My eyes stare unseeingly at her. 
“Elrya?” 
“I don’t know where to start.” My voice is but a hoarse whisper, evidence of too many nights spent trying to hide from the dark. 
“Most people start at the beginning,” the doctor says. Thoughts hanging together by a worn thread, my fingers wound like tightly knit yarn, I go back to the day I regret every day I wake up. “It started with my brother.” My brother, who made one too many mistakes. My brother, older, but too young to know right from wrong. My brother, who led me down the same treacherous path. 
When I stay silent, she prods gently, “Can you tell me about him?”
“He was… he was light. The diamond of the family. The kind of person you couldn’t help but love.” But I suppose everyone would say that about their idol. “I loved him. He was my protector… until he wasn’t. The only mistake he made was the people he befriended. After he died, I suppose I made the next mistake.”
“How did he die?”
Choking on my gasp, I try, “He overdosed.”
“Why did you start doing drugs?”
“I guess I wanted to see.”
“See what?”
“See what was worth him dying over."

"Jason? Jason, are you alright?” My brother’s hazel eyes are black in the candlelight, eyelids fluttering as he tries to focus on me.
“Elrya?” he slurs.  He swings his arm without warning, knocking over a lamp - the lamp I gifted him for his eighteenth birthday - and it shatters on the tile. My ears ring with the deafening crash. I try to back out of his room, but when he spins around to face me, his glare is sharper than the glass on the floor.
“Stay,” he says, and for a second he sounds like himself, like all the times I would creep into his room and wake him; all the times he refused exasperation at yet another childish nightmare; all the times he was my big brother. Then he stumbles, and trips onto the shattered glass. 
“Jason!” I rush forward, yanking his arms, but it’s too late: blood trickles down his face, a slash on his cheek and forehead. 

And as I’m trying my best to clean him up, praying our parents won’t return early, I’m struck by that one insolent thought. I’m too young to have to do this. I push it away, because I’m his sister, and because if I don’t help him, who will? 

I’m missing something, something important, but I can’t seem to remember as my father and I walk down the aisle. Where there should be smiling faces, as I always imagined in my future, the benches weep. Where I should have worn white, as I always imagined in my future, I am enveloped in black. My mother is missing. Where is she? I hear her sobs echoing distantly in my ears, somewhere behind me.
I’m missing something. It’s only when we reach the casket, when my parents’ weeping overwhelms me, when I finally force my gaze downwards, that I remember. I’m missing my brother, an integral part of every function I ever intended. And now he will always be missing, an empty spot in the picture frame, because where his face should be hovering above my shoulder, it lies in front of me, too unfamiliar to be him. Veins are stark at his temples, his lips chapped, bones trying to break through the skin. Eyes closed, never to open again. Skin gray, never to blush again.

A month after he leaves me, my hands are steady, clutching the edge of his desk. The packet of white powder stares innocently back at me, taunting me. This killed Jason.
 
Jason killed himself by taking this.

What could be so amazing about a white powder that it was worth sacrificing a life for? 

I shake it into the spoon, and hold it over the tiny candle flame. And when the syringe pierces my skin, when the liquid enters my blood, I can’t hold back a gasp. So this is what euphoria feels like.

“I was fifteen.” I’m staring at my hands, the same hands which wiped the blood off my brother’s face as I swore not to become him. The same hands that broke the promise. “And somehow, I’m older than him.”

“Why do you want to stop?”

“Because I thought seeing his face every time I took a hit would be worth it. But… I don’t know if it’s worth feeling his disappointment crush me every time I do.” 

“What do you hope to accomplish?”

For the first time since I came to see her, I meet her eyes. And when I speak, my voice doesn’t waver. 

“To live the life my brother never got to have.”