Percy knelt before the cup, ready to drink. The liquid burned like fire and tasted of ash. Then he'd wake up.
The familiar sickness rose in Fathead's stomach and threw his game off. Eating probably wasn't the best idea, but he didn't know when he'd next have a proper meal. He hoped that something sweet would take the edge off his pain. As if she knew, Rhianna brought him a plate with two pieces of pie on it. He was struck by how sweet his fellow users were. That was, when they weren't scheming to take each other off. Unlike Rhianna, who had her baby to give her a reason, he was afraid to come off the drugs. Bad as things got, despite the terrible things he had to do to earn, the only times he truly felt worthless were when he didn't have a girlfriend. He'd go home when he ran out of options. Then it occurred to him that he had no idea what movies were out, what television shows were on or if a new war had broken out. That world didn't matter.
A coiled threat waiting to spring, Tristan waited beside Iz's bed, her knee bouncing with its own energy as she ground her teeth. The room door remained closed as she waited for a doctor to make her appearance. This was not how she wanted to spend another evening. She missed the days of sitting on the floor between Iz's too-skinny, white-girl legs, Iz's fingers scraping the jar of hair-braiding oil, foraging for it to give up the last of its contents. Not that Iz was all that skilled at braiding hair, but her touch was intimate and knowing, her very presence reassuring.
Tristan shifted in the uncomfortable green vinyl chair, which had no give to it so she never found a sweet spot she could rest in. Her black hoodie covered her crest of mauve-dyed braids and shadowed most of her face. She filled the seat with her bigboned frame, though she didn't have a trace of fat. Amber eyes with gold flecks took in the features of her beloved while she slept.
'You about to jump out of your skin.' Iz toted an IV stand behind her as she baby-stepped from the bathroom to her bed. A tattoo of a dragon on the base of her back on full display within the flimsy hospital robe. The fabric of the sheets scraped against her thin skin and she winced. Tristan flinched in her seat, ready to bound to help, but Iz waved her off.
'Just anxious is all.'
'It'll be all right. I'll be all right.'
'Look at you. A good breeze could bowl you over.'
'Doctors said I'd be fitten to get out of here in a day.'
'Shouldn't have been here in the first place.'
'I said I was sorry.'
'Shit. No, baby,' Tristan slipped onto the edge of Iz's bed with a tenderness that belied her stocky frame, more built for fighting than nursing. 'I wasn't blaming you. I was thinking of Mulysa. He did this to you.'
He did other things, too. Maybe. It was all such a haze to Iz. Her head pounded and her vision blurred.
Though always on the scrawny side, Iz's body had shrunk down to a prisoner-of-war thinness. Her sunken cheekbones framed her face, a long nose embedded with a stud appeared more so against the hollow pits of her eyes. The dye of her black hair slowly faded revealing her natural brown hair. Picking at her skin, she caught sight of Tristan's disapproving gaze and tried to find something else to do with her hands. And not think about the terrible burrowing beneath her skin. She wondered if Tristan understood her shame, as she spent so much time in the bathroom picking pellets out of her ass because her body was no longer producing stool.
The first time she smoked pot, she was nine. In the fugue state of her relapse into drug use, she accidently shot up the piece of cotton drawn into her needle. The ride felt like she'd fallen head first onto the sidewalk from five stories up. She remembered throwing up until she blacked out. And Mulysa's hands exploring her. The room spun.
Without warning, Iz sprang out of bed with no trace of recognition in her eyes, and she lunged at Tristan. The first swipe caught the meat of Tristan's cheek, the scratch drawing blood. Tristan cocked a ready fist to defend herself, a survival reflex, but caught herself. This wasn't the first time Iz had flipped out, a kind of psychotic break. Tristan backed away, hands held out as non-threatening as possible.
'Iz, baby, this isn't you. It's me, Trys. I love you, baby.'
Iz chased after her, a glare somewhere between fury and pain, biting at her and arms flailing. Tristan grabbed her arms and wrapped around her as best she could.
'Come back to me. It's okay.'
Exhausting her spindly frame rapidly, Iz heard her, the light of familiarity filling her eyes again, and they collapsed onto the floor.
'What'd you do to yourself, girl?' Tristan whispered, closing her eyes to press back the tears.
Her dad had died from years of alcohol abuse when his liver gave out. Or maybe it was the pills. Iz was too little to remember, and her mother never had a good memory to share of him. Destruction was in Iz's nature. She once took a pair of scissors and tore up all the clothes in her babysitter's closet. This made it hard to find babysitters, not that it stopped her mother from going out. Her mother once abandoned her for two days. It was the first time Child Protective Services was called for her. Mother always left her to go somewhere to cop the best drugs, and she was only about the best. She strung together boyfriends based on who dealt the best stuff. When the school needed to get a hold of her, Iz gave them the cell phone number of her mother's dealer. And when she was out of money and her body was used up, she sold one of her other daughters. That was the last time CPS was called on her mother.
Iz remembered her first stint at rehab. She wasn't ready yet but the court mandated a stint at the Beacon House. When they found her, she had a spray can pressed to her face as she huffed in the janitorial closet. She ran away soon after. When Tristan found her in the alley, a prostitute beaten and left for dead, but still dragging herself along the gravel by her fingers toward her dealer, then she had bottomed out. Tristan sat beside her during the worst of it then. Tristan sent her to school and kept anyone who might distract her from her dreams at bay. And it was Tristan whose anger burned so hot her embrace was like a cauldron. 'Someone has to give Mulysa what he deserves.'
CHAPTER SIX
Not one for existential considerations, Lee McCarrell hated the vague ache in his chest, as if he'd been hollowed out, as he pulled into the abandoned bank parking lot. A piece of hot tail reduced him to his high school days of bad poetry and rubbing his joint by moonlight, pining away for cheerleaders who didn't notice him. Every fiber in him called him the damned fool, the played-out simp, obsessing over a girl. A girl. An errant piece of pussy had him all twisted up inside and chasing after even the hope of catching a glimpse of her. Though, truth be told, it was a fine line between being led by his heart and being led by his dick. For the last few nights he'd made it part of his routine to pass the empty building as often as possible, no better than going by the cheerleader's locker after every class. If a body dropped or he had a run, if he had a lunch break or simply took lost time, he drove by. Across from the Phoenix Apartments, it was a known haunt for prostitutes, but there was only one working girl he was interested in.
Omarosa.
An atrophied brick husk of a building, the drivethrough an easy shelter from the rain, the alcove an easy place to ditch one's works, the overgrown bushes a place to store a change of clothes, and the front exposed to a full view of 38th Street and the Phoenix Apartments. The bank building fell into disrepair once the branch had been sold from one big-name bank to another. And the 'another' decided a branch across from the Phoenix Apartments, in such a high-crime, high-risk, high-insurance area, wasn't very profitable.
A lone woman paced the sidewalk like a panther trapped in a too-confining cage. Sleek, angry, muscles coiled and ready to pounce, only the slightest lock of her head betrayed that she knew he was near. He slammed the car into park and stepped out as coolly as his anxious heart allowed. He stopped to light a cigarette to force him to wait or at least not immediately dash over like a strungout school boy. Crossing the lot with a determined stride, he marched with a rapid pace undercutting his air of cool control. His gaze looked on hers, neither flush nor anxious, oblivious to being the only white boy out walking the streets, marking him as either cop, fiend, or fool.
'Been a minute,' Omarosa said with an aristocratic air despite her black halter top over a blue jean skirt, which had a set of handcuffs dangling between two loops. A blade clung to her inner thigh, a deucy deucy in her purse, and a shotgun in the bushes, all within easy reach. Lee's usefulness had about come to an end and she
