“Oh, sure,” I said. Then I resumed my silence. Michelle stared at me for a moment. Then she reached into a folder and pulled out a script that, judging from the coffee stains, looked as if it had been retrieved from a cafeteria garbage can. “ ‘How do you solve a problem like an RC,’ ” she read, in a tuneless, cheerless voice. “ ‘How do you make them understand your world? How do you make them stay . . . and listen to what you’d say . . . when they look at you like you’re a human—’ ”

“You know,” I interrupted, “it really sounds much better when you sing it.” I sat up straight and demonstrated. “Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them. Many a thing you’d hope they’d understand . . . Low bottoms and low IQs . . . they’re low on empathy, too . . . with nary a prayer of ever getting canned.” I bent my head to hide my smile. “You see?”

“Allison, I admire your team spirit. But you are not permitted to perform skits and songs that make fun of the staff members.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, of course, assuming that there is a talent show.” I arranged my face into an approximation of confusion. “And why do you think I’m the one in charge?”

“Allison, I’m not going to get into that with you. What I need you to understand—”

I cut her off before she could finish. “What I need you to understand is that, to misquote Alexander Haig, I’m not in charge here. I’ve got nothing to do with anything. I’m just some poor, stupid pill-head who can’t figure out how many sessions with her therapist it takes to get a day pass.”

Michelle narrowed her eyes, causing them to practically vanish into her doughy face. “Let me ask you something, Allison. Do you want to get better?”

“Better than what?” I muttered. Better than you? I thought. I was pretty sure I’d achieved that particular goal already.

“Think about it,” she suggested in a sugary-sweet tone, and sent me off to Share, where I listened to a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Dice describe her descent from high-school cheerleader to crackhead. She’d arrived at Meadowcrest after her parents told her they could no longer care for her boys (twelve and nine), and would be putting them in foster care unless she got her act together.

I would never, I thought, as Dice described leaving her boys home alone or, worse, with strangers while she wandered the streets to cop. Her hands, with the nails bitten short and bloody, trembled as she worked to extract pictures of her sons from underneath the plastic lining of her binder. “That’s Dominic Junior, my little Nicky, and that’s Christopher. He eats so much I can’t even believe it. Like, mixin’ bowls full of cereal, gallons of milk . . . I tell him we should just get a cow, let him suck on that, ’stead of using all our money on milk . . .”

Had she ever been like me and Janet, with a husband and a house, a car in the garage and money in the bank? Had she ever had a chance at that kind of life?

“Allison?”

I glanced up. Gabrielle, she of the pink lanyard and officious-bank-lady look, was staring at me. So, I noticed, were the rest of the eighteen girls and women in the circle. “Allison, are you ready to share?”

“Um.” I closed my notebook, then drummed my fingertips on its cover. I had known this day was coming, but, of course, they never told you exactly when it would be your turn. I sat up straight, remembering how every Share began. “Well. Let’s see. I was born in New Jersey, in 1974. I think I tried liquor for the first time at someone’s bat mitzvah, when I was twelve or thirteen. We were sneaking glasses off the grown-ups’ table. I had maybe a sip, and I hated the way it tasted, and that was that until I was sixteen. Um.” I tilted my body back in my chair, looked up at the ceiling and noticed, without surprise, that it was stained. Everything in this place was worn and dirty, frayed and patched, like we didn’t deserve anything better. “I got drunk at a party when I was sixteen. Vodka and peach schnapps, which was a thing back then. I hated the way it made me feel, and I didn’t drink again until college . . . and even then, it was, like, a beer. Or maybe I’d have a few puffs of a joint.”

“You’re kidding,” said a new girl whose name I didn’t know. I could have gotten defensive, but instead, I just shrugged.

“Yeah, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s the truth. I didn’t like booze, I didn’t like pot, and I didn’t really try anything else because there wasn’t much else around . . . oh, wait, I did do mushrooms one time, but they made me puke, so forget that.” I shuddered. “I hate throwing up.”

“Don’t do heroin,” said Lena, and everyone else laughed.

“So, flash forward, I’m thirty-four, I’m married, I have a kid, I throw my back out at my gym, and my doctor gives me Vicodin.” I breathed, remembering. “And it was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything goes from black-and-white to color. It was like that was the way the world was meant to feel.” I could feel my body reacting to the memory, the blood rising to the surface of my skin, my heartbeat quickening. “I was calm, I was happy, I felt like I could get more things accomplished. I started writing these blog posts, and they really took off. The pills made me brave enough to write with all those people reading. They made me patient enough to put up with my daughter, who is gorgeous and smart but can be a handful. They made me who I was supposed to be. I know that’s not what I’m supposed to say in here,” I said, before anyone could chide me for romanticizing my use or failing to “play the tape,” “but I also know that we’re supposed to be honest. And that’s the God’s honest truth. I loved the way I felt when I was on pills.”

“So what happened?” Gabrielle prompted.

I sighed. “I just started taking too many of them. More pills, different kinds, stronger medications, and then, eventually, I wasn’t taking them to feel good, I was taking them just to feel normal. I was napping all the time, and I was impatient with my daughter. I wasn’t myself. I took money from a petty cash account at work and moved it into my personal account. It wasn’t exactly embezzlement, but it wasn’t exactly something I was supposed to be doing. And . . .” Here came the hard part. “I tried to drive while I was impaired. One of the teachers saw what was going on and took my keys away. Then my husband found out what was going on and . . .” I shrugged. By now, my look of contrition was so well-rehearsed that it felt almost natural on my face. “Here I am. Just another sick person trying to get better.”

For a minute, there was silence, as the ladies contemplated my boring, bare-bones, drama-free tale. Everyone had something better—an overdose, an arrest, an intervention full of tears and accusations. The previous week one of the women, a fifth-grade teacher who’d also bought pills online, had talked about being blackmailed. The person she bought from spent an afternoon on Google, figured out where she worked and to whom she was married, and then e-mailed her to say that if she didn’t pay first five hundred, then a thousand, then three thousand dollars, he’d tell her husband and her boss—and maybe even the local paper—just what she’d been up to. It had gone on for months. Linda had drained her savings account and dipped into her twelve-year-old daughter’s college fund before trying to kill herself. Luckily, it hadn’t worked, and now she was here . . . and as for the guy who’d tortured her, Linda said with a sad smile that her counselor had helped her fill out a form on the DEA’s website. “I have no idea if they caught him,” she’d said. “Probably he’s still out there, shaking down other housewives.”

I remembered feeling almost dizzy with relief that nothing like that had ever happened to me. Now, with dozens of puzzled and accusatory faces staring at me, I almost wished something more catastrophic had landed me at Meadowcrest.

“That’s it?” an Ashley or a Brittany murmured. I wondered if I should have talked about learning that my mom was an alcoholic . . . but where could I have fit that in?

“Hey, look, I’m sorry I don’t have some big, dramatic story about almost dying, or almost killing someone, or getting in a car crash . . .”

“It’s not that.” I’d expected Gabrielle to be the one to push me for more details, more emotion, just more in general, but instead it was shiny-haired, tiny-voiced Aubrey, all scrunched up in the seat on my left, who was calling me out. “It’s like you’re telling your story, only it sounds like it happened to someone else.” She squirmed as I looked at her, but she didn’t back down. “Were you sad about it? When it was happening?”

“Of course I was sad!” I snapped. “God. Do you think I’d be here if I wasn’t sad?”

“But you don’t sound sad.” Now one of the Brittanys had taken up the attack, only she didn’t sound angry as much as puzzled. “You just sound, like, okay, this happened, then that happened, and then I started taking Percocet, and then I started taking Oxy . . .”

I wanted to say that progression was a central part of every other girl’s story—first the booze, then the pills, then the powder, then the needle. So why was I being criticized for giving a version of the same tale everyone told?

“What about when your daughter would want you to play with her, and you’d tell her to go away?” Finally, Mary had decided to join the conversation. “How do you feel about that?”

“I feel incredibly ashamed. I hate myself for not being there for her.” I mustered up all the sincerity I could—the hurt look, the shaky voice, the defeated posture acknowledging I’d committed the ultimate female transgression, the Sin of Bad Motherhood. “I feel awful about what I did. That’s why I’m here. So I won’t ever have to do those things again.”