Teddy grew up in a loving home, and he loved both of his parents as much as any kid (maybe more), with a definite preference for his dad. His life was perfectly normal until he was ten years old. It had been as normal a night as any, they'd had dinner, his parents were working on a puzzle together while they talked about going on a trip together--Teddy thought about asking to stay with a friend while they were gone, instead of his grandparents, but he never actually got the chance. His dad took a phone call, then went upstairs to take a bath. His mom went up to check on him, called his dad's name while banging on the door with no answer. She got the spare key to unlock the bathroom door, told Teddy to stay downstairs, but grab the phone. . . Then Teddy heard her scream.

Only ten years old, Teddy sprinted up the stairs and into the bathroom before his mom could stop him, and immediately wished he'd stayed downstairs. Because his dad was lying dead in the bathtub, water pink with his own blood, arms slashed open from wrist to elbow. Teddy doesn't remember moving from his mother's side, but one moment he was standing with her in the doorway, the next he was half in the bathtub with his dad, shaking the man and begging him to wake up, because Mom was crying. Teddy remembers his mom dragging him off his dad's body and out of the bathroom so strange men could take his dad away in a body bag; he remembers sobbing and screaming for his dad to wake up.

The next thing he remembers, several days later, is the funeral. Teddy met some friends of his dad's--his best friends, apparently, from when he was a little boy. They were nice, told him stories about his dad when they were all about his age. And they kept other well-meaning adults trying to give him their condolences at bay so that Teddy didn't have to talk if he didn't want to. 

The next few years were rough. In middle school, he got high for the first time with his friends, an attempt on their part to help him lighten up for once. It was the first time in years that he wasn't plagued by the image of his father, dead in that bathtub, and Teddy nearly cried with relief. It didn't take long for a coping mechanism to become fullblown addiction. 

In the beginning, it was easy enough to hide it from his mom, because he only got high when he knew he had enough time before he saw her again to sober up. But that didn't last very long; the waiting became harder, painful, even, and soon Teddy was high almost all of the time. His mom suspected for a while, but didn't know for sure what he was doing until he was sixteen. When she did know for sure, it became a neverending cycle of interventions, rehab stints, brief sobriety, and Teddy inevitably getting high again.