By Michael Anthony Adams

michael.adams@indystar.com

The last time Carson Meyer saw her 2-year-old brother alive, Max stopped to peek in the doorway of her bedroom. He didn't say a word. Barbie and Kelly dolls were everywhere — too much girly stuff for him.

So the toddler moved on to his brother's room. Jake, 12, was playing a PlayStation game and booted him out. The kid was too young for video games.

Max wandered down the hall, into the living room, past the couch where their mother's boyfriend, John, was napping, and came to the back door, which led to the yard and the swimming pool. He reached up, unlocked the door.

Carson, then 8, said she doesn't remember how much time had passed. But the first thing to break the silence in the house was Jake's crying and screaming. At first, she thought it was a joke. Then she ran into the living room and saw John holding Max's sodden body.

She remembers how blue the toddler was, and how her older brother tried to revive him. But Max was dead. And Jake's guilt and subsequent death from a heroin overdose would lead Carson on a journey that would deepen her sorrow and prepare her to play the darkest role of her young acting career.

On Friday and Saturday, Carson will take the stage in the Young Actors Theatre's production of "Go Ask Alice," a play that tells the story of a 15-year-old girl who falls into drug addiction.

Some nights, after rehearsal, the 18-year-old Herron High School senior feels drained. She cries. She thinks to herself, "I've been here. I've been here."

Her breakthrough moment

Max died on July 22, 2003. Soon after, Carson joined the Young Actors Theatre (YAT), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to building confidence, creativity and discipline. At the time, all the kids in her neighborhood knew what had happened to Max and didn't know how to act toward her, so she kept to herself. She didn't talk much. But she felt a sense of family at YAT.

"Carson was always the quiet one," said her father, Dave Meyer. "I think what we didn't always know was how much she was taking in. As she has grown, she has become more comfortable with her intuitions, her beliefs, and using those to reach out and engage others."

For two years, Carson watched as the other kids in the program gained confidence on stage. In one exercise, the gibberish game, actors stand in front of the other students, make up a language and carry on a conversation with themselves in that language.

One day, she jumped in the circle, surrounded by YAT's older members, and let go. Executive Artistic Director Justin Wade distinctly remembers it as being Carson's breakthrough moment.

"I always go back to that moment as being the moment where I really met Carson," Wade said. "I didn't know her story at that time, but as I got to know Carson more and more, that story made sense. It was a breakthrough for her with everything she was dealing with."

Jake Meyer was dealing with Max's death in a different way. He was angry that he still had to live in the house where his brother died, but his mother, Amy Hunter, a waitress at Pat Flynn's Public House, couldn't afford to move the family. Jake couldn't sleep, and when he did, nightmares about Max's drowning continued to haunt him.

"Jake was always very outgoing and got energy from the outside world," said Hunter, who was working the late shift on the night that Max died. "And it was really, really, really, really hard for him because he couldn't get that at home. We had no energy to give to him at the time."

During his senior year at Herron, Jake began shooting heroin. Carson noticed a change in his attitude. He was barely sleeping, and almost every day a fight would ignite somewhere in the Meyer house. She knew he smoked pot and hung around with people who "smelled weird," but she thought he was just acting out, that it was a part of the post-traumatic stress disorder doctors had diagnosed shortly after Max's death.

In December 2009, Jake entered the Fairbanks Addiction Treatment Center voluntarily. Carson remembers his saying that he wanted to change, that he didn't want to be an addict anymore. She would visit him on Family Nights, and when he finally got sober, she asked him to join YAT.

"Jake started hanging around," Wade said. "He would help me get sets ready. He'd help me with backstage stuff. Not really a stage manager, more of just a builder."

Wade admitted he was a hard case when he was younger, too. Like Jake, he knew the struggles of addiction.

"I knew he was dealing with hard drugs," Wade said. "I could see it in his eyes. We started talking openly about it, and I can't even tell you how many conversations I had with Jake where we would talk about the fact that he was dealing with the death of his baby brother and that he felt guilty from it and that he wanted out of his addiction."

It wasn't long before Jake was back in rehab. He'd been kicked out of the YAT program temporarily because of issues stemming from his relapse. The family insurance wouldn't cover another stay at Fairbanks for heroin use, so Jake's father went to the liquor store, bought a bottle of gin, mixed it with grape soda and told him to drink up. They'd have to check him in as an alcoholic.

The day after Carson's 17th birthday, Jake sent his sister a text message asking if he could come see her. Her parents were out of town, and she knew Jake was using again. She asked him not to come. She was afraid of the violent outbursts the drug induced. But he came anyway.

"I was listening to a Jimi Hendrix song, and I remember looking out the window and seeing a car pull up," Carson said. "Jake didn't have a car. I just knew it was him having some girl drive him around."

Carson went to the door, and there Jake stood. She thought he had come for money, food, cigarettes. But she was wrong. He was holding a birthday card. He kissed her.

"I love you, sissy," he said, and gave her the card.

'I'm not a sad story'

A week later, Carson was in algebra class at Herron when her mother came speeding down Pennsylvania Street, slammed the car into park in the middle of the road, ran inside and screamed, "I need Carson right now!"

Amy Hunter could hardly speak, saying only that Carson needed to run, that her brother had overdosed. The two drove to IU Health Methodist Hospital.

In Jake's hospital room, Carson threw herself on top of her brother and cried. Tenants in Jake's halfway house — where he had been living after his second stint in rehab — had found him unconscious and called police. The doctor told Carson that as bad as her brother was when they found him, he thought he would pull through. Jake was young, 21 years old, and the doctor thought he would be fine.

Carson was relieved, if only for a moment. She left the hospital and went to YAT for rehearsal. But as she was going over her lines for her roles in "The Laramie Project" — a play dealing with a town's reaction to the murder of a gay University of Wyoming student — Jake's blood pressure was dropping.

"We found out that next day that he was brain dead," Carson said. "Even if he woke up, he wouldn't be Jake anymore."

Carson spent Jake's final hours reading "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" to him. It was one of his favorite books, and it was a story the siblings connected with.

"I thought, at least from the time I was 5 years old, because I had two brothers, that someday we would all have these lives," Carson said. "Jake and I always wanted to live out West together. That was our thing, what we found in the West. I always thought I'd have nieces and nephews, and I felt like, in a sense, our dreams together got destroyed."

Carson's final promise to Jake was that she would live her life for him and Max.

She recently auditioned and was accepted into the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Los Angeles, where she'll join the ranks of alumni Jesse Tyler Ferguson ("Modern Family"), Paul Sorvino ("GoodFellas") and multiplatinum recording artist Jason DeRulo.

She said she's not someone who just "got" acting. Early on, she struggled to find herself, but YAT gave her the confidence to embody different characters and still remain herself.

"Carson has grown up into being an actor," said her father, Dave Meyer. "She's an artist. I fully believe whatever she ends up doing, that she's not doing it to become famous. She's doing it to make a difference. That's not what most 17-, 18-year-old wannabe-actors are about."

With the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman from a heroin overdose this month, and nearly 100 fatal heroin overdoses in Indianapolis in 2013 alone, Carson wants to raise awareness of addiction. All proceeds from "Go Ask Alice" — which takes place on the one-year anniversary of Jake's death — will go to Carson's college fund. She hopes her training at AMDA will help her to produce plays and films about addiction, and, eventually, a movie about her brother's life.

"Carson knows how to tell this story from living it," said Wade, who can see the teenage actress channeling Jake as she rehearses the role.

"I want everyone to know that I'm not a sad story," Carson said. "I'm not a victim. This is not a tragedy. This is me taking some really bad things that have happened to me and trying to do some good out of it with following my dreams. And I think I can do it. I think I'm getting there."

Call Star reporter Michael Anthony Adams at (317) 444-6123. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelAdams317 .

"Go Ask Alice"

• WHEN: 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

• WHERE: Wheeler Arts Community Center, 1035 Sanders St.

• COST: $20 minimum donation.

• INFO: yatkids.org or (317) 614-5057.