File I. Archive HSSI

Amber was the kind of girl that most people avoided. It was not because of her outrageous body odor (which everyone at the age of ten had), or the fact that she never ate fast foods or any meats, or really even that she had a great fear of the ball pits in Chucky Cheeses; they did not like her because she never wanted to be touched.

Amber Clemmens supported her local habit of alcoholism by snitching full bottles of tequila from her mother’s cabinet. The cabinet had a lock on the door, but it was well known that her mother just left the key in her top drawer of her bedside stand. (Keep that in mind in case you need just a quick shot of something to get your heart racing.) She drank regularly, like the vitamins she took in the morning to keep healthy, a short gulp of vodka to get her through the day and some rum at night to help her sleep.
The effects that the alcohol had on her system did not seem to bother her as she contented herself with the fact that about fourteen million people in the US abuse alcohol or were “alcoholics”. That came out to be about one in every thirteen people. See, she came to know that it was way closer to twelve out of thirteen people in her school alone that drank frequently throughout the day, therefore it did not bother her so much. She also just told herself, when the alcohol had seeped into her blood, clouding her thoughts and making her tempted to believe maybe she did have a problem, that men were twice as likely to to be alcoholics than women. And since she was almost a woman, at the age of seventeen, she did not truly think that she would be in too much trouble.
Alcohol got her over her fear of people touching her. School used to be Hell when people would bump into her in the hall, purposely swerving into her so that shoulders brushed. So, alcohol, she found, numbed her response time so that she did not care. It was a good camouflage because as soon as she started drinking (and quit reacting to touches), she made a bunch of friends. (Granted, these friends were alcoholics too. Amber did not kid herself about them).
Eventually, she even talked herself into having a boyfriend. He did not really have an alcohol problem, like the rest of her friends, but when he was around, Amber did. The whole arm-around-the-shoulders thing he seemed to enjoy. (It made her skin crawl). He wanted to go further than the, as she called it, tongue-down-my-throat thing and do the hand-in-places-where-it-should-not-be thing instead… or at the same time. Talk about a overload of the disgusting.
Junk, as her boyfriend’s apt nickname was, enjoyed a little more on the … dangerous side of things. He did not steal alcohol from his mother, but prescription pills. He popped those pills like candy at such a atrocious rate that Amber wanted to gag looking at him. (NOTE: Ground Pills are not the same as Smarties! Got it?)
Amber quickly found out that pills and alcohol do not mix.
She did not realize how drunk she really was until, when offered a pill by Junk, she accepted. How would she have known how bad the combination was?
Oops.