Crystal Clean Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Hawaii.
    By the time I decided to go back to school again, he’d settled back in Boise and lived with a woman and their two small children just around the corner from Andy and me. He delivered pizza and still led a hippie lifestyle, so when I decided I needed something to keep me going during finals, I figured he’d be able to help me. We’d partied together in the past, so it wasn’t a big deal for me to ask him to get me some crank. “I just need to get through finals,” I told him.
    He got me a quarter of a gram and it lasted me the whole week. I would snort a line or two after Andy was in bed, study all night and take a nap during the day between classes and work. Things went along swimmingly. I aced all my finals and felt like Wonder Woman. I’ve always loved the rush of speed. I had plenty of energy to clean my house and I could get more done at work. I also lost a few pounds, and I don’t know of a woman alive, no matter how thin or fat, who wouldn’t count that as a huge bonus.
    Weight loss. For women especially, that’s one of the biggest draws to meth. Whether it’s the reason they try it in the first place, or if it’s a welcome side effect, losing weight becomes powerful reinforcement to continue using. It seems so easy at first: no appetite, tons of energy. You’re a God dess. You can do everything: take care of your family, run errands, cook and clean, work, shop for groceries, take the kids to practice and lessons. Until it’s too late, and too late comes too quick. For some people, it only takes one time. Others may use for a few days or a week before it turns on them, but it always does. And the result is always the same. One hundred percent of the time. Meth will rip you apart and destroy you, no matter who you are, and by then it won’t matter how thin you are or how clean your house is because the whole picture is uglier than anything you can possibly imagine. But right then, it worked for me. I got exactly what I thought I wanted that first week. Then the week was over and the crank was gone.
    And I crashed.
    Although I slept every day while I was doing it, for at least a few hours, when I ran out of drugs, I became lethargic. All I wanted to do was sleep. I couldn’t stay awake at work. Driving was scary because my eyelids were like lead. I started wearing rubber bands on my wrist, snapping them to stay alert. I couldn’t stay awake to play with Andy and had no energy to do anything around the house. I felt awful, and I didn’t want to feel awful, I wanted to feel good again. I wanted my super powers back so I could do all the things I’d been doing when I had the drug. I wanted to be a God dess.
    So I called my brother again.
    “It’s different this time,” he told me.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s called meth. It’s just like crank, only better. Much cleaner and a way bigger high.”
    A better high for the same price. Who would turn down that?
    Again, I bought a quarter of a gram, the smallest amount you can buy, that cost twenty-five dollars. He was right. I fell in love with the first line I snorted, and that was the end for me. The end of everything I knew and cherished for a long time to come.
     
    The only reason I never started using needles is because I knew I would never go back. Shooting up is the end of the line, and since I didn’t shoot up, it was easier to convince myself that I wasn’t really an addict.
    I loved meth, and I loved the ritual of snorting lines: chopping it, crushing it, making intricate patterns. But the day someone showed me how to smoke it, I never went back to snorting. When that rush hit my brain, a single tear dropped. I was finally home. The exact words I said when I called my brother were, “I want to do this drug in this way for the rest of my life.” Those words will haunt me to my grave.
    Meth, in the form of an opaque, white cloud of smoke, entered my brain and my soul at the same time, filling the emptiness inside me. It was as