FanFic: Let's Keep It Together
Title: Let's Keep It Together (4a/?) A Sordid Past
Author:ClassicFREAK
Rating: PG-13 Full of swearsies and other unmentionables
Warning: Talk of drug use and physical abuse.
Word Count: 3,602 words
Disclaimer: Dan Harmon is my god and I bow to his tumblr posts.
Summary: Jeff just wants to nurse a sick Annie back to health, and Annie falls down into the rabbit hole where she is faced with her addiction.
Author's Note: I have no idea what happens when you overdose on Adderall, nor do I know how rehab works. Purely fictional and hopefully not harmful to you guys. Also, this is a double chapter because I'm a big fat meany head. Comments and critisims are always welcome.
Previous Chapters: Chapter 1: Prologue, Chapter 2: University, Chapter 3: Routines Ruined
A Sordid Past
Annie is a fighter, especially when something will keep her from doing her work. She doesn’t allow her body to control her life, nor does she let sickness keep her from work or school. In fact she once went to school with strep throat; she wore a face mask the whole days to ensure she wouldn’t infect her fellow classmates. But this? This wasn’t a cold, and it was nothing like strep, this was an alien virus that was trying to take over her nervous system and control her body. She was in near delirium from the headache and sinus congestion that when she turned toward what she thought was the doorway she only saw the wallpaper that covered the walls of her room.
“Annie, I am so sorry.” Jeff whispered from the doorway, he thought that if her head felt as bad as his had that silence would be best, but needed her to know that he hadn’t meant to pass the devilish illness onto her.
Annie, having turned toward him, successfully this time, began to roll her eyes in response but stopped as soon as the pain became unbearable and let out a whimper. She closed her eyes and cringed at the pathetic sound she’d allowed to escape her mouth. She’d been trying to convince the group of years that she could take care of herself in every situation. She peeked at Jeff to see the concerned look on his face and gave into the feeling of being cared for. She opened her mouth to tell him off but changed her mind and asked for a glass of water. Jeff left and she heard his feet hitting the floor, she could hear when he stopped moving and when the tap was turned on. She could hear him move as he walked to the bathroom and grabbed the medication she’d stashed there yesterday after he’d fallen asleep, she listened as the sound of his feet slapping against the floorboards gets louder as he gets closer and suddenly he’s back in the doorway. She feels as her body jump a little in shock, her brain having been slowed by the virus that his appearance, thought she’d been expecting it, was a shock. He walked into her room, handed her the glass of water and sat on the edge of her bed as he pushed the pills through the foil and into the palm of his hand.
“Here, take these. They work wonders, seriously.”
“Can’t.”
“Annie, it’ll kill you without them. Hell, it nearly killed me with them.”
“Pills.”
“Shit. Sorry Annie, this is all you bought. Do you want me to go get some syrup?”
Annie just shook her head, though even that was painful. She was afraid that even the syrup could cause her to slip back into addiction, especially after all the horror stories from the other kids in her rehab group. It’s times like these that she really hates herself for allowing herself to fall into the addiction to Adderall (not that she could have allowed it). It’s not like she needed the pills for their intended use; she was easily able to focus on her work, weather it was during class when the boys got loud and rowdy, or when her parents were having one of their regularly scheduled screaming fits. She’d started taking them when her mother thought she wasn’t able to focus on conversations, but that was mostly because Annie wanted to ignore her overbearing mother. She noticed while she was taking more than the recommended dosage of her pills that sometimes she couldn’t remember doing her work. It freaked her out a first, thinking she’d forgotten to do her homework only to realise she’d just blacked out.
No one noticed the slight changes in her behaviour. She got a little more outgoing; talking to people on the street or at the library study carrel beside hers. She got a little loud; Shouting the answer in class or pushing her way through the hallway. She found people were starting to like her a bit more and it brought her confidence to a soaring high. She was no longer the teacher’s pet everyone used to think she was; she was a person people wanted to hang out with. She had a boyfriend and friends and she was generally happy. Happy until her parents, the ever-loving Annette and Paul Edison, decided they could no longer stand each other and turned Annie into a human rag doll.
The divorce nearly killed her. She’d never been jealous of those children who’d been ignored by their parents but when her parents were fighting over her and trying to convince her that they were the better parent she kind of wished they had never cared. Her father had moved out a week before the papers had come in the mail, and every day since she’d heard nothing but bad things about him; He’d never wash his own clothes, he ate food that had fallen off the floor, even that he’d wanted to try anal once. Annie had taken her pills and swallowed them down with vodka in hopes that the alcohol content in the vodka would act as a cleanser to her brain. She was more than thankful for the blackout that night.
Annie would go to see her father for weekly dinners in hopes of forging a relationship, where they would mostly talk about her grades (straight A's, as if they'd be any different. This is Annie we're talking about.) Or the research he's been working on (her father had a major boner for growing extra organs in rats and giving them various venereal diseases) which had them talking for maybe an hour at the most before they succumbed to an awkward silence until their desserts arrived (He would always order her a strawberry sundae with brownie bits and whipped cream; no wonder she was chubby) that they would rush to finish. Their evenings always ended with a slightly awkward hug and her father slipping her a 20, telling her to buy herself something nice. (At least her father 'supported' her drug habit, ha ha ha ... never mind.)
The divorce procession was long and drawn out; her mother was fighting for everything. She said she wanted the house so Annie could live in her childhood home without having to start a new school halfway through her final year of high school. She fought for the car, the TV and most of their belongings counting on Annie to join her in ridding her father of all his worldly possessions. Annie just agreed in the hopes of everything ending as soon as possible, delving further into her drug supply in hopes of forgetting everything that was going shitty in her life. She started running through her pills quicker and quicker; seeing her dealer almost every day to get more product. It was one of these days when she finally broke down.
It was the 3rd time she’d gone looking for him that week, having run through her official prescription the day she got it, and she was going slightly crazy. She had to deal with normal school shit; the other students in her class being stupid as hell, the almost remedial homework and the hate practically flowing off her teacher’s in her direction. Her mother was going fucking crazy. She’d dropped her charities after being ostracised by her friends for not being able to keep her husband from leaving her. She started drinking starting the moment she awoke, always smelling of gin and olives. Annie had to deal with going to see her airheaded father for a mediocre dinner at a diner she used to like when she was 8.
She depended on these pills to numb the pain of doing all these dumbass things that just didn’t seem to have a point in being in her life. It was fucking ridiculous, but those pills were like God giving her a reprieve from her shitty life … and she really needed it. She ran around the campus looking for the shady guy she had found who somehow had an overabundance of her drug of choice. He let her pay, a lift of her shirt, only enough for a glimpse at a perky pink nipple, before running off to whatever he does during the day. Annie dumped half the packet into the palm of her hand and threw them into the back of her throat before drowning them down her throat with the bottle she always had at the ready.
The effects of the pills seemed to hit her harder than ever before. She’d gotten used to the constant buzzing in her ears since she’d upped her own dosage, but it had never been this bad. What was worse was that the millions of bees that must be in her head brought friends. Her vision tilted hard to the right and Annie thought she was going to fall off her feet. The people in front of her twisted and turned, changing colours as they all seemed to come at her. Sure, she was almost positive she was walking down the hallway towards her locker but everyone seemed to be glaring at her. Was it because she overacted to walking in on her supposedly straight boyfriend kissing one of his male teammates like a thirsty man would attack a tall drink of water? Annie had given him her virginity, though when she thought about it, she had kind of forced him into it the weekend before and since then he’d been distant. Apparently her vagina had magical powers; turning the co-captain of the soccer team gay with just one advanced pass to her nether regions. The rest of the student body had seemed colder towards her since the supply closet fiasco. Sure, they only accepted her because she was dating one of the more popular-yet-down-to-earth jocks, but she’d thought they’d begun to think of themselves as her friends too. Well, fuck. You had to be wrong every once in a while right?
The effects seemed to magnify the closer she got to her locker. The people in the hall were no longer humans. They were giant gray blobs of matter, like silly putty, twisting and turning; changing shape and it was starting to freak her out. It was lunch and all she had to do was grab her lunch bag out of her locker and find a nice, quiet, lonely stall in one of the girls bathrooms on the third floor to eat her lunch in and ‘enjoy’ these crazy side-effects on her own. She turned toward her locker and took a deep breath, reminding herself to sing the jingle she’d created to remember her combination when the hallways around her fell into utter silence. She closed her eyes for only a second before turning towards the crowd, not knowing what to do. She immediately wished she hadn’t opened her eyes; the blobs of matter her fellow students had turned into had finally chosen a shape in which to manifest into. Instead of seeing her fellow peers, she was surrounded by a scene straight out of a science fiction novel; robots.
Annie tried to keep calm; she knew all of this was in her head, but do you know how freaky it is to see people you’ve known since middle school melt into puddles then rebuild themselves into metal contraptions bent on killing you? No? And Annie thought it might be an everyday experience because the change didn’t seem to register with the people - now robots- surrounding her. The breathing exercises she was using to slow her heartbeat weren’t working; in fact she could feel her heart pounding against her ribs. She feared her heart would break through her ribs and the ribs would cut open her skin where her heart would fall out of her chest cavity and she’d bleed to death in front of these robots that were just staring her down, waiting for her to accidentally kill herself as if to keep the blood from their hands … or claws. She realised that if there was any way to save her life she needed to run.
Fuck locking her locker, the one that held what was left of the pill stash she’d just bought. Fuck holding on to the railings as she threw herself down the stairs to the first floor. Fuck asking the stupid people taking up the hallway to move, she just pushed through them. She didn’t realise she was yelling as loud as she could, as if being chased by a serial killer in any of the horror movies she’d never allowed herself to watch, this reality was worse, until she felt her lungs screaming for new oxygen. She tried to fill her lungs but felt her throat close as the glass doors at the other end of the cafeteria loomed closer. There was no way she would be able to stop herself from smashing into the doors; her impractical ballet flats had no traction and the floor was always sticky with whatever liquid the nerds were carrying to their tables when the jocks decided the floors were thirsty. If there was a God, and she’d half-assedly believed in Yahweh, he granted her some kind of miracle. Just as her body was about to hit the door the lack of oxygen caused her to blackout. She didn’t feel her head smash against the glass - causing the glass to crack and her scalp to split and start bleeding like crazy, cracking the skull underneath. She didn’t feel her body fall to the floor like a bag of potatoes and she didn’t feel the stares from everyone in the now silent cafeteria. No one moved for the first minute, when the teachers realised she wasn’t waking up and that her chest wasn’t exactly moving. Yes, her heart had stopped for maybe 15 seconds, but it started again as it noticed the excess of oxygen in her bloodstream. The lungs had started to do its job now that the body they were working in was stagnant. Her heart was beating steadily as a teacher finally got close enough to check for vital signs. She was breathing and her heart was beating but her eyes weren’t moving and she didn’t look to be waking up.
The paramedics finally arrived; hooking a padded contraption around her neck and rolling her body onto a stretcher. It wasn’t until she was safely strapped to the gurney and was well on her way to the closest hospital that she started having signs of waking up. The paramedic taking her blood pressure (that was way too high for a person so young) when she'd noticed the patient’s fingers moving. Then her eyes fluttered, but only for a brief second before radio silence from the tiny young girl lying strapped to the gurney.
At the hospital, the doctors shoved needle after needle into her arms, one into her wrist to start an IV and tubes down her throat, pumping the pills out of her stomach in hopes of lessening the overdose. They pushed syringes filled with different coloured liquids into the IV; medicines supposed to rehydrate her body and reverse the effects of the pills on her heart. The different machines surrounding her were beeping and blooping; using a carefully created language the doctors used to figure out the cause of the problem. The teachers that called for the ambulance had no idea what could have caused such a weird reaction from a student who was “very nice and very smart if not a bit of an asskisser.”
The school called her mother, telling her that her daughter had had an accident where she was hurt so badly she had been taken to the hospital. Ever the unselfish person she was, Annette made herself another martini ‘To calm the intense feeling of sadness and worry” before calling the ever absent Paul to tell him “Your dumbass daughter is in the hospital.” Annette took another 10 minutes (and another martini) for herself before calling a cab service and composing a semi-believable Oh-My-God-my-daughter-is-in-the-hospital-I’m-so-worried façade and pouring herself into the backseat of cab heading towards the hospital where Annie was finally waking up.
Waking up from the stupor that was the aftermath of the overdose was painful and loud. Her hearing had been amplified and she could hear her mother’s faking crying from down the hall. The machines beeping right beside her were causing her head to pound in a way that had her reaching for the pills she normally kept in the drawer of her nightstand. The fact of her being in the hospital hadn’t even registered in her subconscious. She didn’t even open her eyes until her hand found nothing but air where her nightstand was supposed to be. She opened her eyes for only a second before the harsh glare of the overhead fluorescents burned her retinas to a crisp. She sat up and tried opening her eyes again, this time shading her eyes from the lights; she focused on the plastic footboard that looked nothing like the wireframe on her bed at home. She turned at the footsteps approaching her door.
“Miss Edison, It’s nice to see you up. My name is Dr. Pritchard. Do you know how you got here?”
She answered with a groan and a slight headshake. She’d tried to speak but just swallowing caused her throat to burn as if she’d swallowed fire.
“I understand if your throat is sore. We tried to pump your stomach. Your school called just as you were arriving to say they found pills in your locker, a prescription to Adderall that didn’t have your name on it. We had to pump your stomach.”
Annie just stared at the man talking to her. He seemed to be an actual being, but she’d had weirdly vivid dreams before.
“We need to ask you a few questions about your drug use. Have you used Adderall before?”
“I … I have a prescription.” It killed her to talk; the scratchiness of her voice not going away whenever she tried to clear her throat.
“Yes, I see that. Have you been taking the recommended dosage regularly?”
Annie just shook her head. She felt embarrassed that this (possibly fictional) man was asking her all these questions.
“Miss Edison, I’m going to have to ask you to use your words. We need to know if there will be any longer term side effects.”
She was scared. In all of her dreams and hallucinations there had never been a character to ask her about her problems. No one had ever cared about her, only about what she could do for them.
“Uhm, No. For the first little while I did, but then I would lose focus and I thought it was because of a faulty pill.” Soon she was telling the doctor about the messy divorce and her suddenly gay boyfriend and continuously upping her dosage in an attempt to deal with everything going on in her head. At first she felt relieved; telling someone your problems really was the perfect way to let the world off your shoulders, but then she noticed his face turning from shocked to slightly terrified. Had she told him something he’d never heard before?
“Miss Edison, I think you may have a problem. It seems that you have become dependent on Adderall, commonly known as an addiction. I’d recommend checking into a rehab clinic.”
She was kind of shocked into silence. Rehab? She wasn’t addicted to the pills. Sure she took them as a means of ignoring the bad things, and sure sometimes she doesn’t remember some of the things she’d done, but that didn’t mean she was addicted? Did it?
“Miss Edison, I’m not supposed to show favoritism, but I volunteer at Cedar Heights Rehabilitation Clinic. I think you would prosper there. I know you won’t have much support from your parents, and I know you’ll be 18 in the next week. You’d be able to check yourself in if you so choose.” And with that he’d turned on his heel and left her to her own thoughts.
It took her a whole week of uncomfortable hospital beds and pillows of questionable orgins to be cleared from the hospital. They told her to stay in bed and drink a lot of fluids, not that she’d go back to school after making such a fool of herself. She still hadn’t decided if she wanted to go to rehab; Alcoholics and Druggies went to rehab. People with eating disorders went to rehab. Annie Edison doesn’t go to rehab. No she wasn’t going to go to rehab. She didn’t have a problem. The doctors had a problem. Yeah, they didn’t like that she was getting her pills from a middleman. They want her to fork over all her money to the Big Bad Medication Companies, the ones that just give you placebos and don’t do anything. Annie Edison could stop using Adderall whenever she wanted to.
3 hours later she was on the computer looking into entering Cedar Heights for pill addictions. Sure, she’d thought she was fine, until she heard her parents fighting below her and she’d caught herself leaning over to grab some pills. It freaked her out. She’d just gotten out of the hospital for trying to throw herself out of a plate glass window in hopes of saving herself from a bunch of robots that were only in her head. Oh yeah, she needed help.
Author:ClassicFREAK
Rating: PG-13 Full of swearsies and other unmentionables
Warning: Talk of drug use and physical abuse.
Word Count: 3,602 words
Disclaimer: Dan Harmon is my god and I bow to his tumblr posts.
Summary: Jeff just wants to nurse a sick Annie back to health, and Annie falls down into the rabbit hole where she is faced with her addiction.
Author's Note: I have no idea what happens when you overdose on Adderall, nor do I know how rehab works. Purely fictional and hopefully not harmful to you guys. Also, this is a double chapter because I'm a big fat meany head. Comments and critisims are always welcome.
Previous Chapters: Chapter 1: Prologue, Chapter 2: University, Chapter 3: Routines Ruined
A Sordid Past
Annie is a fighter, especially when something will keep her from doing her work. She doesn’t allow her body to control her life, nor does she let sickness keep her from work or school. In fact she once went to school with strep throat; she wore a face mask the whole days to ensure she wouldn’t infect her fellow classmates. But this? This wasn’t a cold, and it was nothing like strep, this was an alien virus that was trying to take over her nervous system and control her body. She was in near delirium from the headache and sinus congestion that when she turned toward what she thought was the doorway she only saw the wallpaper that covered the walls of her room.
“Annie, I am so sorry.” Jeff whispered from the doorway, he thought that if her head felt as bad as his had that silence would be best, but needed her to know that he hadn’t meant to pass the devilish illness onto her.
Annie, having turned toward him, successfully this time, began to roll her eyes in response but stopped as soon as the pain became unbearable and let out a whimper. She closed her eyes and cringed at the pathetic sound she’d allowed to escape her mouth. She’d been trying to convince the group of years that she could take care of herself in every situation. She peeked at Jeff to see the concerned look on his face and gave into the feeling of being cared for. She opened her mouth to tell him off but changed her mind and asked for a glass of water. Jeff left and she heard his feet hitting the floor, she could hear when he stopped moving and when the tap was turned on. She could hear him move as he walked to the bathroom and grabbed the medication she’d stashed there yesterday after he’d fallen asleep, she listened as the sound of his feet slapping against the floorboards gets louder as he gets closer and suddenly he’s back in the doorway. She feels as her body jump a little in shock, her brain having been slowed by the virus that his appearance, thought she’d been expecting it, was a shock. He walked into her room, handed her the glass of water and sat on the edge of her bed as he pushed the pills through the foil and into the palm of his hand.
“Here, take these. They work wonders, seriously.”
“Can’t.”
“Annie, it’ll kill you without them. Hell, it nearly killed me with them.”
“Pills.”
“Shit. Sorry Annie, this is all you bought. Do you want me to go get some syrup?”
Annie just shook her head, though even that was painful. She was afraid that even the syrup could cause her to slip back into addiction, especially after all the horror stories from the other kids in her rehab group. It’s times like these that she really hates herself for allowing herself to fall into the addiction to Adderall (not that she could have allowed it). It’s not like she needed the pills for their intended use; she was easily able to focus on her work, weather it was during class when the boys got loud and rowdy, or when her parents were having one of their regularly scheduled screaming fits. She’d started taking them when her mother thought she wasn’t able to focus on conversations, but that was mostly because Annie wanted to ignore her overbearing mother. She noticed while she was taking more than the recommended dosage of her pills that sometimes she couldn’t remember doing her work. It freaked her out a first, thinking she’d forgotten to do her homework only to realise she’d just blacked out.
No one noticed the slight changes in her behaviour. She got a little more outgoing; talking to people on the street or at the library study carrel beside hers. She got a little loud; Shouting the answer in class or pushing her way through the hallway. She found people were starting to like her a bit more and it brought her confidence to a soaring high. She was no longer the teacher’s pet everyone used to think she was; she was a person people wanted to hang out with. She had a boyfriend and friends and she was generally happy. Happy until her parents, the ever-loving Annette and Paul Edison, decided they could no longer stand each other and turned Annie into a human rag doll.
The divorce nearly killed her. She’d never been jealous of those children who’d been ignored by their parents but when her parents were fighting over her and trying to convince her that they were the better parent she kind of wished they had never cared. Her father had moved out a week before the papers had come in the mail, and every day since she’d heard nothing but bad things about him; He’d never wash his own clothes, he ate food that had fallen off the floor, even that he’d wanted to try anal once. Annie had taken her pills and swallowed them down with vodka in hopes that the alcohol content in the vodka would act as a cleanser to her brain. She was more than thankful for the blackout that night.
Annie would go to see her father for weekly dinners in hopes of forging a relationship, where they would mostly talk about her grades (straight A's, as if they'd be any different. This is Annie we're talking about.) Or the research he's been working on (her father had a major boner for growing extra organs in rats and giving them various venereal diseases) which had them talking for maybe an hour at the most before they succumbed to an awkward silence until their desserts arrived (He would always order her a strawberry sundae with brownie bits and whipped cream; no wonder she was chubby) that they would rush to finish. Their evenings always ended with a slightly awkward hug and her father slipping her a 20, telling her to buy herself something nice. (At least her father 'supported' her drug habit, ha ha ha ... never mind.)
The divorce procession was long and drawn out; her mother was fighting for everything. She said she wanted the house so Annie could live in her childhood home without having to start a new school halfway through her final year of high school. She fought for the car, the TV and most of their belongings counting on Annie to join her in ridding her father of all his worldly possessions. Annie just agreed in the hopes of everything ending as soon as possible, delving further into her drug supply in hopes of forgetting everything that was going shitty in her life. She started running through her pills quicker and quicker; seeing her dealer almost every day to get more product. It was one of these days when she finally broke down.
It was the 3rd time she’d gone looking for him that week, having run through her official prescription the day she got it, and she was going slightly crazy. She had to deal with normal school shit; the other students in her class being stupid as hell, the almost remedial homework and the hate practically flowing off her teacher’s in her direction. Her mother was going fucking crazy. She’d dropped her charities after being ostracised by her friends for not being able to keep her husband from leaving her. She started drinking starting the moment she awoke, always smelling of gin and olives. Annie had to deal with going to see her airheaded father for a mediocre dinner at a diner she used to like when she was 8.
She depended on these pills to numb the pain of doing all these dumbass things that just didn’t seem to have a point in being in her life. It was fucking ridiculous, but those pills were like God giving her a reprieve from her shitty life … and she really needed it. She ran around the campus looking for the shady guy she had found who somehow had an overabundance of her drug of choice. He let her pay, a lift of her shirt, only enough for a glimpse at a perky pink nipple, before running off to whatever he does during the day. Annie dumped half the packet into the palm of her hand and threw them into the back of her throat before drowning them down her throat with the bottle she always had at the ready.
The effects of the pills seemed to hit her harder than ever before. She’d gotten used to the constant buzzing in her ears since she’d upped her own dosage, but it had never been this bad. What was worse was that the millions of bees that must be in her head brought friends. Her vision tilted hard to the right and Annie thought she was going to fall off her feet. The people in front of her twisted and turned, changing colours as they all seemed to come at her. Sure, she was almost positive she was walking down the hallway towards her locker but everyone seemed to be glaring at her. Was it because she overacted to walking in on her supposedly straight boyfriend kissing one of his male teammates like a thirsty man would attack a tall drink of water? Annie had given him her virginity, though when she thought about it, she had kind of forced him into it the weekend before and since then he’d been distant. Apparently her vagina had magical powers; turning the co-captain of the soccer team gay with just one advanced pass to her nether regions. The rest of the student body had seemed colder towards her since the supply closet fiasco. Sure, they only accepted her because she was dating one of the more popular-yet-down-to-earth jocks, but she’d thought they’d begun to think of themselves as her friends too. Well, fuck. You had to be wrong every once in a while right?
The effects seemed to magnify the closer she got to her locker. The people in the hall were no longer humans. They were giant gray blobs of matter, like silly putty, twisting and turning; changing shape and it was starting to freak her out. It was lunch and all she had to do was grab her lunch bag out of her locker and find a nice, quiet, lonely stall in one of the girls bathrooms on the third floor to eat her lunch in and ‘enjoy’ these crazy side-effects on her own. She turned toward her locker and took a deep breath, reminding herself to sing the jingle she’d created to remember her combination when the hallways around her fell into utter silence. She closed her eyes for only a second before turning towards the crowd, not knowing what to do. She immediately wished she hadn’t opened her eyes; the blobs of matter her fellow students had turned into had finally chosen a shape in which to manifest into. Instead of seeing her fellow peers, she was surrounded by a scene straight out of a science fiction novel; robots.
Annie tried to keep calm; she knew all of this was in her head, but do you know how freaky it is to see people you’ve known since middle school melt into puddles then rebuild themselves into metal contraptions bent on killing you? No? And Annie thought it might be an everyday experience because the change didn’t seem to register with the people - now robots- surrounding her. The breathing exercises she was using to slow her heartbeat weren’t working; in fact she could feel her heart pounding against her ribs. She feared her heart would break through her ribs and the ribs would cut open her skin where her heart would fall out of her chest cavity and she’d bleed to death in front of these robots that were just staring her down, waiting for her to accidentally kill herself as if to keep the blood from their hands … or claws. She realised that if there was any way to save her life she needed to run.
Fuck locking her locker, the one that held what was left of the pill stash she’d just bought. Fuck holding on to the railings as she threw herself down the stairs to the first floor. Fuck asking the stupid people taking up the hallway to move, she just pushed through them. She didn’t realise she was yelling as loud as she could, as if being chased by a serial killer in any of the horror movies she’d never allowed herself to watch, this reality was worse, until she felt her lungs screaming for new oxygen. She tried to fill her lungs but felt her throat close as the glass doors at the other end of the cafeteria loomed closer. There was no way she would be able to stop herself from smashing into the doors; her impractical ballet flats had no traction and the floor was always sticky with whatever liquid the nerds were carrying to their tables when the jocks decided the floors were thirsty. If there was a God, and she’d half-assedly believed in Yahweh, he granted her some kind of miracle. Just as her body was about to hit the door the lack of oxygen caused her to blackout. She didn’t feel her head smash against the glass - causing the glass to crack and her scalp to split and start bleeding like crazy, cracking the skull underneath. She didn’t feel her body fall to the floor like a bag of potatoes and she didn’t feel the stares from everyone in the now silent cafeteria. No one moved for the first minute, when the teachers realised she wasn’t waking up and that her chest wasn’t exactly moving. Yes, her heart had stopped for maybe 15 seconds, but it started again as it noticed the excess of oxygen in her bloodstream. The lungs had started to do its job now that the body they were working in was stagnant. Her heart was beating steadily as a teacher finally got close enough to check for vital signs. She was breathing and her heart was beating but her eyes weren’t moving and she didn’t look to be waking up.
The paramedics finally arrived; hooking a padded contraption around her neck and rolling her body onto a stretcher. It wasn’t until she was safely strapped to the gurney and was well on her way to the closest hospital that she started having signs of waking up. The paramedic taking her blood pressure (that was way too high for a person so young) when she'd noticed the patient’s fingers moving. Then her eyes fluttered, but only for a brief second before radio silence from the tiny young girl lying strapped to the gurney.
At the hospital, the doctors shoved needle after needle into her arms, one into her wrist to start an IV and tubes down her throat, pumping the pills out of her stomach in hopes of lessening the overdose. They pushed syringes filled with different coloured liquids into the IV; medicines supposed to rehydrate her body and reverse the effects of the pills on her heart. The different machines surrounding her were beeping and blooping; using a carefully created language the doctors used to figure out the cause of the problem. The teachers that called for the ambulance had no idea what could have caused such a weird reaction from a student who was “very nice and very smart if not a bit of an asskisser.”
The school called her mother, telling her that her daughter had had an accident where she was hurt so badly she had been taken to the hospital. Ever the unselfish person she was, Annette made herself another martini ‘To calm the intense feeling of sadness and worry” before calling the ever absent Paul to tell him “Your dumbass daughter is in the hospital.” Annette took another 10 minutes (and another martini) for herself before calling a cab service and composing a semi-believable Oh-My-God-my-daughter-is-in-the-hospital-I’m-so-worried façade and pouring herself into the backseat of cab heading towards the hospital where Annie was finally waking up.
Waking up from the stupor that was the aftermath of the overdose was painful and loud. Her hearing had been amplified and she could hear her mother’s faking crying from down the hall. The machines beeping right beside her were causing her head to pound in a way that had her reaching for the pills she normally kept in the drawer of her nightstand. The fact of her being in the hospital hadn’t even registered in her subconscious. She didn’t even open her eyes until her hand found nothing but air where her nightstand was supposed to be. She opened her eyes for only a second before the harsh glare of the overhead fluorescents burned her retinas to a crisp. She sat up and tried opening her eyes again, this time shading her eyes from the lights; she focused on the plastic footboard that looked nothing like the wireframe on her bed at home. She turned at the footsteps approaching her door.
“Miss Edison, It’s nice to see you up. My name is Dr. Pritchard. Do you know how you got here?”
She answered with a groan and a slight headshake. She’d tried to speak but just swallowing caused her throat to burn as if she’d swallowed fire.
“I understand if your throat is sore. We tried to pump your stomach. Your school called just as you were arriving to say they found pills in your locker, a prescription to Adderall that didn’t have your name on it. We had to pump your stomach.”
Annie just stared at the man talking to her. He seemed to be an actual being, but she’d had weirdly vivid dreams before.
“We need to ask you a few questions about your drug use. Have you used Adderall before?”
“I … I have a prescription.” It killed her to talk; the scratchiness of her voice not going away whenever she tried to clear her throat.
“Yes, I see that. Have you been taking the recommended dosage regularly?”
Annie just shook her head. She felt embarrassed that this (possibly fictional) man was asking her all these questions.
“Miss Edison, I’m going to have to ask you to use your words. We need to know if there will be any longer term side effects.”
She was scared. In all of her dreams and hallucinations there had never been a character to ask her about her problems. No one had ever cared about her, only about what she could do for them.
“Uhm, No. For the first little while I did, but then I would lose focus and I thought it was because of a faulty pill.” Soon she was telling the doctor about the messy divorce and her suddenly gay boyfriend and continuously upping her dosage in an attempt to deal with everything going on in her head. At first she felt relieved; telling someone your problems really was the perfect way to let the world off your shoulders, but then she noticed his face turning from shocked to slightly terrified. Had she told him something he’d never heard before?
“Miss Edison, I think you may have a problem. It seems that you have become dependent on Adderall, commonly known as an addiction. I’d recommend checking into a rehab clinic.”
She was kind of shocked into silence. Rehab? She wasn’t addicted to the pills. Sure she took them as a means of ignoring the bad things, and sure sometimes she doesn’t remember some of the things she’d done, but that didn’t mean she was addicted? Did it?
“Miss Edison, I’m not supposed to show favoritism, but I volunteer at Cedar Heights Rehabilitation Clinic. I think you would prosper there. I know you won’t have much support from your parents, and I know you’ll be 18 in the next week. You’d be able to check yourself in if you so choose.” And with that he’d turned on his heel and left her to her own thoughts.
It took her a whole week of uncomfortable hospital beds and pillows of questionable orgins to be cleared from the hospital. They told her to stay in bed and drink a lot of fluids, not that she’d go back to school after making such a fool of herself. She still hadn’t decided if she wanted to go to rehab; Alcoholics and Druggies went to rehab. People with eating disorders went to rehab. Annie Edison doesn’t go to rehab. No she wasn’t going to go to rehab. She didn’t have a problem. The doctors had a problem. Yeah, they didn’t like that she was getting her pills from a middleman. They want her to fork over all her money to the Big Bad Medication Companies, the ones that just give you placebos and don’t do anything. Annie Edison could stop using Adderall whenever she wanted to.
3 hours later she was on the computer looking into entering Cedar Heights for pill addictions. Sure, she’d thought she was fine, until she heard her parents fighting below her and she’d caught herself leaning over to grab some pills. It freaked her out. She’d just gotten out of the hospital for trying to throw herself out of a plate glass window in hopes of saving herself from a bunch of robots that were only in her head. Oh yeah, she needed help.