a/n: this chapter is dedicated to ilackserotonin for taking the time to draw eris and ef!!! picture is on the header above; thank you so so much! <3 and now onto the chapter:

Fitz is up to something. He comes home late, the door to our room squeaking in the middle of the night when I'm half-asleep. He avoids my questions. When Dad gets a call from school about him skipping class, I decide to interrogate him, and he finally admits the truth:

"Uh, I've been filming a music video. For my song Catatonic Shock."

He showed me the track a few weeks ago. I think it references what he experienced after the crash that killed our mother—something he's never talked about to me directly. For weeks he was in a motionless stupor, barely reacting to his environment, sitting in the same position for hours at a time. The doctors didn't know if it was brain damage or post-traumatic stress. Before the accident, Fitz got perfect scores on exams without trying, skipping a few grades in elementary school and mastering German far better than I did. He said he wanted to be an engineer or a doctor. After the crash, everything changed. He had issues with memory, even forgetting key pieces of our childhood. I'd reminisce on funny moments with our mom, and he'd stare at me blank and confused, then go silent for hours. I let him read the journals I'd kept since I was five years old, chronicling each day in detail like I do now, and he went through every single one. There's always been the impulse in me to catalogue every memory, stowing it away to use in my art.

"Did you get that feature you were excited about?" I ask.

"Yeah, we been meeting up," he says. "Got it recorded in the studio, mixed and mastered all professional."

He's talking about another rapper in the San Diego area. The kid is a half Black, half Mexican high-school dropout with a hundred thousand followers and a few popular songs.

"And how much is all this costing?" I ask. "Is it important enough for you to completely neglect school?"

"Not much," he mutters.

"Fitz, I can tell when you're lying."

"It's a couple grand..." he admits, rubbing his forehead where the memory of his trauma is now permanently inked in the word CATATONIA.

"A couple grand? What? Where are you getting this from?"

"Oscar's paying."

"Don't bullshit me. You told me the kid is literally couch-surfacing while he's recording his debut album and blows all his spare money on Xanax and LSD."

Fitz stares at the ground. His chest is moving up and down at a faster pace than usual. His capacity for regular human levels of fear and anxiety have been stunted since the car crash, so this is not normal.

"What's going on?" I press.

"Uh... me and Oscar... we went to Tijuana in his car... picked up a package... and took it back here. Border patrol don't even check the cars that come in, and coming back all I needed was my driver's license and they let me through."

My chest clenches, more panic rising in me now than he's probably felt throughout the entire development of this astronomically stupid decision. My worst fears with Fitz and his recklessness since he came out of his "catatonia" are now a reality. I thought the height of his delinquency would be getting that tattoo and running away from Munich to Barcelona for a few weeks, but this is an actual crime.

"You were a drug mule?" I ask, trying not to shout because Dad and William are currently having dinner in the next room, and William could very well kick Fitz out of the house if he finds out. "You don't even have a US passport, and you went to Mexico?"

"I mean, they checked my California license, asked me if I was a US citizen, and I said yeah. And they let me back in."

"You could've gotten deported," I hiss. "Imagine being stuck in Tijuana trying to speak your broken Creole with all the Haitians because you don't know a word of Spanish. And you were carrying drugs! If you got caught... if you went to jail..." I stumble for a bit, my breaths stilted, and then a five-minute lecture spills out of me—he can't push his luck, there will be absolutely no mercy if he gets arrested, this could ruin his life, and all for a fucking music video?

"Who gave you the package?" I demand. "What was it? Cocaine? Heroin? Fentanyl?"

"I don't know. All I know it was from Eris' people."

For the first time in hours, just when I finally got myself to stop thinking about her, her raccoon face invades my mind, and I'm suddenly burning with the rage of a thousand suns—"Eris was involved?"

"Just a one time thing," he says, and now that he's confessed his demeanor is back to neutral, like the only thing weighing on him was keeping this from me. "She hooked us up with the deal."

"With the cartels it's never a one time thing. You're on their radar now; they have your scent. How could you be so naive, Fitz? How could you trust her?"

He finally looks at me, and although his calm demeanor is pure William, the muted intensity in his eyes is the same as Mom's. "You're the one who went to L.A. with her. What you did was just as dangerous."

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"You had my brother move your filthy drugs?" I snap, shoving her, but it's not enough. I want to grab her by the throat, slam her into the wall, choke her until she's bruised.

Eris steps away and puts up her hands. I grab her arms, ready to push her to the ground, but a group of students pass us by in the hall, and I awkwardly let her go.

"Damn, calm down," she says.

"I am not calming down. Do you have any idea how they treat Black men in prison? Do have any idea how lucky he is for not having been deported on the spot?"

"Listen, I didn't want him doing it, but he was kinda desperate; I've never seen him like that before, like actually care about something. I knew he was gonna get into some shit if I didn't help him. I didn't want him going to enemy. So I set him up with the right people.

"How utterly considerate of you, Eris," I say venomously. "Thanks for looking after him, truly."

She takes a drag from her vape. "Now we're even. You screw me and my dad over, I screw your brother over. Hate us all you want, but we. Own. Your. Ass."

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Despite how much I want to commit a felony myself and murder the bitch, we still need to paint. During the next session at her studio, I can't even look at her. I'm fuming, nauseous with worry about the feds, the possibilities of Fitz ending up in jail or lured to Tijuana for more easy money. I can't hold the paintbrush without shaking. I keep mixing colors, obsessing over the right shades, re-measuring and re-calculating angles because it's the only thing that comforts me.

"Ef, it's fine," Eris says. "I told Fitz I'm only giving him this one job. He won't go to TJ again."

"Why not just give him the money?" I snap. "You're rich; I'm sure you've spent a lot more on your shitty little friends."

She sighs and twirls her paintbrush between her paint-covered fingers. "I'm nice, but I'm not that nice. Either way, I don't have five grand lying around. Iker controls all my cash flow."

I grit my teeth. I glare at our painting, everything about it so Eris it's starting to piss me off. My mother would be so disappointed in what her family has become.

"Yeah, this isn't working," Eris says. "Let's smoke and go to the pool or something. You need a break."

"The last thing I want is to partake in drugs with you."

"Then just come to the pool."

It's true—I can't stand to be in this room any longer, surrounded by her forgeries.

"I don't have a bathing suit," I say.

She looks me up and down. "I have some swim shorts that are too big on me. Might fit you. And I can give you one of my bikini tops, you know the ones with the strings that you just tie?"

I don't know why I don't have her bodyguards take me home. I don't know why she's inviting me for a swim if it means we'll be spending more unnecessary time in one another's presence. I don't know why I don't take the opportunity to choke her out right there like I've been fantasizing about for days. I have no explanation, no excuse for agreeing to her offer unless I plan to drown her in the water. I don't know why I don't change back into my clothes after I try on her shorts, tight and revealing every single curve. And although the bikini top technically fits, the little triangles that are supposed to give me coverage barely cover anything at all.

I tell myself some Vitamin D will be good for me, even though I take a multivitamin every morning. I tell myself we need to finish the painting today, and I can't focus right now, so maybe some sun will help me relax. Then we can get back to work, be done with it, and I can avoid her for another week until we get the results for the next round.

But the idea of her seeing me essentially half-naked, I realize, terrifies me. In the bathroom mirror, I inspect every dot of cellulite, the faint lines where the fat creases on my back. Why does it matter if she sees me? It's just flesh, but there's something so very wrong about the fact I'm wearing her garments. The same fabric covering my most private areas has touched hers. It's repulsive. It's not okay. I have every right to demand to go home. But instead, I wrap myself in the towel she gave me and step out.

She's already changed, sporting a white bikini with bedazzled crosses on each breast and little rhinestones on her bottom half. I shouldn't stare. Fuck, I really shouldn't stare, judging every inch of her bare skin.

"Ready?" she asks nonchalantly, not the slightest bit bothered about being this exposed.

I follow her out of the room, and she walks in front of me, her towel thrown over her shoulder. She's not as skinny as I expected, her stomach pudgy and almost... huggable. Why that's the first word to come to mind, I have no idea, because it's not as if I'll ever in my life hug her. For such a short person, her legs are long. Her ass is like a pale, deflated version of mine, and it usually looks flat in her baggy jeans, but her skimpy white bottoms reveal that it's rounder than I thought.

The sun greets us once we step outside. Of course the Lugos have a lavish pool in their backyard, paired with a hot tub and one of those little waterfalls.

Eris sits on one of the lounging chairs. I wrap the towel tight around me, planning out how I'll take it off and immediately go under the water, giving her minimal time to stare at me in the way I've been staring at her.

She puts on music from a little speaker. It's in Spanish, of course, folky and traditional like the kind of thing her parents would listen to.

In the light, I notice the scars on her hips. Thin, horizontal lines, most of them white but a few of them pink and purple, and one or two dark red scabs. Newer cuts.

"Practice," she explains without me having to ask. "For when they slice me up in Mexico."

She thinks her destiny is to end up raped and dismembered, pieces of her corpse paraded through her ancestral land. But for now, she's here. With me.

"You still cut," I say. "Just not on your wrists."

Without thinking, I reach out to touch the black words inked on her thigh over a few of the scars: Guerrera de Dios.

She jumps a little, her mouth parting. "The fuck you doing?"

"Is that a real tattoo?"

"Yeah, and what about it?"

I run my thumb over the letters, fully expecting her to push me away, but she doesn't. She sits straighter, staring at me, but I'm inspecting the ink. It's slightly faded, at least a few years old. And the words are almost the same in French—Guerrière de Dieu.

I almost want to keep my hand on her thigh, see how long it takes until it bothers her. Or maybe she doesn't want to show me how much it bothers her. Maybe it doesn't bother her at all.

"It means Warrior of God, right?" I ask, and she lets out a long breath when I finally let go. "That's... intense."

"Yeah," she mutters. "Some of my mom's cousins tatted me after my quinceañera. I guess to brand me as theirs. Spiritually Guerrero, even if I end up rolling with the Sinaloa enemy because of Iker. They'll never let me forget my Zepahua blood."

"And what's your goal with Sinaloa anyway? What are they training you for?"

She gets out a rolling paper, her stash of weed, and carefully starts assembling. Her parents surely must know she smokes on their property. The possibility of them not caring is baffling, though then again, my own dad is a stoner and William doesn't care when Fitz does it, either.

"Iker's always going on about how power is fragile," she says, rolling the perfect blunt in a few swift movements. "As you know, there's so many cracks in Sinaloa already. Leaders who were shot or extradited, and now everyone's fighting for their place. It's the natural way things go, but it means a shitton of bloodshed. The only solution is to have a strong leader. Someone who can keep all the different factions together. Because if we don't? We're going to get massacred by the next group who can."

My head pounds against my skull with every word she says.

"And Iker is planning for that leader to be you," I say.

She picks up a white lighter—Fitz would say it's bad luck—and lights up, inhaling deeply. "The future face of the operation."

"Yet you're a lesbian teenage girl," I say. "That's... unheard of."

Her lips twist in a tense smile before blowing out a cloud of smoke. "Gotta make history somehow, right?"

Making history is all I've ever wanted.

She offers me the blunt. Just a few hours ago, all I felt for her was an all-consuming rage, and now here we are. I hate how I can't stay mad at her for more than a few days as of late. I hate how fast the time passes when I'm with her. I hate how I can't stop myself from writing about her in my diary, the pages increasing by the dozen as things progressively get more and more bizarre.

Accepting this would be crossing so many lines, willingly sharing a moment that has nothing to do with painting or the competition or our fathers' past. I stare at the burning stick of THC for a long time, and then—

"Fine," I say as I take it from her. "Fine."

Her smile softens, widens, reaching her round cheeks and her eyes, now a striking hazel in the sunlight. I take a few hits as she watches in total amusement.

There's no going back. She's unlike anyone I've ever met or even read about. No matter whether we win gold or nothing, whether she gets murdered at eighteen or dies of old age at eighty, everything about her from the day we met has marked me just like her family marked her with that tattoo.

I'll never be able to get this girl out of my head. 

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a/n: i'm really feeling the slow burn. it may seem like there's been no progress, but if you compare this to chapters 1-5, it's worlds away. i can't believe that at 42.5k words, we're about halfway done with the book... only about 15-20 more chapters to go!