Read Lead Me Not for Free Online

said in confusion. Kristie chuckled good-naturedly.
    “I wish. That would make my job a heck of a lot easier. But no, some of these people have been court-ordered because of drug possession, usually a misdemeanor. Some are first-time offenders; others have been through the system a few times. You always hope they learn something from what you’re trying to teach them, but I can’t confess to being that naïve,” she said, handing me a stack of name tags.
    “Wow, that sounds pretty jaded, Kristie,” I teased. Kristie snickered.
    “I’ve been doing this group for almost five years. I will always have the hope that I’m making a difference, but I’m only human. And I’ve seen too many people end up at the bottom to think otherwise. But we keep on trucking. Because giving up isn’t an option,” she said sagely. I couldn’t say anything to that. I understood feeling jaded, but I was determined to feel the hope all the same.
    “Do they all go to LU?” I asked. Kristie nodded.
    “This group is for students. I facilitate several other groups in town as well. But we keep this one separate and just for the college community. These kids are dealing with issues that are very different from those of the addicts I see in the other meetings. The pressures, the expectations, and the failures of university life go hand in hand with their addiction.” I nodded.
    Kristie wrote her name on one of the tags and peeled it off. She stuck it to the front of her shirt. I followed suit and then put a name tag and pen on each seat. I had a vague idea of what to expect from the group. Having an addict in the family gave you afront-row seat for that particular brand of fucked-up.
    But still . . . I was apprehensive.
    And it all had to do with a night three years ago. A desperate phone call in the middle of the night that I had so quickly dismissed as inconsequential. Followed by days of guilt and fear when my fifteen-year-old sister, Jayme, never came home and the realization that her phone call hadn’t been so inconsequential after all. Then finally the morning when I had opened the door to find two police officers on our porch. Their sympathetic faces as they told us that Jayme had been found dead in some skeevy alleyway. Cold and alone. It was that moment that everything I had known, my entire world, was flipped on its axis.
    I hadn’t handled my grief well at first. I had berated and abused myself. My guilt ate me alive. My parents blamed me for not taking care of my little sister. I blamed myself for spending so much time on my sanctimonious soapbox that I had been blind to what was really going on.
    In the aftermath, my relationship with my parents deteriorated into barely functioning. And I had made it my mission to find a way to fix the pieces inside me that were broken and to live a life that mattered. A part of me was convinced that helping others would in some way help me move on from the devastation of my past.
    So I came to Longwood University wanting to escape and to focus on becoming a drug-addiction counselor. It was far enough away from my hometown in North Carolina to feel like I was in another world. Yet it was close enough that it would be impossible for me to ever truly escape what had happened. Because I needed the daily reminder. It was motivation. It’s what got me out of bed every goddamned morning.
    It made me a fighter.
    But it didn’t change the fact that I was scared. I worried like hell that I’d never be able to do enough for the people who neededmy help. That I would never be able to stop the slide once it began. The fear of failure was acute and debilitating.
    Kristie made it all seem so easy. I appreciated the way she displayed such competence. She must have sensed my unease because she kindly patted my arm.
    “We all have our crosses to bear, Aubrey. Yours led you here. And I know that is a good thing, for you and for the lives you’ll make a difference in,” she said knowingly. My smile was