One Day Soon (One Day Soon, #1)(70)

It was noisy. My eardrums thrummed with the constant drone.

Seventh Street Bridge was the place for the people that life had thrown away.

I was one of too many in this unspoken side of a broken down city.

When I had first found myself beneath the bridge all those months ago, everything had seemed dark and dirty and more than a little scary.

But now, brutal and raw, I found it soothing. The never-ending noise. The stench of fires that burned in the trashcans. The wasted eyes of the kids around me. The shadows that lingered and never went away.

Now it was home.

And that was the only place to spend your birthday.

The sun was bright. The air was cool. I felt the wind against my skin, my baggy sweatshirt and tattered coat doing little to keep out the air.

The rocks were hard and sharp under my palms as I leaned back on my hands, stretching my legs out in front of me, laughing at a lame joke Bug was attempting to tell.

Birthdays had never been a big deal for me. Often my mom forgot about them completely. I had grown out of the disappointment. I had come to expect little.

In some ways, this was better than any of my other birthdays before.

At least I was smiling.

“Shut up already,” Di groaned, throwing a crumpled soda can at Bug’s head. It bounced off his temple and fell to the ground without him even noticing. He continued with his badly recited joke as if nothing had happened.

“And the bartender said, ‘You can’t leave that lying there. Wait, that’s not right.” Bug frowned. “No, the bartender said, ‘You can’t leave that sitting—that’s not right either. Shit, I forget,” he grumbled. Shane rolled his eyes. Karla snickered and I only smiled.

“Just stop already,” Di said, though there was no malice in her voice. Bug never really made any sense.

“I’ve got another one! A really good one too—”

“No!” Shane, Karla, Di, and I all said at the same time. We shared a look and started laughing.

Bug sat down, kicking his foot in the dirt, his mouth in a pout. “Fine. Be that way.”

I nudged his shoe with mine. “Maybe later, Bug,” I told him, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

Bug instantly brightened. His moods were in constant flux. Happiness, sadness, anxiety, excitement, they flowed over him quickly, never staying in place long enough for us to figure out what was really going in his head.

Yoss said it had to do with the drugs.

I often wondered what Bug had been like before he became hooked.

“You’ve got to stop encouraging him,” Di scolded me but I waved away her comment.

“She’s the sweet one, Di. It’s why Yoss treats her like she’s made of f*cking glass,” Karla sniffed, her lip curling.

Karla and I would never be friends. She barely tolerated me and I had many a fantasy about connecting my fist with her face. But we had the same friends.

We loved the same boy.

And that made dealing with each other a necessity.

Even when that particular boy wasn’t around.

Shane took a long drag from his cigarette. A trunk honked somewhere, the sound reverberating off the cement uprights around us, like an echo.

He rubbed his hands together, blowing on them. “Fuck me, it’s as cold as a witch’s tit out here.”

Karla pulled her sleeves down over her hands, tucking them between her thighs. “Maybe we should head back to The Pit,” she suggested.

“It’s not too bad out here,” Di immediately countered.

None of us wanted to go back to The Pit. Even though it’s where we slept at night, it wasn’t a place we liked to spend too much time.

Bad things happened there. Even during the day.

Just last week two guys, that had shown up only weeks before, raped a girl. Police had descended. Arrests were made. Yet we didn’t feel any safer.

Then two nights ago, a man was found dead in the old warehouse of an apparent overdose.

Again, we had had to take off for most of the day while the police combed over every inch of The Pit, arresting known drug dealers, intimidating the runaways. Yoss kept us all away until they had cleared out. And when we returned, Yoss’s CDs were gone.

I was upset, but he told me not to worry about it. Holding onto things was next to impossible in The Pit. If it was important, you had to carry it with you.

“I would give anything for a mocha latte right now,” Karla said, shivering slightly.

Shane, noticing how cold we all were, pulled an empty trashcan over, filling it with litter off the ground. He spent several minutes trying to get it to light.

“Here. This will probably help,” Bug said, pulling a small bottle of brown colored liquid from his coat pocket.

Shane took it and opened the lid, sniffing. He made a face. “What the hell is this shit? Lighter fluid?”

“It’s homemade hooch. Not bad either,” Bug said. Shane dumped it on top of the garbage and put the lighter to it. It immediately went up in flames.

“Yeah, if you don’t mind your insides rotting,” Shane muttered, handing the bottle back to Bug, who took a long swig, coughing afterwards.

The five of us huddled closer to the small fire, holding our hands out, trying to get warm. “Okay, Imi, if you could be anywhere right now, where would it be?” Di asked, starting the familiar game.