1

My eyes flutter open, and the first thing I notice is the headache pounding away at my skull. Behind my eyebrows, at the top of my head, at my temples… the mother of all headaches.

I sit up and take in my surroundings.

I’m shirtless and my chest is littered with bruises. I’m in a ruffled, damp bed, with two figures lying beside me, both partly covered in blankets and both partly clothed.

They’re girls. Good.

What happened last night? I can’t remember a thing. The ceiling has a brown stain on it, dripping into the bed to the left of my head. The reek of morning breath, smoke and feminine perfume are dancing around my nostrils. What kind of crap did I get myself into? In all my sixteen years of living, I’ve never been this confused.

I try to get up, but I realize that one of their legs is splayed over mine. It’s a dark-skinned girl, with smooth complexion and a curvy, filled out leg. I let my finger lace up and down her thigh for a moment, before I try and get up. Her leg is heavy. Instead, I grab the bed frame and pull myself from under her, rolling off the bed and knocking my elbow on the stone floor.

I lie there for a moment, then I stretch out my legs, which feel like somebody tied knots in my muscles. Clambering to my feet, I’m blinded by a ray of sunlight, and my head suddenly feels light. I stagger into a… something… and use it to steady myself. It’s a dresser-desk thing. I squint, seeing littered make-up paraphernalia of which I can’t recall the name of a single one. Definitely a girl’s room.

I feel around, before I find a pair of sunglasses, and press them on. Now with working eyes, I look around the room. There are some spewed clothes, a couple unidentifiable puddles, and scattered glass bottles. I think about trying to find my shirt, but I don’t remember what it looks like. I don’t need it anyway. I find my way to the reeking bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, removing the sunglasses.

But then I decide against it. Not even I, the great Kallix Rane, can bear the pale, angular, sunken image of the great Kallix Rane. But damn, my eyeshades are massive.

The bruises on my chest are staring to look a lot less like bruises, but I’ve still got my pants on, though my fly is open. I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad sign. I don’t have a phone, so nine months from now I won’t need to worry. My dark blue jeans are torn, but not fashionably, at the knees. My black and grey sneakers and white socks are muddy, as if I’d been having a night parkour through a pigsty.

“What the hell did I do?” I murmur, trying to recollect the night before. I rummage through the desk, looking for my pills, but instead my hand comes across something that makes me leap inside my skin. I pistol. I pick it up and feel its weight. I pull out the clip but it’s empty. I toss it aside and put the sunglasses back on. Black ray bans. My favorite.

I walk back into the room to see that one of the girls is waking up. The one with the nice thighs.

“Kallix?” she groans. “What time is it?”

“Time for you to go back to sleep,” I tell her, pushing her head back down onto the pillow. “But thanks for the blow job,” I add.

“What?”

“Toodles!” I wave, as I stumble down the stairs from the bedroom into the living room. It’s even worse than I’d imagined.

Overturned furniture and teenagers litter the floor as if they’d been emptied from a giant sack. I wade through the pond of bottles, clothes and people when my eye catches something. A bong.

Screw it, no time. I need to find my pills, or my headache is going to crack my skull open.

“Kallix.” I hear the spoilt whine of a rich girl. I turn around to see her again, with half open eyelids, standing at the base of the staircase and using the door frame to hold herself up. She’s wearing an oversized shirt that covers half her thighs. Her very nice thighs. The shirt is too big to be mine. Did I get second go?

In her left hand is a little cylindrical plastic container. My little cylindrical plastic container.

I sigh with relief. “Thanks a trillion,” I tell her, sifting over to her and plucking it from her hands.

“What happened?” she whines.

“Don’t look ask me, Monika.”

“My name is Krissa! Monika is my best friend! Did you have sex with my best friend?”

My hands are already at the front door, but it’s locked.

“Kallix, why do you have my sunglasses?”

“They’re beautiful, I must admit,” I tell her as I pull open a window.

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a jiffy,” I reassure her as I slip out the small gap. I dangle from the windowsill for a moment. Two stories up. Not jumping. Instead, I grab hold of the drainage pipe and shimmy down a floor, before dropping down to perch on another windowsill. I step onto the railing of a balcony on the first floor, and leap to the edge of a fire escape on the apartment next to the house I’m on. I drop to a squat and slide down the bannister, landing flawlessly and walk on with a skip in my step.

I saunter through the alley for a few meters, but then I realize that I’m too hungover to saunter. I shake my pill container and hold it up to the light. It’s still half-full. I smack my crusty, dried out lips. Time to get some water. I break into a jog, vaulting over a dumpster and break out into the open road. I’m in the nicer side of the city; the buildings are clean and the people look friendly. At least they did until they saw a bruised up shirtless teenager running down the road.

As I run down the sidewalk, many of the people cross over to the other side of the road. One woman, very small and pushing a baby carriage, pulls out a can of what I can only assume is pepper spray. I blow her a kiss without breaking my stride, and she’s in too much shock to spray me. Maybe somebody will call the cops. I wouldn’t mind that. I always get a good workout when they chase me.

I run on until I see the neon flashing lights of a convenience store. How convenient. I slow to a walk, and eye the front door. There’re a lot of people inside. Perfect. I waltz inside, flinging the door open. Surprisingly, nobody turns towards me. Everybody is transfixed on a little TV, mounted in the corner of the room above the cashier. I unintentionally read the news headline: Shootout over Bansilin Producing Wear-house in North East Sector. Bansilin. The infamous drug that’s been lurking in every corner of the city for the past six years. Since I was ten, it’s been the drug that’s bad, but is nobody’s top priority. There were always worse drugs to fight against, like cocaine, heroin, bath salts or flakka. Bansilin’s side effects aren’t nearly as quick, but they’re just as bad. You don’t wake up hungover, and overdoses are very rare, but it does… other things to you. It scares me because it changes people. Every time you take it, you change a tiny bit. The changes are so insignificant and fragmented that nobody cared for a while. Maybe your favorite color changed from purple to red overnight. You think your favorite color’s always been red, but everybody else knows that it’s purple. The changes are tiny, but as they start to accumulate, people got scared. People got anxious.

The scene shifts to an interview with a man in a police uniform. He’s got defined cheekbones, dark eyes, a strong, square jaw and well-trimmed black hair that’s slick with sweat. The name on his shoulder reads: Kaloaan Rane. My brother.

“We’ve got them pinned down. They’re outnumbered and outgunned and there’s not a chance that they can escape. We want to give them a chance to surrender before we storm in,” he says. He’s confident and reassuring.

“Have their been any casualties yet?” the reporter asks.

“None of my men have been harmed, nor have any of the… people within the building.” He chooses his words carefully.

Before he says anything else, I’ve already slipped a 500ml bottle in each pocket and a third down my pants. Hopefully anybody that sees me will just think that I’m a very blessed sixteen year old. I blunder past the cashier to the bathroom. I lock the stall, put the seat down and prop up my legs against the door. Aside from my hangover headache, I’ve got my regular tension aches creeping back into my neck. I hate them. They ache none-stop, unless I can get my pills, or a very skilled masseuse. It’s worst in my neck, near the base of my skull and in my shoulder, between my shoulder blades. The oddest part about it is that it’s only on one side of me. Literally, it’s as if somebody drew a vertical line down the center of my body, and made my entire left side become an aching handicap, all the way from my head to my feet. I pour one of my pills into my mouth and open one of the bottles quenching my desert of a mouth. I rest on the toiled seat for a moment, but it doesn’t last. Somebody knocks rapidly on the stall door. It can’t be somebody needing to use the bathroom, there are plenty of others.

“Hey kid. Hey kid you’re going to pay for that right?”

“Yep. Yeah just give me a second,” I tell him.

“Alright, but I’m waiting outside.”

I don’t reply.

The door clicks shut.

Quickly and silently, I slip out of the stall. Lucky for me, there’s somebody in the next stall over, and they’ve left their black fabric backpack just beneath the door. As silent as melancholy I make my way to it and snatch it up from beneath the metal frame.

“Oi!” the man shouts, but I’m already blitzing towards the door. I shove the bottles inside, sling it over my shoulder and barrel through. The shop owner is nearly knocked off his feet as the door smashes into him, but I don’t wait to see his reaction. Moving through the isles would take too long, so I grab the top of one, and using the shelves as a ladder I climb on top.

“Hey! What the hell’re you doin’!” cries the owner, shaking his fist.

I don’t miss a beat, and start running, stepping on the tops of the shelves towards the door.

“Stop him!” the owner shrieks. The thumping of heavy footsteps is drowned out by confused screams.

Why the hell does a convenience store have security guards? I wonder as I launch myself at the door. I grab the top of the door frame and kick the door open, swinging out after it. I’m in the air for half a second before I land, splashing into a puddle, rolling through it and scrambling to my feet. I take off, running at full speed with the stolen backpack bouncing. I hear the rumble of a motorbike engine starting. Now I’m screwed.

I’ve got a second to disappear before whoever is chasing me has pulled out of the parking space, so I veer into the nearest alley I see. It’s jammed full of people.

“God damnit!” I curse, turning back to the road. My pursuer, who’s a middle aged, pot bellied man on a Harley Davidson, is revving to life.

Think you damn bastard.

The bike roars and he plows towards me, and he would’ve caught me in a second had I not thrown myself on top of a nearby dumpster. The Davidson crashed into the side, knocking me off the other side. He hollers a curse, hauling himself of the motorbike and charging towards me. Unfortunately for him, I’m on my feet and at full sprint in a second. He soon realizes that he stands no chance at catching me, and drops the chase, bending over and heaving with exhaustion.

I let out a hysterical crack of laughter as I run. My long strides send my flying down the road, but it appears that I’ve attracted to much attention to myself. That or the bastard called the cops on me because a police car veers around a corner and slows down when it sees me. I can faintly see the policemen inside radioing that they’ve got me.

I contemplate my options and decide on the most reckless of them. Then I barrel forwards, right to them. Frantically, they unbuckle and open their doors, but by the time they get out, I’ve reached the car. I leap onto the hood, roll onto the roof and use it as leverage to launch myself at the gutter of the pawn shop they’ve parked next to. I hear them cry out in surprise, which only makes me laugh harder as I half myself onto the roof. They can’t catch me now.

“Don’t you guys have better things to be doing right now?” I ask, reclining against the roof shingles, me heels in the gutter to stop me from sliding.

“You stole from that store young man. Hand over the stolen goods and we won’t take any action.”

“I stole water,” I reassure, pulling one of the bottles from my bag and taking a long swig. “There are freaking murders going on right now, you know that right?”

“Hand over the stolen goods sir,” the officer commands, while the other climbs on top of the car so he can nearly reach my ankles.

“You want my water?” I ask.

The cop nods.

“Alright. All you had to do was ask,” I tell him standing up. I reach for my bag while the cops sigh with relief. Then I lean over the edge and let it rain. It’s not the water I stole though, but rather my personal, bodily made water. I snicker at the color. “I ought to find out about last night,” I muse over the screams of disgust.

“Shoot the damn kid!” the cop hollers.

By the time he’s got his gun out of his holster, I’ve already disappeared.