We Are Inevitable by Gayle Forman (read aloud txt) 📕

“What do you think businesses are?” I stand to leave. “They’re not machines. Or widgets. Or bar codes. They’re people! People just trying to get by. Because what else can they do?”

Daryl looks at me like I’m speaking Latin or some other dead language, and I suddenly know the answer to Lou’s question.

Why do guys like this always win? Because that’s how the world works. Some species is always going extinct. Some other species is always waiting in the wings to emerge. We are the dinosaurs. And the Pennys, the Daryls—they’re what comes next.

The Big Book

Hannah’s meeting is at a school gymnasium outside of Bellingham. As soon as I pull into the parking lot and see the smattering of cars, some bearing peeling bumper stickers with slogans like FRIEND OF BILL W, my stomach bottoms out.

I do not want to be here. I do not want to listen to the serenity prayer or applaud people for doing something some of us have always done.

But I do want to see Hannah. I want to be with Hannah. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Sandy ruin the one good thing in my life.

I follow the trickle of latecomers inside. Hannah’s standing underneath the basketball hoop, deep in conversation with Jax and a large, muscular woman with two long braids coiling along her otherwise-shaved head.

Even though I only ever went to a couple meetings with Sandy, it all feels too familiar: the urns full of burnt coffee, the trays of stale donuts, people huddling in clumps, peeling away the rims of their Styrofoam cups. It was just like this at the last meeting I went to. When Sandy was the lead speaker.

I tap Hannah on the shoulder. She spins around, her expression unreadable. “You made it.” She introduces me to Fran, her sponsor, who grips my hand in a finger-crushing shake.

“We were taking bets on whether you’d show,” Fran says.

“Of course I’d come! Wouldn’t miss it.” My voice clangs like an out-of-tune piano. “Just ran into some traffic.”

Jax nods in sympathy. “I-5’s a parking lot.”

The crowd starts to sit in the folding metal chairs. Hannah chews on her nail.

“You okay?” Jax asks her.

“Mildly terrified,” Hannah admits.

“Just speak your truth,” Fran says. “And then nothing can go wrong.”

“I’m glad you’re here.” Hannah reaches for my hand and squeezes.

“Me too,” I lie. And I squeeze back.

“Hi, my name is Hannah and I’m an addict.”

Hi, my name is Sandy and I’m an addict.

“Hi, Hannah,” the crowd responds, already charmed.

Hi, Sandy. The crowd loved Sandy too. He was charismatic. It’s why he was got away with so much for so long.

Hannah wipes her palms on her jeans. “I’m already sweating bullets. Usually that doesn’t happen at the start of a show but I guess this isn’t a show. It’s the opposite of that.”

She takes a deep breath and scans the group, landing on me. “Three years ago, I got into a car accident and got addicted to painkillers.”

I was in ninth grade the first time I snorted oxy. I didn’t do it because I was unhappy or lonely or abused. I did it because it was there.

“That’s the official story, anyhow. Because, you know, I come from a ‘good’ family, a ‘happy’ family. The kind of family where this ‘sort of thing’ doesn’t happen.”

I didn’t know that I’d woken a sleeping monster in me. And even if someone warned me, I’m not sure it would have changed a thing.

“That’s the story we tell in my family—if we tell any story at all, because we’d rather not discuss this unpleasantness. ‘Hannah became addicted to painkillers after a car accident.’ This is true, but that doesn’t make it the truth. Here’s the truth: In seventh grade I started slipping bourbon into my morning thermos of coffee because that little bit of numb made the day more bearable. In eighth grade I learned to sneak laxative pills to keep my tummy flat. A year before the accident that turned me into an official addict, I crashed my dad’s car because I’d snorted three tablets of Adderall. The car was repaired with no further discussion. Mine was a truth happening in plain sight that no one cared to talk about. Least of all me.”

In the beginning, it’s all fun, right? It’s chasing the next high, not really thinking about how you get it, or who you hurt. I mean, sure, maybe you lift a few twenties from a cash register, steal a rare book your father treasures, but those are just things, right? And it’s all under control.

“And even after I was officially revealed as an addict, we kept up with the lie. ‘Hannah became addicted to painkillers after a car accident.’ This narrative left out the thornier story, the one that explains why a twelve-year-old wants to anesthetize herself, why a sixteen-year-old dreams of death.”

And then it stops being under control. And you see the real shit going down because of you. You see your parents go into debt. You see your brother’s life getting shanked. And you think you should stop. You think you can stop. And you try to stop. And you try again. And again. And again. And you can’t. And you don’t.

“But I was ignoring the real work of my recovery. The hard part of it, which for me is not giving up the dope—though that is hard—but letting go of that good girl my parents raised me to be. Understanding that she was making me sick.”

The Big Book tells us that addicts are not selfish. We just lack humility. We overestimate our power, which trust me, is not a new concept to me. I stand before you thinking that maybe this is the time I don’t fall back down but knowing it might not be. But I really hope it is. Because the hard part of falling down is not the