Page 207 of Always: A Legacy Novel

She didn’t think about it at all when she dropped back two anti-depressants as she sat in the parking lot of the college campus. Another prescription that was supposed to be helping.

Her hands trembled as she rested them on the steering wheel. They had been doing that a lot since she started adding three or four glasses of wine to wash back her sleeping pills for longer than she was willing to admit.

Catherine let out a slow breath, finally feeling calmer.

Slightly.

It wasn’t so much calm, as numb. She liked that blissed, numbed place the meds got her to; a place where she didn’t have to think very much, or feel, if she didn’t want to.

She didn’t have to think.

The only problem with being numb and dazed?

She couldn’t fucking concentrate.

She lost seconds.

Minutes.

Several …

She blinked, and she was sitting in her fourth and final class, listening to a lecture.

Catherine wasn’t even sure if it was the same day.

That terrified her.

It kept getting her through the day, though. It kept getting her to sleep. It kept getting her out of bed. It was doing what it was supposed to, right?

“Did you get that last note?” the girl next to Catherine asked.

She stared at the girl, unsure and slow in her mind.

A bit too in the clouds.

Light on her feet.

High.

“No,” Catherine said, “I didn’t get anything he said at all.”

The girl laughed. “Damn. Trouble concentrating today? That’s me, like, all the time. I don’t even know what I’m doing half the time.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your name?”

“Catherine.”

“June.”

The pixie-like brunette with the short, short hair dug in her bag, and pulled out a blue bottle. It looked like Catherine’s prescription bottles for her sleeping pills, but without a label to say what was inside or who it belonged to.

June popped open the cap, and tipped a small white pill out into her hand. It was stamped with CIBA on the top. “Here, try it.”

Catherine hesitated. “What is it?”

“Ritalin. It’ll calm you down, make you focus. I’ve been on it for, like, seven years, but they won’t up my dose, so I know a guy I can get some from.”