I've flipped through pages and pages now, dialed countless numbers, spoken with barely half as many "managers on duty at the moment." This is the price of trying to better myself, but at this point, I'm getting sick of sounding cheery to gum-smacking teenage girls who've lived here their whole lives and don't care about me half as much as I care about talking to them. I turn the page to the J's, not even near the end of the alphabet but nearing the end of my patience. 

I'm not a religious girl. When I was little I went to school at St. Andrews Catholic Academy for Young Ladies and I went to mass whenever our family piled into the old Volkswagon and drove the four and a half miles to the stone building I could never see as the castle my classmates thought it was. But so did everyone else. So the feeling I felt last night after hanging up on my Mother was unfamiliar to me. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a come-to-Jesus, but it was pretty damn close. I cried. I don't remember the last time I cried, maybe a lack of emotions goes with the lack of imagination, but the tears just poured. And I came out of it feeling stronger than I've felt in years, my resolve to be better was overpowering. "I should be in a Gatorade commercial," I thought, the classic [fill in the blank] picking herself up off the [blank] and trying again. 

And that's where I am now, making myself better. I dial the last J number, and start counting rings. I usually give up by the twelfth or thirteenth ring but I kept listening this time. Lulled into a stupor by the incessant tone, my eyes glazed over as I thought of what I could become. I'm actually going to do something with my life after sitting in this shithole for nearly six months. Which is why I was probably so startled by the rapid rapping at my thin door. 

"Ma'am, open up," a gruff voice called much too loudly for my landlord downstairs. I drop the phone on the ground with a clatter. With shaking hands and a shakier voice, I place the phone in the cradle with difficulty and stand on wobbly feet to answer the door. Before I can make it there, it's pushed open with fat sausage fingers that definitely don't belong to the skinny Asian man downstairs. "Ma'am," he says, "we received a call to check in on ya. Somethin' 'bout you actin' weird an' stuff." I rack my mind for my actions over the last twenty-four hours. The liquor store. "Is everything goin' okay here, ma'am?"

"Yeah, yeah I'm fine," I stutter out. I guess it sounded more like a slur because the man who's badge I now recognize looks me in the eye and asks if there's anything I'd like to tell him about. I stand with my mouth agape, not quite knowing what to do next. I've alway been the good kid. Always. His beady black eyes search the flat, finally coming to rest on the counter where I left the unopened bottle of whiskey last night. "Oh," I say, "I'm feeling much better..." But apparently that's not what he's looking at. The Ambien. Except for there's one problem with it: it's in a Zip-Loc bag, and I don't have a prescription. 

"Ma'am I think you should come with me," he says easily, like it happens all the time. But I'm not a criminal. I got these right before I came. "I just. Sleep. Hard. I can't." But he walks toward me. The cold cuffs click behind my back. And for the second time in twenty-four hours I cry. I tried so hard. 

I step into the backseat of the car and the man closes the door after me. There is no point in my resisting. We drive slowly toward the other end of this slum that I tried so hard to make the best of. I see ambulances and police cars and an assembling crowd by the playground. But everything going on outside is nothing. The cop slows down and asks another overweight cop what's going on. Something about a dead woman on the playground. Usually I'd feel some sadness for her, her family, the things she left behind undone, but to myself I'm dead. There is no point in trying.