Page 35 of Privilege

Fuck it all.

Maybe later, he’d call the emergency room where he knew Carmen had been taken, and ask if she was awake and lucid. That was about the only thing he was going to do, though. It would be in her best benefit if the doctors recognized her for what she was—an addict in need of help—and forced her into inpatient rehab.

But that was unlikely.

It wasn’t how the system worked.

“Okay,” Diego said, holding tight to the book that Renzo had just finished reading him. “Night, Ren.”

Renzo leaned over the bed, and pressed a quick kiss to his brother’s forehead before he stood up, and left the bedroom. He didn’t bother to close the door. Often, Diego would wake up and walk the apartment to find his brother.

He rarely ever looked in the bathroom first which was the place someone could always find Renzo when nighttime fell, and he could finally go to sleep.

Yanking open the small closet in the hallway, Ren pulled out the pillow he kept hidden in there. Given there was only one bedroom, and it belonged to Diego, Renzo was not going to fit on the boy’s small bed. He also wasn’t sleeping on the floor. God knew he’d slept on the ground too many times as it was.

He also wouldn’t take the couch because for one, his mother used it when she was around, but right then, it still smelled like a mixture of bleach and vomit. It needed cleaned again. Or just tossed out altogether.

That was a more likely option.

But he’d have to go get another one.

So yeah, no bedroom, no floor, and definitely no couch. That really only left Renzo with one option, and that was the bathtub.

He’d slept in more bathtubs over his lifetime than he cared to admit, but out of all the things in his life, it was the one thing he didn’t find very much shame in. He found it comforting.

Climbing into chipped porcelain, resting the pillow behind his head, and unloading the shit in his pockets that he’d gathered over the day. A roll of small bills, a grinder for herbs, the small baggie of weed and papers he kept on hand for days like today, a lighter, a pack of smokes, and the gun he kept tucked into the back of his pants. He rested all the items on the edge of the tub, tucked his arms behind his head, and stared up at the yellow-tinted ceiling.

He should light up a joint, and smoke the bathroom out.

He should go to sleep.

He should worry about tomorrow.

He should have done a lot of things.

Instead, when he closed his eyes, he thought about red-soled shoes, hazel eyes, and a girl that asked him a question he really wasn’t ready to answer.

Was his life who he was, too?

Did it make him?

He’d always thought yes.

She said it like the answer was no.

SEVEN

Streams of light basked in flecks of gold and streaked with slashes of white crawled across Lucia’s face. She wasn’t the type to enjoy sun on her face first thing in the morning, not when that meant it was time to get up. She wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting here staring at the light peeking between the opened slat in the curtains. Long enough that her alarm clock had run its course, and then went off again five minutes later in an effort to remind her that she needed to get up.

She never even turned it off. It played itself out.

“Lucia!”

Her gaze drifted from the window, to the closed door of her bedroom. Her father’s shout echoed from down the hallway, but she didn’t answer him back. She knew what he wanted.

Not that she hadn’t gotten up yet.

Not that she might be late for work.