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 f**king 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 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.”

“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.

He curses and throws the light bulb on the floor, where it shatters. “Dammit!” he shouts, his sneakers crunching against the broken glass as he starts to pace the length of the floor. “I thought I was going to score with that find.”

Outside, the sky is graying. We’ve been here for a while—too long. “Let’s just take what we got and go. The last thing we want to do is get busted and be on someone else’s shit list.”

Tristan glares at me, the look fueled by his craving for his next hit, but gives in and stuffs the bag into his pocket. “Fine, but I’m only selling one of these bags and I’m going to go find someone who will trade me a bag of this for what I’m craving.”

“We need the money,” I remind him, following him to the piece of plastic tacked to the doorframe on the back of the house. “And besides, I hate when you do that shit.”

“Okay, Mom.” He rolls his eyes as he ducks and squeezes through the plastic, stepping outside.

“I’m just trying to look out for you.” I lower my head and wiggle through after him, putting the bag away in my pocket as we cut across the backyard, taking a short cut over a fence to our apartment.

He keeps walking, zigzagging around sagebrush, but he shoots me a quick perplexed look from over his shoulder. “You know, you’ve always been kind of weird with the whole heroin thing, but you’ve gotten a little more preachy the last week and I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t just a coincidence that it started happening a lot more when Nova showed up.” There’s insinuation in his eyes as he turns around and walks backward across the sandy backyard toward the space of desert behind it.

“It’s not because of her.” I maneuver around a cactus, eyeing our building in the distance, wanting to get back so we can stop talking and just do some crystal.

“It would make sense if it was.” He whirls around in the sand and walks forward. “That her goody-two-shoes act would wear on you since you’ve been spending time together…I can see it affecting you.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know…you’re just different.” He shrugs. “Less determined to give up on life because you want her and wanting her means being around to have her.”

I tensely massage the back of my neck as we reach the border of our parking lot. “I don’t want her. She’s just determined to come around.”

“You want her just as much as you did last summer. It’s why you’ve continued to draw her even after you two hadn’t seen each other for almost a year and why you were flipping out the other day when I went out with her,” he says determinedly. “You’re just fighting your want a little harder right now for whatever reason.”

I want to disagree with him again, but the lie gets stuck in my throat, because I do want Nova. A lot. “Want and deserve are two different things.” I draw my hood off, the sun and heat bearing down on me. “Just because you want something doesn’t mean you get to have it. Trust me…” I start to get worked up, thinking about how much I want Lexi and Ryder to be alive, how I’d die over and over again if they could be alive right now. “Besides, Nova’s too good for me and I don’t deserve her, so this entire conversation doesn’t even matter…” I kick at the rocks as I trudge along, my chin tipped down. “Nothing f**king matters anymore.”

He grows quiet for a while, reaching for the cigarettes in his pocket. “You know, I’ve often wondered what you saw the day you died that would make you feel like you don’t deserve anything.”

“I saw nothing, other than that I had to come back because some idiot doctor thought he’d save a worthless life,” I say, sounding harsher than I’d planned.

“Jesus, relax.” He surrenders, holding his hands in front of him, pulling a whoops face, knowing he’s pushed the wrong button.

I shake my head. “And besides, me dying has nothing to do with why I think I don’t deserve anything. It’s because two other people died.”

He starts to slow down and this strange look crosses his face. He opens his mouth and he looks like he’s struggling to say something super meaningful that could potentially free me from this internal misery. I’m not even sure what he could say that could do that and perhaps there isn’t anything. Perhaps I’m just hoping there’s something.

He never does say anything, instead offering me a cigarette. But the strange thing is, for the briefest moment, I saw something—felt something. Hope that perhaps something could change how I feel.