Crank Chapters 221-230 Summary

Chapter 221: Three Races

During a break in the races, Kristina and Robyn go to Robyn's car to meet up with the monster. On their way back to the show, Kristina sees Brendan walking toward them with a fourteen-year-old girl hanging off of him.
Bree takes over, and she goes over to him and asks if he's raped anyone lately. Brendan tells her that it's not rape if the participant is willing, so she then turns her attention to his companion and tells her to watch her back.

Kristina's vow to never speak of the Brendan incident again goes out the window when Robyn asks what the deal with their confrontation was. In exchange, Robyn shares her own story.
She tells Kristina that she originally started doing crank to keep up with her academics and extracurricular activities. It was usually pretty available, but she occasionally hit a period of time where none of her usual connections had the drug.
One time, she went to a casino to find a dealer and actually got in the car with him. He drove her outside of town and physically and sexually assaulted her in ways she still has scars from. She claims that she hasn't been totally sane since.

If you're thinking that a story like that will make Kristina run in the opposite direction and leave the drug lifestyle behind, you'd be wrong. After all, Robyn didn't run away either.

Kristina describes her life before crank as having a particular rhythm of school and family activities, with a sense of comfortable familiarity.

Not surprisingly, Kristina can't function like a normal person at school. For one thing, she wakes up groggy and can't find clean clothes. She also has trouble eating breakfast and lunch and spends a lot of time cutting classes or being late.
Before long, she falls into a whole new kind of routine at school.

Kristina's other problem is that there are just too many people involved in this situation. She feels guilty for casting her old friends aside and knows that her new friends aren't exactly solid.
In the romance department, she may have only had experience with three guys, but it's been plenty complicated.
At home, Jake and her parents are a little too interested in her life and Leigh is too far away to confide in about any of this.

Kristina's so hooked on crank that she doesn't want to experience the pain of coming down. This means she has to be high as much of the time as possible, and that means finding multiple connections.
Finding the drug isn't the problem—the problem is that drug addicts aren't exactly reliable or honest and you often don't get what you pay for.
Worst of all, Kristina's running out of money. Her bank account is low and the birthday money she's saved throughout the years is completely blown.

While all these problems stink, the worst of all is that Kristina's lost the ability to appreciate small things in nature that she used to find astonishing and beautiful. She operates only on one setting—the one she's on when she's high.

Kristina's also begun to measure how good she's feeling by how high she needs to get. She has to take various increments of meth in order to keep herself stable and functioning.
Once she does this, food begins to taste a little bit normal and she can almost sleep and look forward to things coming up, like her seventeenth birthday.