Kill Switch by Penelope Douglas

laugh.
She was hardly afraid of me anymore.
“Call or text Banks,” she instructed, ignoring my tantrum.
“She’s worried about you.”
“She’s not.” I lit another cigarette and refilled my glass.
“Banks knows me best. She knows I take care of myself first.”
“And Will?”
I walked for the couch, tossing her a look.
“He has an alcohol problem,” she told me.
But I just smiled to myself. “For men, it’s not a problem.”
Every man I knew or grew up with drank. You held your
liquor and you got shit done. Women were the lightweights,
which is why I never let Banks drink.
“And he has a drug problem,” Rika continued.
I leaned back on the couch, tucking an arm behind my
head and staring at her.
And she was telling me this because…?
I brought the cigarette to my lips with my other hand and
took a drag. I met Will at the beginning of high school, and
he’d played around with drugs for as long as I’d known him.
Weed, X, pills, coke… It all ran rampant in our school. The
only reason we didn’t have the heroin epidemic the inner city
did was because we had the money and access to good shit
from the town M.D.
And Mom’s medicine cabinet.
It was almost the only thing Michael and I ever agreed on.
We didn’t do drugs. We were the drugs.
“I’m sure you all will take care of it,” I told her.
“You whined earlier because you weren’t there for him in
jail, but you can be there now.”
“GGo home,” I said.