by Crystal Jones
The girl was no more than seven years old when she first saw that needle—the needle her daddy had told her never to use. Daddy always said it would do bad things, but now, with the needle in her arm at just fifteen years of age, everything she felt was good. She thought just for that moment that maybe her dad was wrong.
As time continued to pass, her grades stayed up, she attended church, and she even made the varsity soccer team at school. But every weekend she’d catch herself falling into the place of her father. She’d use that needle to numb everything she’d been through once her father left. She wasn’t there when he pulled the gun on her own grandfather and then turned the gun on himself, but she remembers that morning in May when she got the news and realized her father had left her life forever.
After it happened, everyone at school knew and labeled her family as crazy. People even got scared to talk to her, and she was running out of ways to fit in. But once the kids knew that she could hook them up with almost any drug they wanted, they all wanted to be her “friend.” She didn’t party with the other kids when they asked her to because she wasn’t concerned with being cool. She used these drugs and made them part of her life because it’s all she had left of her dad. It was all he had left her.