Excerpt from Corrections in Ink by Keri Blakinger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I'm a couple houses away—right next to the gorge where I tried to kill myself three years earlier—when I realize I can't find the smokes.

I was damaged long ago, though you swear that you are true, I still pick my friends over you.

Without even glancing down at my beat-up flip phone, I send Alex straight to voicemail. Then, I whip the clear container full of heroin out of my oversized hoodie and put it down on the curb.

This—like so much else in my life—is probably not a good idea. But it'll only take a minute, and I need a damn cigarette.

I lose sight of everything else as I hunch over to empty out my pockets, pawing through ballpoint pens, mechanical pencils, gram-sized drug baggies, lint, and the assorted debris of my life.

When I look up, empty-handed, there's a cop walking toward me. Given the presence of the patrol car a few houses down, I'm guessing he drove—but he sure seems to have materialized out of thin air, a harbinger of bad things ahead breaking through the haze of my high.

Instinctively, I toss the heroin under the nearest car before I stand up, hoping he didn't see my roadside discus toss. I smile to show that everything is okay. Of course it's okay, Officer! Why wouldn't it be?

Then something happens—did I just nod out or black out?—and I'm still yammering away to this cop about the weather (which is not as nice as I'm claiming it is) when a middle-aged lady who works at the nearby flophouse comes plodding across the parking lot. She is large and largely unmemorable—except that she is holding the next two years of my life in her hands.

"Are you looking for this, sir?"

Shit.

Eying the contents of my Tupperware, the cop clears his throat and instructs me to empty out my pockets—which I know hold at least a $150 eight-ball of coke and ten or twenty of the deep-green eighty-milligram Oxys.

Welp.

I decide to make this arrest as painless as possible. I take out the coke with my left hand and as I'm handing it over, I take my right hand and pop the pills into my mouth and swallow them all dry. The cop threatens to pepper spray me if I don't spit them out—but it's too late because I've already eaten them all. It's enough to kill most people, but I've built quite a tolerance through nearly a decade of self-destruction.

Soon I'm handcuffed and in the back seat, bouncing around like one of those annoying little jumpy dogs. The policeman is standing outside doing paperwork, but when he notices the flurry of movement gently rocking the car, he glances over, disinterestedly asking if I'm okay.

"Okay" is not the word I would use to describe this situation.

But I nod and smile; I need him to turn back around so I can finish transferring the heroin from under my insole to a far less accessible spot—up my ass. I know I'm probably going to jail—at least for a few days—so I'll do anything to stave off the impending dopesickness.

As the pills really start to kick in, the day proceeds in snapshots of clarity surrounded by dense pillars of cognitive fog. The present fades to the past, and I am seventeen and alone, sitting on a cement step somewhere around Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I came here for Harvard Summer School; my promising figure skating career fell apart and my parents realized there was something wrong. This seemed like a fix. They know about the eating disorders, the depression. They do not know about the suicide attempt. They do not know what to do. And neither do I.

Excerpted from Corrections in Ink by Keri Blakinger. Copyright © 2022 by Keri Blakinger. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.