A continuation of the prologue from my Work in Progress–Drawing Hope, a YA novel about surviving the drug abuse of friends and family.
You know your parents have something to talk about when you’re not around because they keep hinting that you should start your schoolwork. So you go upstairs after dinner, but you and the Dread stand in the doorway to your room and strain to listen. You can make out your brother’s name a couple of times, but you don’t know what they are talking about, except when Mom gets angry. “You have to stop enabling him. I can’t take much more of this.” You hear a door slam.
You make a half-hearted attempt to get ready for tomorrow’s social studies test but the Dread reminds you that you should be worrying, so you throw your notebook on top of your backpack and start watching random YouTube videos in hopes of getting distracted. Somehow you come across a video of people laughing at a guy doing a heroin nod-off at his desk in an office. You should ignore it, but the Dread makes you click on it. You can see the guy’s head slump in slow motion until he goes nose first into his keyboard. His head turns a little so that you can see his slitty eyes and some spit landing on the desk. You wonder if the people around him would laugh if that was their brother.
You yell down “Goodnight” to your parents. Only Mom answers. You thought you heard Dad’s car a little while ago, but you’re not sure. The Dread tells you that something bad might have happened and that’s why Dad left, but Mom’s voice was normal. At least what passes for normal these days. The Dread reminds you that they haven’t asked a single thing about your day except the generic “How was school?”
You say, “Fine.”
The Dread lets you sleep until one a.m., but then it’s just like the night before. Only worse because another day of bad things could have happened. At least no one has called to say your brother is dead or in jail.
Yet.
The Q-View 