For a second, I was weightless. Then I pitched forward, rolling right and falling on the floor. The carpet was soft against my bare legs. My cheek pressed against the plastic back of the passenger seat. I couldn’t move my limbs. They were too heavy, colossal… I was woozy, barely conscious still. I didn’t know who was taking me where, but I was calm. Tranquil. I was stuck and couldn’t adjust my twisted legs, but that was fine. The streetlights and neon signs shined on my face through the raindrops running down the window, suppressing the panic attempting to jolt me into action.

“Here!” a woman screeched once we arrived at a dark suburb with flickering street lamps. We had parked. She opened the door above my head and reached in. I felt her hands on me, gripping my arms too tightly and digging her red and gold acrylics into my flesh. My legs were jammed in the crevasse between the seats, but she tugged until my joints threatened to pop apart. Two swears later, she stormed to the other side of the car to unwedge my legs before dislodging my limp body, heaving from the effort. The decades and dozens of men had not been kind to her, to say the least. My back landed on the rain-soaked sidewalk with a dense thud, leaving me dazed. She threw my suitcase at my head before slamming the door and speeding off with a grin as wide as her self-injected Botox allowed.

I was alone.

The clouds were still weeping, refreshing me with their tears so my mind could clear. I still felt like four conjoined noodles, sprawled out on wet concrete. A few minutes in the icy rain soaked me through. My D.A.R.E. t-shirt clung to me out of fear. The water permeated my old yellow shorts and wet my underwear. Worries of pneumonia set in as I started to shiver, regaining mobility.

While I calculated my odds, a wobbly stick figure staggered down the street. It was a man with unkempt hair and shadows where his eyes should’ve been. He extended a long, trembling hand to me, palm up. I told him I had no money, voice shaky. The rain muffled me, and I didn’t have the power to speak louder. I scooched back, still too leaden to move much.

The storm intensified until the droplets hurt. He pleaded now, hoping I was a liar. His tone was tormented, but I couldn’t readily access my suitcase even if there was any money there. My dear aunt wouldn’t have left me any of my funds. And maybe, I didn’t want him to overdose; I was just cruel and righteous enough to let him keep suffering. I stammered apologies, but I wasn’t a merciful creature.

Both with dripping hair and exposed limbs in late December, we weren’t so different, he and I. In fact, I had considered his path the defiant alternative to my sad imitation of life. But I was especially glad in that moment that I never crossed to the other path.

He sniffled and screamed.

He lunged towards me with impossible speed for someone so wasted. I tried to evade him, but it took me two seconds to process one. He crashed on top of me and searched, grabbing and frisking me for pockets. It didn’t occur to him, nor would it have stopped him, but his skeletal hands were squeezing things they shouldn’t be. He pulled my pyjamas beneath my hip bone by their shallow, empty pocket. So I shouted.

“FIRE! FIRE, FIRE!” until he stuffed his fist into my open mouth. It didn’t fit completely, but it was enough to shut me up.

A light across the street.

Before I could figure, the wraith was gone. Another man stood behind me, or rather, above, as I was still on the pavement, gasping. The adrenaline made me shakier; it mixed strangely with whatever sedative my sweet aunt gave me.

“Are you okay?”

The man now stood at my feet, bent over with a hand out to help. I stared and considered, heart still racing. But I decided to take it, and he yanked me up with a surprising amount of strength.

“What happened?” He paused, studying me. “Don’t run away from home underdressed.”

I opened and closed my mouth, knowing he would’ve dismissed me as another crazy brat. I was suddenly self-conscious, exposed and somehow more alone.

“I was staying with my aunt,” I explained. “She dropped me off here… She doesn’t like me much. I didn’t run away, I’m not crazy! I just look that way.” Believe me, please.

“I thought my family was awful.” He snickered. “Do you wanna come inside? It’s not very… well-furnished, but at least you can get dry. You’ll catch a cold out here.”

I was wary of strangers, but I had nowhere else to go and had already been too close to death in that deluge. I got on my knees and crawled over to my suitcase. No phone. Everything else was there except my IDs and money. My wallet was empty. I was lucky she didn’t have a fireplace in that McMansion.

I closed it and stood up, vertigo kicking in. I swayed, but the man caught me by the arm. It was a frail twig in his veiny hand. I jerked reflexively—not enough to break free from his grasp, but enough for him to tighten his grip.

“Let’s go inside. I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

The rich timbre of his voice made him sound trustworthy, but aunts were generally trustworthy too, even more so than the strangers that lost girls would encounter in the middle of the night. It was a derelict neighborhood, and it granted me freedom. Even if I were walking to my end, I decided, at least it would be my decision for once in my life. And in that sense, I would have won.

He led me in, and I went without a fight.

We walked up a flight of slanted stairs, one step at a time. The dirt stuck to my wet soles, making me wince with each step. He carried my suitcase and held my elbow in case my legs gave out.

We entered a room that was darker than the windowless hallway, and he didn’t bother switching on the lights. I pictured my body battered, being dissolved in acid, as he washed my blood off of his hands.

“You can change in the bathroom and dry off with the towel.”

He sounded casual, as if it were a normal situation. I tracked him by the sound of his steps, wondering what weapon would crack open my skull until he shined a flashlight in my face and stumbled over an apology. With the light, he unzipped my trunk and closed it after I grabbed another set of clothes. My muscles relaxed just slightly. They were still frozen stiff.

He pointed to the bathroom and apologized again for the untidiness. He handed me the flashlight before closing the door. I was afraid of what dead vermin I may find, but there was only an unimaginable amount of mold and a hint of sewage odor. The towel smelled—not badly, but it did—and it, too, had spots of black, but I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or anything of the sort, so I rubbed it all over me and avoided dampening my fresh clothes. I dried my feet with the cloth after rinsing them in the tub. The freezing water felt warm on my toes.

“Sorry the apartment’s so cold. We lost power and don’t have a generator and there’s no heat anyways.” He studied me. “The-there are blankets over there if you’re that cold.”

I was putting on a black puffer jacket over the navy sweatshirt, which was bulky from two other layers, and that was apparently concerning.

“Isn’t that where you sleep?” I asked. There were no doors to other rooms besides the bathroom. There was no bed, no mattress, no dining table, just a corner with two blankets, a kitchen, and a desk with an old computer and swivel chair accompanying it. I didn’t need to swing the flashlight around conspicuously because the apartment was small enough to be illuminated by just pointing it towards the popcorn ceiling.

“Well, yeah,” he replied. “But you could take them. I don’t need them.”

“I’m wearing five pounds of clothes right now,” I declared. “You need blankets more than I do.”

I shined the light at a wall clock. 1:07, frozen.

“I’ll leave tomorrow morning.” I pressed my lips together before asking to sit in the chair till then.

“Sure,” he said with a nod. “I… Nevermind. I think the corner would be more comfortable, and I’m sorry it’s a mess.”

“No, don’t worry. It’s fine, really.” I sat in the chair and made it squeak. My torso pressed against the back, and it kept on pressing until I was on my hands and knees with the seat tipped over, under me. I said sorry again and made my way to the corner.

“So why did she just toss you here?” he questioned. “Did you do something bad? Got drunk at a party? Something stupid like that…”

I raised an eyebrow at him. The flashlight had been turned off, but I knew my glare was burning into him. “I would never. I wouldn’t dream of it. Drink kills you slowly, with no dignity. I’d pass out before I could ever…” We trailed off often, but it didn’t need to be said. “She had to take me,” I said. I started at the beginning. “My mother is gone. The monster’s in prison. They shipped me off to its sister. I’m staying with her and Jenna until I turn eighteen, and I’m close.” Inhale. “Two more years. I would try for emancipation if I had a spine of any kind.”

“I’m not eighteen, and I live alone.” It was too nonchalant to be a brag.

“I guess I’m less mature than you,” I replied.

There was a period of silence before he asked, “Do you want something to drink? My friend brought me some root beer the other day.”

I agreed. We each had a bottle. He opened mine for me. I was still woozy, like I had awoken from an extended nap. I took a sip and scrunched up my face, but I kept sipping nevertheless.

As the liquid flowed down throats, stories welled up. He dropped out of school when he was twelve to work, support his family. The pay wasn’t nearly enough. His mother told him his father died when he was a baby, but he had faint memories of a large, bald man. He searched his surname up and found the phantom on Facebook. I told him about my aunt, the threats and flying objects, the interminable shrieking from that woman’s puffy lips. She was a divorcee, I told him. Bought custody of her daughter, whose neurodivergence she refused to acknowledge. It was always a competition between me and her. And the old men. She had a new one every single weekend, and they sneered at me, infallibly. Then one of them got too bold, and she decided that I had crossed the line.

“If I find that man, I’ll put ‘em in his grave,” he assured. His words lifted the corners of my chapped lips.

We kept talking, easy like that. The rain hushed us, let us whisper about our pasts like they were secrets we swore on our lives to keep. Euphoria washed over us. We chuckled at every tragedy, every sin. We emptied our bottles and simmered, soothed, heard the hisses of the storm and let ourselves drift.

Hours passed.

The sun rose. I didn’t. Neither did he. Our bodies slumped against each other, friends for one night and forever, waiting for the landlady to discover our corpses and spread rumors like wildfire: the empty glass bottles, the blankets that smell like skin. We lied there, inert, our hearts still—at peace.