All Aboard the Hot Mess Express

I opened my watering eyes and sniffed one of those disgusting snorts that pulls all the powder from your nose into the back of your throat, looked around at the squalor I was being subjected to that night. In a corner of the income-based apartment we were holed up in, there was a wannabe gangster kid with horrible prison tattoos loading a bowl. His feet were surrounded by broken toys and a Dora the Explorer doll that was bigger than the little girl I met earlier that it belonged to. Beside him, his friend was scratching a coke rock into lines. I put down the broken hand mirror with God-only-knows-what in the cracks I was blowing oxy off of and jumped up, sat down beside the kid with the white.

“Are you gonna share that with me?” I purred, pushing my chest out a little for security. “Did you get it from around here or is it clean?”

He grunted some half-assed reply about how it came from South Wheeling but it was fish-scale. Fish-scale, my a*s. The only pure thing to ever come out of South is my sister’s step-daughter, and knowing her biological mother, I’m not even sure of that sometimes.

He handed me a crumpled up one dollar bill rolled into a tube and I cringed, dug around in my purse for a straw cut in half. Pulled out three. Sucked hard and hoovered up most of what was on the plate. Sorry, not sorry.

My best friend was smoking cigarette after cigarette, looking at her phone every minute to see what time it was, vaguely “Mhm”-ing the kid with the weed while he tried his damnedest to put the mack on her. I decided to save her.

“Babygirl, will you come pee with me?”

Relief washed over her face and she sprang up, stoked to not be cornered on a leather couch with cracks in every cushion. We sprinted down the 20 foot hallway to the bathroom. I didn’t notice until we got in and locked the door that she had jacked his bowl and we sat on the floor toking for a good ten minutes until someone knocked on the door. Some deathly skinny girl from the apartment complex we were in, wanting to borrow the make-up that was sitting on the sink. I don’t know why the girl we were visiting let people in like that, but that’s how it goes when you’re a 20 year old with your own place and desperate for company sometimes, I guess. She hit our stolen bowl and I’m not exaggerating when I say she smeared black kohl on her face for at least 45 seconds an eye. It was 3 am and she said some kid was coming over to bring suboxone because she’s been clean for three months. I rolled my eyes. Homegirl wasn’t just riding the Hot Mess Express, she was the first-ever first class passenger. Then again, I’d lost ten pounds in the last three weeks and was next in line to become the conductor. We smothered her with compliments about how pretty she looked and she left.

“I still don’t feel s**t,” I sighed as I ground my teeth together and dug through my bag for a Percocet to bust on the back of the toilet.

I never feel s**t anymore.