Never Too Late by Amber Portwood, Beth Roeser Read Free Book Online

relationships, if we’re allowed to count ninth grade. I think I should be allowed. He ended up breaking up with me, though, because he was wanting to hang out with friends and get high and stuff, and at the time I still wasn’t really into it all that much. I was tagging along and dipping in, taking pills here and there, but I couldn’t keep up with the people who had thrown themselves into partying. I still wasn’t totally sold on the lifestyle.
    It was lurking on the edges, though. My brother had already given me trouble about the things I was doing at that point. That’s the thing about having a cool older brother in school with you. Everything gets back to them eventually. When Shawn heard I’d been messing around with the pills, he was literally in tears about it. In my mind I was still the good kid in my group, so I didn’t automatically see what the big deal was. I wasn’t an addict then or doing anything really excessive, I was just fitting in and being a crazy kid. But Bubby was so against it. He wasn’t into that stuff at all. Even when he did start partying a little bit, he would never tell me, because he knew I’d hate him for doing it too. It was this weird thing we had where we hated the idea of each other doing drugs. We just had that kind of silent pact not to go down that road. It’s not the most typical thing for teenage siblings, I know, but that’s how much we cared about each other. When you care about somebody that much, you don’t want them doing anything bad, whether or not it’s something you’re doing yourself. I’m sure that was part of what kept that stuff from blowing up for so long, just having him there to remind me it wasn’t what I wanted. I feel bad now that he had that burden of trying to keep me on the straight path. It must have torn him up inside when he realized I was really going down the road we both swore we’d never take.
    But that wasn’t coming for a while. I hadn’t crossed the bridge yet. The fact was, whether or not I was wild at the time, I was still holding back enough to get broken up with for not wanting my boyfriend to party so hard. So I had the skipping going on, and the pills once in awhile, and the crazy friends hanging around my house all the time, but there was some moderation going on.
    That lasted for another, oh, ten minutes.

4
Facing the Music
    T hings got more intense pretty fast. By the time I was fifteen, I was going to the kind of parties I always describe as “the kind of parties you really wouldn’t expect a high school girl to go to.” That’s a nice way of saying they were completely messed up places to be. I mean that in the sense that if any parent found out their daughter was spending time there unsupervised, they’d probably faint and then cry. They just were not your typical teen house parties.
    Again, I didn’t have one friend who was dating somebody that was our age. I can’t stress that enough, because it’s a fact that really jumps out at me when I look back and try to understand how everything was so intense for my friends and me in high school. Every girl’s boyfriend was in his twenties, and most of them were drug dealers.
    I could have kept saying no to those pills for as long as I wanted, but unfortunately I was already setting myself up for situations I shouldn’t have really been in. When you’re buying drugs, or hanging out with people who do drugs or deal drugs, you eventually get connected to the kind of people you never plan to get connected to. I probably should have tried harder to make friends in history class, or whatever. But what I ended up doing was following the friend-ofa-friend chain to some really dark places.
    We were hanging out at houses full of drug dealers and gang bangers. These guys were ten years older than us—one was thirty years old, dating my friend who was in high school with me, a girl who was half his age. He’d come over to the house with a bunch of cocaine and lay it out on