Chapter 30
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.
“Stable is 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. So not 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—”
“Is this the cunt who posted that video?” a guy said, quickly approaching us, having left Connor’s room. His housemate, Jack, apparently. And then his words registered and I realized he was headed toward me with venom in his eyes and a tightly coiled body, fists clenched.
Logan leapt up and stepped in front of me. “Whoa. This isn’t her. This is Megan. She’s part of our group with Connor. She wasn’t even there last night.”
“It was Chloe, wasn’t it? She did something,” I asked from behind Logan, not even knowing what she’d done, but guessing she was a part of it. Logan nodded, but stayed firmly between me and Jack, who didn’t seem quite ready to believe that the object of his fury wasn’t right in front of him.
“Seriously, Jack, Megan had nothing to do with it. She’s not even aware.”
Jack gave me one last look and seemed to get the message from Logan’s strident stance. I was not to be fucked with.
“He’s awake. I told him you were out here and he wants to talk to you,” Jack said.
I stood, expecting to go with Logan, but Jack held up a hand.
“I didn’t know you were here, so maybe just Logan for now?
We can come and get you once he knows you’re here and is cool with seeing you.
Although the doctor said to keep visitors to a minimum, at least until his parents get here. ”
“The police were going to let Marlo know, so I’m guessing she’ll be here pretty soon too. She’s our instructor, or counselor, or whatever,” Logan said to Jack. “I’ll be back soon,” he said to me, then gave my hand a squeeze and followed Jack into Connor’s room.
I pulled my phone out and called up TikTok while also seeing all the missed texts I’d gotten.
From Chloe, just a half hour ago, when I would have just left the suite: OMG, Emily told me what’s going on. Should I come to the hospital?
Then, a few minutes later, from Emily: Did you see what Chloe posted last night? Might want to look at it before you see your friend. Hope he’s all right. Several heart emojis with that one.
Then, not too long ago, from Chloe: This was not my fault. Connor knew I was filming!
There were some from all the members of the group, some on the group text and some to me directly, but I ignored those for now.
I went to Chloe’s TikTok page and scrolled past the top post—even as my eye caught the gigantic number of likes, comments, and shares—and to a couple of older posts, where the time stamp indicated Chloe’s night had begun.
“Remember that first party we went to all those weeks ago? We’re back at the scene of that crime. Didn’t feel like costumes this year, not with all the heavy shit hanging in the air, so we’re doing an anti-costume party. But comment with your costumes. Halloween, bitches!”
Chloe was in Logan’s living room, perched on the arm of the couch.
She’d pointed the camera away and done a long pan of the crowded room full of people.
One person, dressed as Gumby, either hadn’t gotten the no-costumes memo or didn’t care.
The rest were in groups, drinking, laughing, being basic college kids at a party.
Chloe had effortlessly turned her phone back around to her spouting her send-off line.
Okay, not the kind of stuff to make you take a bottle of pills.
Still weird that Chloe would talk about the “heavy shit hanging in the air” at the party.
She meant the Grief Group posse, I imagined, but her phrasing was suss.
She was not a part of that group. And for the most part, we all tried to leave our “heavy shit” in the room on Wednesday nights when we left.
Obviously, that was not always possible. And here we were, at the hospital.
Her next post, the second-to-last one (I was not ready to jump ahead to that one yet), was another scan of the house, but this time taken from near the top of the stairs looking down.
“Starting to fill up. Guess there’s more of us on campus that feel the need to bond than dress up as slutty nurses.
Mental health, bitches!” She’d once again swung the phone around to catch herself for the tag.
The “slutty nurses” thing felt like it’d been lifted from Connor last Wednesday at the food court. And to talk about mental health during a house party?