Her laugh was only cut short, the sweet sound tarnished, at the mention of her imperfection and demerit. Was that not a perfect characterization of her life thus far? Her happiness and carefree attitude were blemished by her lack of self-control. 

‘Great job, Marlene. Try being sober your whole life like everybody else fucking is,’ he wanted to say. 

But Nathaniel had a soft spot in his heart for her. He always promised himself there was some other reason she used that he wasn’t aware of – no matter if he understood every scanty inch of her tarred soul. He sought to grasp WHY; to avoid judgement he convinced himself she participated in such a detestable way of life for some inducement he was not conscious of.

Originally, Nathan had lived within the approximation that drug users lived on the street and begged for money. They didn’t eat or work, just used and leeched off of others. But Marcy had greatly revised his way of thinking. She kept it so well hidden, which is something he thought about often during the years they spent together. He continued to return, after carrying his cross around the circle of reason, to the possibility it was all for attention. If so, she wasn’t doing an adequate job at it. Other than a select few friends, her dealer, and Nate, everyone was oblivious. As if her wild child phase would end, because they didn’t know how deep her lawless affectation ran, they patronized her as a girl who was taking a little longer than everyone else to grow up. But she still hadn’t grown up, throwing a tantrum this very moment. She always had a way of bringing old shit up, unpacking it and bringing it out of the warehouse of history, into the light.
He remembered the junction in which her ‘fun’ stopped being a behavior he could attribute to wanting to try new things and having new experiences, to being young.

They had slept together plenty of times, maybe just enough to count on his fingers and toes. The fraternity house was poorly monitored and girls spent the night on a regular basis. Though, perhaps the single difference between Nathan and his housemates was the non-plural nature of the girls that stayed with him. It was just Marcy. He had a college-issued twin sized bed in his room in which they slept. She laid on top of him, chest to chest simply because there was no other arrangement that would afford comfort. 

As Nathan drove, remembering his route from years of living in D.C., he remembered how soft she was. She felt so little in his arms, providing him nothing variant from warmth and solace. Her breath was even with sleep, and his hand stroked her bare back underneath the thick fleece he’d brought from home. Many nights he stayed awake, one of the intended effects rather than a side effect, of his own drug. Sometimes it worked too well and still held him days after ingestion. He wondered if Marcy envied that quality of his more subtle white bottle and solo cup of water, rather than spoons and needles, which had been shoved under his bed in a fruitless attempt for discretion. It always seemed as if her high became shorter and shorter, less and less euphoric.

He presently flinched as the image came back into his mind. Perhaps that night his medicine had begun to release him and allow him to drift. The pretty creature on top of him jolted awake, bringing her head off his chest and leaning over the side of the bed. His eyes opened, head turning to face her. A nightmare? He felt her abdomen flex and relax, flex and relax as sounds of dry heaving inaugurated.