I glance up when I notice movement by the stairway, hoping someone maybe came out of the house, but it’s just a woman walking around in her robe smoking and talking on her phone.

So I continue with my video diary entry, looking for something to keep me distracted while I wait. Always waiting, but nothing ever comes. “The dream’s been happening every night since I saw him sniff that powder up his nose and I just stood there and let him. It’s become one of those rewind moments where I want to go back, rip the powder out of his hand and tell him to stop it, even if it pisses him off. But I know way too well that life doesn’t come with a rewind button and sometimes you just have to admit your mistakes, learn, and do better the next time…if there is a next time…” I pause, choking back the images of Landon filling up my head. I can’t go there right now. “I’m trying to do better…my mom still hasn’t gotten ahold of Quinton’s dad, but she’s still trying. And trying is something, right?” I don’t sound too convincing as I say it. In fact I sound confused and lost.

My hope is starting to burn out and I keep having to relight it over and over again even though I don’t have a match.

I need a match, but I don’t know where to find one.


Quinton

May 22, day seven of summer break

I’ve been avoiding Nova, even when she comes over to my apartment and bangs on the door. It’s been two days in a row she’s done it, two days since she and Tristan wandered off together. I honestly thought she’d give up, especially after Tristan told me she saw Trace threaten him and hit him. I thought it’d scare her enough to stay away—I wish it had. But it didn’t.

I’m struggling with my worry for her, along with the fact that I’m trying to pretend it doesn’t bother me that she went off with Tristan, even though it does. And pretty fucking bad, too, since I can feel the annoyance through the meth. It makes me want to do more. But at the same time I want to maintain a balanced high and not go completely crazy and lose my temper like that because the last thing I need to do is hurt someone. But not overdoing it is complicated, since it’s a lot easier to overdo it than underdo it.

I’ve been leaving the apartment a little more lately and that seems to be helping a little, keep me distracted, moving, instead of staying still and staring at that stupid water stain on the ceiling. Ever since Tristan informed me that Trace demanded he get him paid back, we’ve been doing whatever we can to scrounge up money. We’ve been breaking into the neighbors’ houses and stealing whatever we can that has value, which usually isn’t a lot, since no one around here owns much of anything, besides drugs, and they don’t keep a lot of those around, since they devour them.

“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 fucking 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 fucking 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.”

“Are you still tripping about the Nova thing? Because I already told you, nothing happened between us. She was actually just asking stuff about you.”

“I know that…it’s not about that…I just worry about you overdoing stuff sometimes.”

He squints and examines me closely, then pats my arm. “Just relax, okay? What I do isn’t your fault.”

“It sure feels like it is,” I mutter as he goes back to unscrewing the light bulb. My hands are shaking with my nerves, my palms sweaty. I can’t believe I’m saying these things aloud, but the more I do, the harder it is to turn off my mouth.

“You really need to stop blaming yourself for everything.” The light bulb comes off and he removes the bottom of it and his eyes light up as he sticks out his hand and dumps out something that was stuffed inside the light bulb. A small plastic bag inside it falls out, but it barely has anything in it.