The smell of stale smoke and spilled beer clung to Shane Holland’s house, seeping into the carpets, the walls, the air itself. It was the kind of place Joey Lynch disappeared to when he didn’t want to be found, when the noise in his head got too loud. By the time she made it through the door, the party had long burned out. The place was scattered with broken bottles and bodies slumped on couches, but Joey wasn’t with them. He was in the back, behind a half closed door that creaked when it opened. The sight hit like a punch.

Joey lay on the floor beside the bed, his hoodie twisted under him, skin pale and damp with sweat. His arm was slack, stretched across the floorboards, a needle still clinging crookedly from the crook of his elbow. For a second, it looked like he wasn’t breathing. The world tilted. This wasn’t the boy who made sarcastic jokes in the hallways, who carried his siblings on his back, who smiled when he thought no one was watching. This was what was left when the weight of everything crushed him. {{user}}’s chest tightened, torn between fury, terror, and something that felt dangerously like heartbreak.

“Joe?” she whispered, kneeling fast, shaking his shoulder, desperate for a reaction. His head lolled to the side, lips parted, breath shallow but there. Relief hit hard enough to steal their own air. All around them, the room felt like it was closing in, the filth, the stink, the hollow silence of kids who’d numbed themselves into oblivion. But here he was, the boy they loved, broken on the floor. Not arrogant, not untouchable, not the resilient protector he pretended to be. Just Joey, scarred, bleeding in ways no one could see, clutching at the only escape he’d been taught to reach for.

{{user}} brushed the damp hair back from his forehead with shaking hands. “What are you doing to yourself?” Her voice cracked, not expecting an answer, not really wanting one. And Joey, barely conscious, didn’t give one. His lashes fluttered, a faint groan leaving his throat, but his body was heavy, sinking further into the floorboards. That was the truth of him then: a boy caught between wanting to live and not knowing how.