Addiction

She knew the path to addiction too well to let herself fall into that trap again. Yet somehow, somewhere, she got lost in her habit, and soon she was back in a hospital bed. Shivering, unable to stop the nauseous feelings that were her withdrawal symptoms, asking for her shadowlands and nightmares to come and claim her. Yet this time it wasn’t heroin she craved. It was me.

She came to our school with a history, though the only thing people really knew and cared about was her being kicked out of her last school because of drugs. All the boys thought she used pot and waited for some stoned girl to walk in and all the girls hated her because of the attention she was already receiving. I didn’t even know she was coming. I was too busy trying to set right my own problems to indulge in school gossip.

She came in March, the middle of the term. She wasn’t anyone’s idea of a drug addict. She was small, with short dark hair and very bright green eyes. I didn’t notice her then. She was too thin and she stumbled a lot. She didn’t speak to anyone, and in return no one talked to her.

Her name was Alice.

Girls bitched about her: “she’s a freak” was a common phrase among the cliques as it became more and more evident that Alice didn’t like speaking or conversation. It wasn’t that she couldn’t speak– she answered questions when forced to and would mutter a few words to a teacher if asked whether she was alright, but except for that she only responded with absent-minded nods and vacant smiles.

Then a boy talked to her, in a compulsory PE class. He found out she was eighteen, but she had to re-sit her A-levels because she hadn’t turned up to the examinations. And suddenly, she was popular.

Everyone liked her for her brute honesty, which shielded her, and her looks, which, though gaunt, had authentic beauty which she didn’t highlight with make up or try and show off with the latest fashion. She was an interesting phenomenon for everybody.

I didn’t like her. But not for her looks or her body, I didn’t like her because she wasn’t part of the rules. She didn’t follow our strict code of conduct. I was a nobody and I didn’t want to be anybody, but I stuck by the rules of a nobody, which she didn’t. She didn’t hide away in corners and she didn’t restrict the amount of people with whom she talked. I was scared of the fact she didn’t care.

The first time I talked with her was when my Literature teacher realised Alice was sitting on her own at the back of the class. “Alice, please come forward! There some room here next to Jamie!”

And so she came and sat down next to me. We were reading Jane Eyre, a book that I loathed. So while the teacher was blathering on about Jane’s relationship with her cousin, I drew.

I drew a river, flowing through a wood. I was using a charcoal pencil, so soon my innocent wood was filled with dark smudges, and soon I decided that my wood could become a nightmare. I accentuated the smudges and added drawings of ice to my river.

“So you have an addiction to drawing.” A voice whispered in my ear, a hand examining my notebook of drawings. Alice picked up my notebook to look more closely at my drawing. “Interesting - My shadowlands looked very similar.”

“Shadowlands?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at her, curious but pretending not to care.

“Yes. When I was in my coma I dreamt of lands like that. I was locked inside a very similar landscape, though it was stormier than your picture.”

“You were in a coma?” I asked, surprised. Suddenly a look of horror crossed her face as she realised what she had unveiled and she ignored me, pretending to concentrate on our teacher.

I couldn’t get her to talk to me again that day in Literature, and so I gave up on asking her on her coma. I asked her other questions, all of which she refused to answer or evaded by giving cryptic answers. I stuck around with her though, and soon I gave up asking her anything. We spent the rest of the day together and after I finished badgering her, mostly in silence. She only spoke to me again when the bell rang at the end of Biology.

“Thanks Jamie.” She handed me a slip with her number and address on it. “I’m grounded for my next three lifetimes, but you might want to drop by. I could use some help on the biology.” She smiled at me before picking up her bag and leaving with the comment: “No one every sticks around me when I am silent. Thanks again.” She smiled at me and left.

I was pleased, because during the silent time I had spent with her had made me like her more. I had noticed she was thoughtful and careful; each one of her movements deliberates. Each of her movements was contemplated, every answer deliberated – she didn’t seem to be spontaneous at all, yet somehow here care made her seem more trustworthy.

I left school feeling a lot better than I had that morning. I had little homework except for an English essay and the biology, which meant I could spend the better part of the weekend with Alice, trying to figure her out.

My mother had taught me to read people, as she was an expert gambler, specializing in poker, where she honed her ability to see through people’s bets. I had always wondered why we didn’t live in Las Vegas with her skill, where she could win billions, but my father didn’t trust her enough.

So we lived in the middle of nowhere, my mother playing online poker, which just wasn’t the same for her and my father still distrusting my mother even though she was contained. Whenever anything happened, a neighbour or a repairman came over, my father would stay home from work or call in every half an hour to make sure my mother wasn’t having an affair.

My ‘different’ home life meant I spent as much time away from it as possible, which usually meant doing my homework at the bus shelter or at the local library where all the computers were broken and the librarian bad tempered.

I was glad to get away on Saturday morning, prime time for my parent’s cat fights about what events had occurred during the week.

Alice’s house was right in the centre of town. It was a small flat that she and her mother, step-father and sister shared. It was evident that they had just moved; boxes had replaced any need for furniture in the house. Her sister was a bright and happy fifteen year old, named Scarlett. She was leaving right when I came, yet she greeted me cheerfully. She went to a boarding school where they used to live. This was her weekend off.

Alice’s mother resembled her younger daughter and just reminded me that ‘if her daughter left the house to feel free to kill her because her next life was to be grounded too’. I nodded and smiled, not quite getting the joke. She and her husband followed Scarlett out of the door.

I walked towards the room Alice’s step-father had pointed out to me. I entered carefully and stopped in my tracks surprised.

The originally white walls of the room were plastered with charcoal drawings of bleak landscapes, frozen rivers and dark woods. They resembled my doodle in English and I guessed that they were images of her ‘Shadowlands’. The whole room seemed to be only black and white. The carpet was black, her bed was a metal frame covered in a black quilt and her desk was so covered in papers that I couldn’t see the colour, though it wouldn’t have surprised me if it was black.

In the middle of the floor sat Alice, wearing a short black dress which displayed her gorgeous legs. She was sitting cross legged and looked innocent, like a child. She wore a black T-shirt under her dress so that her arms were concealed even though the dress was strapless. I had wondered about her habit to conceal her arms, but now I know it was to cover up the tracks of her addiction.

“Hiya.” She said without looking up. “I am sure my whole family has introduced itself to you by now?”

“It has.” I smiled as I folded myself next to her, taking off my jacket. “Where does your sister go to school?”

“Oxford.”

“That’s like five hours away!” I said surprised.

“She got a scholarship for one of the best schools in the country.” Alice said, I could swear I detected some bitterness there. “David really wanted her to go, but we had to move because of me, so Mom decided to get a job so Scarlett could board.”

“Who’s David?”

“I thought you’d met every member of my family. He’s my step-father. Nice guy really.”

“So Scarlett’s your half sister?”

“No, no. We’re full siblings. She’s just much better than me.” Alice smiled and said the last words which a finality which stopped me arguing. She took her biology book from her bag. A sketch fell out with it. I snatched it up and was surprised to see it was unmistakably me.

“You should do art!” I told her, examining the sketch. I was reading. My hair was in my tight braid, hanging over my shoulder, as usual. I smiled at the perfect image of myself thoughtfully, curious of the amount of thought I the picture.

“I did.” She smiled and pointed to one of the largest drawings on her wall. The canvas stood out in the room of paper sketches. It was a painting done in ink, a beautiful muddle of chains, barbed wire and dark faces, unrecognisable but yet familiar. The only colours in the painting were the eyes of one such person, which were luminously yellow. “That was my A level drawing.”

“Why aren’t you retaking it?”

“I’m only allowed three subjects;” She smiled. “English Literature, Biology and Greek. And speaking of biology, shall we start?”

And we did start. We started on a friendship which was fragile enough that one word from either of us could tip it. We spent a lot of time together, where I realised things about her. She loved her sister, though the rivalry between them was evident. She trusted her step father a lot. Her own father had died when she was three and her mother was still pregnant with Scarlett.

She only told me about the scars on her arms a week before our biology A-level. We were sitting in her room – I was leaning against her bed and she was lying down, head in my lap, as I fired questions at her. She was wearing a black dress, the same black dress that she had been wearing the first time I visited. The only differences between now and then was that this time her arms were free. I traced the tracks on her fragile arm as I fired questions at her, curious to know where the tracks originated but not curious enough to risk upsetting her.

One other thing I had learnt about Alice was that she was fragile. She needed to be sure that I loved her, sure that nobody was more important to me than her. I guessed that being raised by her mother alone must have made her feel the limited in the amount of love she got, and now she needed proof that I loved her.

I didn’t realise until that day that she needed romantic love. I thought she just needed a friend’s love.

“Do you love me?” she interrupted, catching my hand as I meant to retrace her scars.

The question startled me, so I didn’t answer immediately. She sat up in my lap and help eye contact with me, repeating the question more urgently. “Do you love me?”

We had spent almost every day together for the last two months, sometimes talking, sometimes being silent for days on end. During that time I had become to respect Alice, even love her as a friend, but I wasn’t sure whether that was the question.

“In what way?” I stuttered, unsure.

“Anyway. Everyway.”

“Yes.” I answered, and she kissed me. It was awkward, and I didn’t know how to respond, except to kiss her back. Her lips were warm and tasted like chewing gum. But I liked it. I had never really looked at either a boy or a girl, the idea of dating simply hadn’t appealed to me, and my parents were to busy fighting to notice.

She pulled away first and lay down on my lap again, holding my eye contact. “You know, all I wanted was for someone to love me. But I felt so unsure. I didn’t have any security – not my mother, not my very new step-father, not even my sister. My mother and sister had a fake image of me that I didn’t want to shatter, so I got into drugs, especially tranquilisers, yet then I got heroin.”

“It was weird. I knew the dangers. I knew everything, yet the effect it has on you – no more pain, nothing… it was so tranquil. I didn’t have to worry about my mother and my sister, I didn’t worry about my school work, I didn’t need to worry at all. After almost two years of taking it I found that my best friend was my step-father. I left him a note, stole his and my mothers combined money and took an overdose.”

“I didn’t die like I had had planned. My body had become tolerant and the amount I took simply put me into a coma. This was in March last year.”

“I woke up in December.”

“I always thought that I couldn’t live without something I was in control of. I knew that control was vital for me. And I realised that letting myself get hooked on heroin, I had lost control. So I regained it.”

I stroked her face in my lap. My fragile little Alice had gone through so much, and yet here she was. “I’ll help you.” I promised.

I kissed her again, and this time I was confident. I liked Alice; she was attractive, she was intelligent and she was cautious. We promised each other to stay together.

And I broke that promise.

When we fell apart, I ran away first, scared of the commitment Alice wanted. Ever since I have wondered ‘what if I had stayed by her side’ and held her sweaty hand?