❝when i met you, we were young and
like gasoline to matches, waking up drunk,
sleeping through your early classes.❞

❘❘

ACADEMIC PROBATION.

I think it's supposed to scare me or hurt, but when I opened the email and found that final warning, no sentí nada. I couldn't find a reason to care.

Maybe it was because I spent the entire morning dry heaving, shaking and shivering from withdrawals, crying on bathroom tiles, but academic probation didn't fucking matter. Nothing mattered.

A cold breeze lifts my hair, sending it fluttering around me in a tornado of tangled strands and wasted ashes. The cigarette burns slowly, crystallizing red-hot embers at the ends of numb fingertips. My hands won't stop shaking, and I can't fucking deal with it. I shiver, close my eyes, sink into the bench with another deep drag. Icy, rigid wood digs into my thighs, a chill seeping through denim to remind me that it's fucking diciembre.

Es el final de semestre, and I can't even remember what classes I signed up for. I can't remember the anxiety of September weather or the stale heat I was desperate to escape. All those sensations are dull and distant, lost in faint memories of chasing sunsets, surrendering to the sting of sunburns, inhaling every last moment of salty ocean air in the blazing Florida heat.

Somehow, everything melts together—years and years of mindlessly navigating wave after wave of bad decisions. All I'd wanted was to get away, leave my family behind, find a place that could be a home.

Las cosas cambian. La gente cambia.

Nada es para siempre.

My knees wobble when I stand, but I shakily make my way from the small nook in the park to the concrete wall that hides me from the blossoming flags of NYU. Something about that shade of purple is sickening, and as my stomach lurches, bile surges up, a violent string of hot acid splashing my teeth.

I swallow the sour taste thickly.

As I duck under a small canopy of trembling branches, hidden from the street, a gust of air follows, biting at my cheeks relentlessly. Though faint rays of sun peek through the shadows, they lick up my forearms with a prickling sensation of cold heat. No hace calor, but I'm burning.

I take another desperate drag of the fucking Newport I stole from Emmy and collapse against the wall, rubbing a hand up my face in defeat. Smoke billows from my lips as I exhale, twisting into the air until it fades with another winter breeze.

I can't do this.

Fuck, I haven't even taken a step inside the school.

It's never come easy to me, but mamá used to lecture us on la importancia de educación—una educación that she and papá didn't get. As Enzo and I grew up, the lectures became rants, and after papá died, the rants became demands to go to school, to find opportunity, to get a good job, to become something.

Anything.

Ese fue siempre el problema. I wanted to be nothing.

Weightless in a summer storm, completely free of responsibility and misery and anything that could ground me. Maybe I was always searching for something that doesn't exist.

Because life comes with responsibility and pain and sadness and grief. It's always there, in every action and word, just lingering in the background—a million feelings buried into an icy grave.

An aroma of greasy food wafts through the rustling leaves leftover from autumn, carrying with the whistling wind to attack me. Everything inside of me somersaults, and as my shoulders shake and my head spins and my eyes burn, I keel over, dry heaving.

No, no, no.

My body feels like it's been fucking ripped apart. It's miserable, detached and dizzy, moving sluggishly through the crisp air, swimming through trenches of the Lower East Side, standing still and just fucking... feeling like this.

I shake my head, shake, shake, shake, and then I inhale, I inhale, I inhale, in furious bursts of air, my lungs burning with dread. All I can taste is smoke on my tongue, stale and faint, a reminder of everything that won't stop, stop, stop.

The cigarette falls from my fingers, and I squeeze my eyes shut again to rub my temples. Fuck this.

Maybe Emmy convinced me to come, but there is no fucking way I'm going inside that building. Not now, not ever.

I take a long, hard breath, and then open my eyes. Heat explodes in my chest as my gaze lands on the backpack at my feet. It feels too easy, but isn't that... okay? Isn't that what I am?

"You are too easy, Neva."

A tiny, tiny, tiny pocket at the top of my backpack hides and holds the tiny, tiny, tiny bags of white powder.

My heart boomerangs somewhere in my chest, smashes against my rib cage like it can't stay there... like it's meant to be somewhere—anywhere—else.

"The American Dream," a voice taunts, withering and twisting in the icy catacombs of my brain. A dizzy spell claims me, and suddenly, I'm picking up the backpack numbly, edging closer to where the wall meets the corner, and my fingers are moving too fast, too fast, too fast, tugging my hair over my shoulder, tugging the zipper to the left, tugging the tiny bag of coke free.

"El sueño americano," I used to tell her. "Por eso vinimos aquí. That's why we're here, and he's not."

"Mija," she would sigh, and then tuck her hair behind her ears to drill me with that motherly look. Exhausted. "No es un sueño americano. His dream was always for you and your brother to live a happy, safe life."

"Without a family, mamá, a happy, safe life is nothing."

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

I dig my key out; I take a bump; I sniff.

A flurry of snow stirs my heart to life, and as I seal the bag and stuff it deep into the pocket of my backpack, frustrated tears burn at my eyes.

I'm alone, I'm free, I'm nothing, and it's... it hurts.

"Without family, mamá, a happy, safe life is nothing."

"La familia lo es todo, Neva," she said softly, and everything about it destroyed me. "I know."

Slumping against the wall in defeat, I turn my gaze up to the sky, to those branches withering through the winter, to the last few stray leaves quivering, grasping, still holding on to... to something. A home.

My bottom lip wobbles. Will I always be... holding onto estos sentimientos? Will they never go away?

A buzz rips through the slow ascent, muffled and electric, ripples of electricity ricocheting through denim and to my fingertips as I yank my phone from my pocket. One vibration. A text. Emmy.

someone set up a memorial tomorrow for julian

And as I take in the eight words in that little bubble, I don't feel anything.

"Hey."

My heart comes hurtling up my throat with a sharp gasp, surprise piercing the air, and my gaze swings up and around to find... her.

"Are you okay?"

No recuerdo su nombre. I only remember shards of that night we spent together, fumbling in and out of a dimly lit bathroom, so fucking high, laughing and dancing and kissing in some Latin club in Bushwick.

"Hey, I..."

One brow raises. "Is everything okay?"

Mustering up a weak smile, I shove my phone into my pocket. "As okay as it can be, I guess."

Fuck, she looks tired. With tangled hair and pale skin, dry lips and bloodshot eyes. A million dull emotions scraping the surface of her fragile smile. "I haven't seen you around."

I blink, and it all comes flooding back, the moments of complete chaos, crashing, shouting, shoving, those big, block letters that still haunt me.

ICE

"Yeah." I avert my gaze guiltily. "I haven't been around much."

As she sidles up to the wall with a heavy sigh, the air around us shifts into a suffocating tension. "That... that was crazy," she mutters. "That night, right?"

My heart stutters. "Yeah."

"I heard they arrested like... ten people or something."

Irritation pinches my chest. Like a stroke of violence storming to my fingertips, some irrational rage seizes me. Fuck her. Fuck that night. Fuck this conversation. Fuck everything. "Yeah."

"You were with Javier when they busted in," she says, peering up at me timidly. "Both of you were in the bathroom, but I was hoping you'd get out."

My teeth grind together. "I didn't care if you did."

"Ouch." A tired grin tugs at her lips, but it falls quickly. "I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't know something like that would happen."

Exhaustion derails me, swallowing the trace of fleeting anger. "It's okay," I say, and I mean it. When I meet her shaky eyes, I exhale. "What... what happened?"

She leans back against the wall, crosses her arms, heaves another sigh. "It was bullshit. They took us out of the club, questioned us, asked for our names, demanded IDs. I'm here on a student visa."

"So you were okay."

"Yeah, but I... I didn't know if you and Javier would be."

"I got out," I admit, my voice cracking. "I don't know how he... I don't know what happened to Javier after I bailed, but..."

A dry laugh falls from her lips. "Yeah, Javier was fine. I met up with him not long after that, but he... he was asking about you." Teasingly, she quirks a brow. "Seemed really... interested in you."

"I fucked him."

Or he fucked me. Lo que sea.

"Yeah, I know," she snickers. "But he wanted to know if I had any information about you and that... that guy you said you got some of your shit from."

My throat tightens. "Yeah. Jules."

"Yes!" She straightens and swivels, eyes widening and brightening, and I nearly flinch back. "Yes, that guy. You were... you said you were sleeping with him."

Half knew I was sleeping with Julian. "Yeah."

"Is he... in Brooklyn? Queens?"

"Why?" I snap. "You need a hook up?"

"No, but I mean..." With a guilty laugh, she looks away. "I could use a new connection."

I almost fucking laugh. "Yeah, I don't think that's gonna work out. Besides, Javier didn't get arrested. You've got him."

Julian was... mine.

"Half got picked up," she says softly... so fucking softly. "I heard it was an investigation of a... a drive-by, and they found the drugs and the weapons and... and he's gone."

I blink. "Gone?"

"Deported back to Colombia."

Just like that.

Gone.

I nod numbly. "Sorry."

I hope Half didn't leave any children behind.

❘❘

**YEPPPP. This happened to a guy I knew, so... yeah. Anyways, there are a few more. Chapter 46 will be up tomorrow! ❄️