NIXED LIKE NIXON.  As is typical of my life in recent years, NoMo is looking hella like a compleat bust this year.  Not too likely to do anything else on this story for a minute.  Who even knows?  Life really fucks with me sometimes.  It ain’t even a lack of motivation, believe me.  I wasn’t really feeling the story, but I absolutely could write it, and easily, if there weren’t highly specific factors in my day to day life fucking directly with this kind of activity.  I am not presently allowed to explain.  Maybe some years from now…  Meanwhile, I just post what I had going on right up until the hammer fell.

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I’m low key finna try to write this shits contemporary style.  Did I say low key?  I meant high key.  I’m tired of making every story a period piece set in the nineties because I don’t know what the kids are saying.  I had goog’s butt search write a dialogue between teen girls in the midwest circa 2018, using slanguage in the mode moderne.  Observe.

Here is a short dialogue between three teenage girls—Chloe, Maya, and Sarah—sitting in a parked car outside a suburban Milwaukee house party in 2018…

Chloe: (Looking at her phone, groaning) Maya, tell me you brought the portable charger. My phone is dead, and if I lose my Snapchat streaks tonight I’m low-key gonna cry.

Maya: Yeah, I got you, it’s in my bag. That was so clutch of me to grab it before we dipped. But wait, look at the front door. Is that Hailey walking in right now?

Sarah: (Squinting through the window) Oh my god, yes. Look at her outfit, she is being so extra tonight. Who wears a fur jacket to a basement garage party? It’s giving basic.

Chloe: High-key agree, but honestly? Her makeup is fire. You have to admit she had a major glow up over the summer.

Sarah: Whatever, don’t gas her up too much. She’s only here because she’s trying to link up with Jordan. She’s been so thirsty for his attention all week, but he completely curved her in the hallway today. I was shook.

Maya: Wait, Jordan is even here? I thought he bailed on the squad tonight because he was too barred out from the weekend.

Chloe: No, he’s inside, but he is completely faded right now. I walked past his car earlier and he was straight up nodding in the passenger seat. It was so sketch.

Sarah: Ew. He’s such a fiend lately, it’s wild. His friends need to stop acting like he’s the G.O.A.T. just because he has a plug for pharmaceutical script. Like, half the stuff that guy buys on the street is pressed anyway. He’s tripping.

Maya: Don’t say it too loud, his brother is right over there and he is a total hater. He’ll get salty and try to throw shade at us.

Chloe: I don’t care, Jordan’s brother is a savage, he doesn’t care about anyone. Remember when he ghosted Elena after she bought him tickets to a show? Absolute broke boy behavior.

Sarah: Ugh, I’m finna go inside and get a drink before they start taxing people at the door. Let’s go.

“But wait, look at the front door.  Is that Hailey walking in right now?” is giving me “Hark, what light through yonder window breaks?”  In fair (generic upper midwestern city), where we lay our scene…

I chose 2018 because adult professionals of 2026 would have been those children in 2018, right?  I’m just gonna hafta make up my own pop culture references because I don’t know shit about the musicians from back then except that a third of them died from fentanyl, a third of them had rape allegations and still made that bag, and everyone had facial tattoos.  Right?  Any youths have anything to say about all this?  Psych (zoomer preferred spelling is “sike”).  I know no one within a mile of FtB is young.  Like, baby Vittorio is young, but he doesn’t know he’s on Candid Camera.

Anyway, that’s all in preparation for trying to write some backstoryish snippets that can be edited into the final product, wherever.  Proceeding thusly…

***

“Hey Teeny!  Hey Teeny!”

Christine heard her father Gabe yelling from downstairs just fine, at a lull between tracks.  In her room it was more comfortable to listen on a speaker than on headphones.  But did she want to get up?  She finished her pabst quickly and stood up from the desk.  The empty slipped from her hand and clacked loudly on the floor before spinning to a stop.

“Christine, don’t make me come up there!”

She stepped into the hall.  “I’m twenty-two, Dad.  On god.”

He stood in the bright amber light of the living room, his bald head and big belly dusted with shadow from the dark hall above.  The way his body was angled suggested he had company down there.  “Your little friend wants ta see you.  Should I send ‘er up?”

“No.”  She considered the state of her hygiene.  “I’ll be down in two minutes!”

“Alright.”  He conveyed her message and she disappeared into the room.

It was barely brighter than the hall, under pink accent lights and her monitor’s cool glow.  She slid in front of the screen again and opened its cam.  Her dark thick eyelashes made mascara and eyeliner a low priority, but her face had a sickly gleam that needed repair.  The AC worked just fine, but somehow summer found a way to tease the salt out of people.  She wiped the bulk of the ruined foundation off her face with a dirty t-shirt like a savage, then daubed the remainder away with proper makeup wipes from the front center drawer of her desk.  Christine did want to keep it to two minutes or less, because people were less annoying in life if you didn’t keep them waiting.  Hopefully it wasn’t anyone she wanted to look good for.  Concealing blemishes, redoing the lipstick, that would be it.

As she wheeled around to grab a hoodie, she was surprised to see the sun was still up, painting the neighbor’s house in pink and orange.  Then it was downstairs, to emerge blinking into the bright lights of the living room.  Gabe was leaning on the back of the couch, Christine’s visitor too uptight to sit for the wait.  It took her a moment to remember who she was.

“Emberlyn?”

“Christine, hey.  It’s Carlin.”  She was a younger black girl – not yet eighteen – who hardly bothered with makeup, thick glasses and combed hair in a fuzzy unglamorous pony tail.  They were both in charcoal grey hoodies, Emberlyn’s with cursive pink branding.  Her hands were buried in pockets.

“We haven’t dated in forever.  Is he OK?”

Emberlyn looked furtive and before she could speak, Gabe cut in.  “If they’re old news, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t be dragging her into his business.”

“I can speak for myself, Dad.  Emberlyn, what’s going on?”

“He’s on some broke boy shit, but it’s bad.  I’m worried.”

Gabe rolled his eyes and went back to the recliner.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but why do you think I can help?”

“I don’t know.  I just didn’t have any better ideas.”

“Alright.”  She shot a look back upstairs, half wondering if she should try to look any better, but that was absurd.  Carlin’s opinion about her appearance was far down the list of her concerns in life.

The short stairs spilled them into the street with momentum, like the house had spit them out.  Very slight hills rolled under the streets, so walking was alternately fast and slow, with the slower times making you wonder if you should’ve biked it.  Still, it was only eight blocks to the housing project.  Christine had gone to the same schools as those kids, but was fortunate to have never lived in those buildings – those blistering off-white boxes in erratically mowed fields of trampled dead grass and dandelions.  There were no fences and the curbs were short enough that people often treated the grass as additional parking – especially for parties.

No party raged that night but kids were everywhere, in small groups either celebrating life or quietly conspiring.  A clique of ten to thirteen year olds squatted around a ripped piece of cardboard in a patch of bare sand, playing an unknown game for unknown stakes, someone in their crowd hiding a vape as the young ladies passed them by.  Christine remembered the way, and reliving that walk brought back other memories too, shadowing her steps, threatening.  The air was a strange stifling melange of dust, tobacco, tar, and something between the scent of a port-a-potty and tang.  Walking through the door added sawdust, mildew, and dirty diapers to the mix.  A solitary cockroach raced away from them in terror, until it could find a gap to disappear into.  Milk white dome lights were peppered inside with dead bugs, and one dome was missing, the exposed bulb searing retinas as they walked below.

Emberlynn didn’t have to stop to unlock the door, walking right in.  Just past the strip of a kitchen and jammed-up closet, they were in the living room, no Carlin in sight.  Their mother was sitting on the couch in front of the TV, which blared commercials.  She had been staring through the screen into some unknown space beyond, mind stewing with emotions she was trying to suppress through drink, when the sight of Christine provoked her.  “Whossat bitsh?  Getter tha fuck outta my house!”  She was a pathetic species of monster, easily ignored.

The apartment mostly smelled like stale laundry, powerful enough to drown out the miasmas of the neighborhood, until they got to Carlin’s end of the unit, where pervasive cannabis residues were slightly less disgusting.  Despite the anticipation of this miserable scene, Christine had a moment, close to Emberlynn’s shoulder, when she was able to have a flash of sympathy for the girl.  Regardless of her own good hygiene habits, her clothes would smell awful until she had a chance to move out.

Carlin’s room was small, dominated by his bed and the window that ran along the top half of the wall.  He was laying in darkness, the lights off and the sun having nearly disappeared in the time it took them to walk over.  A passing car’s headlamps briefly illuminated a history of smudges and filth on the windowpane.  Lavishly produced beats and strings looped under a young man mumbling about drugs and suicide, easily filling the room despite the small size of the speaker – a bluetooth thing, permanently left on the wall charger.  Emberlynn didn’t let Christine flick the light switch, instead putting her cell on flashlight mode and resting it on a dresser, pointed at the ceiling.  The outlines of the body in that bed became ever so slightly more clear.

“I brought someone to see you.”  She toed the sole of his bare foot with her sneaker and he jolted.  “Bruh.  Look at us.”

He rolled onto his side for just a moment, then back onto his face, crying a muffled lament into his pillow.  Emberlynn stepped as close as she could to the wall and gestured for Christine to get closer to him.  She edged past her and crouched beside his bed.  “Carlin.  Why is your sister all shook?  What are you doing to yourself?”  Her voice cracked, uneven.  She couldn’t tell if she was too quiet to pierce the heavy blanket of sound, or if she was so loud as to sound shouty and rude.

He said something else she didn’t understand, but at least it seemed less choked with tears.

The singer said, “Swalla ’nuff pressie kill a mule erranight, Flintstone cut wih fent til it geh my shit right.”

Carlin was a Schiele sketch toned with charcoal – the grey of his flesh, of his tank top and underwear, indistinct from the grey of his mattress.  Shadows made lines of erratic thickness with blobs of deeper dark.  Christine hated to think about the bugs that could be crawling over her body, but needed to get closer, if she was going to be of any use at all.  She spread her palms on the mattress and leaned down.  The image of him became more clear, his face still mostly smashed into a pillow.  His hair was a small and unhealthy afro, not as black as his sister’s.

“Carlin, what are you going through?  What is this?”

“Why she hafta bring you here?  Fuck.”  She could finally see his face, smell his ill breath.  He looked like a child who dropped their candy in a pile of ants and aged forty years from sorrow.  Wet and dry by streaks.  Discolored.

Christine shivered and bit her lip, coloring her teeth and ruining her lipstick.  “Never mind that.  Now that I’m here, I wanna know.  What’s going on with you?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I don’t have all night.  You know Emberlynn don’t get it, might as well take a shot on someone else.”

He pressed a weak fist against his forehead and scowled deeply, trying to collect himself enough to speak.  “I just.  I’m just realizin’ this is all it is.  There’s dudes that got paper, and dudes that don’t, and I’ll never.  I know, you’ll say run that hustle.  I can’t!  I don’t have any fuckin’ hustle.  I got nothing.  I’ll never have nothing!”

“Lotta broke people don’t trip like this.  There’s more, right?”

“I need shit too!  It’s like god made me just to suck and hurt and die.  Just another cuck.  Just a bad joke.”

“What is it you need, Carlin?  You didn’t need me; I know that much.”

He couldn’t speak, chewing on his fist.

“It’s drugs.”  Christine stood up.  “Cry me a fuckin’ river, dude.”  She turned to Emberlynn.  “Get him some kinda opioids and then get him in rehab.  He’s just fiending, is all.”

He flailed and she jumped, but he caught her arm.  “It’s not just the drugs!  OK, it’s the drugs, but fuck!  It’s everything!”  Now everyone could easily be heard over the music.

She slipped out of his grip and stood up, one step out of reach.  “Then stop bein’ a bitch and tell us what it is!”

“I seen the future!  I can work at one fuckin’ burger joint after another until I die.  I can prowl cars and bum and snake fuckers too.  For what?  It ain’t worth it!  It’s all we get and it ain’t worth it!”  He sank into the corner where his bed met the wall, conforming to the space like a puddle of slime, balled fists on his forehead again.  “I can’t even afford a gun or some pills to get the fuck out.”

Why not the cord on these broken blinds?  Christine thought it but would never say it.  Nobody should have to do that, but she didn’t know what else to say instead, so she hung in that gloom silent and breathless.

Emberlynn said, “Bitch!  If my brother kill himself, it’s gonna be your fault.”

Christine shook her head and ran out of the horrible room.  Behind her the ghost of a rapper said, “You wannit done right gotta do it ya self.”  An angry pink woman sneered and spat at her from the kitchen, sloshing her plastic cup of wine, and then she was in the hall.  Out the door, over the grass.

She should have been arguing against Emberlynn’s parting shot, in her head if not out loud, to prevent any sense of guilt from taking root.  She couldn’t make herself do that.  It was all about getting away.  Christine snagged a bicycle out of the yellow grass and started rolling fast.

“HEY!,” a voice cried out.  She was moving so fast the single syllable diminished before completion.

Having to brake for a car along the way snapped her out of it, and realizing she’d stolen some kid’s bike, she dropped it at the intersection and ran the rest of the way, going a block off route to reduce the odds of getting seen by pursuers.  Not that she was afraid of children, but she was very afraid of socially awkward situations.  Thanks, Emberlynn.

The block one down from her house was the end of the residential area, more dilapidation showing in those homes, the blocks just across the street from it a flatland of vast parking lots used by the commercial tenants of warehouses and factories.  A soaring overpass housed a flock of pigeons settling in for the night, and the last streetlamps came to life.  Like a signpost at the corner of the homes, a convenience store buzzed and gleamed.  She went inside…

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