Junk Love.

eighteen.

Mel has remained directionless, spirit-like as she drifted in and out of people's lives. As if her celestial presence casts a curse rather then a blessing.

As a teenager, she was edgier than everyone else. She attended a Catholic private school of barely two hundred students. Because her father was the minister he wouldn't condone switching into the public districts. It became a game, testing how recklessly she could shed her image, but everyone still saw her as only the preacher's daughter.

Mel was the leppar.

Despite attempts to fit in she felt more obsolete after each year. Usually she'd hang out with the older kids smoking in the boy's room like a bad eighties song. That was the start of her punk phase, spiked green hair and rebel red lipstick. It wasn't long after that Mel met Calvin.

He'd lit a cigarette in the middle of Mel's choir rehearsal. Unabashed and casual as the blue sky, he leaned back on the front church pew as he took a long pull. Of course the director smelt the bitter tobacco aroma. But each time she glanced over her shoulder the boy would tuck his arms behind his back in the nick of time.

Mel's intuition spiked. A tingling stir in the pit of her stomach at the idea he might be watching her. It wasn't like she didn't stand out. Although she wore a matching white robe with an itchy red polyester collar, her hair was spiked and green as fierce as a sirens.

Her instincts were proven correct when he leveled his gaze with hers. At first she had blushed, ashamed to be caught staring. Calvin's eyes flared, almost amber, a blazing challenge as he blew smoke rings her direction. Such showmanship nearly got him caught.

The director's nose twitched at the stink. Mel snickered mid-verse when she turned to stare at the boy, forcing him to hold in his next drag. When she finally faced forward again his eyes were bulging. A shrapnel cough bursts from his chest with a plume of smoke that envelops the first row in thick fog.

Still afflicted by a raging coughing fit he was defenseless as the robust woman shooed him out the back door, resembling a mother hen with ruffled feathers. While the other girls ambled around stage, confused by the interruption, Mel took her chance sneaking away. She met him out back.

The rest, as they say, was history.

Although she dated Calvin nearly four years the courtship spiraled as cataclysmic as a tornado colliding into a volcano. Molten lava rained upon the mass destruction of every pitfall in their lives. He kissed her with lips dripping heroin -- a rotten apple guised in succulent juices dripping from a hollow core.

Despite it all they remain friends. He hadn't only taught her drugs. Calvin showed her how to play guitar, to fit in her own skin, and to love. Perhaps that's why she finds herself accepting his earlier invitation already fully knowing the consequences.

Sleeping and withdrawing sheltered only by the underpass has bricked her limbs, causing her to stagger down the sidewalk like a drunk. Her knees refuse to bend and her arms are dead weights dragging her further into the Earth. Mel is spent.

The journey from Chinatown to the slums takes nearly two hours. Her only companion is the stealthy shadows narrowing in closer around her. The streetlights are spread a block apart making the darkness endless and inky. She's suffocated by it, struggling to suck each pathetic breath of air through her nose.

A deep throated growl knocks her from the stupor. She'd been traveling on autopilot,dragging her stone limbs with every miserable step. Veering away from a large dog's vicious barking and rattling of the chain link fence, Mel steps off the curb slightly picking up her pace across the road.