Now he is twenty-two. He sleeps in a storage unit behind a strip mall. His face is gaunt, his teeth are rotting, and his arms are a roadmap of collapsed veins and infected tracks. He does not play guitar. He does not read books. He does not remember the name of his third-grade teacher, the one who told him he could be a writer.

The change was subtle at first, like rust spreading under a car’s paint job. His grades, once a constellation of A’s, dimmed to C’s and then to incompletes. His guitar gathered dust in the corner of his room. The boy who used to walk his neighbor’s dog and hold the door for strangers began to slouch through hallways with his hood up, eyes fixed on the linoleum.

In the beginning, there was no single moment that screamed danger . Liam was fourteen when he first tried marijuana, a clumsy joint passed around a campfire in the woods behind the high school. He coughed, laughed, and felt, for the first time in his anxious life, a profound and deceptive sense of peace. His mother, a nurse who worked double shifts, never smelled it on his clothes. His father, a foreman at the local auto plant, simply assumed the moodiness was adolescence.

At sixteen, it was prescription pills from a neighbor’s medicine cabinet. Oxycodone. The first time he crushed and swallowed one, he understood why sailors sang about sirens. It was a warm, velvet erasure of everything: the pressure to get good grades, the echo of his parents fighting in the kitchen, the gnawing sense that he was somehow not enough. For a few hours, he was perfect. He was weightless.

He dropped out of school three months before graduation. The scholarship to the state university, the one his teachers had cried over when they wrote their recommendations, was revoked. He stole his mother’s wedding ring from her jewelry box—not out of malice, but out of a cold, mechanical need that had replaced his soul. He pawned it for forty dollars. He shot it into his vein in a gas station bathroom.

By eighteen, the pills had become too expensive and too scarce. That’s when heroin found him—or rather, when he walked into its open arms. The first time he injected, he vomited and wept. The second time, he smiled. The third time, he stopped being Liam altogether.