My first major depressive episode occurred after I graduated high school.
I had always been a downer; my sippy cup was half empty and my drinking glass was never full. The therapist my mediocre health insurance covered at my job at the legal firm said that my coping mechanism was alcohol throughout high school and that's most likely why my first distinct depressive episode was so late. By her accounts, I should have experienced one with my first major stressor like finals or that night when the bikers showed up in my house.
But nope. The thing that depressed me was the end of high school.
Cliché and annoying as fuck is what that "stressor" ending up being. I wasn't even sad that high school was ending in theory; I never made friends, only met people who would direct me to the party that weekend. And they wanted to direct me because, because of my parents, most drug dealers trusted me (even though technically I never bought anything from them) and I knew where the convenience stores were that didn't card.
We all knew, though, that after high school I wouldn't give a flying fuck about them and they would never say "Hi" to me on the street in their grown-up suits and combed hair, free of the bodacious waves of youth attitude. And maybe that's what was so depressing.
Added on to the fact that my job with the hospital officially ended and we didn't have a stable, or legal, method of income flowing into the house meant my summer was not sunny. The ice cream shop I had worked at the summer prior hired "fresher" faces to provide experience so that they could get work later on. Like that'll happen all because of a "scooper" being put on someone's resume.
Instead my summer was spent not being able to sleep (I blamed the California heat), but feeling tired all the time. I couldn't tell when June ended and July began, or if my parents had failed to turn any lights on or they just cut our power yet again. For some reason the last MC visit scared them straight from selling in Charming but that didn't stop them from hitching a ride from my "Uncle" Mickey into Lodi to sell to the high schoolers there.
Yay, we had money to buy groceries but you couldn't pay most bills straight in cash anymore. Especially if said collectors knew what your parents did and were worried that they were getting tainted money.
Even then, without a list and a determined mind-set, I felt like I was drifting astray through even the most remedial tasks like grocery shopping.
The last hoorah string of parties meant I had easy access to booze (my parents never stocked the stuff, preferring the harder way to get off), but it only made me feel number. And I was beginning to get drunken girls clutching my arms, telling their friend that they wanted to be "this" skinny while waving me around like a doll.
You work on that by getting a mood disorder and we'll see how happy you are with your new body, sweetheart.
So I was wafting through hangovers to at least feel something and drunken states to numb that feeling when it began to get too annoying when finally, at a party in the last week in July, the cops finally caught us in the act of actually partying.
Whether I didn't hear the kid yell "POLICE" or I did and just decided to ignore him to gain the experience of being arrested, I will never know. I was too far gone to really comprehend anything, but the policeman who was doing all of my paperwork said I was quite cooperative which was a nice change. And nothing turns a frown upside down like a sincere compliment from a cop when you're behind bars.
I knew my parents wouldn't pick up if I phoned them to bail me out (the charge was only underage drinking as they couldn't pin me as being a public disturbance nor could they confirm that I bought any alcohol or owned the house – which I didn't). They weren't stupid enough to ignore the caller ID and I'm pretty sure being drug addicts meant they would avoid anything that said "CHARMING PD" on it if they could help it.
So I was stuck spending the night sobering up in a cream colored jail cell, counting the number of sullen teenagers getting bailed out by their own disappointed and disgruntled parents instead of sheep. Too bad neither would help me sleep.
Being both a stupid drunk and someone at a party thrown by a rich kid who had one of those confusing PUR filters on his tap that I couldn't work (remember, drunk), I started to feel the pounding in my head around three AM. The pounding got worse as I earned new cell mates who banged the bars as they were escorted inside, to which only goaded the officers more into a noisy din of yelling and baton twirling and me wanting to stick the largest cotton swabs into my ears if only to blow out my own ear drums.
The noise eventually settled as the police officer – not the one that complimented me – walked away, but I didn't pull my head from between my knees.
"Why're you here?" A gruff voice asked. A gruff voice that I knew. A gruff voice that forced me to sit up quicker than was healthy and caused my vision to swim.
But I didn't need eye sight to know that whoever was in the cell next to mine was one of the guys in my room that night – the one that wanted to at least rough me up, if not more.
Now because my parents finally got the message that Charming was off limit to the drug trade and I never flapped my lips, I didn't have any other personal run-ins with SAMCRO. Sure, I'd see them gun their motorcycles down the streets but since that night I hadn't even made eye contact with a member and was quite content keeping it that way.
So for a member to acknowledge me suddenly again, as if I was the only person the club had threatened and therefore would never forget, sobered me up quickly. The throbbing of my brain was still there, but I could think clearly, finally. If only this had happened during a mundane task like picking up coffee grounds and I wouldn't have to take 15 minutes to decide which brand we had always had in the house.
"Drinking," I said cautiously, eyeing the bald headed man who was doing the same to me, in the adjacent cell. We sat facing each other and the close quarters of the holding cell – plus the fact that everyone else had been picked up – meant we were each other's proverbial bed fellows.
He smirked but didn't say anything – just crossed his arms over his chest and legs at the ankles, stretching them before him. He was wearing a white t-shirt stained with what was probably blood and mud around the collar and sleeves, jeans and the ever-so-permanent cutte. Tattoos peaked from every opening that his clothing offered and in my tired, but newly un-influenced state thought he could probably bend the bars encasing him if he wanted to.
But he was just smirking at me and it was annoying as fuck, so I rolled my eyes once and laid down on my back. I didn't even pretend I was going to sleep, I refused to allow my first willful sleep to happen in a jail cell, but at least I didn't see that stupid smirk.
"Happy," he said from his side. I was trying to master the art of zen and he had to go and ruin that. He probably hadn't even moved from when I last looked at him.
"What?" It came out more moan-y than I intended, but I lacked a lot of control over my body that summer.
"My name," He answered. I furrowed my brow at the ceiling. Glad to know our local MC gang was endorsed by Disney. "Yours is Harper McHale."
We sat – well I laid – in silence for a few more moments.
"Do you still want me dead?" I asked. It was a shot in the dark – I didn't even know if he for sure wanted me dead the first time – he just wanted something violent to happen to me. But I was past gleaning for an answer.
"Are you going to do something to make me want you dead?" He countered. I could hear that shit-eating smirk.
"Maybe," I shrugged, shifting so my back was to him. I felt exposed. "Never know when a girl you run into is one of those death-wish types."
"I do," I wish they put up curtains between cells. "You should sleep more often."
I didn't want to know how he knew I wasn't sleeping just as much as I wanted to know why he even got arrested in the first place.
It was 4:30 AM when Happy finally got access to Harper's room.
They had been waiting for three hours – Tig, Opie and Chibs snoring in a corner of the waiting room that they had sectioned off as theirs. Jax was stuck between flipping "ironically" through the parenting magazines and pacing up and down the halls. Sometimes coming back with coffee. Sometimes not.
Happy had stood the entire time by the double doors. Arms crossed, he leaned against the wall and stared straight ahead gathering whatever thoughts were flying through his head. No emotions were showing on his face and Jax knew the eerie calm that washed over his brother as the same calm that came over him when he was planning his next kill. It worried him.
So when a nurse had walked through the doors to tell the party that came in with Harper McHale that the doctors were finally done and that a call from her sudden primary doctor in the place, Tara, allowed for one visitor to sit with her, Jax had half a mind to tell Happy he shouldn't go. But he was already halfway down the hallway through the previously forbidden doors before even the nurse had time to react to his departure and raced after him to show him which room she was in. Jax could only guess that Tara called the hospital as soon as she woke up again because her shift didn't start for another hour.
Happy sat in a sleeping Harper's room in a chair in the corner on the same wall as the door. The doctors gave her heavy sedatives to make sure she got through the night, letting her autonomic response system regulate her body rather than let her emotions influence and fluctuate her heart rate, breathing, etc. He didn't want to hear any other medical information from the eager to leave nurse, though, cutting her off when she went onto explain just exactly what the ER did. He didn't want to have to explain it to the guys again later on and besides, Tara would explain it with an easier digestion.
No, for that moment, he just wanted to sit and stare at Harper from the shadows with the beeping confirmation that she wasn't dead.
Although the fact that she put herself there in the first place made him consider making it so anyway.
A/N: Thank you everyone who followed and reviewed this story! I really do appreciate it!
This feels a bit more angst-y and teenage sarcastic than all the other Harper POVs, but it's fitting with her just graduating high school I guess.