Sugar High

“Tell me that it won’t happen like that.”

“Not to you,” I lied.

            Recorded by: Divinity Sykes

Jen’s diary: Entry 5

            So, I guess it’s time we had ‘the talk’.

            Drugs are very bad. Bad for you, bad for your health, bad for your family. They just are. That being said, addictions are also bad. Bad for you, bad for your health, bad for your family. They just are.

            That being said, everybody’s got their poison. For me, it’s any kind of caramelized fizzy drink with enough calories to sustain a herd of elephants. Hence why there is so much of my lovely self. For my brother Ronald, the thing that will contribute to his shamefully early demise is mixing energy drinks with various hard liquors.

With the Others, well, anything sweet will do.

            If addiction is defined as substance dependency then they are strung out hard on candies, chocolate, sodas- heck, I’ve even seen some of the less discretionary ones down sugar packets whole. The slow descent into crazy they face is due to their circumstances as exiles. Being away from home is the key ingredient for what some of them call ‘Jumping Sickness’, and there are only two, admittedly temporary, fixes for that.

            The first, as I’ve said, is a cavity inducing rage fest on that sweet white powder found in the confectionery aisle. It’s not hard to understand when you think that we, as humans, also turn to sugary snacks in a stress pinch, or during the worst time of the month.

            The second fix, and this again holds true for humans, too, is love. Which is hard to find in a world where your only options for friends and family are the monsters your mother told you bed time stories about. For most of them, human companionship won’t do. After all, we’re half the reason exile is such a crummy punishment.

            That aside, my most vivid memory of the ‘Great Addiction’ so far happened while I was on the road home with my big brother and my best friend, Helix. Now, my older brother Dennis had just gotten his driver’s license that day and we were coming home from the mall. His twin, Ronny, ditched us at the mall for some friends and petty vandalism because he was bitter about failing his own driver’s license test that day.

            Fair is fair, Ronny’s friends got him and we got to ride home in peace without listening to him complain. On the way home, we ended up crawling through a wreck at the intersection just before the entrance to the public park. And believe me, it was just as much fun as trudging through slush in a blizzard. I must give Dennis his due when it comes to quick thinking because as soon as he saw the makings of a traffic jam, he veered off down a back road.

            As it so happened, we were free from Crimson city’s outer limits in a matter of ten minutes. We still had about an hour left to drive because our summer farmhouse was literally in the Middle of Nowhere, Tennessee. Dad’s favorite hobby and career choice was dirt. The blood of a thousand centuries of hard farm labor ran deep through his DNA, and he got his kicks dragging my Mom, biting and screaming, out of the city and away from our lovely suburban home. It often led to some inexcusable arguments between them.

            “Should we have stopped to help?” I cast a glance back the way we had come, although the car accident was far out of sight by then.

            “You mean finish the job?” Helix retorted sarcastically, “Nah, too many cops.” Cars sputtered past on our left, and Dennis politely flashed his lights at them to let them know what they were coming up on.  

            “Helix, please, I just cleaned the upholstery yesterday, put your feet down,” Dennis swiped unwisely at Helix’s appendages and received the stink eye for his troubles. It’s not like Dennis had any right to talk, this old beater held, at most, six people and one overly friendly dog. Cleaning the upholstery literally just meant scraping off the latest layer of gunk before it melded with the previous layer in the summer heat.

            “Dennis, would you roll down a window or something? The milk is going to go bad,” I voiced my usual complaints from the backseat. The air conditioner in this hunk of junk had sputtered out its last goodbye ages ago. And it didn’t help I had to ride in the backseat with our freshly prepared Chinese takeout burning my lap, or the fact I had forgotten a ponytail holder to keep my flaming red mane from insulating me like a Husky unfortunate enough to live in Florida.

            “No, Jen, you know having the windows rolled down hurts my ears.” Dennis said this and muttered on about how the driver should not be subjected to any distractions that might endanger his passengers. All the while I struggled to maintain a sisterly vocabulary that didn’t make me out to be an angry sailor.

            “Come on, Dennis,” I groaned, my fingers itching for that window lever. “Even God thinks it’s too hot out here, look, he turned on the sprinklers.” I swept my hand in the direction of a taunting thundercloud in the distance.

            “You mean that swarm of mosquitoes in the distance?” Helix nodded his Mohawk in the direction of my alleged rain cloud and I lost all hope of ever being a comfortable temperature again.

We rode on a little in heated silence. Perspiration was most evident on Dennis’s pale, freckled forehead and in his mop of long sandy blonde curls. Good, I thought, it’s what he deserves.

We might have been another half hour from the summer home when we hit the bird. It dove in out of the sky with a final cry that sounded something like, “Goodbye, cruel world!” and then we ground it into lunch meat under our tires. The Chinese food popped up out of my lap and tumbled to the floor, much to my dismay. The car swerved, the tires hissed and screeched across the asphalt. There were butterflies in my chest as Dennis straightened us out and pulled over to the shoulder. A van rushed past us, honking their horn until long after they were out of sight.

Our seat belts snapped off simultaneously. The clothes I had bought at the mall were drenched in soy sauce and Helix’s new R.P. rule book had flown forward and cracked the windshield. The milk and eggs we picked up for Mom and Dad were fine, but the bread had been crushed under a pile of easy meals. Some hot and sour soup had splattered against my window. Rice had somehow wriggled its way into my ankle socks.

Helix was the first to respond. He checked himself up and down, from his chest to his feet, then turned to us with urgency. “Is everyone okay?!”

Dennis nodded breathlessly. His shoulders were pinned to the seat, his knuckles drained because of his desperate grip on the steering wheel, and his foggy square rimmed glasses sat askew on his nose.

“Okay, nobody panic!” I instructed in a rather panicked tone. “But the sweet and sour chicken isn’t breathing!”

In the rear view mirror I could see a ghostly pale face shooting me a smoldering glare. If Dennis were Ronald, I’d have been getting another kind of bird than the one we just slammed into.

Helix rested his shave head back against his fabric seat, allowing his breathing to catch up with him, but my making him chuckle didn’t help any. “The chicken is dead.” He mumbled, not talking directly to either of us. “the chicken is supposed to be dead.”

Dennis and I shared a worried look, but said nothing. Helix wasn’t paying attention by then, anyway. He was staring, oddly, at a dilapidated service station nestled into the tree line on our right-hand side. An inconsolably lonely look crossed his face, and his skin seemed to sag against his bones. For a second, I was worried he would go into an episode right there in the car, right in front of Dennis. I tried to keep our momentum going so that wouldn’t happen.  

“Come on,” I sighed, tapping him on the shoulder, “Let’s go see what we hit.” Everyone got out of the car slowly, except me who had to brush off the rice and wipe away soy sauce. My t- shirt was going to have a stain the shape and size of Texas down the front of it.

  Dennis walked around inspecting all the tires, and Helix’s eyes had fallen down to his big leather boots with the holes in them, so I saw the guy we hit first. He was sprawled on his back, shirtless, moaning, and holding his bleeding head. A bolt of electricity coursed through me and screwed my feet to the ground. “Look,” I tried to say, but it choked coming up and I only made a high-pitched squeaking sound that got Helix to look up, at least.

He ground down hard on his teeth, and then he clasped onto my wrist, sticky as it was from soy sauce. “I can’t watch that happen again, Jen.” He whispered, leaning in towards my ear so Dennis couldn’t over hear us.

“He isn’t human,” I murmured back, taking him by the crook of the elbow.

“I thought we hit a bird!” Dennis exclaimed, swishing past us in the fastest run I’ve ever seen from him. He crumpled to his knees like a stunned rabbit at the man’s side, trying to take the man’s hand, but he yanked it away, screaming incoherently.

I had to think on my feet. Dennis did hit a bird, and then again, he did hit a man, but he didn’t know they were the same person. “Look,” I pointed to a trail of loose feathers on the burning asphalt as my proof, “You did hit a bird, this guy is just detoxing.”

I wasn’t technically lying about any of it. Helix picked up on it, too, after the initial shock of finding the man lying wide eyed and foaming at the mouth on the roadside.

“My phone is dead,” Dennis looked up at us desperately, fearful tears crowding his eyes, “I’m going to go get help.” He stood up, brushing the asphalt off on his jeans, and started to jog across the road without looking both ways.

“Don’t go over there, man, you don’t know those people!” Helix warned him, as Dennis started towards the run-down gas station parking lot. As Helix started to yell, a huge truck came barreling around the curve, barely missing Dennis.  

“Turn on your flashers, morons!” Cried the guy in the passenger seat with a scraggly black beard and missing front teeth.

“Watch out, next time, jerk face!” I hollered after them, livid that they nearly hit my brother and hadn’t even bothered to check on him. “There are children playing in the road here!”

“I’ll take care of this,” Helix mumbled, and nodded his head back towards the car.

“Guess I’ll turn the flashers on,” I conceded, jogging and then walking breathlessly back to the car. Behind me, I heard Helix murmur in a language I didn’t understand, and then in a language I did understand that wasn’t English.

From the driver’s side of the car, I could see Helix kneeling over the man, both of them in the uncut grass by the roadside. Getting scratched by brambles and bitten by whatever bugs they were tangled up in.

Helix took a white packet out of his dirty, black jean’s pocket and split it open with his teeth. While Dennis was screaming and hitting on all the doors and windows of the gas station for anyone to come out, Helix slipped the contents of the sugar packet in this guy’s nearly toothless mouth. He kept his knees pressed against the guy’s arms, and sat heavily down on his chest.

There was fighting, screaming from both sides of the road, and angry curses I was glad Dennis wouldn’t understand, but after a few minutes, the guy had calmed down enough that Helix got off him. He just laid there, dazed and staring at the sun, sweat dripping down his face and exposed torso.

To my surprise, someone did come meet Dennis at the doorway of the gas station. He was a huge bear of a man, over seven feet tall, and dark as night. In one ear was a golden earring, glimmering in the sunlight, and his head was shaved bald and marked with white tread mark tattoos all the way down to his neck, where it disappeared beneath the collar of his loose-fitting green army shirt.

He dwarfed my brother in height and sheer, bulking mass and he had kind eyes, but no smile. “What’s all this, then?” He looked first at my dumbfounded big brother, and then he locked eyes on the three of us standing across the road. Nodding to himself as he answered his own question, he strode casually towards us like this was an everyday scene for him. Helix backed away from the detoxee, as the huge man inspected them both.

“Jeremy!” A flash of recognition flit over the hulking man’s face, and his eyes sparkled brighter, but he still did not smile. “Is that you?! Man, you owe me money.” He bent down to a knee, a process I’m surprised both he and his faded blue jeans survived. He snapped his fingers in front of the guys’ eyes and gave him a firm slap. As if to lighten the mood when he saw there was no reaction, he said, “You know your wife’s been by here looking for you? And if I were you, I’d get lost again.” He laughed at his own joke.

“Can you help him?” Helix whispered, and garnered the attention of the enormous bald man once again. Even his dark eyebrows had been shaved straight off his forehead. They shared a familiar look.

“Don’t you worry about ol’ Jeremy here, son, I’ll watch out for him till the missus can get here.” He grunted, but really it was more a deep, throaty growl when he hefted Jeremy up over his shoulder like a sack of flour.

“Don’t you think he needs a doctor!?” My brother seemed to startle him, as if he had forgotten the two of us. Dennis shrunk back when the big man’s eyes fell back to him, and Dennis lowered his. I noticed that the man shot an inquisitive look at Helix over his shoulder, but I nearly missed it when Helix shook his head, “no,” an imperceptible degree.

“We’ll get him to the doc first thing, kiddo,” He strode past, ruffling up Dennis’ hair as he did so. In a matter of moments, he was gone, and we could hear the click as the doors locked behind him. He drew the shades down, one by one.

It took some talking before we could convince Dennis to just get in the car and drive off. I think what finally convinced him was the realization that that man wasn’t going to tolerate company he didn’t want, and he made it clear we had done enough. Helix helped me clean up the back seat and then sat next to me, with his head in my lap. I ran my fingers through his greasy black mohawk in a distantly absorbed fashion.

More likely than not, Helix had bought our bird friend a few hours of comatose sanity, but once they had gotten that far gone, there was no coming back. Helix had to struggle with that reality the whole way back home because when he saw the guy laying shirtless in the summer weeds, vacantly staring up at the sun, he saw his own future written out plain as day. The day when sugar no longer did the trick, and what was left of his mind tipped its hat and walked out the door.

That being said, drugs are very bad. Bad for you, bad for your health, bad for your family. They just are. But for Helix, the alternative was way worse.

© 2020 A.K