The Fear of Letting Go by Sarra Cannon

we were so stoned. We could not stop laughing. They kept yelling at us in French, telling us we weren't allowed to be there. They actually put me and Mason in handcuffs,” I say. “Penny fell on the way back down the mountain and burned her leg, though, and they ended up having to call in an air evac to get her off the mountain. She was in the hospital for like three days. Still has the scars to prove it.”
    “Holy shit, I can't believe that,” she says.
    “Yeah, it was crazy,” I say. “We totally lost those scooters, too. By the time we got back down to them, they were gone. Probably stolen. I thought my parents were going to kill us. I don't even want to know how much it cost them to get us out of that mess.”
    “So, you weren't arrested?”
    “Not officially. Once my parents intervened, everything was fine,” I say. “After that, you would think they would have kept closer tabs on us during vacations, right?” I shake my head. “I did end up getting arrested in Paris that following Christmas for getting drunk and throwing an empty bottle of wine off the top of the Eiffel Tower. So stupid. I did a lot of dumb things back then.”
    “Did your parents get you off the hook that time, too?”
    “Always,” I say. “But it was less about what would happen to me and more about how an official arrest would reflect upon them and the family name.”
    “Must have been weird to grow up knowing you never really had to deal with any consequences,” she says. “I can't imagine it. I probably would have been dead by now if I wasn't scared of getting thrown in jail.”
    I laugh. “Did you get into a bunch of trouble when you were younger? I have this very clear image of you as a young, rebellious teenager.”
    “I got into way too much trouble,” she says. She avoids my eyes. “The kind that's much harder to get out of.”
    I study her. “What do you mean?”
    She shrugs. “No one was ever there to bail me out when I fucked up,” she says. “If I got arrested, there were real consequences, you know? Of course, that didn't stop me from making all the wrong choices.”
    “Like what?”
    She takes a deep breath in through her nose and lays her head back on her knees. “Like, skipping school and doing drugs with my boyfriend,” she says. “I was fourteen the first time I got arrested for possession. My dad—”
    She stops herself and the air shifts around us, as if some ghost of her past has returned to haunt her. The hairs on my arms stand up and my stomach twists.
    “Your dad what?”
    She leans her head back against the wall of the elevator and closes her eyes. “My dad was pissed,” she says. “Let's just leave it at that.”
    “Did you go to jail or something?”
    “Worse,” she says. “Had to enter a rehab program for juveniles and go to school at the juvenile detention center for most of my sophomore year of high school. It was rough.”
    “I had no idea,” I say. I try to imagine what my life would have been like if my parents hadn't been there to bail me out of every single bad decision I made.
    “You would think I'd have learned my lesson the first time,” she says with a laugh. “I got pretty messed up with drugs when I was younger. It got bad for a while, but I pulled myself out of it.”
    The conversation has very quickly gone from a carefree sharing of a silly story I thought would make her laugh to some real shit about her own life.
    “How did you get out of it?” I ask quietly.
    Her eyes meet mine and there are glassy tears in them. “My boyfriend, Aaron, overdosed on heroin,” she says. “Christmas break our junior year. We were both out of our minds fucked up and he just went a little too far. I passed out at some point during the night and when I woke up the next morning, he was just lying there beside me, all the light gone from his eyes forever. That was a big wake up call for me. I've never touched drugs since that morning, and I never will again.”
    My heart pounds in