Then, I went back to where the pills were scattered on the ground. I searched around and found a lone Xanax. On second thought, I grabbed a random handful and shoved them in my mouth. Something was bound to happen if I ate them all.

4 Back at the station that night, I stared into the fire as José slept fitfully and Sebastian tossed and turned and puked his fucking guts out. The pain in my leg was throbbing, and it was almost like it got into my head and made it raw and bloody there, too. I couldn’t keep my mind off of the night that Lux disappeared. I kept replaying it over and over.

Lux, José, Sebastian and I had been down in the streets. We were pretty lit, and we were yelling at each other, goofing around, throwing rocks we found through windows down near the ground just because why the fuck not? We didn’t even hear them coming.

Suddenly, they were all around us, a bunch of guys. As soon as I saw them, I almost shit myself. It was obvious that they wanted to fuck us up. Hell, they must’ve known we didn’t even have anything to steal. We were in the streets of an abandoned city, and we were surrounded.

“What’s that?” one of the guys asked. “A bitch? Or a faggot?”

“It looks like a faggot to me,” another guy said.

I grabbed Lux’s arm and tried to back away, but one of the guys pushed me from behind.

“You got a pussy or a dick, faggot?” another guy said, laughing. “Wanna show us?”

My heart was beating so fast that my head felt tight. Putting my hands up in front of me, I feigned surrender, all while backing up. As soon as I ran into the guy behind me, I bent my elbows and swung them back, hard, into his stomach. If I’d had a gun, I would’ve killed him. Ass blossoms like that, they don’t deserve to fucking live, it’s them or us. But I didn’t have a gun or anything, and I was fucked up and didn’t even have a crowbar.

He fell down and we pushed through the circle of them. I saw flashes, something making a quick motion in the dark. I ran and ran and it wasn’t until blocks later that I realized there were fewer of us than there were supposed to be.

“Lux? Lux?” I said. Her tall, thin frame was the one that was missing. I leaned over my knees and tried to catch my breath. “Where the fuck is Lux?”

“I don’t know, Jesse,” José said. “We gotta get outta here. We have to get back to the station.”

“No, we need to find our goddamn friend, you shit socket,” I said. Would I have done it for someone else? Even José or Sebastian? I didn’t know. But it was Lux that was missing. “Come on.”