Shine - Lauren Myracle [31]
It sounded like she knew a lot about it. As she checked her lipstick in the mirror, my eyes strayed back to the nesting dolls. I wondered who gave them to her. How long she’d had them.
I toyed with a question as she applied a new layer of gloss over her already bright lips. Finally, I went ahead and asked.
“So . . . why did you and Tommy break up?”
She smacked her lips, checked her teeth, and drew back from the mirror. “I’m s’posed to be at Sheldon’s,” she said, exiting her room.
“Just tell me quick,” I said, trailing after her. She was a girl once, too. The dolls said as much. If Tommy had hit her or something, I’d have proof that he liked to hurt people in general, and not just me.
Then I realized where my mind had gone—that I was hoping Destiny had gotten beat on—and I’d have done about anything to take the question back.
Destiny didn’t seem traumatized, however. Just put-out. “You know Willow?”
“Yeah,” I said. Willow got pregnant and had a baby when she was sixteen, same age as I was now. She lived with her boyfriend, and they both liked chasing the dragon, meaning they liked to burn their meth and sniff the wispy white fumes. That’s what people said.
“Willow and me used to be friends,” Destiny said. She passed through the living room and swooped up her purse from the sofa. She continued on to the front door, but didn’t open it. “Then Willow got with Darren, and she had her baby, and you know how that goes.”
I didn’t, but I could imagine.
“I didn’t want to just abandon her, so I went to see her one day. To see the baby.”
“That’s good. I bet she was real glad.”
“No, she was real high,” Destiny said bitterly. “Dumb girl didn’t have no job, and neither did Darren. But I showed up at Darren’s apartment, and what do you know? They’ve got a wide-screen TV and a massage chair, not to mention all kinds of crap for the baby. I was, ‘Dang. Where’d y’all get this stuff?’”
“Were they the ones washing checks?”
“God, no,” she said, like I’d insulted her. “Washing checks takes a steady hand.”
“So where’d the stuff come from? Where’d they get money for it?”
“From Darren. Darren’s a runner, but he steps on it sometimes.”
“Steps on it?” I shook my head. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means he mixed the shit with talcum powder, but sold it as pure and kept the profits.”
“Oh.”
“So one day I went over to get a bump, right?”
“I thought you went to see the baby.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She looked at me hard. “And just so you know, this was before I got my head straight. I don’t do that crap no more.”
“Um, okay.”
“Well, Tommy got there before I did,” she said with a sigh. “I was gonna meet him at Darren’s, and we were gonna see the baby, and maybe we’d stay for a while. But by the time I arrived, they’d started without me, and every one of ‘em was higher than a Carolina pine. End of story.”
“What do you mean, ‘end of story’? How is that the end of the story?”
She twisted her mouth. She didn’t look happy, but her blond hair was shiny, and she didn’t have any burns on her face or picked-at scabs on the insides of her arms. She didn’t look like a user.
“They thought it’d be funny to pull a gun on me,” she said. “They were amped out of their frickin’ minds, and Darren, he pointed his pistol at me and said, ‘Hands up, bitch. We’re gonna have to do a strip search.’”
“What jerks,” I said.
“‘Jerks,’” she said. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“Does Tommy use meth?” I asked. Tommy was a lot of things, most of them bad. But a tweaker?
Her eyebrows formed upside-down V’s. “Um . . . yeah.”
Incredibly, a wave of sadness washed over me. I felt like such an innocent.
“So that’s what split y’all apart,” I stated.
“And that’s why I won’t let him come over or nothing, even though he says he’s clean now.” She opened the front door. “Called me up and said he didn’t want to date me no more, but he did want to apologize for how bad he treated me. Said he’d gone clean for Jesus.”
“That doesn