want Beanie to come along. Jesus! You mean you’ve been sleeping all day and don’t even care or notice where Beanie is?” Kate shot Dan a look and rolled her eyes.
I looked at her, incredulous. “You all locked me in here! I have no say where Beanie is or what his movements are!”
“She’s a hot mess. Just look at her.” She. Kate gave me another withering glare, before she left the room and slammed the door, yelling Beanie’s name as she went.
I sat on my bed, hardly moving a muscle. I needed all my energy just to ride out this cold turkey. Sweat was pouring down my face, trickling into my eyes. My legs were so weak I had to crawl my way to the bathroom when I needed to pee. I had the runs, too.
Dan smiled. A tiny smirk that once I would have found charming but now turned my stomach. “You’re one fucked-up bitch,” he said. “You’re pathetic, you know that? You actually make me laugh you’re so fucking strung out.”
“Would you bring me some more Mumm, Dan?” I slurred in reply. “I’d kill for a drink,” I lied.
“Sure, why not?” He winked at me, and his lopsided grin made me wonder for the first time if he was actually the devil’s righthand man.
Thirty-Nine
“Take your meds,” Kate instructed, handing me my Mumm-filled Thermos and a handful of “Beanie” pills. I was tucked up in bed. They always came to bid me goodnight. Now I knew why.
“Did you find Beanie?” I asked.
“He’s fine. The vet told us what to do. We gave him some milk and he’s wide awake, happy as a lark, to use one of your clichéd expressions. Pop these babies in your mouth.”
I pushed her hand away. “What happened to him?”
“He ate something he wasn’t meant to eat.”
“Oh, no! What?” One of my pills?
“Nothing you need to know about. Take your meds.”
“I’m fine, Kate, really, I don’t have a runny nose,” I garbled, making myself sound drunk. Not hard; I felt like death. The last thing I’d do was let them know I knew. I hadn’t lost hope.
“Take your goddamn meds!”
“Really, Kate. I feel okay.” I had planned, earlier, to replace the contents of the pills with face powder from my makeup bag, before I realized they had taken all my makeup away, eyebrow pencil included.
“Swallow these down.” She crammed the pills into my mouth. “Take a swig and swallow.”
Dan stood in the doorway. Extra backup. “Do as she says,” he ordered.
I reluctantly took a sip from my Thermos.
Kate’s hand smothered my mouth. She laid her finger on my Adam’s apple to check the pill was going down the hatch. “Night, night, sleep tight,” she said in a faux sweet voice.
The second they were out of my room I stuck my fingers down my throat and vomited up the pills and champagne. I poured the Mumm down the sink, tears streaming down my face as I did so and topped up my Thermos with tap water. God, I craved alcohol. It took every ounce of willpower, because I’d never felt so bad in my whole life. I needed to glug down as much water as I could before I died from dehydration. I tried to swallow, but I could hardly find my throat. It was so parched and raw—rough as unused sandpaper. I felt as if I’d been bashed with a baseball bat, my head spinning, blood-red stars flashing behind my eyes. As well as my jaw and ankle, other pains were emanating from within, deep inside my muscles. My skull was like a withered walnut shell, my brain the nut rattling inside.
Everything about me was wrong. I crawled back to bed.
Later, I could hear voices from my room. The sound floated through the cracked-open skylight in the bathroom (way too small to crawl through even if I’d had a ladder). The girls were in the Jacuzzi. Their voices traveled in waves, sometimes clear, sometimes a mutter. They splashed and chatted as I lay in the dark. Earlier I had been dripping with sweat. Now I clutched my comforter around me like a cloak, teeth chattering.
I was frazzled, but I forced myself out of bed, crawled along the floor and craned my head up towards the skylight, hoping to catch their talk. The crash of the surf rose up from the cliffs, and I heard a coyote somewhere in the distance. But as for the voices? Silence. Had the girls gone to bed? But then I