Annabelle played with the syringe between her narrow fingers. Her slender digits looked like flailing spider's legs as she spun the needle around as if it was a pen. It was a clean one, she paid extra for that, and even had a plastic cap on the end to protect the point. The liquid inside the graduated cylinder was a dull white, as if someone had collected it from a puddle where a child's chalk drawing used to be. For all Annabelle knew, someone had.
She wondered if injecting chalk-water into her arm would be as dangerous as injecting heroin. She tugged on a loose piece of frazzled, dried out hair. It was from dying and bleaching it too many colors too close together and not taking care of it. She was too lazy to wash her hair as often as she should, though she thought about it constantly. If she shot up would she forget about it? Would she stop constantly poking her thighs, watching the fat jiggle and regretting quitting dance? Ballet, of course.
Annabelle flipped the syringe around her hand again and looked at the curtains. She had made them over the summer, for her dorm room that had huge windows that anyone could see into. Idiot architect though huge windows around a courtyard would be brilliant, let all the other students have a clear view of your entire room. No where to hide unless you fucked around with the bent and broken venetian blinds. So she made curtains.
Green curtains, trimmed with a kind of tye-dyed green-yellow mish-mosh.
It reminded her of the forest canopy during the summer back home. It always smelled really clean back there, until they developed the big lot on the other side. Now she had to angle herself just so in order to not see any houses.
The room was dark, even though it was only four in the afternoon. She had the curtains drawn, sitting on the shag rug. Brown shag, it was soft and comfortable. Her suite-mate liked to sneak in just to lie around on it. Annabelle didn't mind.
She looked down at the syringe again when the cap popped off from a missed twirl. She picked up the cap and put it back on, then shook the needle so that the liquid spun around like a snow globe. She didn't know heroin glittered like that.
"Annabelle!" said her suite-mate, throwing open the door to the bathroom that connected their two singles.
Annabelle stuffed the syringe under the papers of essays, stories, and hand-outs that were strewn about near her ass. She put on a smile as she looked up at her friend's round, cheerful face. She was always so eloquent.
"I got an apartment!"
"That's great, Claire."
"You aren't going to be staying in the city after graduation then?"
"Nah. I'll probably end up going back to my parent's house for a bit until I get a steady job, then look into apartments back home."
"I understand. You never really took to the city like me."
Annabelle wasn't sure if that was an insult or not, but decided it wasn't because her friend just liked to state her idle observations.
"Yeah."
"Well, I'm going to grab dinner. You want to come?"
She glanced at the ruffled papers, tented over the hidden syringe. Annabelle got up to her feet and tugged her pj booty shorts straight. She didn't poke her thigh.
"Sure. Just let me get some real pants on."
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