and then turns and sees her.
Guy—Guillermo Lopez, or as he sometimes calls himself, “Guy-Lo,”—is a taut stretch of rope in a black wife-beater and urban camo pants. His head is shorn to the scalp and even the day’s meager sun gives it a slight shine. The smile that spreads across his face is like two doors thrown open wide, and his arms move to match the gesture, spreading out in welcome.
“Oh holy shit, look who the fuck just came slinking up my six like an alley cat. What up, girl?” He moves in to give her a hug and she extends a finger and presses it hard against his breastbone. All she has to do is give him a look and he gets it and backs off. “Dang, sorry, sorry. Stupid. The fuck was I thinking?”
She shrugs it off even though her body feels like it just touched an electric fence. Irrational response, of course. Not like she doesn’t know Guy. She does. Trusts him like she trusts few others.
More than her own mother, plainly.
And yet. And still. Shit.
They stand there like that for awhile. But Guy isn’t comfortable in silence.
“I’m sorry to hear about what happened,” he says. “Fucked up, man. Real fucked up. I, uh, y’know, I gotta ask and all—that shotgun, the little .410 chicken shooter, you didn’t, it wasn’t…”
“I did. It was.”
His face goes ashen. She knows what he’s thinking so she gets ahead of it:
“The cops don’t care,” she says. “They’re not following the case. There’s no case there. My part in it is… well, they saw it how it happened and they’ve got more important things to worry about. I spent a few months at Emerald Lakes. And the shotgun, they think it’s my Mom’s.”
“Cool, cool,” he says. “Then I guess I’m glad you came by to buy that gun offa me.”
“I need something else,” she says, in part because she likes cutting to the heart of things and in part because she’s too close to the heart of the wrong things. “I need drugs.”
He waves her inside. “Let’s talk.”
* * *
His trailer is nicer than it should be. It also looks like the trailer of a middle-aged housewife, with the kind of décor Atlanta’s mother would’ve chosen. A pink wooden pig hangs by the front door to hold keys and mail. An Amish hex—a blue and red 8-pointed star—hangs above an old avocado-green stove. On the breakfast nook table, the salt-and-pepper shakers are a ceramic sheep and goat respectively, each framed by a cutesy wooden paddock made of popsicle sticks. Powder blue curtains hang at the windows. Blue like a robin’s egg blue.
“It came like this,” he told her once upon a time. “But I kinda started to like it. Made me feel all cozy and shit. What, you think I was going to hang up the Puerto Rican flag all over the place? Soccer balls and and rap posters and shit?”
What’s funny to her is how clean he keeps it. He must dust. Her own mother doesn’t dust. But her gun-and-drug dealer does.
He motions for her to sit at the table, then he plops down across from her, and sets a beer in front of her. A proper beer. Yuengling Black & Tan.
“What you need, girl?”
“I need to not sleep.”
“But sleep is fucking awesome.”
“Not to me it isn’t.”
He leans in. Smiling, like he’s solved all the world’s problems. “You know what you need? You just need to sleep harder. Dang, that sounds like a fucking movie and shit. Sleep Hard 4: Sleep Harder. Whatever. What I’m saying is, you get a little Ambien, that’s like a baseball bat in pill form, you take that and it’s like wham, your head’s a mailbox and it’s hitting the ground.”
“I don’t know.” She sips the beer.
“Plus—plus!—you do it right, Ambien can get you really fucking high, too. You push past the urge to sleep and next thing you know, you’re like, breastfeeding a baby that’s not yours while hang-gliding over the Amazon river basin and shit. You don’t know what the hell happened.”
“A baby that’s not mine? Hang-gliders? That does sound special. For now let’s try something that picks me up rather than puts me down. How’d that be?”
He nods. “Okay. Okay. Yeah. But don’t be asking for meth. I don’t sell that shit up in here. You want that, you head up Grainger Hill way.”
“No meth.” She’s seen what meth does to people. Bad skin. Funky teeth. Every meth user ends up looking like