His face goes ashen. She knows what he’s thinking, so she gets ahead of it: “The cops don’t care,” she says. “They’re not following the case. There’s no case to follow. My part in it is . . . well, they saw it how it happened and they’ve got more important things to worry about. I spent a few months at Emerald Lakes. And the shotgun, they think it’s my mom’s, so.”

“Cool, cool,” he says. “Then I guess I’m glad you came by to buy that gun offa me.”

“I need something else,” she says. “I need drugs.”

He waves her inside. “Let’s talk.”

His trailer is nicer than it should be. It looks like the home of a middle-aged housewife, with the kind of decor Atlanta’s mother would’ve chosen. A pink wooden pig hangs by the front door to hold keys and mail. An Amish hex—a blue-and-red eight-pointed star—hangs above an old avocado-green stove. On the breakfast-nook table, the salt and pepper shakers are a ceramic sheep and goat, each framed by a cutesy wooden paddock made of popsicle sticks. Powder-blue curtains hang at the windows. Blue like a robin’s egg blue.

“It came like this,” he told her once upon a time. “But I kinda started to like it. Made me feel all cozy and shit. What, you think I was going to hang up the Puerto Rican flag all over the place? Soccer balls and rap posters and shit?”

What’s funny to her is how clean he keeps it. He probably dusts. Her own mother doesn’t dust. But her gun-and-drug dealer does.

He motions for her to sit at the table, then he plops down across from her and sets a beer in front of her. Yuengling Black & Tan.

“What you need, girl?”

“I need to not sleep.”

“But sleep is awesome.” He pauses. “Pretty much my favorite thing.”

“Not mine.”

He leans in. Smiling like he’s solved all the world’s problems. “You know what you need? You just need to sleep harder. Dang, that sounds like a movie and shit. Sleep Hard 4: Sleep Harder. Whatever. What I’m saying is, you get a little Ambien—that’s like a baseball bat in pill form—you take that, and it’s like wham, your head’s a mailbox and it’s hitting the ground.”

“I don’t know.” She sips the beer.

“Plus—plus!—you do it right, Ambien can get you really fucking high, too. You push past the urge to sleep and next thing you know, you’re, like, breast-feeding some other girl’s baby while hang gliding over the Amazon River basin and whatever, man. You don’t know what the hell happened.”

“Teen pregnancy? Hang gliders? That does sound special. For now let’s try something that picks me up rather than puts me down. A little more accelerator, a little less brake.”