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Romeo and Juliet but next to nothing about my own tale?
    I’m getting lost in my thoughts again, digging for more bits of Ashlyn while keeping my visual focus on Breckon, when I notice his mother ease his bedroom door open. She watches him for several ponderous seconds that set me to thinking … how long has he been asleep? It was only the one pill that he swallowed this morning, I’m sure of it.
    Granted, you’re probably not supposed to swallow them back to back the way he did last night and this morning, but it would take many more than that to overdose, wouldn’t it?
    My attention shifts to his alarm clock. Twelve minutes to one. No wonder Breckon’s mother is checking on him. “Honey?” she ventures. “Breckon?”
    He opens his glazed-over eyes and they remind me of frosted glass windows—it’s as though you can barely see through them to the actual person they belong to. Breckon stares hazily at his mother and listens to her say, “Your father and I are meeting Barbara and Sean for lunch. Lily was wondering if you’d like to join her, go out somewhere together?”
    I have no idea who Barbara and Sean are but Breckon runs one hand down his face. “I’m really wiped,” he mumbles after a five-second delay. “I’ll warm up something from the freezer later.”
    “You don’t want to get up?” his mom tries again. “Lily has to drop into the health-food store and run some other errands.”
    “How does that have anything to do with me?” Breckon asks, sounding like your stereotypical moody teenager.
    Dawn Cody drops her hands into her cardigan pockets, her eyes weary but concerned. “I thought you might like to go with her. You shouldn’t stay in bed all afternoon today, Breckon.” I wonder if Mr. Cody told his wife about Jules’s sleepover last night and whether this is the point in the conversation where she’ll choose to bring it up.
    “If Lily really needs me to go, I’ll go,” Breckon says. “But not if you just want me to get up for no reason.”
    “For no reason?” his mother repeats. “How about because I’d feel better if you were doing something?”
    “Why shou K20119;ll go,ld I do something?” Breckon fires back. “Why should I do anything ?”
    He glowers at her from the bed and I feel sorry for his mom, even sorrier when she points her chin down towards her chest and says, “Don’t fight me, Breckon. I don’t have the energy for it.”
    “I’m not fighting you,” he protests. “I’m just really, really tired, Mom. Can’t you tell Lily to go without me?”
    His glazed-over eyes plead with her, her own expression revealing she’s about three seconds away from caving. “Please eat something,” she tells him. “Okay?”
    “I will.” Breckon yawns and dives under his pillow. Outside a delivery truck is backing up and I’ve just remembered something else about myself—I’m a light sleeper. I’d never be able to drift off to the annoying sound of that beep, beep.

    Well, unless maybe I’d taken a sleeping pill. For the second time today I watch Breckon Cody slip back into sleep.

five
                             ashlyn

    I think I’m beginning to understand what it would be like to live inside a straitjacket. Although time seems to speed up when Breckon’s asleep, it can’t move quickly enough for me. With every hour that goes by I find myself more and more surprised that the depth of my agitation doesn’t snap me immediately into full consciousness.
    I think …
    This is going to sound completely freakish but I think I might be able to remember the moment I was born, and if that’s true it’s something I want to forget fast. The experience smelled like sweat mingled with disinfectant. Overwhelmingly bright and loud and altogether wrong. I screamed at the outrageous wrongness of it, every cell of my tiny being protesting, but I couldn’t make it stop—the incomprehensible flurry of images and sounds, cool air brushing