Kimmie didn’t throw away her LOVE lollipop this time. Instead she opened it in the elevator with her teeth, spitting out the cellophane wrapper onto the floor. She suddenly felt hungry, ravenous even. She had barely eaten her lunch, and in fact hadn’t eaten much of anything for days. But she felt different now. As soon as she put the lollipop in her mouth, Kimmie bit right into it, enjoying the crackling sound of the candy breaking apart, splintering between her teeth. She was so busy crunching the cherry-red candy, she hadn’t even noticed there were two men her father’s age in the elevator staring at her.

“What the fuck are you staring at?” Kimmie snapped. “Didn’t you hear, it’s goddamn Valentine’s Day!”

VI

Dustin’s brother and his mom hadn’t spoken in half a year. Dustin blamed Nicholas for this. Six months ago, their mom had come home from the movies to find people in the apartment. Assuming she had just walked into a break-in, their mother rushed out and dialed 911 on her cell phone. But what his mom didn’t know was that the break-in was being led by her oldest son, Nicholas, who was in the process of removing the Samsung 4K fifty-five-inch TV from her bedroom wall with a power drill. It was the very same TV Nicholas had installed only two months prior for Mother’s Day. His mother had been so touched by Nicholas’s gift that she had broken her own rule and given him some money afterward, which Nicholas used to buy drugs, breaking his four-month sobriety streak. Basically, the whole thing was a Greek tragedy of epic proportions as far as Dustin was concerned.

Dustin had missed the whole thing because it was his week to stay at his father’s place downtown. But from what he’d heard, Nicholas and his friends bolted when they heard the sirens and ran right into their mother, who was standing in the hallway outside of her apartment. When she saw it was Nicholas, she grabbed him by the arm, but he roughly pulled away from her, causing her to knock her head into the wall and then fall.