It was the seventeenth time Remy talked with Megan that it all fell apart. Nights at the bar had become fewer and farther between over the preceding weeks, the workload for diagnostics having skyrocketed, leaving Remy too tired to even think about going out at all. A handful of concerts and awkward lunches had occurred instead, Remy unable to stop herself from spending time with Megan even when she couldn't fathom why she wanted to in the first place.
They were at Megan's apartment the seventeenth time, after going to another local show. Remy was, for once, sober, having volunteered to drive so Megan could drink. Megan, consequently, was buzzed on Johnny Walker and Grey Goose, and sat curled up on one edge of the sofa tiredly.
"I think I might puke," she mumbled. Remy couldn't help but laugh softly at the absolutely pathetic sight of her friend (because sometime, she'd started to consider Megan a friend—the friend, actually, the only one outside of work in this state). She moved into the kitchen, retrieving a bottle of water from the fridge and handing it to Megan.
"Aspirin?"
"Medicine cabinet," Megan said, wincing as she twisted the top off the bottle. "In my bathroom."
"Got it," Remy said. She kicked her shoes off, leaving them in the living room, and went into Megan's familiar bedroom. In the bathroom, she rummaged through the medicine cabinet, searching for the elusive bottle of aspirin as she hummed along tunelessly to one of the songs they'd heard earlier in the evening.
"Aha," she murmured, standing on her toes to look over the top of a bottle of allergy medication and spying a small aspirin bottle, wedged between the corner of the cabinet and a compact mirror. Reaching in carefully, she still upset both the allergy medicine and the compact when she pulled out the aspirin, the other two falling into the sink. "Damn," she said.
Picking up the allergy medicine and the compact, she ground out another curse when the lid of the compact fell off, the hinging having broken when it fell. The lid clattered into the sink, along with a tiny plastic bag filled with white powder.
Remy froze, allergy medication still in her hand, as she stared at the bag of heroin in front of her. With trembling fingers, she reached out and plucked it out of the sink, staring at it in disbelief. Her diagnostician's brain went into overdrive, wondering why Megan had heroin, how long, how, when, why why why.
Carefully, she opened the bag, dipping one finger into the powder and smearing it along her gums, testing it. The drugs were cut—the kind one got from a dealer they'd been buying from for a while—instead of pure. This was far from the first time Megan had bought or used.
The sound of Megan coughing from the living room jerked Remy out of her disbelief. Swearing again under her breath, she shoved the allergy medication and compact back into the medicine cabinet, resealing the bag of drugs and sticking it in her pocket on her way out of the room, aspirin in hand.
Sitting down on the coffee table in front of Megan, she dropped two aspirin into her palm and handed them to the redhead. "Here you go," she said quietly. "Drink up."
"Thanks," Megan mumbled.
"No problem," Remy said slowly. She took a deep breath, drawing up her nerve, and dug the bag of drugs out of her pocket and held it out in front of Megan. "Care to explain this?"
Megan froze, hand still outstretched and loosely clutching the two aspirin. Her eyes, clear grey clouded with scotch and vodka, dropped to stare at the drugs dangling from Remy's fingers.
Remy waited patiently, counting out thirty seconds of Megan's unwavering silence before she sighed and sat back, dropping the drugs on the table next to her and bracing her elbows on her knees. She pulled her eyes away from Megan's guilty posturing and stared instead at her bare feet, peeking out from under the frayed hem of the jeans she'd had since med school. Familiar, simple, comforting; quite foreign from the constant undercurrent of awkwardness, shyness, inexplicable determination she felt around Megan.
Inhaling deeply, she shook her hair out of her eyes, not looking away from the familiar stain that marred the denim covering her left knee, a remnant from an oil change gone bad three years ago. "Are you careful?" she asked softly. She forced herself to look up, unable to prevent herself from wondering for who-knows-which time why on earth she was so drawn to a quiet yoga-fiend bartender.
Megan had retracted her hand finally, setting the aspirin and the water bottle on the small table beside the couch. She was curled in on herself, arms wrapped around her stomach as she pressed herself into the corner formed by the back and arm of the couch; she refused to meet Remy's eyes.
Remy sighed, rubbing her hand over her eyes and wishing that she had taken her contacts out before going to the show that night. She had a dark feeling that this was going to be a long night. "Megan," she said. She winced inwardly at the inadvertent edge to her voice that seemed to jolt the redhead into finally looking at her.
"Megan," she said again, her voice softer. "Talk to me."
"Why?" Megan mumbled.
"Because you're my friend, and you're doing drugs, and it worries me," Remy said simply.
"Why me, though?" Megan met her eyes squarely this time, chin set in defiance. "You come into my bar and take girls home and never talk to them again, but you say good night to me every single time. You kiss me for no reason and offer no explanations. You show up out of the blue with an amazing gift, just because I let you crash at my apartment. Why me and not one of the other girls? Why me?"
Remy stared blankly at Megan. The anger she expected to rise in her throat, that would have exploded inside her had anyone else spoken to her that way, never came. Instead, there was only a dead silence that hung between the two of them, expanding and growing and pushing them further apart with each second Remy struggled to collect her thoughts.
"I don't know," she said finally. Heaving a frustrated sigh, Remy stood from the table, shoving her hair back from her face and moving to stand on the other side of the table. "I don't know why, I don't know why you." She crossed her arms defensively over her chest. "Anyways, don't deflect this on me, Megan. I'm not the one with heroin in the bathroom cabinet."
"Yeah, like you've never done them before," Megan snapped. She stood as well, her drunkenness forgotten or ignored in her own indignation. "I'm not blind, you know. You think I couldn't tell when you were high or coming down when you came in sometimes? That I just didn't notice the circles under your eyes, the track marks on your arms, the way you kept losing weight?"
"This isn't about me," Remy ground out. "Stop making this about me." She turned around, resting clenched fists on the shelves of records in front of her. A week ago, the fourteenth time she and Megan spoke, she had spent seven hours sprawled out on Megan's living room floor while she listened to old records and Megan did yoga and cleaned her apartment. Remy fought the urge to put her fist through the wall of music in front of her.
"Then get of your goddamned high horse!" Megan shouted. Remy flinched at the sound, closing her eyes and breathing in deeply to try and control the tremors shaking her body. "It's none of your business what I do on my own time, and even if it was any of your business, you certainly wouldn't have a single bit of moral superiority to condemn me with. You were as bad as I've ever been."
The fury lacing Megan's voice snapped something in Remy. She slammed her hands against the shelves in front of her, shaking records and dislodging dusts and causing Megan to jump back in shock as Remy spun around and bellowed, "I'm dying! What's your excuse?"
Remy watched with detached disinterest, her anger leaving as swiftly as it had arrived, as Megan seemed to deflate right in front of her eyes. The rage that had burned in her eyes vanished, her shoulders slumping; even her hair seemed to go limp at the sound of Remy's unintentional confession.
"What?" she said in a tiny voice. Her hands dangled uselessly at her sides.
"Forget it," Remy said stiffly. She strode away from the shelves, unintentionally taking the long way around the room to keep the table and couch between her and Megan, shoving her feet into her shoes and snatching her purse and coat from the counter.
"Remy, wait," Megan called, scrambling over the back of the couch and following her out into the hall. Remy ignored her, doing her best to hold back the tears she felt welling in her eyes as she hurried towards the stairwell. Three steps shy of the stairs, she felt Megan's fingers wrap around her wrist, the gentle pressure not enough to force her to stop, but slamming her to a halt anyways. She closed her eyes, her posture stiffening to the point of caricature.
"Leave it, Megan," she whispered. "Let it go. Please."
"Remy," Megan said. Exhaustion weighted her voice. "You can't drop something like that on me and expect me to just drop it." Her fingers tightened on Remy's wrist, tugging gently until she turned around, head down and eyes locked to the floor.
"Come on," Megan said gently. "Come back inside." She led Remy back down the hallway to her apartment, depositing her on the couch. Megan perched on the coffee table, staring at Remy concernedly. Tiredly, Remy pushed her hair back, then wrung her fingers together as she refused to meet Megan's eyes; anything to keep her hands busy.
Neither of them spoke for the longest time, an uncomfortable silence spreading between them. Remy kept her eyes locked on her fingers, focusing on the blunt edges of her fingernails and the smeared stamp from the concert they'd gone to earlier and the delicate bones of her hands that creaked painfully as she clenched her fingers together ever tighter, as interlocked with each other as she felt intertwined with her diagnosis. The soft give of the couch cushions behind her made her feel queasy; the reversal of their positions from just a few minutes earlier, the almost-irony of it, was not lost on her.
"When I was a kid," Megan said suddenly, shattering the silence with her usual soft voice. "My parents and I used to go on these trips. When I was little, it was just hiking and camping. We'd go backpacking for a weekend when the weather was good, and every summer we took these weeklong trips down south, to the Appalachian Mountains and the A.T., and backpack all around."
Megan paused, shifting awkwardly on the table she sat on and leaning forward, elbows propped on her knees. Remy finally looked up, her eyes following Megan's absent gaze to stare at the fading bruises on the back of her freckled hand.
"When I got a little older, around eight or so, they started taking me climbing. That's how they met, you know, climbing Grand Teton when they were younger. It was the one thing that all three of us loved to do. We were all really different, you see. Dad was an engineer, and Mom was a CPA, and I hated anything even related to math or science. But we all liked to climb, so that's what we did. They'd been thinking about climbing Aconcagua, in the Andes, before I was born, and I jumped on the bandwagon and convinced them that we should go do it together before I went to college. We started planning that trip when I was twelve.
"When I was sixteen," she continued after a hesitation. Her voice dropped, bordering on a whisper, growing unsteady. "It was summer vacation, and we were out climbing in the Rockies. We were rappelling back down to our camp at the end of the day, and I was tired, and I slipped. I only fell about ten feet or so, but I impacted on the rock face hard enough to cut up my arm a lot. It wasn't deep, so I thought it'd be fine, but it wouldn't stop bleeding. I passed out on the hike back to the camp, and the Forest Service had to send in a helicopter to take me to a hospital."
Megan took a deep breath. Her fingers swept gently over the bruises on the back of her other hand. "The doctor in Denver diagnosed it as ITP." She glanced up at Remy. "You know what that is, right?"
Remy nodded, her throat dry. "Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura," she said quietly. "Clotting disorder."
"Yeah," Megan said. She took another deep breath. "I was lucky I didn't bleed out, then. After that, my parents flipped out. They refused to let me climb any more, didn't want me doing any sports at all. We had so many fights about it; God. They sold all my climbing gear, started filling up my schedule with private music lessons and SAT tutoring and somehow got me into this local orchestra to take up my time. As far as they were concerned, I was never going to do anything that would put me at risk for bleeding out like that again.
"They still went to climb Aconcagua. We had this huge fight before they left. I couldn't believe that they were going to go on this trip we'd been planning as a family and leave me behind to play the cello in Boston. We barely spoke when I left to move into my dorm, and a week later they were on a plane out of the country."
Her voice trailed off. Remy sat frozen, unwilling to breathe, so caught in Megan's story that she hadn't given a single thought to her own since it started.
"There was a storm," Megan said finally. "Freak incident. It hit the camp they were in that night. The entire climbing group, even the guides, they all died. Thousands of miles from home, and I hadn't even said good-bye to them properly."
Megan fell silent once more, her eyes locked on the bruises on her hand. She picked the bag of drugs up from the coffee table, turning it over in her fingers. Remy could see a telltale tremor in her shoulders as a few tears leaked out of her eyes.
"So that's it," Megan said finally. Fatigue laced her voice, dragging it down and weighting her words. "I should have died ten years ago with my parents, and I didn't. I'm still here, only because of a stupid medical condition that kept me locked in a conservatory when I wanted to be out climbing. Nothing's felt right since then. That's why I started, and that's why I won't stop." Not meeting Remy's eyes, she dropped the drugs back onto the coffee table and pushed herself to her feet. Silently, she trudged into the kitchen and retrieved a bottle of vodka from the counter.
Remy remained on the couch, unmoving, eyes unfocused and fingers still clenched together. She didn't move until Megan reappeared in front of her, standing uncomfortably on the other side of the coffee table with her arms locked around her stomach, shoulders still trembling slightly.
"That's my excuse," she said softly. Her voice was empty, blank, hollowed out of every emotion that had been laid out over the course of the night. "Your turn."
Her words finally brought Remy out of her stupor, cloudy eyes slowly lifting up and focusing on Megan's form, taking in the sight of her friend standing in front of her with her arms wrapped so tightly around her stomach that Remy wondered foolishly if they were the only thing holding Megan's body in one piece. Her imagination was running rampant with Megan's story, filling in the faces of Megan's parents and Megan falling off a rock wall and Megan's world coming apart with a phone call from the southern hemisphere. Her stomach felt as if it had solidified, filing her insides and crushing the rest of her organs until it was struggle to even breathe.
"I…" she started, and faltered. She struggled to swallow, to inhale, to bring any oxygen to her lungs. For the first time in months, she thought of Spencer, and how it had felt to look in someone's eyes and see the pain and frustration and the ticking clock she couldn't escape in her own; how it had felt to see all of that evaporate in a single heartbeat and wafting onion fumes. She wondered how long it would take for any singularity or camaraderie she felt with Megan to disappear, and how much it would hurt this time, and how far she would end up falling when it came apart.
"I'm sorry," she finally whispered. "I should… I have to… I can't. I just can't do this." She bolted to her feet and half-ran for the door. Through her unsorted frenzy of emotions, the stab in her chest when Megan didn't follow this time served as a dark satisfaction that she was right to walk away. She was thankful that she made it out of Megan's front door before she felt the tears start to fall.
That was the seventeenth.