Addiction

Pushing her way through the sweaty, crowded, too-bright high school gym, past booths she’d seen at the last conference and brightly coloured banners advertising the latest trend in God only knew what, she sniffed appreciatively at the air. The new smells were electrifying – every part of the room had a slightly different scent of its own, every person had a unique blend of sweat and perfume and hair and skin products, every conference had a distinct and completely new odour. Someone passed by her in a cloud of something sickeningly floral, and she pressed her hand against her turning stomach and grinned.

She milled about for hours, allowing herself to be tossed around by the crowd until the colour combinations got boring and she could quote the hawkers’ lines back to them perfectly. “Designed with the chemistry of the stars in mind,” she murmured to herself as she made her gradual way to the exit, “to help maintain a healthy balance between your aura and Mother Nature’s.” A vaguely purple crystal tinkled against the eyelet of her skirt pocket as if in response to her words, and she gave an inward shudder of delight at the new little sound.

The door loomed ahead of her, big and solid with peeling red paint and a drooping, unlit “EXIT” sign perched precariously above it. She sighed and wondered when this sight had become so standard in schools that it ceased to provoke even the slightest reaction in her normally sensitive body. Pushed it open, breath catching with pleasure as it gave its own distinctive creak, a few tones up from the one she’d come in by, a few tones down from the one to her bedroom at home.

Stepping out into the crisp fall air, she took a moment to savour the change in scent from inside to outside, breathing in the heady mix with relish before pulling open the crinkly blue plastic bag that had been thrust into her hands as she arrived at the conference. Leaned against the brick wall, a little disappointed when the rough pattern of it turned out to be exactly the same as that of her own high school’s walls, and began to explore the innards of the bag.

The conference guide was fascinating, although she already knew some of the information, and she closed her eyes and let her shaking hands rustle the plastic until the wash of adrenaline thinned and she could think clearly again.

The blue pen lit up, she discovered with a shudder of joy, and she clicked the light on and off, on and off, until she had exhausted every ounce of pleasure from it.

The lanyard was disappointingly nondescript, a discovery so commonplace that she didn’t even get a rush from the plainness of it. Annoyed, she thrust it back into the bag and dug around for the free samples.

A coupon for free yoga lessons, saying nothing she didn’t know. A cellophane-wrapped stick of incense – boringly jasmine – afforded the brief pleasure of the unwrapping. A packet of matcha tea with the usual characters demarcating its origins was useful only for its odd shade of green. She threw the bag down in disgust and pulled her lighter from her pocket. It was, she realized, almost a week old and even its spiderweb network of cracks from when she had dropped it two days previously had lost its ability to quicken her pulse.

Scrambling angrily in her other pocket for her pack of cigarettes, she swore in Cantonese, her newest language acquisition. The jolt of pleasure from the words calmed her down a little, and she pulled a cigarette out of the pack without spilling the others, sending a thrill up her spine at the unprecedented feat of coordination. Placed the thin white stick in her mouth, orange end loosely clamped between her lips, and flicked the lighter into flame.

Glanced down at the pack in her hand as she inhaled, pausing to take in the new chips out of her silver nail polish before reading the label. It was a fairly obscure brand, a sign of her growing desperation, and as she breathed out a stream of bluish smoke she crumpled the pack and tossed it to the ground beside the abandoned conference bag, despondent in the face of the exotic tobacco’s waning effect on her system.

Suddenly too warm, she struggled out of her sweater, leaving her bare arms to goosebump, suddenly too low to notice the cold, the ashes dribbling onto the lilac lace of her camisole, or the pinching of her jet black patent-leather shoes.

Suddenly feeling too closed in by the rough brick walls, by the peeling red door, by her slowly unravelling mind, she blindly stepped out into the street, stumbling a little, clutching her stomach, breathing in fast, short gasps, sweat beading at her temples and at the nape of her neck.

Too quick, too close, and he skidded as he slammed his foot onto the brake pedal, praying uselessly that he’d stop before he hit her, that she’d notice and dart away.

Body quaking uncontrollably, she lay in a growing scarlet pool and luxuriated in the feeling. She’d never been hit by a car before. It was so brilliantly new, so unexpected, so completely out of the ordinary, and, dying there on the street outside a high school, she had never been higher.