Young and Loaded

Chapter Fourteen

   Months since watching the Trans-Am disappear into the sunset had passed. It to the point where I barely remember what the car looks like anymore, from the blurry image of graffiti to the shakily carved initials into the dash. Hell, I could barely remember how many bottles of pills and alcohol I'd gone through without having to count the number of them strewn across the floor in the back of the Diner. It was all I did pretty much all day, trying to reorganize them against the wall until I had a mental breakdown over the only thing I could remember accurately at this point and kicked them across the room again.

   And all I could remember from the last few months was the fact that Poison was dead.

   I knew the fact that he was no longer in my life anymore would've elated me at some point. I'd threatened to kill him so many times that it drove him crazy and up the walls just thinking about it in the middle of the night. And I only knew this because I could never sleep myself, sitting up against the wall and watching him shift anxiously in the dark after we'd separated ourselves thanks to another argument in the thrilling series that seemed to have no conclusion. He was nothing more than a silhouette in the darkness of the room, but it was a silhouette I missed watching with tears glistening in my eyes as I thought of things we could've been instead of two divided parts of a former whole.

   But he was the one who killed my best friend.

   Who deserved it, I guess, but I had wanted to stay angry because it had become apart of me. I had wanted to see if Poison would apologize, too. But Poison never apologized for anything he did, and he never would now, and it plagued me to no end. It stuck with me even now, as I sat around in the back of the Diner with no one to check up on me but empty bottles, one of who-knows-what packed into little tablets and one of alcohol.

   The last in the stash.

   I'd been out of tablets for a week, but I craved more. The guy who'd sold me them the last time hadn't been at the Diner in a month or so, but I don't blame him — I had accidentally threatened to kill him. So he'd given me three bottles for the price of one and run away and was probably never going to come back again. Or, at the very least, trash the fuck out of the Fabulous Four's legacy, ripping little thing from little thing from untrusted pirate killjoy websites and radio shows and overexaggerating them by not even showing the full story.

   Just thinking about it made my brain hurt.

   There was nothing I was going to do about it. And as much as some people are going to try to defend us and say we've apologized, he'll just keep going until he's ghosted. And the fact that the rest of my team was fucking dead didn't help. So I was stuck with a shitty headache and all out of pills that made me feel good, and back to feeling like I wanted to kill myself or someone else. Though had I even tried to kill someone else, I probably would've fallen flat on my face. Unprecedented dizziness had come within a day or two of running out and hadn't stopped. So I just didn't get up, minus to use the bathroom and actually eat or drink something. Ironic, since I'd gained a lot of weight from sitting around for days on end, barely eating as it was and numb out of my mind.

   Withdrawal is whack. And I wanted it to stop. I wanted to feel okay again, but the only way to do that now was with something I was no longer able to get.

   If only I hadn't held the poor kid at gunpoint. Then I could be on cloud nine with a fully stocked arsenal of that feel-good drug that only made me happy. It reminded me of the pills that Better Living would give to us, and I cursed the frustration that came without that damned happy pill. That, and the extra frustration that came without a name for the drug. I couldn't get another bottle from someone else without a name. Describing what it felt like probably wouldn't have helped jack shit. And only because I suck dick at describing things and everything I took felt the same, anyways. Maybe I'd done so much that at this point the effects of one drug blurred into another and confused the shit out of me.