2

While he was still asleep she got ready to shower and looked in the mirror. What was he thinking? She opened up the medicine cabinet and pulled out the bottle of Phentermine HCl and took one pill. There was a doctor that no one knew about, especially not him, who worked north of the city and who didn’t ask any questions. She’d told him it was her first time and that she was just curious and that she’d thought it was better than ordering it over the internet. And it seemed like the doctor believed her or at least didn’t care.

When she had gotten out of rehab after trying to overdose her parents took her to renew her license. She couldn’t believe how much weight she’d gained on the medications they put her on and so she was quick to stop taking them. In the hotel where she and her parents were staying she made a phone call to her boyfriend when her family stepped out to get some food from the restaurant downstairs. He loved her, he told her, and he’d missed her he said. While she felt as though she had really changed while inside and done away with her addiction (they called it) she needed to see him. An hour later and the hotel phone rang and she answered it and told him she’d be right down.

Her parents got worried and went down to find her, in the parking lot, arguing with her boyfriend. When her parents intervened he became even more agitated and told them it wasn’t any of their business. He didn’t leave until they told him they were going to call the police, which he didn’t want (and secretly neither did they, hadn’t they been through enough?). On the way back up to the room in the elevator they told her she wasn’t ever to see him again. It didn’t matter to her what they said. She’d told him the same thing. He wasn’t happy to find out that she wanted nothing to do with him and that she’d really only been using him for the heroin that he gave her but sold to everyone else. She’d gone down to tell him she’d changed, that she had realized she was killing herself all along, and that now she was different. That much she was sure of.