Now he is twenty-two. He sleeps in a storage unit behind a strip mall. His face is gaunt, his teeth are rotting, and his arms are a roadmap of collapsed veins and infected tracks. He does not play guitar. He does not read books. He does not remember the name of his third-grade teacher, the one who told him he could be a writer.
Somewhere, in a high school auditorium, a boy like Liam is sitting in the back row, already wondering what it would feel like to disappear. And somewhere, a mother is setting the table for a son who will never come home.
At sixteen, it was prescription pills from a neighbor’s medicine cabinet. Oxycodone. The first time he crushed and swallowed one, he understood why sailors sang about sirens. It was a warm, velvet erasure of everything: the pressure to get good grades, the echo of his parents fighting in the kitchen, the gnawing sense that he was somehow not enough. For a few hours, he was perfect. He was weightless. the boy who lost himself to drugs
The change was subtle at first, like rust spreading under a car’s paint job. His grades, once a constellation of A’s, dimmed to C’s and then to incompletes. His guitar gathered dust in the corner of his room. The boy who used to walk his neighbor’s dog and hold the door for strangers began to slouch through hallways with his hood up, eyes fixed on the linoleum.
The saddest part? Liam is still alive. But the boy he used to be—the one who laughed too loud, who loved too hard, who dreamed of playing guitar on a stage—that boy died a long time ago. He just forgot to stop breathing. Now he is twenty-two
His friends tried. They really did. They invited him to movies, to the lake, to birthday parties. But Liam had already found a better companion. The drug didn’t judge his stuttering. It didn’t ask where he’d been. So he said no so many times that eventually, they stopped asking.
Last week, his mother drove past him on Main Street. He was standing outside a convenience store, asking for change. She did not stop. Not because she doesn’t love him—she loves him with a ferocity that has burned holes in her heart—but because the boy begging for a few quarters was no longer her son. He was a ghost wearing her son’s face. He does not play guitar
By eighteen, the pills had become too expensive and too scarce. That’s when heroin found him—or rather, when he walked into its open arms. The first time he injected, he vomited and wept. The second time, he smiled. The third time, he stopped being Liam altogether.