Kristina's Relationship With A Friend Character Analysis

As if Kristina’s troubling relationship with her father is not enough for her to deal with, she must also cope with the disconnectedness between her and her mother, who is too self-absorbed to bother with her daughter. Kristina recalls, “I’ve been alone since my mom met Scott. He sucked the nectar from her heart like a famished butterfly. No nurture, no nourishment left for Kristina” (Hopkins 13). This horrific confession makes it blatantly obvious why Kristina eventually turned to drugs to deal with the stress of her everyday life. Kristina feels neglected and unimportant not only in the eyes of her father, but her mother, too, which is a difficult realization at any age, but especially difficult as a teenage girl. When Kristina gets off her returning flight, Marie knows “she caught sight of something not quite right,” but she ignores her motherly intuition and the fact that Kristina is still high on meth (Hopkins 186).

Later on in the novel, when Kristina is coming down off of yet another high, her mother asks, “You’re not in trouble are you?

These new friends… are they…okay?” (Hopkins 324). Clearly Marie knows Kristina is not hanging out with the right sorts of people, but since she cannot be bothered with getting into the details of Kristina’s increasing addiction, she just beats around the bush, knowing Kristina will not confess. Kristina wonders, “Why couldn’t she just say what she meant, as in they’d led me down the path to hell” (Hopkins 324). She is aware that Marie is wise to the fact that she is doing drugs, but Kristina knows that her mother does not want to confront the situation and actually deal with it, so she simply ignores it. Even Scott comments, “Are you blind, Marie? You don’t sleep like that unless you’re crashing. Come on. We both know the

scene. You just refuse to believe it” (Hopkins 448). Although her husband is telling her that Kristina is doing meth, Marie still refuses to address Kristina’s drug problem with her because it requires too much effort and energy that she could she could spend focusing on her own self. Since neither one of her parents pay any attention to her, Kristina resorts to acting like Bree in the hopes that her mother will notice her, but all this does is drive them apart even more (Hopkins 5). As Kristina becomes more like Bree, summoning her “when dreams no longer satisfy, when gentle clouds of monotony smother thunder, when Kristina cries,” her mother intervenes less and less, failing to pay attention to the warning signs, including failing grades, temper tantrums, unusual sleeping patters, habitual lying, and stealing from family members, that prove her daughter is a full-fledged addict (Hopkins 6). Kristina’s strained relationship with her mother pushes her father into the monster’s grasp, since being high allows Kristina to forget about her family issues.