My blood turns cold. There’s a tingling in my lips, and I lose sensation in the tips of my fingers.
Then, a scream sounds, and after a moment, I realize it’s coming from me.
I dive toward Margot, grabbing her shoulders and screaming her name. I slap her face—harder than I intended—and her head lolls to the side.
My throat is raw. My stomach has dropped so far down I almost expect to see it in a bloody heap on the floor.
Sheer, white terror grips my chest, like barbed wire tightening around my lungs. I scream again, scrambling to find my phone. I realize it’s downstairs in the kitchen, and despairs starts to tear me apart.
I scan the room, but the edges of my vision are going black.
That’s when I remember to take a breath.
I suck in some air through gritted teeth, teetering onto my feet as I look for my sister’s cell phone. Lunging for it, I grab it from the bedside table. It slips through my fingers and goes flying across her rug.
“Hang on, Margot,” I rasp, crawling to the phone.
My fingers tremble so hard, I misdial the emergency number the first two times I try. Finally, it rings. I hold the phone between my shoulder and my ear and scoot back to Margot, cradling her head in my lap.
A calm, female voice comes on the other side of the line. Her words sound hazy, like she’s speaking to me from far away. All I can see is Margot’s skin, grey and listless, and the way her eyes are rolled back in her head.
Somehow, I manage to tell the emergency services where I am. I think I put Margot on her side, following the woman’s instructions.
It’s a blur.
All I know is that when the paramedics burst through the room, Margot still hasn’t breathed.
The paramedics ask me a thousand and one questions, and suddenly my sister’s bedroom is a flurry of activities.
“Jim,” one of the paramedics says to the other, holding up a syringe and a little bag of powder. I frown, staring at the two items.
A syringe.
Whitish-brown powder.
A syringe.
Whitish-brown powder.
My eyes flick from one item to the other, not understanding what I’m looking at.
“Heroin. Might be laced with something,” the man says.
Jim, the other paramedic, nods. “OD. I’ll get the naloxone.” His hands move as he speaks, pulling out a sterile syringe from a pocket of his bag.
“OD?” I repeat. “Heroin?”
What the hell is going on?
The paramedics brush me out of the way with surprising gentleness, and I stand by the wall to watch them work. I have to look away when they inject my sister with the drug, lifting her shorts up to deliver it to the muscle of her outer thigh.
“What’s that?” My voice trembles as I squeeze my eyes shut.
“It reverses the effect of opiates,” Jim answers. The two paramedics work on my sister, speaking to each other in curt, professional voices.
It’s a normal day for them. Work. Another day on the job.
Me, on the other hand?
My world is shattering all around me. It’s like someone taking a sledgehammer to a snow globe, pulverizing it into a million pieces as I watch.
Opening my eyes again, I see one paramedic put his fingers to Margot’s neck, listening for a pulse. He looks at his coworker and nods.
“Got it.”
Jim looks at his watch. “Three minutes until the next injection. Let’s get her on the stretcher.” He looks at me. “Ma’am, would you like to ride with us?”
I nod, unable to speak.
This isn’t real life. This is a dream. A nightmare. This isn’t happening.
Everything is a dream. Ever since the very first night Margot went to the castle, I must have been asleep. This can’t be real.
Heroin?
My sister?
As the paramedics carry her out of the room, her body firmly strapped to a board, I glance around my sister’s room. The paramedics have taken the bag of drugs with them. Whether it’s as evidence or just to be able to identify the drugs at the hospital to treat Margot, I’m not sure.
The rest of her room looks normal.
This is wrong. This isn’t her. Something else happened.
I stumble on the steps on the way down. My legs are heavy. My tongue feels too big for my mouth, and I’m having trouble seeing straight. When the paramedics motion to the back of the ambulance, I stumble on the way up and smack the side of my head on some equipment.
“Oopsie-daisy,” Jim says, pulling me into the ambulance. “Sit.”