Between the Shadow and Lo by Lauren Sapala

Author:Lauren Sapala [Sapala, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-08-27T20:00:00+00:00

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After the Falcon opened V.C. got Cass a job bartending there and now they didn’t need to depend on Dante for regular coke. It was everywhere. With every day that passed their relationship became bound by a thousand more threads of cocaine, as if they were being cocooned together, against their will. By midsummer the web had coalesced into an indestructible net, cradling both of them and swinging back and forth every night from the midnight disco high to the 4:00am dark gutter fights.

V.C. had a friend named Nikki who he delivered coke to on the regular. Apparently they went way back and V.C. felt like he owed her. Cass agreed to help him out and met with Nikki whenever V.C. couldn’t. Nikki lived in a townhouse that was paid for by a shadowy and mostly nonexistent husband who lived full time in New York. Nikki was around 30, but she didn’t work. It seemed that, for the most part, she curled into herself in the dark townhouse day after day and shot up massive amounts of cocaine.

To me Nikki looked like a porcelain doll. Her skin was pale and translucent and she had red hair the color of beaten copper without any of the attendant freckles most redheads have. Her face was almost obscene in its perfection. Her body was like a mannequin’s. Nikki was hard, hard all over. Her arms were round and white, and the glint in her eyes said she was made of stone under the shimmer of that blinding snow-white skin. Her gaze was flat and sharp, like a jagged piece of slate. Every time we met with her I felt she was turning more completely into a human-size piece of rock.

Cass and I met Nikki on small deserted streets that wormed out from Pike Place Market or down windy alleyways close to Puget Sound. Nikki was always eager, too eager—and grabby. She was done with conversation and finished with being polite. Nikki wanted her stuff and she wanted it now, two minutes ago, yesterday. In the darkness of Cassady’s car I saw her face change from week to week. She had the by-now-easy-to-recognize paper skin I’d seen stretched across dozens of sick skulls at the Avatar. Her porcelain head looked like it was on the verge of cracking. Her white round arms became gray sticks. Her hair had lost all its illusions of sun and glory and dragons, now it looked just like the dead thing it was.

Cass started to feel weird meeting with Nikki, but she didn’t dare refuse. Nikki and V.C. were good friends and he watched the lavish townhouse whenever she spent weekends in New York. Plus, Cassady hated offending people or hurting their feelings in any way. Even though I personally thought Nikki reminded me of one of those lizard creatures from that old sci-fi TV show “V,” Cassady saw every lost soul as a puppy waiting to be rescued. She knew that for some people, addiction was all they had left.

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