Lou giggled as she turned back to look at the car. Her laugh seemed to echo through the quiet street; she clasped her hand over her mouth, and glanced around, but saw nothing to worry about. The engine and headlights were off, but she could just hear the muffled laughter of the others from inside. She dangled the bunch of keys in the air, and heard her friends cheer. She brought her index finger up to her lips, hunched over theatrically, then tiptoed to the front door of the surgery. Nobody would be there, she knew: it was after eleven on a Saturday night; they wouldn’t be back until Monday. And even then, she doubted anyone would notice. They never had before.
She hesitated, holding the key millimetres from the lock, then glanced back at the car again. It belonged to Theo’s mum – he was in the driver’s seat. The passenger seat, where Lou had been sitting, was empty. For a moment she wanted to run back over and jump in, swig some red wine and have a drag of the joint to take this edge off. How many pills had they taken? She laughed at herself – was it out loud? Not enough, that was the answer. Astrid and Ben were sitting forward in the back seat, their hands waving wildly as they chattered at Theo. Lou took a deep breath, unlocked the door and walked inside.
The alarm began to beep, quietly. She knew she had thirty seconds to switch it off before it would escalate and alert the security company. Her fingers trembled as she moved them towards the display; dexies always gave her the shakes. She wasn’t nervous, not really. She knew the code: it hadn’t changed since her mum had started working here, years ago. Lou typed it in, pressed enter, and the beeping stopped. She let out a breath, grinned, then poked her head back out of the doorway and gave her friends the thumbs-up. She heard them all cheer inside the car again; she wanted to run over and hug them all. They understood each other so well, they were like her family – no, better than her family.
She turned back inside, stuffing her mother’s key ring into the back pocket of her skinny jeans. She wouldn’t put the light on; she knew where she was going. In the doctor’s office, dimly lit by the streetlight outside, she opened the top drawer of the desk and found the small key for the filing cabinet. It unlocked easily. She pulled open the filing cabinet drawer, screwing up her face at the grinding noise and clunk as it stopped at full extension, then paused for a moment in case anyone came running to investigate. No one did. She took another deep breath. She should have made Astrid come in with her. Her stomach knotted and her pulse quickened; she wanted to get out of here, get back in the car with the others. She thought about her bedroom at home, her own bed, her parents asleep in the next room, thinking she was safe, at Astrid’s place. Maybe she could just go back outside and say she couldn’t find anything, that the drugs must have been used up or moved; then they could just go home and tomorrow they could go to the movies or something.
She thought of Theo again, waiting outside in the car, waiting to spend a few more hours – the night – with her. She was just being paranoid. The drugs did that sometimes, gave her this feeling, this edginess as she started to sober up. She was here now, and she knew that soon it’d all be better. Lou reached into the open drawer and riffled through the cardboard sample boxes. She knew what she was looking for. Not the antidepressants – they’d tried those and they did nothing except make them dizzy. Here they were: the ADHD drugs. There were six boxes, each with four pills in them. She couldn’t take them all. Two boxes were enough: one for her and Theo to share; one for Ben and Astrid. Before she could change her mind she grabbed them, slammed the drawer shut and locked it again.
Then she stopped.
The sallow glow cast by the streetlamp outside had been replaced by red and blue lights that rotated silently around the room. Lou closed her eyes for a moment, hoping it was a hallucination, but she could still see the lights pulsing through her eyelids. She heard a car start and the screech of its tyres as it sped away, a car door opening, then closing, and footsteps clip-clopping across the car park to the front door of the building where she was now trapped. Voices yelled. The lights went on; Lou couldn’t move, but saw herself as if she was the officer about to walk through the doorway: a thin, bedraggled teenager, too much make-up, drunk, high. Stealing amphetamines. Her hands began to shake as she desperately tried to think of what she could say to get out of this. When she heard the voices at the doorway to the office – one male, one female – she knew it was all over and there was nothing she could do. She hadn’t even had the sense to drop the boxes of tablets into the bin or kick them under the desk. Lou suddenly felt very sober. Sick. She sank down to the floor and waited.
Lou sniffed as her dad drove up the driveway. He hadn’t said a word on the journey home from the police station; her mum hadn’t even come with him. All Lou wanted to do was to go to sleep and wake up somewhere else, in someone else’s life. Or take off. Her parents wouldn’t understand, they never had. In between her bouts of tears, she kept thinking about how Theo and her so-called friends had abandoned her to save themselves, leaving her to look like a junkie when she was doing it all for them. She hoped they were hiding somewhere, terrified in case she had told the police about them. She should have, but she wasn’t like them: she stood up for her mates.
As the car stopped under the carport, she tried to open her door, but the child lock was on. She tried the handle again, letting it whack back against the door, then again.
‘Lou! For God’s sake, just wait!’
She glared at her father, then slumped back in the seat and waited for him to walk around and open the door from the outside. He held it open, waited for her to get out, then slammed it shut. She walked about a metre behind him to their front door, then followed him inside. She thought about turning around and running; maybe then he’d do something, say something. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d just let her go and lock the door behind her.
She followed him down the hallway to the kitchen. In the doorway, she hesitated. Their golden retriever, Sandy, bounded over to her, wagging his tail; Lou bent down and tangled her fingers in Sandy’s thick coat as she watched her dad walk towards the sink and fill the kettle. Her mum, in her dressing-gown, was sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up at Lou, shook her head a little, then dabbed at her eyes with a damp tissue. No one said anything. Then her mum gripped the edge of the table, pushed herself up and stared at Lou. Lou’s face got hotter and hotter. She wanted to run over to her and lean into the fluffy gown, while her mum kissed her head and stroked her hair. Instead, she stood still while her mum pushed past her, out of the room and along the hallway. Her dad leaned on the grey granite kitchen bench with his back to her as the kettle started to boil.
‘Sorry, Dad,’ Lou mumbled, trying to keep her voice steady.
He nodded but didn’t look up.
‘Is Mum OK?’
She saw the muscles in his jaw tense. ‘What do you think?’
‘Dad?’
‘Just go. Go to bed. I can’t talk to you right now.’
Lou pressed her lips together, trying to stop her bottom lip from quivering. She wanted him to make her a Milo and let her drink it beside him on the couch while he watched TV, like they often did when she and her mum had fought. But he only took one mug out of the cupboard, and one tea bag. Lou hung her head and walked out of the kitchen and along the hallway towards her room with Sandy padding after her.
In her bedroom, she closed the door behind her. The room was as she had left it before she went out. Clothes were piled on her unmade bed, and shoes lay on the floor in front of the mirrors of her built-ins along the wall opposite the door. Her desk, underneath the window, was piled with books and folders, homework that she had to finish tomorrow. After a few minutes, she heard her parents talking in harsh whispers. Her mum must have gone back to the kitchen. The kettle slammed into its base, spoons clattered on the benchtop, the fridge door thudded. Lou sat cross-legged on her bed; she patted the space next to her and her dog jumped up beside her. Lou wiped her face, and her hands came away smudged with black eye make-up. Be quiet! she wanted to shout. Stop fighting, go to bed, please, sleep. Because she couldn’t sleep until they did, couldn’t shut them out; all she could think about was what they were saying about her, and why they didn’t shout at her instead of each other.
She turned on her iPad – no doubt it would be confiscated tomorrow when they remembered – and started streaming a music video. She wanted to turn it up loud to drown out their bickering, but she also needed to know when they stopped. They were forgetting to whisper now: her mum’s voice was getting higher, her father’s deeper, though their words were still unclear. Lou brought her hand to her mouth and started to scrape off dark red nail polish with her front teeth, spitting out the little chewed-up balls onto her bed. Then she bit her nails until they were down to the quick, and started gnawing on the skin around them. She told herself to stop but couldn’t pull her hands away. Tears fell quickly now, and her head hurt. She needed a drink of water. How did they expect her to sleep like this? With all this noise? Her skin was so itchy; she began to scratch at her neck, her arms. Her jeans were too tight: she couldn’t get at her legs. She put her hand down the neck of her t-shirt and scratched at her chest and under her arms. But she’d bitten her nails too short; there was no relief from the itching. She rubbed at her face as the noise around her continued: music, shouting, slamming, crashing, pounding in her head. She squeezed her hands into fists as hard as she could, but it wasn’t enough. Her whole body was agitated now. She knew what she needed to do.
She got off the bed, went to her bookshelf and took out the big hardback dictionary that her grandparents had given her for her last birthday, two months ago. Opening it at C, she took out the thin, sharp razor blade that she kept there for emergencies, for times exactly like this. As she looked at it her breath quickened in anticipation. The tension inside her body, her muscles, her head, was building, building, peaking, but she knew that in only a few moments she would release it, let it all out, and sink down, down, down …