Page 86 of Overdose

No hoodie, or rave.

Just me.

A girl who nearly died and made up a fantasy to keep herself from drowning.

I let my head fall forward. My shoulders shake, I cry.

Really fucking cry.

Because maybe I didn’t survive anything at all.

Maybe I just woke up to the lie I told myself to make survival actually worth it.

Epilogue

Blair

Months Later

It’s been nine months.

Three fucking months since I left the motel behind. Since I got back home. Since I sat in a beige university office, nodded along to some guidance counselor telling me how strong I was for “overcoming adversity,” and re-enrolled in school like none of it ever happened.

Like I didn’t lose my goddamn mind. Didn’t invent a whole fucking world.

I graduated last week. With honors, apparently. Not that it matters. None of it feels real—not the degree, not the praise, not the life I’m supposed to want now.

Because a few days ago, they found her.

My sister.

What was left of her.

Buried in the woods, wrapped in black plastic like she was trash someone needed to forget. Dental records and a customer silver earring our grandmother gave her on our sixteenth birthday confirmed it.

Brynn was never missing. She was dead.

On some level, I always knew that, but it still guts me.

The funeral was yesterday. Closed casket, obviously. My mom cried into tissues she kept folding and unfolding like maybe she could smooth out the grief. My dad didn’t show.

Now it’s just me. On the beach.

Same place. Same hour as that night with Dagger.

The air smells like salt and gasoline. Like wet pavement and something rotting. Fitting, honestly. Waves crash soft and lazy, the sky smeared with early dusk, and I sit cross-legged in the sand, staring at what used to be the warehouse.

Now?

It’s a goddamn fish market.

Fresh paint. Neon sign. Bougie little food stalls out front selling overpriced oysters and seaweed chips to influencers in linen pants. The roll-up doors are gone, replaced by wide glass panels. There’s even a chalkboard out front that says, TODAY’S SPECIAL: LOBSTER ROLL + KOMBUCHA.

Kill me.

I glance down at my boots, then back up at the place where everything started—where I danced, where I got high, where I kissed them both like it was the last breath in my lungs. Right on the beach where Dagger gave me his jacket and looked at me like I was the center of his universe.

Where he kissed me like I was his.