anchors

 I am currently reading the book Crank, by Ellen Hopkins. It is about a girl named Kristina, who goes to visit her father after eight years of no contact. There, she discovers crystal meth. There are many things to write about in this book, but one of the things I had the most trouble with understanding was how fast Kristina became addicted to crystal meth, and how Bree helped play a part in her downward spiral. She was only with her father for 10 days, but when she came back home, even a month after being completely clean, she still wanted the monster.

You first meet Bree when Adam comes and introduces himself, and Kristina tells him her name is Bree. After this, she seems to become more comfortable with talking to him, and then later taking her first lines of crank. The thing is she agreed to take the drugs almost without a second thought, even though she was 16, smart, and was living with her father, who was practically a walking billboard as to how drugs will mess up your life. But I think that the initial reason she took her first line of crank was, apart from attraction to Adam, some part of her deep down wanted some way to bond or share a common interest with her dad; she unconsciously wanted to impress him, or show him that she did share half of his genetic makeup. She may have not been seven and his little princess anymore, so this was the very last thing she could do to get his attention. It would probably be extremely hard to be separated from a parent for eight years, especially if your last memories of them are happy ones instead of sad ones. Kristina was clinging to any last thing that may have proven she was her father’s daughter, even if it meant the drugs.  

It is probably very hard to suddenly submerge yourself into an entirely different world overnight. Instead of being surrounded with drugs her whole life, or slowly slipping into a haze of crystal meth, Kristina was just plopped right in. she never even smoked pot before she visited her father. She was a quiet, straight-A, nice, well-rounded person. It would be mentally trying to change all of that so fast. In order to cope with her whole new lifestyle, Kristina had to introduce Bree into her life. I think that everyone has a much more tuned down version of Bree inside of them; when you are listening to your parents chastise you and are silently screaming shut up! Can I go now?  Kristina had to let her “bad side” out. She is not schizophrenic, she just needed a way to keep the rule-abiding person she used to be from completely leaving, so, in order to cope and preserve her former self, she gave her more outgoing self a different name. Kristina and Bree are the same people, which is what makes it so hard to decipher who is who. Bree was Kristina’s anchor to her life before the monster.

People change a lot as they get older, especially in their teen years. I think that the people themselves do not really notice their changes as much as the people around you. It really is not healthy, though, to be forced to become a whole new person in a matter of days. Everybody changes on their own, and you don’t have any control over it. Your mind is actually pretty delicate, and once it learns something new, you can’t ever un-learn it.