The air smelled of gasoline. Two streets away, a couple of men sat on the curbside, sipping their deaths through a bottle hidden in a paper bag. The unlit street lamps stood over their heads like pallbearers. The day was so hot; it seemed like the sun looked to cremate everything in sight. Ciarra, who already had a cigarette in her mouth, handed one to Aria and lit it. At the very least, it took the edge off the adversity that no amount of nicotine could fully drown out. Every time a car passed, Ciarra would lean forward to look inside the windows to ascertain whether the driver was a prospective client or just some passerby who wasn’t worth her notice.

She had lied to her father, for obvious reasons. Ciarra wasn’t working night shifts at a bar. Ciarra was a nightwalker. She slept with men for money or for blow.

Almost two weeks had passed since Luke had brought Taylor and Aria to the abandoned car lot. Luke had taken Palin up the coast of California to attend a festival of some sort. Without him as a go-between, Taylor and Aria had been forced to converse with the other inhabitants of the lot. Though they all lived very separate lives, the connection formed by common circumstances had already garnered them a certain level of acceptance in the group.

One night, before the sun went down, Aria noticed someone flailing and moaning in the old broken-down Camaro. When she approached the car, she found EJ in withdrawal. His bone-thin body was writhing in pain. Sweat stuck the loose strands of his black hair to his forehead. His eyes were rolling behind his eyelids and he was breathing as if he was having a seizure. Aria sat in the driver’s seat and tried to soothe him. Under her touch, he quieted and tears started to roll down the side of his face toward his ear, which was pierced with a hoop earring.

Even though he was 23 years old, he reminded her of a small child stricken with the flu. EJ, who was an acquaintance of Ciarra’s, was addicted to fentanyl. He was used to injecting every five hours, but hadn’t managed to get his hands on a dose. EJ never spent the day at the car lot. He came and left, so absorbed in the cycle of his addiction that he was a mystery to everyone, more like a ghost that slept among them. The day after Aria had been with him through such a vulnerable moment, he went back to acting as if he didn’t know her at all, or perhaps didn’t remember.