Yoss said it had to do with the drugs.
I often wondered what Bug had been like before he became hooked.
“You’ve got to stop encouraging him,” Di scolded me but I waved away her comment.
“She’s the sweet one, Di. It’s why Yoss treats her like she’s made of fucking glass,” Karla sniffed, her lip curling.
Karla and I would never be friends. She barely tolerated me and I had many a fantasy about connecting my fist with her face. But we had the same friends.
We loved the same boy.
And that made dealing with each other a necessity.
Even when that particular boy wasn’t around.
Shane took a long drag from his cigarette. A trunk honked somewhere, the sound reverberating off the cement uprights around us, like an echo.
He rubbed his hands together, blowing on them. “Fuck me, it’s as cold as a witch’s tit out here.”
Karla pulled her sleeves down over her hands, tucking them between her thighs. “Maybe we should head back to The Pit,” she suggested.
“It’s not too bad out here,” Di immediately countered.
None of us wanted to go back to The Pit. Even though it’s where we slept at night, it wasn’t a place we liked to spend too much time.
Bad things happened there. Even during the day.
Just last week two guys, that had shown up only weeks before, raped a girl. Police had descended. Arrests were made. Yet we didn’t feel any safer.
Then two nights ago, a man was found dead in the old warehouse of an apparent overdose.
Again, we had had to take off for most of the day while the police combed over every inch of The Pit, arresting known drug dealers, intimidating the runaways. Yoss kept us all away until they had cleared out. And when we returned, Yoss’s CDs were gone.
I was upset, but he told me not to worry about it. Holding onto things was next to impossible in The Pit. If it was important, you had to carry it with you.
“I would give anything for a mocha latte right now,” Karla said, shivering slightly.
Shane, noticing how cold we all were, pulled an empty trashcan over, filling it with litter off the ground. He spent several minutes trying to get it to light.
“Here. This will probably help,” Bug said, pulling a small bottle of brown colored liquid from his coat pocket.
Shane took it and opened the lid, sniffing. He made a face. “What the hell is this shit? Lighter fluid?”
“It’s homemade hooch. Not bad either,” Bug said. Shane dumped it on top of the garbage and put the lighter to it. It immediately went up in flames.
“Yeah, if you don’t mind your insides rotting,” Shane muttered, handing the bottle back to Bug, who took a long swig, coughing afterwards.
The five of us huddled closer to the small fire, holding our hands out, trying to get warm. “Okay, Imi, if you could be anywhere right now, where would it be?” Di asked, starting the familiar game.
When we didn’t have food in our bellies, we fed off dreams.
Off possibilities.
It sustained us when we had nothing else.
“The beach. It’s what she always says,” Karla interjected before I could say anything.
“I didn’t askyou,Karla. So shut up,” Di snapped. Karla snorted, not put out by Di’s attitude towards her. It was their dynamic.
