When heroin hits home

From the Washington Post:

The tall young man with the square jaw and the mop of dark brown hair held the phone pressed against his ear. He didn't know what to do.

His girlfriend had just shot heroin from a tiny plastic bag he'd given her earlier that night, in her car, in the rain. She'd taken it back home to her parents' house in Centreville. She'd gone alone to her room and closed the door. She'd laid out the powder, dissolved it in water, as he'd taught her to do, drawn it into a syringe through a cotton ball, as he'd taught her to do, and injected it into a vein in her arm.

That much Skylar Schnippel knew, because his girlfriend, Alicia Lannes, had talked to him on the phone as she used. That was four minutes ago. But now she wasn't answering. So he called her again. He called her twice in two minutes. Then twice in the next two minutes. It was 1:45 in the morning, and she wasn't answering, and he knew. She must have overdosed, as she'd done two times before in front of him: her head lolling, her face pale, her lips blue.