train at Broadway-Lafayette and wandered east on Houston, looking for the line of bored-looking guys staring at their phones. They didn’t have to look far. It was getting dark. Illuminated by the Bowery streetlights stood a hushed and orderly throng that spanned the four blocks to the store. They walked alongside the line of boys, compelled to check out the store itself before heading back to wait.
“Hey, assholes.”
It was Bruce, a third of the way down the line. He’d left school early, claiming he felt sick. Now they knew why.
“Hey,” Liam said sourly. It was a little difficult to stomach the notion that he and Ryan had been scraping poo and bubble gum off a bathroom floor while Bruce posed on a street corner, playing Fortnite on his phone.
“Thought you were sick,” Ryan grumbled.
“Black Ryan, my man.” Bruce held up his hand to high-five Ryan.
Ryan did not hold up his hand in return. “Come on,” he told Liam. “Let’s go see if we can cut this line.”
“Good luck with that!” Bruce shouted after them.
The line was so long. Liam wondered if they shouldn’t just turn around and go home. “Why are we here again?” he asked.
“Because your parents have plans tonight and you’ve always wanted to witness a drop,” Ryan said. “Plus, your ‘not my girlfriend’ will be impressed if you actually managed to score anything. We ate like a whole pizza before we came here. We can stand up for a couple of hours.”
* * *
Roy Clarke was the first to turn up at the bar. “So what’s with the invisible barkeep then?” he asked. “Is he, like, disfigured or something? Does he wear a mask?”
Peaches poured him a pint of Brooklyn Lager. “He’s not a he.”
“She then. Is she you?”
“No. I just work here. For free. I keep it clean and meet the deliveries and play the drums and offer people drinks if they’re brave enough to come inside. Usually they just open the door and look around and then walk out again. You were the exception. It’s not really a full-fledged bar. More of a ‘space.’ She put up the sign for karaoke tonight though, not me. She’s an artist and she travels a lot. I’m sure you’ll meet her later.”
“I see.” Roy took a sip of his drink. “What’s her name?”
“Elizabeth Paulsen.”
“Aha,” Roy replied. It figured. How could someone so mysterious be so ubiquitous? “Does it smell like formaldehyde in here to you?” he asked, sniffing the bar top.
Peaches pressed her lips together and nodded. Elizabeth had amassed a fuckload of weird shit in the basement. It was all part of her Birth.
“Maybe,” she replied coyly. “I didn’t smell it ’til you said it.”
* * *
Liam flipped up his hood. It was colder than he thought it would be. Ryan was still marching toward the store, ignoring the annoyed glares of the lined-up, waiting boys.
“If we’re waiting on line, don’t we have to go to the end?” Liam asked when he caught up.
“I hope not. I have an idea,” Ryan said determinedly. “I did it once before, at the North Face store when they released a new line of limited-edition parkas.”
Liam glanced at his friend. “Did what?”
“Well, it might be different this time. My mom knows the CEO of North Face. Anyway, we’re going to pretend to be models.”
“Models?” Liam stopped walking. He was tall and skinny and had pimples and a sort of perpetual half-asleep expression. His childhood barber still cut his hair, so he looked kind of like a Roman emperor. “Yeah, right.”
Ryan kept walking and Liam hurried to keep up with him.
“They like real-looking models. We just go up to the door and say, ‘Hey, we’re the models.’ Just let me do the talking, okay?”
“Okay.” Liam was pretty sure this wasn’t going to work, but the worst thing that could happen was they’d get sent to the back of the line, which was where they’d wind up anyway.
The Sublime storefront was totally nondescript aside from the distinct purple logo in the window. The windows themselves were papered over to keep bystanders from peeking inside and taking pictures of the drop. Two enormous bouncer guys in navy-blue bomber jackets stood at the door.
Ryan went right up to them. “We’re the models,” he said.
Liam couldn’t believe it. His face felt hot. Good thing it was dark.
“What models?” one of the bouncers asked. His thick mustache turned up at the corners. He looked like an inflated bullfighter.
“We’re modeling the drop,” Ryan explained patiently, like the bouncer