Chapter 06: Streets changed names, but you're still the same ! 

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As it turned out, a lot could go wrong.

If I reflected on progression, the night seemed to deteriorate in phases. It began when we reached Nitrogen, a sleazy nightclub on the outskirts of town. Then continued as three out of the five St. Jude's girls accompanying us went to "use the washroom" straight away, which was really just code for: 'we're gonna snort cocaine off filthy toilet seats'.

I hoped it would end with someone dead on a sidewalk. Preferably me.

I stumbled across the LED dance floor and steadied myself against a cold leather stool by the bar. I didn't know how late it was but over the hours the teeming crowd had diminished to no more than laundry fluttering in a breeze of earthquake-inducing music.

The club wasn't as packed as it should be on a Sunday night, but that didn't make up for how small it was. If I stood straight and extended my arm upwards, my fingers would probably touch the ceiling.

I sat down and heaved breaths through my mouth. The stench of sweat and alcohol still seared my throat.

"Can I get you anything to drink, sir?"

I swiveled at the sound. And nearly stumbled off my seat. The waitress, painted pink under splaying strobe lights, could have been Picasso's lissome muse.

There was something so undeniably abstract about her that slammed into me, harder than reality. Was it the thick brows—cynically arched by romans and conspiracy theorists alike—or the haughty length of her nose? The labyrinth twist of her bubblegum mouth, or the faded acne scars along her cheekbones?

My attention skipped unwillingly down the rich brown river of her demeanour, struggling to take in the individual features meandering in it.

Much like Picasso's paintings, and probably a child's too, her appearance was far too chaotic to find a cynosure.

"Sir?"

I realized I was keeping her waiting and fumbled for a response. The name-tag pinned to her top waved a red flag of remembrance over my eyes. K-A-V-Y-A, the block letters spelled out. "Gin and tonic, please."

She blew out a breath. "ID, please?"

I yanked it free from my pocket and handed it to her. It was fake, but state of the art.

She stared at the plastic, long and hard, before raising her head. The spite in her expression startled me. I didn't actually hear what she said over the music but I read her lips and it was suspiciously like: this is fake.

I coughed. "Pardon?"

The deepest dimples resided as crevices in the plums of her cheeks. So deep that even the slightest twitch of her mouth caused them to surface. She tilted her head to the side, black eyes hard as I wanted my heart to be. "This. Is. Fake."

Today. Was not. My day.

"Fine," I muttered. "Screw it, I don't want a drink." I reached for the card, but she pulled her hand back.

"I'll be keeping this."

"What?"

"Possessing a fake ID is a felony, sir. You can get up to five years." Her eyes narrowed. "But you're under eighteen, so probably a fine. A few thousand dollars, max. No big deal for you."

I stared at her in disbelief. She stared right back. There was a one hundred percent chance she'd figured out who's kid I was. As inconvenient as it was for my own name to be my worst enemy, I knew how to deal with gold diggers.

"I see how it is." I reached for my wallet and placed two twenty dollar notes and a ten dollar bill on the counter. It was the last of my savings from my summer job. "Will this cover it?"

She didn't respond. Her gaze bored into mine, perpetually enigmatic. Without breaking eye contact, she pocketed the cash. Then returned to her state of hostile stillness.

I couldn't help but scowl. "Look, Kavya, is it?" Her name rang a bell but the sound echoed out of my frequency. "I don't have any more money. That was the last of it, I swear. Just give me the damn ID, get yourself a drink. On me. And forget this ever happened."

She didn't even blink. The card, and my fate, remained ensnared in the intricate cusp of her syrup-dipped fingers.

I gritted my teeth. My warped reflection glared back at me. I could have sworn I'd seen the rigid scar under her left eye before.

"What the hell do you want from me?"

When she leaned forward on her elbows, waving her chin like a sword, I realised how tall she was. Must have been a little under my height, and I was near six foot. Seated however, I had to tilt my head up to meet her gaze. That was easier said than done when a gold chain on the pyramid of her toffee clavicles was winking distractingly at me.

Her reply was delayed, words carefully thought out and marinated in acid. "I want to know how the fuck the asshole that drove me out of Liberty Park has the nerve to sit here and act like he doesn't know me."

I nearly choked. On air. Liberty Park. My old elementary school. That's where the sound waves originated. Now that I thought about it she still looked the same, just . . . different.

Totally gorgeous in the weirdest way, and corrosive like bleach. She wore the same expression she had the day I'd poured a bottle of PVA glue in her hair. The one that said she'd murder me with her bare hands.

"Kavya . . . Kapoor?" I said slowly, certain I was pronouncing her surname wrong.

She rewarded me with a nasty smile. Her front tooth was crooked, out of alignment with the rest. "Want a prize?"

"You can't be her," I breathed, "you have boobs." She threw something at me. An ice cube, I think it was, if the ruthless kiss it slapped onto my cheek before skittering soundlessly to the floor was anything to go by. I snapped my eyes back up to her. "Wait till your manager hears about this."

I swear she was Jack Nicholson in The Shining crazy.

Her saw-edged laugh hacked at my chest, wedging deeper until it was trembling within the core of my rotting asphodel bones. "He's my uncle, so go ahead. I'll get you kicked out faster than you can say fuck you."

This was my cue to retort something harsh and brittle, something that'd make her think I'd swallowed a bomb and my words were it's shards, something that'd pierce her skin the way it pierced mine.

I said nothing.

I didn't move as she took the dollar bills out of her pocket and shoved them back into my hand. Didn't breathe as she hissed, "I don't need this, by the way." Didn't flinch when she said, "If anyone's a charity case, here—it's you."

I didn't do anything. How could I?

Her caustic words burned through my treacherous flesh, exposed ever nerve and tendon, sliced the tethers to slip my heart upon my sleeve.

"Fuck you." I hoped she heard, but she didn't so much as scoff, just rolled her eyes.

"Get out, Ryder."

I stood and walked away from her, letting the cash flutter to the floor. Our conversation brewed a toxic taste on my tongue. Something like white lies and diagnosis and the inevitability of death death death.

Fuck, I needed out.

Where the hell had the others gotten to?

I moved towards the end of the club, into one of the backrooms with a forest fire consuming my lungs in the exact same way that words and opinions consumed me whole until I was just another incorrect-but-deemed-correct idea of myself.

The first two rooms were empty. In the third I found them. It was surely a sight to see.

Folded together like yin and yang at the edge of the couch were Chase and Alaska. Chase was nuzzled in the slide of her shoulder, eyes closed as she tapped the tangle of their fingers on his thigh. Beside them, Avery Fernandez straddled Vincent's lap—I looked away before my eyes melted in their sockets.

The music from the club was muted in here under the heave of moans and hiccuped breathes, but another sound was mingled with it; something of an incoherent mumble.

I stepped around the glass table littered with beer bottles, lighters, and Mary Jane's carcass to find Johnny slumped against the wall, head hung like a deadman's, and a short-haired girl on her knees in front of him, yanking his trousers past his hips. He made small noises of protest but didn't stop her straying hands.

"Jesus, what the fuck?" I stalked over and pulled her back by the shoulder. "Get the hell away from him."

She landed in a heap of trigonometric shapes, similar to those that artists used as rough outlines for portraits and those that Mr. Monroe scraped onto the blackboard. Blue eyes dissolving in rings of thick eyeliner glowered at me. "Or what?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose and screwed my eyes shut, trying so damn hard to keep the abuse behind my teeth. 

God, let this night end before I kill someone. "Or nothing. Just leave."

It was a few moments before I felt her brush past me. When I opened my eyes again, she was gone. Alaska and Avery stared at me. I ignored them and crouched down. The lopsided smiled Johnny gave me as I buttoned his jeans made me wonder why I'd been mad at him this morning.

"I miss you," he mumbled quietly. His figure was flaccid to my touch; easily maneuvered by my fingers. I frowned and hooked an arm under his armpit, heaving him up. His eyelids collapsed and he became dead weight against my hip but he kept speaking, hurried and slurred and loud. "I'msosorree, I don' wanna lose. I don' wanna—"

I pressed my palm over his mouth. I could barely handle him sober, how the hell was I meant to tolerate him drunk? "Where the fuck is Eli?"

"Went out for a smoke," Alaska supplied. Both her and Avery were standing now, adjusting their clothes and tugging Chase and Vincent up as well.

For some reason their co-operation made me want to cry.

Get a grip. With Johnny's tongue and teeth scraping my skin and an anchor in the pit of my stomach, I declared to no one and every one in particular, "Right. Let's get the fuck out of here."