Crank

At the party, Kristina drinks beer, smokes tobacco and pot, and uses crank. She senses that all the girls envy her for being accompanied by someone as good-looking as Brendan.

Brendan becomes sexually aggressive with Kristina. Kristina tells him she is sexually inexperienced and wants to wait.

Brendan says he forgives her for now, but Kristina must let him be the first person with whom she has sex. Kristina is uncomfortable with his remarks but feels pressured to continue making out with him.

Much to her relief, Kristina does not get caught sneaking back home.

School begins, and Kristina attends the first day still high from the crank. Sleep deprived and weak from her loss of appetite, Kristina feels disoriented.

On her way home on the bus, Kristina wishes she could fall back into her pre-summer, regular life that she has “lately disdained.”

Famished and tired, Kristina eats grapes and ice cream at home and passes out on her bed. Marie finds her sound asleep hours later and sprinkles cold water on her face to wake her.

Irritated with her mother for waking her up, Kristina uses the f-word against her mother for the first time in her life.

A shocked Marie slaps Kristina across the face. Kristina and Marie both break down crying. Marie asks Kristina about what’s going on with her. Kristina cannot tell her mother the truth. She says sorry to Marie, and Marie hugs her, telling Kristina she loves her.

Kristina joins her family for dinner. She thinks her mother will tell everyone about the swearing, but Marie stays quiet. She even lifts the GUFN ban on Kristina. Contrite, Kristina decides to focus on family, friends, and school from now on.

For a week, Kristina studies hard at school and hangs out with Sarah and Trent. She auditions for the honors choir and is accepted. Then she gets a letter from Adam, a phone call from Brendan, and a visit from Chase all in the same day, and things begin to spiral.

Kristina gets into Chase’s car. Chase tells Kristina he has been keeping his distance because he heard about her hanging out with Brendan. Kristina tells Chase she only went out with Brendan because she felt flattered by his attention. She actually really likes Chase.

Though Kristina feels she is falling in love with Chase, she is also eager to call Brendan, who in his voicemail promised to bring “refreshments.”

Adam has written about a new girl called Giselle in his school who looks like Kristina. Adam wants to ask her out and hopes Kristina is dating someone nice too. Lynx has begun to walk. Adam ran into Kristina’s dad, who did not mention Kristina.

Kristina is annoyed with Adam’s letter. She feels sad that her father has not called her or written to her. In emotional turmoil, she wonders if she should call Brendan and end her sobriety.

Bree seems to grow stronger in Kristina, urging her to chuck caution. The need for meth snowballs, and Kristina calls Brendan for a date and an “eight ball,” one eighth of a pound of meth. It will cost her $250 of the money she’s been saving to buy a car, but Kristina feels it is worth it.

Kristina fears Brendan will want to be sexually intimate with her, but the lure of the meth trumps her fear. Brendan picks her up for their date on Friday. He parks in an isolated spot and gives the bindle of drugs to Kristina. The packet looks suspiciously less than an eight ball.

Kristina and Brendan snort the crank and drink beer. Brendan gets sexually aggressive with Kristina and tears off her clothes. Kristina tells him to stop, but he does not and proceeds to bite and bruise her. Brendan rapes Kristina.

In pain and bleeding, Kristina summons Bree to sit up, compose herself, and plot revenge against Brendan.

Brendan does not speak to Kristina all the way home. When he finally opens his mouth, he does not say sorry but tells Kristina that had he known she would just lie there, he wouldn’t have bothered with her.

Brendan’s cruelty and vulgar remarks make Kristina so enraged that she cannot say anything in response.

As they reach her home, Brendan asks Kristina for $250 for the meth. In hindsight, Kristina cannot believe she paid up.

Kristina gets into the hot tub to relieve the pain. In bed, she wonders if she will ever feel normal after the trauma she just underwent.

Unable to sleep, Kristina writes a scathing letter to Adam. She asks him why the news he delivers is always so bad and ends by telling him she was raped.

Writing the letter eases some of Kristina’s emotional pain, but she knows there is only one way to forget it all: She opens the bindle of meth.

As she suspected, Brendan has cheated her. The bindle is almost empty. She decides to use the meth conservatively so it can see her through the next few days.

With a large dose of crank ruled out for now, Kristina’s brain is forced to relive the night’s trauma. She bitterly regrets going out with Brendan and thinking she could manage someone as violent as him.

The horrors of the assault replay in Kristina’s mind till morning dawns. She snorts a line of meth so she can compose herself and go meet her family for breakfast.

To fend off any potential questions, Kristina lies to her mother and says that her date was great. When she is alone, Kristina calls Chase over and breaks down before him, telling him about the rape. When Kristina says the rape was her fault, Chase tells her emphatically that it was Brendan’s fault, not hers. Brendan chose to be violent.

Chase comforts Kristina and tells her he loves her. Kristina is stunned that he is crying. She tells him she loves him too. Kristina asks Chase to make love to her, but he refuses gently. Chase tells her they should make love when Kristina is not feeling as vulnerable.

Kristina is relieved that Chase said no but also worries that he may be rejecting her. She wants to make love so that she can know what it feels like to have consensual, caring sex. Chase explains that he is not rejecting her but waiting for her to heal.

Chase’s words soothe Kristina, but her mother’s return “slam[s] [her] down back to Earth” (366).

Chase drives away, and Marie wants to know about him. Kristina tells Marie that Chase is her boyfriend. Marie asks Kristina about Brendan. Kristina tells her that Brendan was all over her. She didn’t tell Marie before because she didn’t think Marie would care.

Kristina’s words disarm Marie. Kristina feels exhilarated that she has managed to score a point over her mother. She accuses Marie of judging a book by its cover and assuming Brendan’s beauty made him good.

Shocking Marie makes Kristina’s high even better. She sings a Queen song loudly, skipping up the stairs.

Pulling weeds in the backyard, Kristina decides what she will do. She will mail Adam the letter and end the relationship. She will never tell anyone about Brendan and move on. She will make love to Chase. When she goes upstairs, Kristina realizes the crank is about to run out. She sends her brother out of the house on an errand and calls Chase.

Chase doesn’t answer the phone, so Kristina decides to cycle over to Trent’s house to ask his sister, Robyn, for help scoring crank. Robyn is part of the group of cheerleaders Kristina suspects may have access to drugs.

Robyn is alone at home, and Kristina can immediately sense she has been using drugs. When Robyn hesitates to let Kristina in, Kristina assures her she is not a narc and shows her the almost empty bindle of meth.

Robyn shows Kristina a new way of consuming meth. She heats the powder in the foil and instructs Kristina to suck in the smoke through a straw. The drug is even more potent this way. She and Robyn bond over their high and plan to score more drugs.

Of course, taking a potent hit of meth has side effects. Kristina’s lungs cannot get enough air as she cycles back home, and when the high subsides, she feels worse than usual, screaming expletives at her parents.

Scott asks Kristina for a private conversation, but he begins talking before she agrees. Scott suspects Kristina is using drugs, but she denies it. She promises him to be careful with her choices.

Kristina listens to Scott so she does not get GUFN again. After he leaves, she goes to the kitchen to eavesdrop on him and Marie. They seem to think Scott has made headway with Kristina.

Robyn comes through for Kristina, producing an actual eight ball. Over the next few days, Kristina regularly smokes meth with Robyn in an area called The Avenue, the designated smoking area of their school. Kristina tells everyone there to call her Bree.

Instead of taking the bus to school, Kristina hitches rides with Robyn. Chase picks her up from school, and they make out in his car. However, Chase refuses to smoke meth the new way, as he has set boundaries for meth use.

Kristina wants to test Chase’s boundaries on their date on Saturday. She cannot explain why she needs to test someone she cares deeply about.

The date is postponed as Saturday is Nevada Air Race Day, an event her family attends every year. Kristina knows she cannot skip the day, so she asks permission to bring Robyn along. Marie is so happy Kristina wants to attend that she agrees readily.

Kristina and Robyn smoke up on their way to the races and wear sunglasses to hide their bloodshot eyes. Men catcall at them when they reach the grounds. Robyn suggests they kiss to grab more attention. Kristina hesitates, but Bree agrees and kisses Robyn.

The men’s wolf whistles make Kristina blush and stop, but she realizes she likes shocking people.

Kristina and Robyn make their way to the box in which Scott and Marie are sitting. They notice that the adults are acting like “juvenile delinquents,” with Marie flirting with one of Scott’s colleagues and Scott flirting with his boss’s wife.

Kristina and Robyn go off for a line of meth and run into Brendan. Brendan is with a 14-year-old girl. Kristina wants to avoid Brendan, but Bree asks him if he has raped any schoolgirls lately. She advises the young girl to watch herself around Brendan. The girl looks crushed.

Kristina shares what happened with Brendan with Robyn. Robyn tells her she was also raped. Robyn began “cranking” to keep up with schoolwork and gymnastics and quickly became hooked. During a dry spell, Robyn went to a casino to procure meth. An older man offered her drugs, and she followed him to his car. He drove her to the desert and raped her.

Kristina tells the reader that while such traumatic experiences should deter people from doing drugs, she and Robyn are so in thrall to their addiction that they cannot stop.