Chapter 27: The Kick

Alexander sat in his room, flipping his phone around and around in his hand. His flask of Comfort lay on his side table. He felt nervous having it out in the open, but Alexandria was over at Theresa's. The chance of her coming home, with all she had to talk about, was negligible.

He was still thinking about the message that he had received.

'We need to talk about some things. Meet me at Cliffside at seven.' It had been from Adrian.

All the uncertainty from a month and a half ago at the dinner party had left him when he saw the text. If Adrian hadn't remembered their first meeting in the brewery then, he sure did now. Miranda had probably talked to him about the Christmas Break trip, and she couldn't do that without mentioning Alexander's problems... and if she had done that, she very easily would have mentioned her plan.

Her plan to get Alexander on the brews to cheer him up. And once Adrian heard that plan, he would remember and realize that Alexander had been lying to Miranda most of this time. And lying to his sister. Lying to everyone, really.

He reached over to the side table, and took a swig from the flask. A few moments later, happy chemicals rushed through his brain, and he tried to think.

Miranda hadn't mailed him about anything. And she would have, if Adrian had told her that he had been on the brews for a while. So Adrian hadn't betrayed his secret.

Therefore, Adrian probably wanted to meet in good faith. He was the one person in this group that probably had any idea of what he was going through. He couldn't tell his sister, he couldn't tell his girlfriend, but Adrian... yes, he could talk to Adrian.

He thumbed his phone on, and sent a message back. 'I'll see you there.'

That was in thirty minutes. He had better start walking, then. He got up and put on a winter coat. He reached for his flask, and paused.

What was he hoping to get out of this conversation? Honest help? Someone to complain to, with no lies or half truths? In either case, he shouldn't bring the flask. It warped his view of his own problems. In an odd moment of clarity, he knew that if he brought and drank from the flask he wouldn't be honest about what he was going through. And if he wasn't being honest, then what the hell was the point of talking? He would just create another person that he had to lie to constantly whenever the subject came up.

He left the flask on the counter, and headed out the door.

The night was black and cold. The stars seemed to him to be unusually dim, tonight. There was no moon, of course.

As he walked, he thought about the man in the lighthouse. He was tempted to believe Alexandria's version of things: lonely, stuck on the brews, and without any kind of a support group... and then they ran out, and he had no where to turn.

He was feeling better and better about his decision to leave the flask at home. It seemed so obvious once you saw the traps, the mistakes, and started to do something about them. The man in the lighthouse had no one, and he killed himself. Currently, he had no one-- and yes, he acknowledged fully that it was his own fault. But that was about to change.

An unlikely friend in a time of need to get him out of trouble. It was odd how much hope he was feeling right at the moment, now that he could plausibly see a way out. Adrian had said that he never drank the brews at there first meeting, but was at the dinner party he showed that he was familiar with them. That suggested that Adrian had struggled with the same things, and had beaten them.

That mean that this unhappiness and emptiness that he felt, achingly, constantly, could be beaten. It had been beaten before. And it had would be beaten again. That was the worst part of it: Miranda, Elanor, so many people acting as if this thing was normal. Nobody ever seemed to consider that the brews did lasting damage, and made people unhappy at the end of it. No one except for Alexandria, but her problems were purely selfish. She didn't understand anything about the problem. She was right, but for the wrong reasons.

Adrian must be right, and for the right reasons. He must have seen this darkness, struggled with these same problems. And won. Even though Alexander didn't know how, he couldn't know how, the mere fact that someone had done it gave him confidence.

He took a deep breath. Yes, this was how the story should go. A former addict-- yes, he had never labeled himself in that way before, but that was what he was, wasn't he? The stories all said the first step was naming the problem. The problem had been named. And Adrian, this former addict, helping Alexander, a current one, to safety... yes. That was it. That was the way out. It all fit together, it all made so much sense.

Let the darkness enclose around. Let the cold eat into his flesh and bone. It was Act Four, it was the dark before the dawn, it was the turn, it was the anagnorisis, and it was time for all of this to be over.

Cliffside Library loomed large and black ahead of him, but he didn't care. For the first time in a very, very long time, he knew that things were going to be okay.

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