YOU & ME | JENLISA

Chapter 8

Lisa

I know that I should probably wait until I'm somewhere private before I sell my soul to my addiction but I've reached a point where I'm past caring about what people think of me and what I do. I don't want to wait until class ends, I don't even want to wait until this substitute teacher gets me a bathroom pass. I just wanted it in my system working its magic like now.

I flicked my tongue over the scab, reminding myself why I was doing this, abusing my body and my mind like this. Then I looked at Jennie. I wanted to make sure that she wasn't watching, but she was. She was looking right at me with her warm, and deeply brown eyes.

My brow twitched in confusion, why was she looking at me? How long had she spent looking at me? Could she see how tense and irritated I was? Could she see the struggle that I had going on inside? Was she wondering about my cuts and bruises, building her own conclusions - none of them accurate because to these kids I was just a trailer trash, violent drug addict and rapist.

She turned away instantly, embarrassed or frightened to be caught staring. But now, I was interested, did she perhaps see the depth to my struggles after catching me mid-breakdown yesterday?

I pulled my hand out of my pocket and rested it empty on the table. Jennie didn't turn around again, but I could sense that she wanted to because she kept pivoting her body to almost look my way.

To me, Jennie was the dream girl for everyone. The girl I'll never get because she's so unreachable and out of my league, so that's not even worth considering or pursuing. She stood out to me from all of the rest. There was just something about Jennie that resonated within me. I could date any woman, talk to them fine but with Jennie, I'm so damn nervous that I can't even speak.

My crush for her started in elementary school, we were never friends but our coat pegs were located next to one another. Her dad always sent her to school wearing outrageous dresses. Puffy, bright and boldly patterned. She wore oversized bows or extravagant hats. Kids teased her sometimes, and probably myself included if she looked particularly weird that day but that never stopped her from wearing them with a beaming smile on her face.

Kai, the douchebag asked her why she wore them and her reply was simple.

"My dad likes me to wear them, it makes him happy, which makes me happy and we both deserve to be happy."

What I soon came to realise was that they also made me happy. When I was seven, my dad passed on and I struggled to come to terms with it. I was overwhelmed by grief, guilt and negativity. In the black cloud that my life had become, I imagined Jennie.

In my mind, whenever I felt down, I pictured the smile on her face that she greeted me with every morning as we hung up our coats. I still see that smile now, a cute baby toothed smile ever changing over the years to become what it is today.

During my dad's funeral, I dreamed up her crazy outfits, the black puffy dress with the red cherry pattern or the big pink frilly one with the extraordinary sleeves. I heard her laugh in my head, twirling around with a blur of yellow sunflowers on her skirt. During my toughest times, she made things seem not so bad.

But then we got older and what used to be cute, girly and ridiculously silly dresses turned into cropped tops and tight jeans. Her hair stopped being tied up with bows and instead hung in dark silky waves down her back. Her body developed in ways that stood out to me more than the dramatic in-your-face dresses. The little girl grew up, she stopped being cute and went straight to being hot as fuck.

One thing that didn't change about Jennie was her smile. Sure, it went from baby toothed to missing toothed to a radiant, beautiful full toothed smile. But it still held the same power over me as it always did. When the drugs wore off, her smile was still the medicine to get me through the toughest days.

It gave me the courage to hold off another hour without snorting the blow.