In attempt to stop this madness, Gordie scrambles up two-thousand dollars, and gives it to his brother, hoping that once Chase pays off this debt, he can fix himself up and get back to living his life. Gordie's family is already struggling as it is, and now there's a new problem. He hasn't paid off his debts, and now the dealers are threatening to kill him if he doesn't pay them. When Chase comes back, his drug dealers are after him. For bail, Gordie's family must pay fifty-grand to bail Chase out, and his family just doesn't have that kind of money laying around.

Chase is arrested for assault, and if the man dies, it can turn into something far worse. Then Chase attacks a stranger and puts him in a critical condition in the hospital. Gordie's family try to help him, but it is getting out of control. Ever since Chase became addicted, he's been in and out of the house, wasting away, while stealing money and family belongings to purchase his meth. His older brother, Chase, is a drug addict, and Chase is bringing everybody down with him. Tweaked is a book about a sixteen year old boy, named Gordie, who is practically living in hell. Does it ever occur to you that what I'm doing might also be important?'' Where does he get the nerve to call me at work? 'Not now, Chase. A somber counterpart to Nic Sheff’s autobiographical Tweak (BCCB 1/08), this poignantly demonstrates the fact that the addict’s agony is only the beginning.My stomach clenches at the sound of Chase's voice. The book models various reactions to the situation, with Gordie’s mother a desperate enabler who keeps slipping money to her bail-jumping son, and even Gordie, who is clear-eyed about Chase’s incapacity for change, gets sucked into giving Chase money to pay off his violence-threatening dealers (Chase predictably uses the money to get high instead). It’s laceratingly clear that Gordie has been largely tossed to the side as his parents focus their energies on Chase, even though Gordie has also been paying for his brother’s crimes from the get-go.

While the story has a bit of the predictable trajectory of a good old problem novel, Holubitsky offers a painfully authentic exploration of a family locked into a disaster and making things worse by their attempts to control the uncontrollable. Gordie’s parents can only focus on their troubled son and his current dilemmas of bail and upcoming trial, but Gordie watches in anguish as Chase’s random and dangerous actions destroy the family of his assault victim (who eventually dies) as well as his own.

It’s seventeen-year-old Chase, older brother of narrator Gordie, who’s the tweaked methhead of the title, and after having been a methamphetamine user for two years, Chase has just landed a man in the hospital with a serious head injury, so his crimes have expanded to include aggravated assault.

Tweaked by Katherine Holubitsky