Page 8 - March-April HER

8 MARCH HER
HER Feature
and you can live the life you wish that you would have before you had kids’ and I said, ‘Alright, cool.’”
She said Michael’s prescription of Ritalin was the catalyst that initi- ated her descent into methamphet- amines.
“He said, ‘Here, try this,’” she said. “And I did. It was like nothing I’d ever had before — an amazing burst of energy and I was happy. Everything’s great and nothing can bring me down. It didn’t very last long at all. Maybe, not even an hour. And then he kept giving me more and more over the next couple of weeks. I would crash really hard and get into a deep depression. It would just hit that hard, really fast.
“When I got into everything, time seemed to go really fast. I met one person who introduced me to another person to another person and then I was really deep in what they call ‘the game.’ I was hanging out with people in gangs ... I had a car and it wasn’t stolen. ... Every- one’s like, ‘Oh, well if you give me a ride, I’ll give you drugs.’”
During the half-year, Tilley en- countered several dangerous situa- tions while deep in “the game.”
“I had a gun pulled on me, just a couple weeks into it,” she said. “You would think that would kind of make me think, ‘Yeah, I need to stop. I need to go home.’ But no. It happened twice.
“ ... They were doing raids in all the drug houses. They had all run off and left me at the house I was staying in by myself while the police were coming to raid everybody ... I was in the middle of that and I think there were eight people we dealt with that got arrested in the course of about three days.”
She also described a circum- stance of loaning her vehicle to a friend.
“My car was stolen,” she said. “I let one of the people — Ty in my story — I let him take my car. He had taken it before and he brought it right back so it was no big deal. So he took my car and he didn’t bring it back on time. I get a call from him and he’s running through the woods or something and he’s like, ‘You need to call right now. Tell the police that your car’s stolen ... ’ It turns out he got in my car, robbed several businesses. I was told there were TVs, computers, and all kinds of stuff in my car.
“Later, he came up to the house I was staying at and pulled a gun out in my face and all I did was smile at him and say ‘What’s up?’... That was probably one of the most major things, was just having somebody 8 March/April 2020 ¯ HER MAGAZINE