I can feel my teeth cracking in my head. Coming down is like that—it makes you feel every sensation in your body more intensely.
Last night we were lying in bed, and I found a big fat vein in between my thigh and my crotch. Actually, he found it—he was running his hands over my panties for the first time in months. I felt his nail run along a strip of raised skin—I felt a shiver somewhere in my neck, and I had to look down—It was purple and thick. It was better than sex. It was better than him on top of me, inside me, looking me in the eye, ’cause at that moment I couldn’t even remember what colour his eyes were. The smoothness of a needle doesn’t compare to the brush of someone’s lips against yours or the sliding of someone’s tongue. It’s sharper, more real. It doesn’t lend itself to any doubts.
I’ve been grinding my jaw for half an hour now and I can feel the enamel coming off the backs of my teeth.
He calls me at 1:35 in the afternoon. The flashing numbers of the call display are bright red against the Christmas-green of my alarm clock. I pick up the phone and whisper into it. His voice is ragged. He asks me how I’m feeling. I tell him I’m thinking of taking the frozen peas out of the fridge and rubbing them against my jaw. I don’t have an ice pack. He tells me he can’t believe I’m living alone after all of this. I nod my head. I know. I can’t believe it either. He asks me if I want to go to the park, between my apartment and his. He can get a dealer there in fifteen minutes. I drag myself out of bed, splash water on my face. When I look in the mirror, I notice that I still have the mark on my neck.
The smoothness of a needle doesn’t compare to the brush of someone’s lips against yours or the sliding of someone’s tongue. It’s sharper, more real. It doesn’t lend itself to any doubts.
I can still see his teeth marks.
Before, when I had friends who weren’t constantly fucked up, when I was still in school, this girl would tease me about not having any foundation or concealer. She’d say, “Angela has eye glitter in every colour of the rainbow but nothing to cover up a zit.” I pick up a bottle of red sparkles and sprinkle them on my lips. The door knob that hit the top of my mouth the night before makes me look like I had a collagen injection.
The bones in my knees scrape against the bones below my neck. I am freezing. My body temperature is all fucked up now. I live beside a park where 15-years-olds deal acid and shrooms, and I live in a building where a lot of people smoke crack. The elevators constantly smell like burning plastic. I never got into the rock, even though he does it, ’cause I believe you get what you pay for. My father used to say when you buy something cheap in life there are always consequences.
All the crackheads I know don’t function in real life. None of them have jobs anymore, none of them are artists, half of them steal and do crazy shit just to get by. Crack is where I draw the line. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a junkie.
I was really young when I first met him. It was at a party—one of those fake-ID, looking-the-bouncer-in-the-eye, wearing-a-low-cut-shirt type of deals. He was eleven years older than me. He had a swagger—the kind of man who walked into a room and owned it. Every woman in the room was watching him. He was an arresting but laid back presence.
I was sitting in the corner by the bar, drawing in my sketchbook with a thick black Sharpie. I was writing out my name in thick loopy letters, trying to come up with a tag. I wanted to start doing graffiti.
I wanted to professionally vandalize.
He approached me and started talking. He said something about my Converse, something about how pretentious the place was, how he could tell I wasn’t like everyone else based on my shoes. He could have been with anyone, but he picked me. We shared a cigarette outside. I felt we connected, that he might understand me.
That night he took me back to his place. I wrote the letters of my name all over his arms and legs. I marked my territory. I sunk my teeth into his body.
He laughed and looked at me. “Are you trying to give me a hickey? Want me to find a parking lot, and we can make out like 16-year-olds?”
I laughed too. “Yeah, I’d like that,” I told him, and I wasn’t sure if I was being sarcastic or not. In the dark, he traced the smile that crept to the tops of my cheeks.
I moved in with him two weeks later.
I’d never lived with anyone except my mother. She was a single mom, and for the longest time it was just me, her and my brother.
We don’t talk about my father either.
My mother had a boyfriend for a while, this guy Steven. I liked him okay, I guess. He seemed like he was okay to her, and he was decent to me. She got pregnant and they seemed happy about it. Then one day, when my younger brother was three, he up and left her. They never got married. My mother went crazy after that—yelling, screaming, blaming. She resented my little brother for standing in her way of being able to work full-time, and she resented both of us for putting her in a position where she had to work full-time. She was too proud to go on any kind of assistance, so for months at a time we subsisted on Spam sandwiches and Cheerios.
My mother alternated between screaming at me for not being more maternal, not wanting to be a mother to my little brother, and confiding in me about our finances, her job, and her loneliness. On the one hand, she insulted me so much it was crippling; on the other, she wanted to be my best friend. She got me a cellphone, and would call me during the day, complaining about me and whatever was wrong with her life. She never developed the skills to communicate that she was having a bad day—I began to understand that when she said terrible, insulting things to me, she was stressed.
At the same time, I was 15 and I had angst of my own. I was an average student at best, despite her expectations. My mother was one of those people—it was her way or the highway. After two years of sleeping on people’s floors and couches, in basements, and in the hallways of strangers, after high school, I finally chose the highway. He helped me find it.
It wasn’t really that difficult leaving her. My mother had been making my life a living hell for years. He never liked hearing about how my mother and I didn’t get along. His mother died when he was young, and they’d been close. “It’s a tragedy,” he’d tell me when he was pacing and sweating, needing a fix while I lay on the couch, with my legs splayed open, trying to find a new vein. I’d look at him, accusatory. “I’m lying here like this, and you don’t even want me,” I’d spit. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Angela,” he’d scream, and throw a beer bottle against the wall above my head. It would narrowly miss me, and I’d be so caught up in what I was doing I’d forget to wince. That’s what was happening to us. We couldn’t even get a reaction from each other anymore.
“I’m going to find someone to fuck who’ll give me more of their junk,” he’d snap, finally.
He meant it too. He always meant it when he said things like that. It would dawn on me, hours later, when I realized where he was, when the feeling in my body and brain had returned. He’d crawl into bed, or beside me on the couch, at three or four in the morning, smelling like weed and perfume, with new rips in his jeans and fresh bruises everywhere. Sometimes his neck would ooze blood.
“Take care of me,” he’d whisper, and I’d press my lips to his cuts. I’d rub my lower lip on his jagged edges and will the pain to go away. I could still feel his pain even if I couldn’t feel my own. When I had the energy, I’d get up, go to the bathroom, find the disinfectant, clean him off. When I was sure he had passed out, I’d cry. I’d wake up the next day with eyes so puffy it would take me ten minutes to be able to see.
Danila Botha is currently working on a collection of short stories. Her next book, the novel Too Much on the Inside, will be published in September, 2012. This is an excerpt from her recently published short story collection, Got No Secrets.