Megan
“How is he?I got here as fast as I could,” I said as I made my way down the hallway of Schoolport’s hospital. Toward Logan. Who, thank God, was pacing the corridor in front of what I assumed was Connor’s room.
Connor had OD’d in the early hours this morning. His housemate had found him unconscious and gotten him to the hospital. The police had notified Logan, since they wanted to question him about Connor’s activity the night before.
“Stableis the word they’re using. Still unconscious. Jack, his buddy who got him here, is in with him now. I just finished talking with the police, and they’ve left.”
“What did they say?” I reached Logan and opened my arms to him. He walked into them and I hung on tight. Scared witless, I tried to be a calming influence when Logan’s body, his big, athletic body, sank into mine and his head dropped to my shoulder.
“They’re calling it accidental. The police are. But they’ve notified the college to put whatever protocols in place.”
“Protocols for what?” I asked.
“Attempted suicide,” he mumbled into my shoulder.
“Oh my God.” I hadn’t really thought of that, though I should have. I was just thinking some party drug like Ecstasy had gone horribly wrong.
“I can’t believe he would do that, you know? And yet some part of me isn’t surprised. I should have kept a better eye on him at the party. I lost track of him for a while.” His body stiffened when he finished, and he pulled away. He wouldn’t meet my eye, and I realized how guilty he felt about it all.
“Not your fault.Sonot your fault.” I took his hand and led him to a small waiting area just down the hall from Connor’s room. “Sit. Talk to me.”
He nodded, but still wouldn’t meet my eyes. Instead, he hung his head while putting his elbows on his knees and dangling his hands. It had been a familiar posture in the early weeks of group when it was his turn to talk. But I realized that he hadn’t assumed that posture for a while—instead, he now sat up and looked at us when talking about his feelings over his brother’s death. I sat next to him, even on the same side as in group, and put my hand on his back.
“Did you see Connor leave the party?”
A sideways look at me, and then he put his head down again. “No, I was busy… dealing with other people.” I was about to ask him about that, because it seemed a weird thing to say, but it was also his house and presumably he was hosting the party alone, and then he continued on. “Paige found me and told me she was taking Connor home, that he was pretty drunk. I asked if she needed help getting him to an Uber, but she said he was already in it, that she’d just come back in to let me know in case I wasn’t aware that they were leaving.”
That was also kind of weird. People left parties all the time without telling their hosts they were going. It was a college party, not some suburban get-together where you had to greet and thank your host upon arrival and departure.
I’d circle back to that odd detail, but didn’t want to derail Logan’s narration of the night. “And so he was just drunk when he left your house?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Paige dropped him at his house. Even made sure the housemate, Jack, was aware how drunk he was. They got him to his room together. Left a glass of water, put him on his side in case he puked, left his door open so Jack could hear him if he called out. They did everything right.”
“Except?”
“Hours later, apparently after he came to and saw all the shit on his phone, Connor took a bunch of pills. Jack found him not too long after that, thank God, and got him here.”
I had so many questions about that, but my first was: “What kind of pills? Where’d he get them?”
There was a fentanyl crisis on many campuses. Bribury didn’t have a huge problem with it, but we were a small school. There were also party drugs out there that could be deadly, either because they weren’t what they were supposed to be, or just caused a bad reaction. Coupled with alcohol…
“He had a bottle of painkillers from when he was in the car accident last summer. The best everyone has been able to put together—the doc, Jack, Connor’s parents, who are driving up from North Carolina right now—is that he hadn’t used any, or very many, for the shoulder injury he got in the accident. That he’d, I don’t know, been maybe saving them?”
“Hoarding them,” I whispered, and Logan nodded.
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t even know he hurt his shoulder in that accident. He always talks like he walked away from it scot-free.”
Logan’s head came up and he looked at me. “I’m guessing there’s a lot of things that Connor didn’t share during group.”
Obviously. I ran my hand up and down Logan’s back. “So, we know that he had the means available. Do we know what triggered his taking them last night? He seemed in a good place Wednesday.”
Logan stared at me as if I’d missed something big. “Are you kidding? You don’t think that post was enough to send him over the edge? And the responses to it?”
“What are you talking about? What post?” Just the word “post” made a cloud of dread descend upon my body. Oh fuck, what had happened last night while I was deeply sleeping?
“Megan, you don’t know what she did? You need to—”
