Blood and Barbies

Lacey

Today was the day I had to talk to our gang manager, Lacey. A manger is different from a leader in several ways. One way is that a manager can be appointed to their position at any time, while a leader usually was the person who actually created the gang themselves. Of course, this is not always true. If a leader dies or even quits they can pick a new leader or leaders. Another way they are different is what they do. Managers literally manage and execute the rules. They are in charge of foreign affairs and relations with other gangs. Only high people ever meet the manager but almost everyone knows the leader personally somehow. The manager is always busy. Lacey got to her position through Cherry. They were friends all their lives.

Jade walks me to her office on the first floor of the locker. People holler at Jade as we walk by; they are drunk. People who were busted for partying with illegal substances have to spend the rest of the night in the bottom floor of the locker to the next morning. I have to walk through crowds of hungover partiers every morning to get to training. Jade ignores them as usual.

"Okay, so Lacey is going to explain to you your mission today" Jade states without eye contact. My stomach flips, I am so excited to finally learn what I will be doing for the next few months. "Ask lots of questions".

We get to the office right next to Cherry's. Jade types in a six-digit code in the pad next to the door handle. It clicks and she opens the thick black door.

Lacey is a very interesting person. She has very light skin with barbie pink hair that seems to trail down her back in bubbles. She has long pink oval nails. She looks almost futuristic in her white clothes. She sits at a desk surrounded by monitors that show different places in BnB that are being taped. One shows live footage of a trade being done at the border. Another is replaying a fight that went down at Club X yesterday. Lacey pauses a video on her huge computer in front of her and looks up at me with a smile.

"Hey, I'm Lacey"

"Hi, I'm Lazuli"

"Yeah umm, okay so let's start this off with talking about your partner, Flick. You can sit down." I grabbed a foldable chair that was propped against the wall behind me. The room was very dark, like the rest of the locker was. The only thing keeping it lit was all the monitor and computer screens. I sat down. "Do you want to see him?" she asked with a grin.

"Yeah..." I responded with a guilty smile. I kinda did. She did some confusing things on her computer and then the screen filled up with live footage of him. It was pretty pixelated but I recognized his blonde hair. He was sitting at the stoop of his apartment building in the lower class hood, smoking something. BnB has three hoods, lower, middle and upper. Where you live depends on your income. Being a spy, Flick and I could definitely afford living in the upper hood, but then we would stand out.

"There he is" she mused "smoking a blunt it looks like." She laughed. Technically you weren't supposed to mess with any form of drugs but as long as you are not going crazy with it at a party or something, no one really cares. Lacey swiveled her chair to face me head on. "Lazuli, this is going to be a hard task for you." She then proceeded to explain the gist of the mission: go to PKT, retrieve my smuggled-in supplies, make friends, and "fraternize" with Flick until we had something. Over the course of all that I would be collecting data and basically sneaking around trying to find as much information I could on why Sunset has stopped trading with us. The information may be biased because it's from the point of view of the leaders of PKT and not Sunset, but it's something.