“I hate to say this, but I’m a little worried we’re not going to be able to come up with enough money,” I say as Tristan digs through dresser drawers. We’re in one of the few houses on our street, although it barely qualifies as a house. The roof’s got duct tape and mold all over it, the walls are just Sheetrock, and the back door is a piece of plastic, which allowed us to easily tear through and slip inside after checking through the windows to make sure no one was home.
Tristan has this needy look in his eyes that he sometimes gets when he hasn’t shot up for a while. “Yeah, sort of…but I know we’ll figure something out—we’ll get enough money to pay him back, just like we did with Dylan.” He pauses, wavering. “We could maybe even borrow some from Nova if we have to.”
“We’re not doing that,” I say harshly. It still annoys me as much now as it did two days ago when he told me she offered to help out. “She doesn’t need to get involved in this.”
“Fine.” Tristan takes something out of the dresser drawer. “Jesus, would you relax? Every time I mention her name you get all crazy.” He looks down at the small plastic bag in his hand, which has maybe a gram of crystal in it. “Shit, this sucks. There’s hardly anything in this.”
I flick the bag with my finger. “You could probably make like fifty to seventy-five bucks off this by selling it.”
Frowning, he shakes his head. “While that kind of helps the owing-Trace-money problem, it still doesn’t help that I need a fix.”
“It does too,” I say. “You can take a small fix of that and still sell the rest.”
“This isn’t what I want.” His fingers curl around the bag and he grips it tightly.
It sounds like a car pulls up so I quickly go check out the window, nervous we’ll get caught. But it’s pulling up next door. Still, I’m uneasy.
“You need to stop doing that shit.” I draw the hood of my jacket over my head. It’s hotter than hell outside, but I want to stay as covered up as possible just in case someone comes home, because they’ll be less like to identify me that way. “Seriously. Lay off the f**king smack, Tristan.” I’m being a hypocrite—I know this. But I feel this need to try to protect him like somehow it makes up for killing his sister. “It’s only going to get you into more trouble than you already are.”
He glares at me as he searches through the next dresser drawer, which is filled with clothes and empty cigarette packs. “Why are you so sure that doing crystal is better than doing smack?” He gives up on the drawer and turns toward the lumpy mattress on the floor. He hands me the bag of crystal and then kneels down on the floor and looks underneath the mattress.
“I don’t think it’s better—none of this is better. I just think smack’s a little more dangerous than crystal. I mean, look what it’s doing to Dylan—he’s going crazy,” I tell him as he drops the mattress back down on the floor, dusting off his hands. “You putting that stuff into your veins with a needle is bad and besides you totally pass out when you’re on it.” I follow him as he gets to his feet and goes back into the living room/kitchen/bathroom that we walked through when we first entered the house. “Someone could beat the shit out of you and you wouldn’t even know until you woke up with bruises all over your body. And at the moment someone does want to beat the shit out of us.”
“I know all this,” he insists as he wanders back toward a floor lamp beside a couple of overturned buckets and a large plastic bin that acts as a kitchen table nestled in a corner of the room. “And Dylan’s been going crazy since before he started using heroin. He has a lot of issues, you know.”
“Like what?” I ask, trailing after him, looking under the bin, checking if there’s anything of value hidden under it.
“I’m not sure about all of them,” he says, digging through a box on the floor, which has a few light bulbs in it, a sheet, and a lighter. “But when we first started hanging out, when he was normal, he’d talk about how crazy his mother and father were. Although he never gave me any details, I got the impression it really affected him.”
I peek under the buckets, too, searching anyplace I can think of where people would hide their drugs or anything else of value. “Well, I’m getting a little worried…that he might be losing it more than we all can handle.”
“You always worry.”
“And you never worry,” I tell him, dropping a bucket back on the floor when I see a dead mouse under it. I shake off the nastiness and move away from the bucket. “Sometimes I wonder if you see the bigger picture of how much shit we’re in if we can’t come up with the money to pay back Trace.”
“We’ll come up with the f**king money…we’ve already got like two hundred.” He nods at the bag in my hand. “Plus fifty more if we can make a quick sale with this.” He tucks the bag into his pocket. “And if I have to, I’ll find where Dylan hides all his shit he uses to deal. Now there’s an easy way to come up with money.”
I shake my head. “Don’t go there yet. Not when he’s acting crazy and has a gun,” I say. When he doesn’t respond, I step in front of him and add. “Tristan, promise me you won’t do something that stupid. It’s not going to fix the problem, only make it worse.”
He scowls at me, but says, “Fine.” He bends over and looks down into the lampshade, then reaches up and pulls the chain to turn the light on, but it doesn’t so much as make a click. “You know, you need to stop worrying all the time about what I do.”
“I can’t stop worrying about what you do,” I say as he muses over something, then takes the shade from the lamp and chucks it on the floor. “I feel like it’s my job.”
“Why would it be your job?”
“Because I’m the one that put you here…because I killed your sister.” Wow, I think I’m a little more out of it than I thought. Either that or Nova might be making me crazy still, despite the fact that I’m shutting her out. All this making me talk about shit has made me say something aloud that I’m not sure Tristan or I am ready for.
He pauses in the middle of unscrewing the light bulb and searches my eyes. “Fuck, how much have you had today?”
I glance down at the bag in my hand and then shrug. “I don’t know…maybe a little more than I usually do, but not that much.”