Renee hasn't been the same since we abandoned ship. She's all fucked up in the head. Some people would say we just got into the wrong crowd, but I think she's just been cooped up too long in that military household with her piece of shit dad and his blonde, bimbo, bitch of a girlfriend Abbey. Other people say she's been fucked up all her life. Maybe I just didn't notice. I've always seen myself as the fucked up one.
My mother has been addicted to heroine for as long as I can remember. She'd lock herself up in her room for days and I'd be left to fend for myself. My earliest memory is watching her shove a needle into her arm. I was four years old and I still remember the look on her face. She cinched her arm with such care, like it was the only fucking thing in the world that mattered; like I wasn't there. She inserted the needle so slowly. It took forever. I play it forward and backward in my head in slow motion. I'm back in that house, in that awful room again. I'm young and scared.
Mommy, I say, but she won't look at me, she won't stop. Then her eyes are rolling into the back of her head. She's falling backward but it's all in slow motion again. Her head hits the pillow and I could swear she stops breathing, stops thinking, stops living. Her body seizes as the drug works its way into her blood stream and then she's still.
I creep slowly from the doorway to the bed. I grasp her hand but she's motionless, her entire face is glazed over, and that's when I just can't take it anymore. The tears come. I'm sobbing because I'm tired and hungry and my baby sister is wailing in the other room and I don't understand why I'm here and what's going on anymore. I'm crying because I'm too young for this, because I know this is not the life little girls lead. I'd sit there for hours with her all fucked up. She'd do anything she could get her hands on so long as she had that high.
I grew up too fast.
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