“All right,” Tristan says, as calm as can be, and then signals for me to follow him as he heads to the left. “I’ll lead the way.”
Shaking my head, I follow him across the balcony and past the apartment doors. The entire place reeks like cigarette smoke mixed with weed and it throws me back to a place I don’t necessarily want to forget, but that I don’t like to remember either.
There’s a ton of beer bottles and buckets of cigarette butts around the fronts of the doors, old shoes, shirts, plates of rotting food, and one door is surrounded by a lot of trash bags that smell awful. There’s even a plastic chair and table in front of one of the doors with a guy slumped over it, passed out with what looks like a joint still burning in his hand.
“Is that guy going to be okay?” I nod at the guy as the smoke burns at the back of my throat and nose.
I remember.
God, I do.
It smells and tastes just the same.
Feels the same.
The numbness…the way it momentarily takes everything away.
Stop remembering.
Forget.
Remember who you are now.
As much as I fight it, I remember everything. The feelings of being lost, drifting, numb, yet content at the same time. Detached, floating, flying, running away from my problems. I was sinking, in mud, in drugs, in life. And Quinton was there, sinking right beside me, holding my hand as we went down together, but he told me I was too good for it—that I was better than the things I was doing. He did what he could to get me to stop sinking, even though he wanted to sink himself. That day he left me in the pond, he showed me that aside from the drugs, he was a good guy. He didn’t take advantage of my drifting, my confusion, my mourning.
Tristan pauses near the table and follows my gaze to the guy with the joint. “Oh, that’s Bernie, and yeah, he’ll be fine. He does that sometimes.” He plucks the joint out of Bernie’s hands and I think he’s going to smoke it, but instead he puts it out in the ashtray. When he catches me staring at him funny, he shrugs. “What? It’s not my thing anymore.” He starts down the balcony again, glancing over his shoulder at me. “Not really, anyway.”
It takes a lot not to stare at the track marks on his arms and keep my eyes focused ahead. Lea mutters something under her breath, staying just behind me with her arms wrapped around herself. Tristan starts humming some song as he strolls past door after door and I don’t recognize it, but I wish I did for no other reason than that it would be a distraction. I could sing the lyrics in my head, find solitude in music, like I’ve done many times.
When I check on Lea, she has her eyes fixed on pretty much everything, taking in a world she’s never been in. Hell, I’ve never even been in it, not like this, anyway. This is so different from the trailer park—much more dangerous-looking. Its own dark place hidden from the world and the light and I’m not sure what it’ll take to get Quinton out of here, but I need to find that out.
I take slow breath after slow breath, forcing myself not to count them or my heartbeats or how many steps it’s taking me to get to the door. How many stars are in the sky or how many lights there are on a casino just across the street.
Finally Tristan stops in front of one of the doors and looks back at the parking lot, like he’s checking on something. I’m proud of myself for not running to numbers to calm me down, but when he opens the door my pride crashes and shatters like the pile of glass on the floor just inside the door.
“Welcome to our palace,” Tristan jokes as he shoves the door open and the doorknob bangs against the wall behind it, causing the really bony guy slumped on the couch to let out a grunt as he turns over. I think I recognize the intricate tattoos on his arms, most in black, but some in crimson and indigo, but I’m having a hard time placing him.
As I enter, stepping over the threshold and out of the light of the porch, the first thing I notice is the smell. It stinks. Not just like weed or cigarette smoke, but like garbage, rotting food, dirt, grime, sweaty people, and there’s this really musty smell, like a humidifier is on nearby, yet I can’t see one anywhere. It’s all mixed together and it stings at my nostrils. I wonder if this is how the trailer smelled or if I was just oblivious to it—if I was oblivious to a lot of things.
On the floor are three 1970s lamps with beads hanging off the shades, one of which is tipped over but still on. There’s a large blanket with a tiger on it hanging over the window and the ceiling fan is on, but it’s missing one of the blades and it makes this thumping sound as it moves. There’s no carpet on the floor, and there are holes in the walls, water stains on the ceiling, and crack pipes on the floor. It reminds me so much of the trailer they used to live in, only much shittier (and that’s putting it nicely). I’m both repulsed by it and drawn to what’s hidden beneath the surface, the crevices, the pipes on the floor. My senses are heightened because I know that just one or two hits and I’d probably feel twenty times more subdued at the moment, instead of so anxious I feel like I’m going to combust. At least if it were weed, but Delilah told me on the phone that they were into meth now.
“So this is our place,” Tristan says, switching the bag of ice to his other hand as he weaves between the two old sofas, then he gestures at the person on one of them. “And that’s Dylan…you remember Dylan, right?”
I slowly nod, trying not to look so stunned, but I can’t help it. Yeah, Dylan was always a little scraggly-looking, but he looks like a skeleton now, his bald head showing every bump and divot in his skull and his arms as scrawny as mine. And Tristan looks worse under the dim light of the living room, his skin pallid and his hair really greasy and thinning. There’s a red mark on his forehead from the cigarette and he has a few scabs on his cheeks and neck. Only two things run through my mind at the moment. One, what the hell is Quinton going to look like? And two, what the hell would I look like now if I hadn’t walked away from this life?
“And that’s the kitchen.” He nods at a ratty curtain draped over a clothesline.
I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say and I follow him across the living room, noting that the pungent smell in the air is amplified as I get closer to the curtain. It makes me wonder what the hell’s behind it, but also lucky that I don’t have to see, since it’s probably going to push at my anxiety even more.
As Tristan starts down a narrow hallway, I peer over my shoulder at Lea. She’s horrified, her enlarged eyes looking around at the glass bongs, the roach clips, the ashtrays, and a syringe on the floor. When her gaze meets mine, I can tell she’s realizing the extent of what I went through last summer. And although I don’t think I ever made it this far, I still was hovering over the fall that could lead to this, and this could have become my life—I could have ended here.