1 In my dreams, we were huddled up in the zero-degree sleeping bag, back in the squat. The fire was burning in the oil drum, bright as a thousand mother-fuckers, warm like summer on a beach. Lux and I had our hands up against each other in the dim light, just fucking around, measuring them against each other, wishing out loud that we could switch.

I was just settling into the warmth and the serenity of that scene when the shit-ass douche-jockey nurse woke me up. Me, José, and Sebastian were not in the squat in the old IRT station, but the dark-as-fuck lobby of the hellhole hospital we’d dragged Lux to, nodding out from the pills we’d taken. We were all covered in her blood from lifting her body off the street and dragging it there while she moaned this horror-film death-rattle moan that scared the nut sacks off of us.

The nurse’s mouth was in a hard line, and the circles under her eyes were dark. She shook me fully awake roughly.

“Your friend,” she said.

“Yeah? What’s happening?” I mumbled.

“She’s not in great shape,” she said. “She’s lost a lot of blood. We should airlift her out of here first thing when a helicopter comes, but even if we do . . .”

“Is she going to live?” I asked.

She looked at me hard then. The pompous ass-herpe of a jerk looked me up and down in that way that makes you want to puke all over someone. She took in my dirty, patched-up clothes stitched together with dental floss, my black eye makeup, my nodding-off slouch. I had my coat off, and her eyes didn’t miss the scars up my arms from when I lived in a shitty abusive house in a fucked-up little town and cut myself over and over to get my head out of there for fifteen seconds.

“There are a lot of people here who are clinging to life for everything they’re worth,” she said. Her mouth was still in that hard line, like she smelled something terrible. “There isn’t a lot of room on the helicopter. So I’m going to ask you something. Does your friend want to live? Or would it be better just to let her never wake up?”