Pay the Price for Paradise (standard:drama, 2682 words)
Author: L.M.Penswick	Added: Jun 03 2006	Views/Reads: 3313/2362	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Danielle had been surrounded by drugs for as long as she could rermember. She vowed she would never turn to them but will she keep that promise when her world is transformed into a place of turmoil, addiction and death?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

taking the bag, the other would slide the target's money (and sometimes 
even a wallet) from the person's pocket. 

Usually ‘Trigger' would take the money; he was a large Afro-American boy
with a shaved head, beady eyes and a head too small for his body. 
Danielle would offer to help as she looked the most unsusceptible of 
the gang, her huge midnight blue eyes shining with a childish 
innocence, her long golden hair hanging like a mantel around her oval 
face. The adults idea of a ‘Perfect Child'. If only they knew. 

She wagged school to hang out with the ‘gang' and they would go down to
an old stream with a huge old bridge over it to get high or convince 
young children to ‘have a smoke' and laugh at the ones who wouldn't. 

Her parents knew what Danielle was doing. They didn't care; they knew
where she was going everyday and night. Once, her mother had struck her 
across the face for becoming as “useless and weak as she had been” for 
giving in to drugs as she had. Then she started drinking again and 
forgot the conversation. Danielle didn't care. 

She started failing at school, her results dropped and she was sent to
talk to the principal. She shouted at him and ran away from school to 
her place under the bridge. The next time she was sent to the principal 
she was so stoned she was sent back home again. From then on her class 
talked about her even more, talking even worse about her than usual. 

When she was seventeen when she saw Rebecca. Danielle was drunk then,
walking home from a party in the early hours of the morning, she reeked 
of smoke and marijuana and the scent of alcohol hung heavily around 
her. Her party clothes were hanging loosely over her emaciated form as 
she staggered down the road in the rain. 

Rebecca was driving home after a night shift at her part-time job in a
jeweller's. She noticed her old friend just barely through the loose 
strands of hair that had fallen from her hairstyle. Rebecca knew it was 
her and took her back to her house. 

Rebecca was flatting in a rental in the nice, cosy area of town. She had
a boyfriend and the two were planning of moving in together as soon as 
they left for university. She was studying to become a nurse or a 
surgeon and heading off to medical school to get her degree. The girl 
was happy and healthy, and looked with pity upon her friend. “We 
promised, remember,” she said quietly as Danielle sat with a blanket 
around her, swallowing an aspirin for her hangover. “We promised we'd 
never do this stuff.” Danielle shrugged, “we were, like, eight.” “And 
yet you had more sense when you were eight than you do now you're 
seventeen?” Rebecca questioned. Danielle didn't reply. “What happened 
to you Danielle?” Rebecca asked in her slow, quiet voice, “why did you 
do this?” “I had to,” she replied. Rebecca shook her head, “no you 
didn't Danielle, you chose to.” 

Danielle left Rebecca's house after a few hours. Rebecca had offered to
be her GP when she got the training, but until then she offered a 
business card for Dr. Rendall Tyro, a friend of hers. Danielle took it 
and headed home. She looked at the little piece of paper, tore it in 
half and threw it into the stream. Rebecca watched from her lounge 
window and shook her head; “I'm sorry Danielle, truly.” 

*** 

Danielle had no money. She had no job and she had no family. Trigger had
gone too far this time. His parents suspected him of being on drugs and 
sent him to rehab. He didn't want to go so he didn't. He told his 
parents he was fine and that he was completely changed. They trusted 
him with his two and a half-year-old sister Malavika while they went 
out for their anniversary. While on P he had been down with the gang at 
their place by the bridge, and he wanted to go for a swim. Malavika 
followed her big brother. While he was in there he forgot who she was 
and thought she was a monster. He drowned her. 

It was only when he was off his high (hours and hours later) that he
realised what he had done. As he saw her blank, lifeless little body 
lying on the bank, her beautiful brown eyes glassy and empty; her 
expression of surprise, shock and fear. She was so little and frail 
compared to her large older brother, she didn't stand a chance. 

The band split up after that. A few went into rehab and successfully
managed to defeat their demons, the others just looked for another 
group that would take them in. Danielle tried to get a job. There was 
no point quitting, she knew. She would just go back to them when she 
got home and her mother started hitting her again. 

She left school with no money, no scholarship, no friends and no job.
She was still at home with her parents, who didn't care whether she 
stayed or left, ate or starved, lived or died. When she turned 20 her 
father died of an overdose heroin and alcohol, her mother had her own 
issues; she was severely depressed for days before drinking her sorrows 
away or taking it all out on Danielle. 

Danielle knew she ought to stop her addiction. She went to a rehab
centre to quit and heard of people like her. It worked for a while, 
until her mother went into a rage larger than usual, yelling how 
Danielle was to blame for her father's death and she threw Danielle out 
onto the street with a pillow and a pair of slippers. She told Danielle 
never to come back or she would kill her with her own two hands. 

She needed a job and money, she owed her dealer and she had no friends.
She stole, she busked, and she even reduced herself to prostitution. 

With nowhere else to go, Danielle returned to Rebecca's house. She had
moved and the owners, taking pity on the woman, told her that she and 
her husband had moved into a house on the other side of town. 

It took her three trailers and four vans to get her there but Danielle
turned up on the doorstep of her old best-friend's house. A man 
answered the door. “I'm looking for Rebecca,” Danielle said. The man 
beckoned her inside and disappeared off into a brightly-lit room. He re 
appeared with Rebecca. “Danielle!” Rebecca gasped, a long white apron 
smeared with some kind of sauce was tied over her polo shirt and 
expensive looking jeans. “I need help, Becca,” Danielle pleaded. 
Rebecca told her husband to finish making dinner and sat with Danielle 
on the big leather couch. She listened as Danielle told her all about 
her problems and how rehab had done nothing for her at all and about 
her mother kicking her out. 

Some people would have dismissed Danielle and left her on the street,
but Rebecca hugged her old friend and promised that she would do 
whatever it took to get her better again. 

Danielle tried. She really tried. She spent hour's everyday in a rehab
centre. Rebecca made it clear that if Danielle missed even one meeting, 
she would be back on the streets. That never happened. Although it 
became quite unusual after a while, that money had begun to disappear 
from the house. Money left on countertops in the mornings would be gone 
in the afternoon. It seemed very strange to Rebecca. 

It became obvious one day, after over five hundred dollars went missing,
who was to blame. They waited out for Danielle to get home from her job 
in a cleaning shop. She never showed up, although they received a call 
from Danielle's boss to inquire about a large sum of money had been 
missing from the register during Danielle's shift. 

When Rebecca saw Danielle next, she was on her way to work. She pulled
over again and stepped out of the car. It looked as though she was 
going to hit Danielle as she strode over to the drudge. She did not. 
She just looked sadly at the dirt ridden woman and said in a sad voice, 
though it was quiet Danielle could have sworn she shouted it, “You've 
had all the chance in the world to change and now you never will. You 
made a promise years ago, that you would never become your mother... 
Drugs don't make you happy they make you delirious, you should get a 
high from life itself, just being able to see to hear to touch and to 
smell. To breathe, to laugh and to live. Do you know what life is 
Danielle? You didn't become your mother... you became worse.” 

Rebecca drove to work that day, knowing that she would never see
Danielle again, that she had done all she could to help. She knew that 
some people could never be helped that some people didn't want to be 
helped. She took one last look in her rear-view mirror at the girl she 
had known once, the girl that had been so consumed in finding a place 
that didn't exist that she had walked right past the paradise that she 
had. 

It was days after that Danielle knew her life was worth nothing. Nothing
at all. The promise she had made to herself all those years ago, when 
her world had been an endless cloud of possibility, a place she could 
feel safe, secure...loved. It was gone. She had lost it when she began 
the drugs, when they had altered her mind and possessed her soul, 
taking her miles away from the innocent child she had once been. 

She thought of taking more then, to send her off to that place that she
craved; that wonderful heaven that she knew could not exist. She looked 
off the bridge where she and the gang had spent long, endless days 
getting high and laughing at pointless things. She looked down at the 
inky waters far, far below. She heard the current as it flowed on 
through the place that she had thought to be home. 

Drugs, booze, lust was that all that she had lived for? Friends, home,
family was that what she was never to have? Rebecca had a life. She had 
money, a career, family and a home. She had her high without touching a 
pill, a needle or a cigarette. 

All of this ran through her mind as she placed her stiletto's upon the
hard stone wall of the bridge, first one. Then the other. She wished 
she had never left her old home, left her friends who had now gone, 
deserted her like so many others. Her long blonde hair fanned out 
behind her, the moonlight making it glow like finely spun gold, her 
dirty clothes, for a moment were fresh and clean and new. 

The wind whipped past her with the ferocity of a winter's storm, with
the force and freedom of a million wild horses on a balmy summer's day. 
The wind that now carried Danielle far away to where her drugs had 
taken her, to where she had allowed them to take her. 

And as Rebecca worked late that night, pouring over papers, not knowing
that the next morning she would find that she was pregnant, she could 
have sworn that she heard the distant calling of a voice she heard long 
ago.  A small cry of ‘I promise' as it fluttered in through the open 
window. But she knew it was just the wind. 


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