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Hannah Smith
Honeysuckle and Heroin
Picture this: you are seventeen years old. The days are dull, the nights are long, the
music is loud, and the invigorating mixture of marijuana and morphine pumping through your
bloodstream numbs you of any and all pain and instead makes you acutely aware of every single
detail around you, from the smell of stale, lukewarm beer wafting across the underground dance
floor to the tiny mole on that chick’s enormous left tit. You flash her a devilish smile and she
bites her crimson bottom lip. You take one last drag of your joint and plunge a needle into the
crease right below your elbow, the euphoric surge of heroin seeping quickly through your veins.
You crunch the glass syringe underneath your heel, and take a step towards her. The bass
pounds in your eardrums. And the night begins.
Picture this: you are seventeen years old. The days are dull. The nights are long. The
music is loud. And you don’t give a fuck about a single thing in the world.
◊ ◊ ◊
It’s cold. It’s insane how cold it is. Your breath creates a foggy mist in front of your face
as you sigh impatiently, lurking under a street-corner windowsill and waiting for SophomoreBobby to hurry up and get here so that he can get his fix, and you can get your money.
You glance down at your phone, the bright screen blinding you for a moment. 3:24 AM.
Fuck. Where is he? He’s almost an hour late. You may be a drug dealer, but you’re a punctual
drug dealer. You decide to call it—he’s not showing up anytime soon. Maybe he got caught by
the fuzz, maybe his cheap Chevy broke down, maybe he found a freshman slut drunk enough or
dumb enough to let him bust a nut inside of her. Maybe he’s dead from an overdose on the drugs
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you got him hooked on. You don’t much care.
You yank your hood up and pull open your backpack, grabbing the Ziploc of black tar
heroin meant for Bobby. The sight of the shiny syringe makes the blood pump in your sluggish
and clogged veins. It’s been too long—almost two hours. You rip open the plastic bag and
combine a double hit of smack with a sour swig of Jack Daniels. You feel a little better and a
little worse at the same time.
Puffing on a cig, you stumble your way down the sidewalk, trying to avoid the bright
spotlight of a streetlamp. Down the block, a hobo goes through a black trash bag on the curb.
Bottles tinkle against one another.
Without warning, that familiar sound brings you back to four years ago. Suddenly, you
are a gangly, shaggy-haired thirteen year old boy again, losing yourself in a Star Wars movie
marathon on a muggy Thursday night. The front door slams shut, and the thump of heavy boots
is interrupted by the shattering of a glass bottle being thrown at the wall. It seems that sound is
always present in your house. It’s the only thing that’s constant and reliable.
You turn the volume on the TV way down, desperately hoping against all hope that your
drunk-ass dad won’t hear it and stumble his way into your bedroom. But you know it won’t
make a difference, because either way, he is going to beat the living daylights out of you within
the next half hour. All you can do is pray that he won’t do the same to your little brother,
sleeping soundly on the top bunk.
Of course, he does. He will kick down your bedroom door, and he will slice your
eyebrow open with a cracked, jagged green bottle edge, and he will kick you in the gut until you
choke out a crimson river, and he will yank Adam down from that top bunk, and he will and he
does and he did. No matter how many times you play that night over in your mind, it always
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ends the same way. He always does. Your brother always ends up dead. And he always will be.
You shake yourself out of the memory. You absentmindedly run your finger over the
white, puffy scar just above your right eyebrow. You jab a needle into the hardened flesh of
your forearm. You spit. You walk.
◊ ◊ ◊
This morning at school, you grab some kid by his shirt collar and knock him a good one,
right in the jaw. He stiffed you on your money—what else were you supposed to do? The
threatening voicemail left on your phone from your supplier was no joke: get the money, or
you’ll pay in a different way. Jimbo’s a great guy, but he doesn’t fuck around when it comes to
his drugs. And nor should he. After all, it’s a business just like any other. You don’t care about
the welfare of the consumer, just the cash flow.
You shrug your backpack further up onto your shoulders and walk down the hall. A twofingered wave of acknowledgment here, a slap on the back there, a threatening glance to that
random freshman and a wink to that particular one. Your life is just a series of body language
and indifference and heroin.
The nasal ding of the bell sounds overhead, so you stalk off to English with a sickened
snarl on your face. Leaning back as far as you can in your chair, you half-listen to Mr. DoucheDick-Dilbert ramble on about Edgar Allen Poe or some crap. Fuckin’ raven. Who cares? You
shake your head in disgust for a moment, but then are forced to admit to yourself that deep down,
you kinda dig that shit. Something about the flow of the words eases you, sort of like pot
combined with the rhythm of a kickdrum.
No, screw this. What you need is some black tar in your system to slow the momentum
of your thoughts, so that you can zone into the gray dots on the ceiling and taste the dust motes
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floating around the stuffy classroom instead of drowning in the poetic river of words cascading
out of Dilbert’s mouth. You need it so you can remind yourself that you are Trent Michaels, and
you don’t care about anything.
You meet Dilbert’s eyeline with the least amount of respect possible and mumble
something about the Porcelain Pisser. The classroom door slams behind you. You wander up
and down a couple sets of stairs before your feet decide to take you past the metal water fountain
by the attendance office, and out the front door. You head to Smoker’s Corner, a small plot of
razed dirt a block south of the school where the stoners hang out. Gargling with a swig of vodka,
you finagle some drug money out of a kid you went to elementary school with. Nothing too big,
just enough to keep Jimbo off your back for the afternoon.
Before you know it, the sky overhead is dark blue and you’re killing time all alone on a
faded, rusting picnic bench outside the 24-hour convenience store at the edge of town. You
don’t wanna go home, because all that waits for you there is the woman you’re supposed to call
“Mom.” But of course, she’s not really your mom—foster parents don’t count. You think about
your real mother. She left you long ago and that’s okay, because by the end she had just become
a washed-out shade of gray anyway, thin as a sheet of paper and about as blank as one, too. For
months you watched the life gradually fade out of her, right after Adam—
No, you’re not going to go there, not tonight. Not again.
The bell dings as you swagger into the musty, ill-lit convenience store. The pock-marked
cashier tosses his Peruvian porno mag aside for the time being and glances at you out of his lazy
eye as he rings up your Mountain Dew and roll of donuts. You think you’ve sold him some sort
of paraphernalia before, but you can’t be sure.
The air outside is cold in your lungs as you sit back down on your bench and suck down
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the Mountain Dew, along with a fat, tightly-rolled joint. You suppose you should get home
soon, but the thought of your foster mom tunelessly humming along to Sinatra and flourishing a
feather duster over the plastic-wrapped furniture is just too fucking much for you.
Loose gravel crunches under someone’s heels as they exit the store. An engine roars, and
bright headlights cut across your vision. The back of your hand flies up to shield your eyes, but
before you know it, the world is black again. A car door opens, and then slams shut. More
crunching gravel.
“Trent…?” a voice asks from the darkness.
You recognize it, but you can’t quite put a face to it. You think this is the voice that
offered to share Goldfish and Capri Sun with you in Kindergarten when you forgot your snack,
and maybe did most of the work on a presentation about the Dust Bowl in middle school. An
image of long, straight black hair flashes across the forefront of your mind’s eye.
She takes a step towards you, and the glow from the moth-infested lamp plays tricks with
the curve of her nose, throwing shadows into the ever-present dimple on her chin and the cupid’s
bow of her upper lip.
Of course you know this face.
“Annie,” you state—not ask—after a moment of silence. You remember her perfectly
now, without a doubt. But you don’t want her to know that.
“It’s Annabel now. What are you doing here?” she asks. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” you reply stiffly.
“Alright,” she murmurs quietly, but sits down beside you on the frozen bench.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” The tone of your voice is deceivingly curt and
uninterested, the forced apathy masking your true curiosity. You realize now that you used to
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see her around town with some Haircut. Much too old for her. Cufflinks. Cologne. An
indifferent face that looked as ironed as his button-up shirt.
“Yes,” she replies, “and you do, too. And I know that neither of us really wants to be
where we’re supposed to be, or where we are. But it’s cold.”
“So?”
“So. Can I give you a ride?”
◊ ◊ ◊
It’s a little after four in the morning. You lie awake in bed, your feet pushed up against
the pointless wooden support beams of the empty bunk above you. You can’t stop thinking
about the glint in Annabel’s eyes as she stared at you beneath the dome light in the cab of her
pickup truck. No one’s ever looked at you like that before. Not as a mistake, or a fuck-up, or a
lost cause. She looked at you like…like you were worth taking a second glance at. You just
haven’t decided yet whether you want her to or not. Picturing that chin dimple fading away into
a frown of disappointment and regret feels like chunky, expired milk in your abdomen. But
dammit, what if…
So you offer her some smack in exchange for the ride home—free of cost. It’s just good
manners, right? But she says she’s not into that, so the next day you make a call to Jimbo to see
if he’s down with letting you deal mary jane on the side as well, or perhaps some shrooms—
maybe she digs that instead. You hope so. It’ll give you an excuse to see her again, to breathe in
the perfume of her shampoo lingering in the air, to revel in the sound of her voice. It is the
Edgar Allen Poe of voices.
But as it turns out, she doesn’t like pot or mushies, either. Doesn’t like drugs at all.
Won’t even take a cig from you! You have to come up with something else, so you start going
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to study hall because you know that she does. You spend all period trying to catch her eye from
across the room, to make the corners of her lips curve upward. One of them does. As you walk
home, both of yours do, too.
The next day, you blow off some chick with an unstoppable ass who offered to let you
“give it to her however you want” in exchange for some drugs. Annabel is waiting at study hall,
and this time she sits down next to you.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
And that’s it. But somehow, it’s enough.
Yet after a while, it stops being enough. You’ve spent day after day after day
surreptitiously memorizing every ivory, star-kissed curve of her face from behind an upsidedown textbook, and now you wanna know more. You wanna know what she dreamt of opening
on Christmas morning when she was six years old. Does she ever meander downstairs at
midnight in a pale pink robe and slippers for a late night snack of waffles? What kind of berries
does she pile on top? Or is she a whipped cream kind of girl? When did she stop going by
“Annie” and start answering to “Annabel” instead, and why? You wonder what her sheet of
raven-black hair looks like when she first wakes up in the morning, and how long the imprint of
her face on the pillow lasts before it disappears with the glow of the rising sun. You’ve never
felt the slightest urge to know any of these things about a girl before. And now, suddenly, you
need to know these things. But it’s so impossibly frustrating, because every time you try to
bridge the gap between her veil of morning dew and your shadowy shroud of drugs and pain, it’s
like you slam face-first into an invisible and thoroughly impenetrable barrier.
Maybe your worlds just aren’t meant to collide.
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◊ ◊ ◊
You’re sitting in the dark on the rusted convenience store picnic bench when it hits you:
you haven’t sold any drugs at all in three whole days. What’s more, you haven’t taken any in the
last twenty four hours, or even felt the need to. Of course, as soon as you realize this, your skin
starts to crawl, and you become positively positive that every single fucking organ inside of your
sober body is trying to rip its way to the surface and escape. You tear open your backpack,
searching for a syringe in a frenzy, but your shaking hands fumble with the open Ziploc bag and
seventy five dollars-worth of uncooked tar oozes into the dirt by your feet. You drop to your
knees, not sure how to remedy the situation but desperate to do something (the Three Second
Rule applies to drugs too, right?) when you notice a pair of shoes inches from yours. You look
up. You can’t see anything in the darkness, but the smell of honeysuckle shampoo soaked into
raven hair is enough. Her.
The hundreds of tiny, crawling worms underneath your skin begin to slow their
wriggling, and then cease completely. Your heartbeat, however, continues its incessant beating
as she ignores the sticky mess on the ground and sits down next to you, on the same side as last
time. She doesn’t say anything yet, but you can feel her wide silver eyes trying to make out your
face in the darkness. Your ragged breathing is gradually slowing to a human pace.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bother you,” she says quietly. “My truck was on empty so I
had to fill up, and then there you were.”
You glance over at the four deserted gas pumps in front of the shop. There’s no truck,
just a bike on the sidewalk. You smile in the darkness. What a beautiful lie.
“Can I ask you something?” she inquires.
“Y-yeah.” Your voice cracks.
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“Does it ever get easier?”
“What do you mean?”
“The loss, the memories.”
That’s all that needs to be said for you to suddenly understand her previous question with
painful clarity. For a moment, you resent her for making you think about this. It hurts. You
choose not to reply. She waits a moment before speaking again.
“I’m sorry, Trent, I really don’t mean to pry. It’s just…I see the way you live your life
and the choices you’re making, and when I compare them to the picture in my head of the sandyhaired boy I knew growing up, I’m forced to wonder…is all of this just a way to try and cope?”
she asks, gesturing to the gooey disaster on the ground. “You know, to keep your head above
water and stay afloat?”
You still don’t reply, but you know that she hears confirmation in your silence.
“I knew him, you know. Adam.”
Still nothing from your side of the bench.
“He was four grades younger, but he used to sit by me on the bus sometimes,” she recalls.
“He came right up and touched my hair on his first day of Kindergarten…” A quiet laugh comes
from the darkness. “He asked me if I was Snow White, and said that he wanted to meet the
dwarves.” You can hear the faint smile dancing on her lips. It reflects the one that’s spreading
across yours.
“That sounds just like him,” you agree with a mixture of joy and immeasurable sadness.
She lightly presses two fingers to your left cheek, and it is only then that you realize there
was a tear there. You are both silent for a long time.
“So, does it ever get easier?” she finally asks again, gently.
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“It feels a little better right now,” you whisper.
And then your fingers are in her silky, night-dark hair, and her flawless lips are on yours.
◊ ◊ ◊
And for a few glorious months, everything is as wonderful and as shiny as her hair. The
two of you claim the rusty picnic bench for your own, and you spend most of your days there
together. She reads poetry to you and squeezes your hand when the withdrawal tremors get to be
too much for you. Against all odds, you survive them. It’s a difficult process, but you cut ties
with Jimbo and the whole institution of drug dealing, and spend more time on your English
assignments instead. When you find a picture in the top drawer of your dresser from so many
years ago of you and Adam proudly presenting a twenty-five pound rainbow trout on the end of a
strained fishing pole, you can actually bear to keep in your wallet. It’s starting to hurt less and
less to look at.
But after a while, you start to realize that she is constantly trying to get you to talk about
your dead brother, or your waste-of-space father, or your dark history of narcotics. Why does
she have to do that? Can’t she just be with you without having to dig into your past? She knows
how much you hate talking about it.
When you confront her, she just looks at you with a sad smile on her face.
“Trent, I…I’m not with you because it’s easy, or because we’re ‘two peas’ or some crap
like that. I’m with you because I feel utterly heartbroken for you, and I want to help you, to heal
you.”
You jerk away from her suddenly, her words shooting a sharp pain through your veins.
“I’m not a god damn project, Annabel. I thought you actually cared about me, but I
guess I’m just something to fix and polish until you think I’m up to par. But don’t bother, I don’t
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need your charity, for fuck’s sake.”
“Trent, that’s not what I—”
“Save it,” you spit, turning away. “Go find another apathetic Suit to label you as his
property, because I’m clearly not good enough.”
“Trent!” she cries, but you’re already gone.
You track down Jimbo, not because you’re looking to make some cash or because you
need a friend to confide in; no, tonight you want to forget. He hooks you up with your usual
fix—and then some—because you’re bros. It’s Saturday night, so you head to a kickback by the
waterfall at the edge of town. Kegs, syringes, and pounding bass—they are your chief
companions tonight. You shoot up more than you ever have before, but you don’t get the same
feeling of fluffy clouds in your bloodstream that you used to. The booze isn’t hitting you either,
so you sidle your way over to a group of scantily-clad girls and heavily pierced dudes, because
you can tell they’re on something strong just by the way they’re shaking, vibrating, pounding in
time with the beat. You make your way closer, and realize that the sub woofer they’re circled
around is being used as a makeshift snorting table for something you’ve never tried before:
MDMA, “Molly” for short. The fine, snow-white powder makes your brain tingle and throb, and
you want to experience firsthand why they call it ecstasy.
You push through the sweaty, half-naked bodies and drop down to your knees in the dirt.
You’ve never done this before, but your body instinctually knows how to break off a rock, crush
it into all of its bits, and nudge the powder into a perfect line with your switchblade. Tilting your
head to the side, you place two fingers over your right nostril and inhale like a pro, sucking up all
of the Molly. It burns like hell as the amphetamines surge through your nasal passage, but you
don’t stop, setting up another six inch line.
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From there, the night takes a turn. All you see are lights and colors and the sheen of
sweat on skin and the breath from your super-heated body seeping into the frigid winter air. All
you hear is bass and water pounding on rocks and the sound of your own maniacal laughter as
you roll and reel in the dirt. Everything is so funny…so…fucking…funny…
Lights…Bass…Laughter…Funny…Tingly…Vomit…Smile…Booze…Flame…Tar…
Adam…Raven…X…Dirt…Dark…Black.
◊ ◊ ◊
Clean. The world smells…clean. Why?
Everything hurts, aches, slams with pain, but it’s not your body that feels it. You move
your hand up to search for your head, and the unfamiliar surface beneath you makes a crinkling
sound. You try to open your eyes, but you don’t know where they are. Where are your eyes?
Why can’t you find them?
But your hearing is somehow enhanced to make up for the absence of your other senses,
and that’s when you notice the beeping. Slow, then fast, staggered and disjointed.
Beep…Beep…Beep Beep Beep…Beep………………….Beep Bee-Bee-Beep… You realize that
this sound is tracking your heart, painfully broken in so many different ways. Slowly, you start
to piece together your surroundings, shards of the previous night all compiling to form a mosaic
of complete and utter disaster. Your throat makes a strangely cracked, broken growl, and you
can sense movement to your side. You smell flowery shampoo. A hand is placed on your
forehead, helping you—as always—to find yourself, and your expectant eyes flutter open.
But the person leaning over you is heavyset, blonde, and wearing a pair of sickly green
scrubs that look as worn and as tired as the body beneath them.
“Trent?” the voice asks, “Trent Michaels? Do you know where you are? Do you know
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who you are?”
You wish you didn’t.
They tell you what happened, that you had been anonymously dropped off at the hospital
at 4 o’clock in the morning, passed out and unconscious with a lethal combination of liquor,
assorted amphetamines, cannabis, black tar heroin, and straight ecstasy in your bloodstream.
They pumped your stomach of all its contents and then flooded it with antibiotics and
medications, and you’ve been in a nearly-comatose state for three days. They give you some
other news, as well.
You tested positive for HIV.
◊ ◊ ◊
Annabel is allowed to come visit you after two more days, once you’re stable enough.
You’re both so desperately grateful to see eachother that for a while you don’t even talk about
what happened nearly a week ago. She’s feeding you chocolate pudding and running her long,
thin fingers through your hair when she finally breaches the subject.
“That’s never what I meant, you know—you’re not a project. I only meant that you were
beautifully broken but held so much potential, and I wanted to be the one to show you that
potential.”
“I…I know,” you croak, “and you did. I knew that wasn’t what you meant, but…I do
this thing where I push people away when they get too close, because I don’t wanna get hurt.
And there’s no one else in the world who could hurt me like you can. But it’s too late, I screwed
everything up, I did this.”
She smiles that familiar sad smile and it feels like a knife to the heart, because you know
what you have to do. The thought of tainting her purity with such a horrendous disease makes
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you feel physically ill. You’re a loose cannon, a wrecking ball, and you can’t keep infecting and
injecting her with your dysfunction—eventually, you’re going to hurt her, destroy her. You know
that what you’re about to do means sacrificing your happiness for her health and safety, and
you’re okay with that. You take a deep breath, and speak.
“You know I can’t do this to you anymore, right? I’ve fucked up my world too badly for
you to ever be a part of it.” You intentionally leave out the little nugget about the HIV for her
sake, but even getting just these ten small words out is still the hardest thing you’ve ever had to
do. But it needs to be done.
“I know.” Her voice holds a lifelong sadness, but you can hear acceptance in it as well.
“Good.”
You’re glad she agrees without a fight, because you know it makes everything easier.
Yet at the same time, you wish she would have put up just a little bit of resistance. It stings. But
then she leans in close over the hospital bed, and the smell of her hair distracts you from the
petty thoughts inside your head. She places her hand on your cheek. Pauses. Speaks.
“I love you, you know.”
The air leaves your lungs as you revel in those words, and all the pain goes away. Your
heart soars and races faster than it ever did on heroin. But just like gravity, everything that goes
up must come down, and all at once you realize the finality of this moment. This is it. You’ll
never get to find out about the Christmas list, or the midnight waffles, or the pillow indentations,
or the abandonment of her childhood nickname, or any of it… Your heart sinks back downwards
and rests deeply in your stomach as you reply with the utmost sincerity.
“I love you, too. And you will always be my Annabel.”
You kiss her gently on her perfect lips, and then once more on the crown of her head.
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She smells just like honeysuckle and an innocence that no one can ever take away.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
And that’s it. But somehow, it’s enough.
◊ ◊ ◊
Picture this: you are twenty five years old. The days are full of morning dew and Edgar
Allen Poe. The nights are still just as long as they were when you were seventeen, but in a
different way. And you still haven’t forgotten Annabel, or Adam, or any of it.
Home is a cottage on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona. A faded picnic bench sits in
your backyard, and you oftentimes write poetry on it by the light of the moon. Usually it’s about
life, or death, or both.
You’ve stayed clean throughout the years, the thought of Annabel’s last words keeping
you from falling back into your old destructive patterns. The doctors are patient and
accommodating, and the disease hasn’t yet overwhelmed you. They are constantly assuring you
that HIV/AIDS is not the death sentence that it used to be, and it’s mostly true. But either way,
you’ve started speaking at high school anti-drug conventions about the dangers of sharing
needles.
About five years ago, you went and visited your father for the first time since the death of
your brother. He was still being held in a maximum-security correctional facility in Atwater.
He looked about the same as he did when you lived under his roof, aside from the addition of a
mane of shaggy hair and a more drawn, gaunt face. But you didn’t recognize his eyes at all, and
years later, you still don’t know what to make of that. Neither of you exchanged any words
whatsoever; you simply set down a very worn, decade-old photograph from your wallet of you
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and Adam fishing, and left. You haven’t gone back since, and you don’t plan to. You have no
idea what he did with the photograph, or what any of his thoughts are about what transpired on
that hazy Thursday night. Quite frankly, you have no right to know, and you’ve come to accept
that.
You never heard from her again, but somehow you know that she’s doing fine. You like
to think that she’s happy, with a doting husband and two beautiful daughters with eyes like
platinum. They share a bunk bed, and they do not fear the sound of the front door opening and
closing.
There is a raven that has made her home in the massive saguaro cactus outside your
kitchen window. She lost most of her eggs in a wind storm one night—all but one. You
watched her intently each day as she cared for that one weak, confused little bird. She brought
him back from the brink of death, of nothingness.
You decide to name her.
Annie.