At some point, he screws up very badly. He overdoses, and somewhere along the line, registers as dead. Vanessa resuscitates him, and he is sent to the hospital. The college, on the other hand, finds out, and to protect their prestigious image, kicks him out. The bank he worked at let him go, and he was unemployed.

Vanessa still stayed with him and allowed them to live with each other, but he begins to lose his care for self-control. Still, he held back a little for Vanessa, because he felt like otherwise she would 'nag', and this annoyed him. But he still used smack and Tina and all those names to make the word for drugs easier to stomach. And this frazzled her to no end. Living with someone addicted to substances is extremely hard to do, watching them decay. And she decides to formulate a plan. One day, she tells him that he can either clean up his act and stay, or she'll have him move out and leave. 

So, he left.

 He was also angry when he left, finding Vanessa being completely unreasonable. As a result, he very kindly stole some of her more pricey possessions, and her car, and drove off in the middle of the night. He then sold these things, and used the money for drugs, a ticket to his hometown, and a cheap, stingy house barely better than a trailer. Without a Vanessa, a job, and being scrapped of his entire life goal, plan, and what he believed his intended purpose, he also lost his self-control. Considering his bad neighbourhood, where he likely wouldn't run out of any suppliers, he quickly became a heavy user. The type that mostly hung around other users, and thrived on that. Sometimes he would go out to bother old high school people-- just for old time's sake-- where he would pretend that he was still in college, still in England, still doing much better than Randy, a secretary working for a barely functional company made by his father. How about that neopotism, eh, Randy?

However, the worse that he would start to look, he began to be avoidant of them. Especially Randy. He didn't want someone whom he enjoyed so much to look down on and scoff at to pity him. He tried to make himself seem presentable, of course. He's a vain man, after all, but there's a point when you can't find a way to mask how sick you are beginning to look, that you have sores on your skin that refuse to heal. 

He still viewed himself very self-righteously. He still believed himself to be better than most people, that he could just think himself out of any addiction-- if you could even call it that, right? He wasn't like other guys he saw on the street, with their jittery movements, and their large dilated eyes. After all, he was accepted into one of the nicest colleges a Yarsivian could go to. What did they have?

But it was denial, and he used the high as a distraction for his desolation. It was an escape from his uselessnesss. 

Until he began losing teeth, he didn't realize how dire his addiction had become, or how badly it was beginning to affect his brain chemistry, or health, or physical appearance. The day he started to loose he began to become very frantic and scared. The propsect of what he had gotten himself into terrified him, and he wanted to get help before it got much worse. 

 He called his mom, who reacted with dismay and shame for all the money he wasted, for losing his chance at success, all for something so minuscule. Something that his father squandered on similarly with gambling and alcohol. She is also a very vain, and materialistic woman, and seeing all of that money, wasted, filled her with shame. He ended just as much of a useless deadbeat as his father in her eyes. And seeing as he had nothing but disappointment, a stigma, and loss of more lined up for her, she disowned him. 

And after that phone call, he tried again with someone else for help. Unfortunately, Henry found that he couldn't remember the phone numbers of very many people-- people that weren't already in a similar situation, anyway. The only one he could remember was Randy's. And to this he felt worse, how could he confide something so personal to him?

Figuring it was better than nothing, he called anyway, to which he recieved no answer. It was something to be expected, though. Maybe Randy was afraid to answer. Considering everything, it was very likely.

By now, he only hung around heavier drug users, himself being one. He deteriorated very much so as time went on, he got worse.

It was to the point that when Randy spotted him in the supermarket, he could barely recognize him. By then, Henry was extremely thin, and had a tendency to sweat lot. Scratched open sores from meth bugs and acne, incredibly jittery movements, and a swaying when he walked. So one and so forth. And to Randy, he felt like if something wasnt done soon, he'd be close to dying.

Randy, of course, felt incredibly concerned and also full of anxiety about the matter. On one hand, he was afraid to bits of Henry, but on the other hand... no one deserves to do like that. It was a conflicting thought, the fear of manipulation verses morality, but, ultimately, he decided to help Henry. However, it was under a condition. The day Randy arrived and offered his proposition, he told him that it wasn't out of friendship or regarding what Henry did that Randy would do this. Randy was not his friend, he was only a Good Samaritan. And unless Henry showed he was somehow a better better person, Randy would never be his friend.

Cognitively, at this point Henry was still a manipulative and shallow human being, but his previous prowess was now stunted. His brain left him a slower thinker, with memory problems. Not to mention, his vocabulary was now much smaller. But in his heart, he was still very mean-spirited. Maybe it was due to an uncharacteristic seriousness that Randy possessed, but after a brief dispute, Henry obliged.

Then Henry found out that Randy took a day off work, went through his house and threw anything drug-related out, it became a big dispute. So Randy took his cell phone. Haha, suck it Henry.

Before long, withdrawal hit, and with everything, he had a very rough time. He decided that trying to quit smoking would be too much, so he didn't try that, but nonetheless it was extremely hard. He started sleeping a lot, and side effects from medicine didn't help either. He couldn't even finish a movie without falling asleep. He'd stay asleep for a very long time, too. He spent most of the day asleep, he normally felt too tired and unmotivated to get out of bed. Maybe it was just another way of distracting himself from reality.

Without a distraction, and a horrible headache, Henry started to spend a lot of time thinking. He thought about how he basically wasted an entirely picture perfect path in his life, the plan that he wrote those years were nothing but a could-have-been. He saw how Randy would go off his lunch breaks to see him, and how he was doing this much for a person he didn't even like meant something to Henry. He started to realize that his actions were horrible, that all this time, he was entirely in the wrong. Whatever justification he reasoned before for what he did was nothing more than a simple excuse to be hurtful.

This realization caused him to loathe himself further, and this prompted eventual self harm. He decided that he didn't want to be like that anymore, manipulative and hurtful. He didn't want to be like that. He had a massive amount of guilt for everything he did, and especially for Randy.

By here, Henry started going on walks with Randy during his lunch break, where they saw an adoption campaign in the park. Henry wanted to go see the campaign, ignoring the fact Randy was allergic to dogs, and he started to play with the cats. As he started to play with the kittens, he noticed a very small cat in the corner of the cage that no one seemed to touch. After a brief inquiry, he found out that that cat had been in the shelter for ages, due to being undesirable. It was a very old cat, 13 years old, and nearly completely deaf.

Upon hearing this, Henry felt for the little cat, seeing how it had trouble doing some things, like how he had trouble doing some things. He felt for it a lot, and decided to adopt her. Without her, he would have committed suicide or gone back to drugs quickly in his withdrawal. He loved this cat a lot. Her name was Pearl.

Eventually, Randy decided that maybe Henry wasn't going to be simply using him, and he told Henry that he forgave him. This meant the world to Henry, because Randy was the person that he did the most things too. And out of everything, Randy still forgave him, and thus became one of the only friends Henry now has.