Trust No Bitch: Part 1

Alice Jenkins: Monday, 31st October, 2015

Distant blue flashes, especially in the black of the night, always took Alice back to that party. To June the 13th. To wonder how she could've originally dismissed Cleo's absence when paired with the comments that had been made the last time they'd spoken. Had people known about their conversation, her attitude towards Cleo's disappearance would be considered foolhardy. But when someone disappears all the time, only to return weeks later as if they never left, it becomes less of an enigma and more of an inconvenience. All the same, as Alice went about her nightly jog, the distant fluoresce of police cars from just beyond the tree tops was enough to bring her to a halt. She glanced around her, ponytail whipping from side to side, before picking up her pace and advancing along the path. It was around 2:30AM in the morning, wind caterwauling around her, and the pathway that ran alongside the river was illuminated only by streetlights. Dotted every 50m or so, they switched off at 3AM, so she always made sure to get back to her flat by then. Alice did it almost every night; despite her intentions to quit them and her two trips to rehab over the 3 month summer, she was still taking amphetamines along with a host of other drugs. If you were to open her bathroom cabinet, which was of course padlocked, you would find pretty much every prescription drug going, regardless of the fact that Alice did not require a single one of them. In there, lined up neatly in a row, an array of prescription drugs could be found, from Ritalin to Vicodin through to Valium. Some she had managed to fool her doctor into prescribing her, others she sourced from the less scrupulous students at St. Edmunds, and the rest she bought off a host of spurious online pharmacies, each one claiming that their business was completely "legit". These sites were not to be confused with actual online pharmacies, of course; most of them spelt the word "legit" with a superfluous Y after the E, just in case any pointers were needed towards their legality. She needed opiates to numb her migraines, amphetamines to maintain her brilliance, and the benzos to calm her nerves. Even if the drug use been recreational to begin with, it certainly wasn't anymore. Every day was a migraine day. Every day she needed to work through the night. And the solution could always be found in a pill bottle; the magical Z to her X+Y. People believed that Alice Jenkins spent her summer holidaying in one of her family's many houses, not in rehab centres dressed in jumpers and tracksuit bottoms, hair scraped back, catatonic aside from the occasional splatter of sick into a specially provided bucket. God, it was humiliating.

And pathetic.

Mostly pathetic. At least that's what Alice continued to internally aver, preferring to pretend the whole affair had never happened, saving herself the embarrassment. She knew that in the circle she hung around with at uni, speed was sure to be flying back and forth amongst people. Those that she had grown closer to since returning to uni in September were hardcore studiers. There was no getting trashed on Wednesdays through to Saturdays with them, only nocturnal study binges accompanied by black coffee and red bull. On the nights Alice ventured out of her flat to study in the library she was rarely alone, and there was always a couple of individuals in whom she noticed the tell-tale signs: the slightly edgy look, the tapping of the foot on the table leg, the shadows underneath their eyes, much like her own. But it wasn't a you-show-me yours-if-I-show-you-mine kind of situation. Nobody ever dared to acknowledge that they had more in common than they were letting on. For Alice, at least, it was crucial that nobody could ever find out what she was doing.

It didn't fit with who they, and even she herself, believed Alice Jenkins to be.

Of the group, she'd always seemed to be the "together one", and it was evident in every inch of her flat. Her plethora of novels were arranged in alphabetical order, the location of every top in her wardrobe could be determined depending on its suitability for a certain occasion, and her row of nail polishes transitioned perfectly from one hue to another. Even her makeup (the standard armamentarium of social acceptability) was tabulated first by purpose and then by value. After all, she had a certain image to uphold. It was that middle child of successful parents syndrome. She had to be everything to get any form of recognition. It was probably why she had excelled academically from such a young age; school had provided a level playing field for herself, her older, more impressive sister and her baby-of-the-family brother. The result was her being relentlessly complimented on her intelligence throughout her childhood. "Smart Alice", "Clever Alice" and "Little genius", primary school teachers called her. Teachers, that was. As she got older, it became her identity. Because in her mind, she didn't have "enough" of any of the other things society valued to prevent her from being deemed forgettable. She was pretty but never irrefragably beautiful. Lacked the so called "womanly" curves of her older sister. Possessed an acerbic sort of wit, her jokes funny in a way that tended not to generate affection amongst people her own age, whose humour she noticed had always seemed to be some droll variation of let's-inadvertently-make-fun-of-the-slightly-eccentric-kid-and-then-call-it-"banter". She was tall but had knobbly knees. Her chest was "too flat". Her hipbones were protuberant. Jesus Alice, you've got to be something, she told herself. So every morning, she spent an inordinate amount of time assembling an outfit, doing her hair and applying makeup until the image was faultless. With that, on top of the intellect, she formed her identity. Poised, put-together, self-possessed. As she progressed to sixth form, it got harder to be the best but to her benefit, she soon realised that teachers, parents and friends alike, would fail to notice if she found a way to use otherwise useless nights (when she was too awake to sleep but too tired to study) to her advantage.