Page 13 of False Start
“You smell like shit, and you look even worse, Nia. Pay me back another night.” He closes the cabinet doors and walks over to the bathroom door, as if to tell me to shower.
“I can just shower at my hotel,” I laugh.
“Stay the night. You can have my bed.” He’s not joking.
“Miss me that bad? I’m not even high yet. I can drive home.” I walk past him, back to the living room.
“I can’t have my neighbor thinking this is exactly what this is. Sarah Prichard is enough of a bitch without being suspicious of my daily activities,” he finally explains.
“Sarah Pritchard? I think I went to school with her. She lives next door now?” She was a nosy little clarinet player who always got me in trouble for smoking cigarettes in the bathroom.
“Sure fucking does.” He seems annoyed just thinking about her.
“And what do you mean? How are you making money if all your customers are spending the night?” I cross my arms over my chest, trying to figure out what the hell he was doing for money.
“I upscaled. Signed on with some heavy hitters. Now, I justliaisonthe product between them and some big timers.” He emphasizes liaison like there’s a lot more to it than what he’s letting on. “More or less, anyway. None of the product except my personal shit makes its way to my home now. Had to make changes to the game once they gentrified the fuck out of the neighborhood.”
“Wow. I’m impressed,” I admit, walking over to the coffee table and swiping my keys. “Don’t get in over your head,” I warn him, like I’d done a million times before. It makes no difference; Ryan Lee only listens to himself. “I gotta grab my bag out of the car.”
“Pull your car into the driveway. Looks less suspicious,” he clarifies.
“Jesus. That paranoid? You’re almost as bad as Mitch the Twitch,” I joke, rushing out the door before he can react to the insult.
Mitch was a low level dealer who did way too much of his own product and always came up short when Ryan needed to collect. He ended up switching to meth and developed a twitch after enough time, and the nickname Mitch the Twitch stuck. He wound up in prison not too long after for selling meth at a school playground. Anytime he came around, he’d ruin Ryan’s blinds, fingering them to death to make sure we weren’t being watched by the feds.
That kind of paranoia is unavoidable when staying up three to four days at a time.
I used to like the feeling. It made me feel productive, like I could get everything done for the first time in my life. Now, I just want to sleep every feeling away like they don’t matter. Back inside Ryan’s, I’m in the bathroom, undressing in the mirror. My reflection is just another routine I avoid.
I don’t even know who that girl is these days.
The shower is hot and everything I need to feel better after the unexpected beatdown my muscles received today. Less prepared for the hit of losing the person I loved most, but still unprepared for my speed test today. Yet somehow, my body managed to pull it off anyway. Muscle memory or something of the sort. I push the thought of Lonnieback down into the dark recesses of my mind and go back to the twenty seven laps I skated.
Maybe it was the 60 milligrams of Roxy coursing through my veins that made it somehow doable.
I’m not going to overthink this one.
Not tonight, anyway.
5
HARVEY
There’s something about proving an asshole wrong that fuels me like nothing else can, and provingthisparticular asshole wrong has just climbed to the top of my to-do list. I’m the first at the rink, as always, using my spare key to unlock the place before gearing up and eating a breakfast bar. Mo comes in next and prepares the track, bringing the cones out of storage to set up for ladders and drills.
We usually don’t talk anymore until the others arrive. One on one time with other skaters stopped being a part of my interests after Lonnie’s passing. Five weeks without Lonnie is starting to feel like a lifetime.
How long are we supposed to keep doing this?
Keep living like we’ll eventually be okay without them, when I neverwantto be okay again.
Now, everything is changing, and I’m tired of being strong. Being silent feels better. We’re also both well aware there is nothing we can say that would matter anyway.
We’re just here to skate.
B team arrives first, Nancy, Venice, and Bae as if theyrode together, and then K-Otic follows shortly after. None of us know much about K, other than the fact they showed up two years ago, never missed a practice, but never said a word. Their chin length hair is kept slicked back, the same shade of cerulean since the day we met them, never once fading, never a trace of the natural color growing out.
I very much appreciate their presence, especially now that I prefer silence to the sound of voices.
