Shannon played final fantasy seven for about an hour while her boyfriend brushed her hair. I sat beside her on her lumpy mattress and watched the glowing figures as reflected in the milky film of her eyes. Her mouth was open very slightly, her lips chapped and cracked. With every flicker of her thumb on the controller she became more mesmerized by her video game. The cocktail of hallucinogens was beginning to kick in. Suddenly she stopped playing her game, put down the controller, and shut the television off. She looked quite lost, in the same way that one looks lost in thought, but her vapid expression told me that her thoughts had become meaningless static.
"I have got to go take a shower." Shannon said in a buzzing monotone and smiled eerily. She stood up and shuffled though a layer of trash and dirty laundry on the floor of her room to her white dresser whose drawers were completely without handles. She grabbed her blue towel from an open drawer and skipped off to the bathroom, fully severed from reality.
Someone turned the game back on and the white noise was reborn. I stood up and navigated the garbage laden floor toward the far wall. It was covered with drug induced drawings, and even select few sober ones. So I picked up a red marker and began my next masterpiece on the sheet rock. That's the way it was there. If you're not too inebriated to stand, you draw on the wall.
After a half hour Shannon hadn't come back. I could hear the water pipes squeaking in the wall. The shower was still on. Something told me to go check on her, but I ignored it. Just as I was reassuring myself as to her safety, Rob ambled sleepily into the room. He had been living in one of the smaller side rooms since he got kicked out of his parents' place.
"Hey Lani, Shannon wants you." He said, rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand.
"Huh? For what?" I asked, concentrating on my drawing, but still a little worried.
"I don't know. But she's screaming. She woke me up."
I dropped the marker, neglecting to replace the cap. I bolted for the sliding glass door and proceeded speedily around the corner of the house and into the hall. I rapped furiously on the bathroom door.
"Lani?" A tremulous voice squeaked flatly over the thunder of the shower.
"Shan, you alright?" I put my ear to the door.
"It's open. Come here. Please?" The squeak evolved into a pleading whine. I turned the brass doorknob. Sure enough, it was unlocked.
Shannon was curled at the corner of the tub, hooking her phantasmal fingers around the edge. Her knuckles were whiter than usual. She looked like a child from a starving third world nation, her eyes cold, black and staring. Her lower lip trembled. I knelt down on the linoleum beside the bath tub and put my hand on her clammy shoulder.
"I saw them. My mom and my brothers in coffins, right there on the wall. There was this noise and then the soap bubbles were laughing at me. I saw their faces, the faces in the coffins and on the bubbles." She ranted, her jaw shaking violently as she spat out the words.
"It's just the drugs, Shan. You're having a bad trip and you've got the shakes real bad. You have to wait it out. How can I help you?" I spoke to her carefully, her eyes were watching my mouth move.
"I don't want to be in here. Cold. I want to get out. My legs don't work." She took in a heavy breath of air and let it out in a whine like a slowly deflating balloon. "Help."
"It's gonna be all right." I didn't know what else to say. I always thought that phrase was just a space filler for people who were failing at comforting a friend, but in this case, in Shannon's fogged over mind, it was what she needed to hear.
"Lani, thank you so much." She sniffled a little now, I don't know whether there were tears spilling down her face or droplets of water sliding down from her hair.
"You know you're my best friend?" This scene was the saddest thing I'd ever seen. Her legs were crumpled lifelessly beside her, arms thrown over the side of the bath tub like an inert marionette, and her shockingly pale face stared up at me pathetically, pleading for help and pledging how much I mean to her. All due to the ingestion of two tiny items.
"Yeah. I know." I said quietly. She looked suddenly serious.
"Do you have a knife?" She asked, genuinely curious.
"Uh, yeah. In my pocket. Why?"
"Will you be my blood sister?"
