Evanna gulped down her water quickly, nibbling on a digestive biscuit with her slightly uneven teeth, looking nervously at Christine every so often as if she was making sure that this wasn't all a trick; that she'd not phoned the police and they weren't on their way to arrest Evanna right this moment.
"Better?" the headmistress asked the teenager, who had gone back to picking at her uneven nails and avoiding eye contact as best she could. Evanna nodded slightly, before beginning to run her finger around the rim of the tall, empty glass, swinging her skinny legs as she couldn't quite touch the tiled floor of the kitchen with her small feet. She looked like a little girl lost; left behind by her mother accidentally in a coffee shop, biting her lip and looking all around her with wide, scared eyes.
"So tell me about yourself." Christine said, knowing that distracting her and keeping her mind working was the only way to get Evanna to talk. If she wasn't thinking slowly and deeply about each and every word leaving her mouth, then she might just reveal the key to unlock her secrets.
"Well, uhm... my name's Evanna Gallagher... I was born in Glasgow, and my mam put me up for adoption... but nobody wanted me, so I ended up in a care home until I was about nine." she paused in between her points as if she didn't know whether to elaborate, looking up unsurely at Christine to check that she was still listening. Her accent, upon closer listening, was Glaswegian, with some words pronounced in unidentifiable accents, presumably from several different parts of Scotland.
"Then I was adopted, but I ran away with an older girl in the same place when I was twelve, her name was..." she stopped, her clear eyes showing her thoughts racing as they flitted around the kitchen, "Joanna... or Jess. I can't... I can't remember." Her tears welled up in her enormous, glass-like eyes, and she wiped them away viciously, rubbing at her pale skin as if she thought it would bring her to her senses. Christine pushed the box of tissues across the table, and Evanna took one gladly, wiping away the salty tears roughly. They'd left trails on her face where they'd removed the grubbiness from her skin and left ivory tracks, like a half-finished spider's web across her face.
"We lived in hostels and squats and places like that for a couple of years, but she drank a lot - she had an older boyfriend, and he wasn't nice... and she died when I was fourteen. I can't remember what they said... cirrhosis or something. They couldn't do anything in the hospital, like... she was only seventeen." More tears fell from her orb-like eyes, and she didn't wipe them away this time. Christine herself found a lone tear making its way down her own cheek as she realised that what had happened to that girl could just as easily have happened to her. She realised that her alcoholism hadn't only had the ability to destroy her life, but those of the people around her, too.
"She'd done smack, because she said it stopped the pain and that... and I found some in one of her old bags with a hypodermic... so I tried it," she continued, pinching a scar on her arm which Christine imagined was probably what Evanna knew to be the oldest of many, "And it worked, I suppose... I mean, I liked it. So I got more, and it just sort of began from there." She was shaking now, almost as if she was totally incapable of controlling what her body was doing. She looked desperate - presumably she hadn't had a fix in several hours, and was beginning to show withdrawal symptoms. Coming down from her high; mind catching up with what she was saying and doing, her body gradually beginning to unhinge without the drugs.
"Evanna, I want you to promise me something."
"I can't promise. I always break promises; I'm sorry, but I can't." Evanna said hurriedly, shaking her head rapidly. She was sweating now, as well as shivering, her legs still swinging wildly as she sat on the chair. She itched the skin on her arms, her blue eyes darting around the room as if she was fixated upon looking for something that wasn't there. Christine watched her silently across the table for a few seconds before deciding that she couldn't watch Evanna doing this; couldn't watch her destroying herself with an addiction as Christine herself had spent much of her life hellbent upon doing to herself. She took hold of Evanna's tiny, scarred wrists firmly, as if she was telling off a naughty toddler, threatening to not let her play with a toy. She wished it was that simple.
"Listen to me." she commanded, and Evanna looked up, her eyes skittish and wide, the whites visible all around her vivid irises. She'd initially fought the contact with her wrists, but suddenly gave up her cause and allowed her arms to be controlled by the older woman; defeated. She was slumped in the chair now as if all her energy had left her, a salty tear glistening as it made its way slowly down her cheek, dragging a trail of porcelain skin through the dirt on her face.
"I'm going to run you a bath, you can have a cup of tea or something, and then we'll talk again. Do you have any drugs with you?" Christine asked, watching the teenager breathe rapidly as she shook, eyes still darting around the kitchen. Somewhere deep in those glimmering blue glass orbs, the girl wanted to be free from her addiction. There was a part of her, however small it was, which wanted to not spend the rest of her days looking for her next fix, and somehow, that tiny part of her overpowered the addiction in that moment, as she handed over two small, full bags of the powder in its pure form. Christine had never actually seen pure Heroin, despite having known several addicts, and it occurred to her that it looked very much like densely packed brown sugar, albeit not having so innocent an effect upon the user.
"C'mon." Christine murmured, retaining her hold on just one of the teenager's slight wrists, and helping her stand up slowly. Evanna's stature was slightly hunched as she stood, as if she didn't have enough energy to stand straight as she followed Christine through the large, light kitchen and through into the slightly darker hallway, barely able to look where she was going.
Christine put an arm around the teenager's quaking shoulders and led her slowly through the hall and upstairs, supporting her frail body as she herself could not do. Evanna stumbled more than once, again seeming incapable of controlling her own body, but she clung to both Christine and the cream banister, determined to make it up the flight of steps and onto the landing. The shoulder of her dress was torn and pinned back together with safety pins, tarnished like the buckles on her boots, and it tore at Christine's heart to see the girl, even younger than her son, so very broken.
What am I doing? Christine thought to herself as she began to run the hot water into the bath as Evanna leant against the cream tiled wall, still shaking rapidly. A drug addict turns up in my house, having burgled me, and I offer her a drink, a bath, and consider letting her stay in my spare room? I've gone mad, she thought. Regardless of what her head told her, her heart told her that she had to try and help Evanna, if only to stop another girl growing up, whilst still spiralling downwards in addiction.
