A Dangerous Life [Teacher/Student]

Tired

When I walked into Mr. Clark’s room after lunch he wasn’t in there. The folder from class was sitting on his desk open to Luke’s story. The one he had decided not to read. I looked around; to make sure he wasn’t in the room. He wasn’t. My heart was pounding; I had been doing a lot of deceiving lately. Did I want to try my hand in sneaking around too? Fuck it.

I picked it up.

For as long as I’ve been alive my sister has been an addict. When I was little she was addicted to attention. She was the middle child so she was always screaming for it. With my big brother being the model son and I being the baby she had to basically beg to be noticed. When she started to develop she found a way to quench her attention addiction through another one. She got more than her needed dose of addiction through boys and sex. I can’t remember her having one solid boyfriend. It was always a different boy always a different partner.

She wasn’t being very safe though. She got pregnant at 16, she stopped having sex but her attention addiction was still around. She got more than enough of it with her pregnancy. Everyone fused over her. She basked in it. Although she loved being pregnant she didn’t love the idea of being a mom. She gave the child up for adoption and once the attention stopped she had to find something else to fill her time. She found herself with boys again, except these boys were different. These boys were older, dangerous, and…addicts too. Except these boys weren’t addicted to attention or sex, not they were addicted to other things and it didn’t take long for my sister to fall in with them.

Eventually the boys went away but they left their mark on her in the form of heroine and alcohol. My sister fell hard. It got to the point where I didn’t even recognize my sister anymore. With my brother gone she was all I had left. It was painful watching her destroy herself like that. Have you ever seen an addict at their worst? It’s a horrible thing.

I’m not very religious but I found myself wondering there was a higher power that could maybe help my sister through this. Help her beat this, so I used to pray to him. Whoever he was…and he didn’t really help. She only got worse and worse and then there was the day she OD’d. Thankfully mom came home early and found her there on the floor vomiting and ceasing up.

I had to do something. Rehab cost money, and that was money we didn’t have. Plus my mother was determined to get me into collage. I was good at things too. I was good at basketball. So I worked harder at it. I thought that maybe if I got a scholarship for it we could use the money we weren’t using for my sister’s treatment. Use it to save her life. I got my scholarship but then there was the problem of actually getting my sister to go. She refused, she insisted that she was fine, she was okay.

She was anything but.

She was skinny, she was pale, she was sick.

So I stopped playing basketball despite my offers to go pro. I needed to make money to help my sister. I thought that maybe if I used the money I made to help her through. I was tired of her overdosing. I hated seeing her like this. I would make money and only give her want she needed but not too much. I would make her reliant on me, and then I would cut her off and send her to rehab. That was what I needed to do, but I just needed a way to make the money.