another nurse and told them we didn’t know what she’d taken. Then Nicholas and I went to the waiting room and took seats in the plastic chairs against the wall. He called Jessica and told her what had happened, while I called Patrick and left him another voice mail. After we’d both hung up, we just sat there in silence for a long time as the last of the adrenaline burned out of our systems.

“This isn’t the first time, you know,” he finally said. Unnecessary, since his response to the situation was clearly one of familiarity. “Probably no one’s told you this yet, but Lex and pills go way back.”

“Yeah?” I said.

He nodded, staring off into the middle distance.

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