CECE, DISRESPECTFULLY | ✓

05: BELLY-UP

            I jump off my skateboard in the front garden and kick it to my hand, a simple move but I nearly fumble it. Either I'm still that high or I've got frostbite.

Cramming my earbuds into my pocket, I dig out my keys. Ease down the handle as slowly as possible and open the door without a sound. Once in the entrance, toe my Vans off and sink toward to staircase.

'Cece?'

I drop my skateboard and backpack at my feet with a ruckus of paint cans. He's awake anyways.

'It's almost four in the morning.'

Nicolás strides from the kitchen and his face morphs into a different one on each step. Watery and roughly sketched. Echoes of what I can remember from our parents, maybe.

His parents. They were his parents for seven years before they were mine.

It's your fault.

'Why haven't you answered your phone?'

My brain is still working on 0.25 speed and before I can answer, he grabs my right wrist, not tight, but firm enough to twist my hand and get a clear view of my fingers. He finds them tainted black.

'You've been painting? Cece, you–' He cuts himself off as his eyes find mine. They narrow in the dim light. 'Are you high?'

A laugh rolls against the roof of my mouth though I'm not sure what I find funny.

'Just a little, innit.' Without specifying which accusation I'm responding to, I tug myself free and step around him.

He climbs up the stairs at my heels. What must be a well-rehearsed lecture is lost on the other side of the bubble around my head. I catch only fragments and those fragments slip right through the broken sieve that is my brain at the moment.

'You can't be out in the middle of the night, get high, and vandalise private property. What if the police saw?'

'Don't be a Tory.'

'It's not a joke. Not for–'

I shut the toilet door before he can finish.

'Cece, you can't run away every time we try to have a conversation. And you can't stay out this late. You've got college in four hours.'

'I just got expelled.'

'No, you didn't. And you're not going to. What you're gonna do is go to school on time, and pick an extracurricular.' His voice is so drenched with derision that it seeps into the toilet through the crack under the door. 'And if someone mithers ya, you're gonna grow up and not break their nose.'

I glare at the wood, chest heaving. Each breath fans the flames behind my sternum. My high is quickly waning.

'I'm tryna help you stay home. But if you'd rather move to the other side of the country, be my guest. Go to that home O'Dorcey recommended.'

O'Dorcey's my social worker, and, like all adults, loathes me.

'That group hope for troubled teens—Oak Shaw, or what have you. If you get expelled, he can move you there for all I care.'

I rip the door open. Unprepared, Nicolás staggers back.

'I'd rather die than live in fucking Somerset.'

He recovers balance quickly. 'So don't get expelled.'

I slam the door again.

Flames licking my neck, I dig out my phone and attempt to untangle my earphones from it but my fingers have gone numb and static claws at my palms. The wire winds itself into more knots the harder I try to undo it.