“Your rights extend to the point they start trampling on someone else’s,” Paul said.

“Yeah, well, I’m not trampling on anything,” Lauren protested.

“You’re—”

Lauren bolted, pushing her way past the girl with the prosthetic leg. She felt the girl grab her clothes, fall, and take her down with her.

She landed in the midst of the girl’s collected trash and general garbage. A resealable lunch container, and what looked like a mess of pens, tied plastic bags of personal items or actual food-smelling trash, papers, a dirty blanket, dirty clothes. She shrieked, fighting to get her way free, backing off.

“Jeez, you didn’t have to go that far,” Paul said.

“I thought maybe she stole something. You weren’t clear about what she’s apologizing for.”

Lauren, eyes wide, scrambled back, past the girl with the prosthetic leg who now sat on the blanket. Paul took a step forward, and she wheeled around, ready to run.

The wheeling made her aware of a sensation at her arm. She heard Paul exclaim as he noticed the same thing.

They hadn’t been pens. Syringes, lined up and packed together in a case. Some had stuck into her arm near the elbow, and bounced as she moved. She rushed to pull them loose, scattering them to the ground. Then, struck by the thought she might need to know what was in those syringes, she dropped to her knees, grabbing at one.

Paul stepped closer, and she backed away on hands and knees, the syringe feeling fragile in her hand as she put weight on it.

Panicked, she turned to go—only to see the commotion had stirred up some of the other locals. Someone had stepped out of a nearby doorway. Someone across the street shouted.

Loathing and revulsion in all directions, inward included, choked her. The scene around her distorted, and for a panicked moment, she thought it was drugs.

But what she saw was too big for drugs.

⊙

Fume Hood, Now

Surrounded on all sides by hatred, revilement, disgust. Aimed at her.

Try all her life, never make headway. If anything, trying only got her stuck deeper in the mud. It was only in retrospect that she realized what she did wrong.

Being a stupid sixteen-year-old shit, refusing to back down or apologize out of some twisted pride, and crashing into some diabetic’s used syringe stash?

Slumming it with the guys who celebrated doing nothing, aside from the occasional so-big-it-has-to-fail attempt at something outlandish, be it some get-rich-quick business, starting a gang, siccing a giant vegetable on Boston, or attempting a prison breakout to get on the good side of some key villains in the scene. Failure, failure, partial success, wish-it-had-been-a-failure. Then, after all that slumming and fucking around, smoking up and fucking, she’d found herself wondering why she never made headway in life. Which fed more self-loathing, more of the activities that served to distract herself.