SIXTY-TWO

It’s like being high.

She’s moved beyond the pain now, beyond the fear. The agony has become numbness and she no longer feels as though her arms and legs belong to her, will do what she wants them to do. The terror has given way to a strange kind of excitement; an exhilaration that feels familiar. Her and her friends out in the fields with cider and cigarettes, screaming their heads off then laughing like lunatics.

It’s not being chilled out, nothing like that, not like she gets on weed when she can afford it. It’s more like that time she was persuaded to try MDMA at a party. The only time she’s ever done it.

Everything intensified; louder, brighter, lovelier.

She laughs, remembering how that night was and where she is now.

It’s funny, she thinks, how the darkness stops being dark after a while, becomes just a different kind of light. It shifts; blooms and withers. It has moods. Maybe it changes when her moods change. Thickens, gets gritty, comes closer.

Sounds bizarre, but she doesn’t even know if she’s thinking straight.

She does know that it’s a very different kind of dark when she shuts her eyes. Black velvet behind the lids, with a blanket of speckles, like stars that glow and dart and three bright spots which are always fixed. Close together.

Her mother, her father, her brother.

Any time she wants them, there they are.

The smell, which at any other time would have her chucking up her chips, has become one she is used to, something she breathes in easily now, something she tastes, and the rustlings and scratchings are nearly drowned out by the low drone, which is sometimes in her head and sometimes coming from deep in her throat.

She remembers the night she took that little blue tablet, the warnings from her mates. Enjoy it while you can, because afterwards it’s not so great.

Didn’t stop her, of course.

Now, she drifts high above the pain and the fear. The knowledge that there is a man who did this and who might come back to finish what he started. The thought that when he does, she will probably be dead, if she isn’t already. She smiles, and her dry lips crack, but she doesn’t feel it.

Being dead would certainly explain a lot.

Poppy closes her eyes and seeks out those three bright pinpricks.

Waiting for the comedown.