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Somehow she always fucking ends up like this.
The bouncer didn't care how fake Carmen's ID was, as long as she slipped him a Jackson in his pocket. Carmen had been dancing when one of the bartender girls, with their platform boots and black dyed hair, approached her and gave her a drink someone sent over. The victim was a balding thirty-five year old who probably had a wife at home and came to this goth club to 'explore a different scene' and poach girls young enough to be his daughter.
Carmen didn't give a fuck. He'd lavish her with drinks and when he'd get starry eyed and when his tongue will become too thick for his mouth and words will become garbled non-sense, she'd pull him close, batting her fuck-me hazel eyes and dip her hand in his pocket, pull out his wallet and 'go to the bathroom to freshen up' and the poor old bastard will go home to an earful from his wife and empty pockets.
This time around, the pathetic bastard grabbed her wrist and pushed her off him and as everyone was too drunk to notice or simply didn't care to help her as he was threatening her, calling her a thieving whore and a prostitute, she had to wriggle out of his grasp and make a beeline for the bathroom, where she is currently puking up cheap liquor and the two biscuits she ate for lunch.
A lighter clicks and that's when Carmen notices him, sly as a cat, features odd and harsh but still intoxicating under the white bathroom light. It's cliche but he does look like the type of guy Mother would warn her to stay from or she'll end up like Aunt Hilda, a single mom and ex-communicated from the family, removed from the will.
She immediately gets up, holds on to her purse, ready to dig her nails in his eyes if she has to because she does know him, she's seen him talk to John, the blonde owner with smudged red lipstick and the other one, with long black hair and different colored eyes but no one with pure intentions would sneak in the women's. Of course not, this was a cesspool of junkies and fetishists, raving and fucking on the stairs until the MDMA wears off and they'd sway, glass eyed, like they were all sharing in their fucking misery.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" she yells at him but the guy just fixes his long raven hair in the mirror and tsks.
"Maybe you are dizzy from puking up your guts, princess, but you do know this is the men's bathroom?" he says and picks up the fake ID, flicking it to get the coke residue off and turns to her, a look of genuine concern on his face. "You don't belong here. You should go down to the arcade, have some fun with people your age."
"I am old enough to be here. Give me my ID back."
"No, Elizabeth. You're whatever age I was when I'd sneak in here to score blow."
"Just give me my ID back." she sighs, defeated. The comedown is already hellish, almost makes her want to go home, fall down to her knees in front of Mother and promise that she'd be the perfect model debutante daughter, that'd she'd go back to that ridiculous overpriced boarding school and she doesn't need this guy and his fake concern but he just blinks at her, his lashes going one-two-three with her heart. When he just turns to the mirror, periodically taking a long drag of his cigarette , Carmen just slides down to the floor, all the fight leaving her body. "Will you at least tell me your name?"
"It's Trent." he says with an easy smile before he turns to the mirror, as if he's waiting on someone. "What's yours? Your real one."
"My Christian birth name?" she teases. "Carmen."
"And how old are you really? I promise I won't tell Tim."
"You already care about me?"
"No, Twigs, the guy at the door, is my friend and if I tell Tim he's letting in underage girls, his ass is toast."
"I'm seventeen."
They stay in comfortable silence, as he takes a drag, making O shapes with the smoke until she snaps at him to stop, he was going to stink up her red dress. The leather jacket he's wearing is ratted so he must not come from money like her. There are dark circles under his green eyes, his body on the verge of being dangerously thin and she wonders if he's impatient for his next bump or fix and gets her answer when someone knocks on the door. The guy-Trent- grabs her elbow and whispers to her to hide in the stall.
"Where the fuck have you been? It's been an hour, other people are looking for me." Trent snarls but the guy takes out a wad of cash and slips it in his pocket.
"That enough?"
"For two grams." Trent says and pull out a baggie full of dope, as Carmen tries to slow down her beating heart, balancing herself on the toilet. The guy takes a bump with his car key and snorts it, whooping as his nose burns.
"That's some good shit, bro. Same time and place in a week?"
"I'll be there, man, sure."
Carmen nearly pulls the door off its hinges when she opens it, right after the guy is gone with a bag full of coke but Trent just looks at her, amused by her antics and she snarls in frustation.
"You're a fucking drug dealer." she says angrily.
"Listen here, princess, I don't push it down their throat, they're the ones calling me. Not all of us have a safety net of cash to catch us when things get fucked up. I don't need a trust fund brat who thinks she's hard for drinking Bacardi at '2wo' underage to tell me I've fucked up in life. But every time one of you is having a dorm party or some shitty bachelorette thing, you all run to me."
"You don't know the first thing about me."
"Whatever you say, kiddo. Now leave, you're gonna scare my customers away."
Carmen flies out of the bathroom door and out in the cold air and when it fully hits her, churning her stomach she bends down and pukes again. As she gets up, she notices her some old crone watching her from her window, probably some boring old lady named Mildred whose biggest excitment is winning at bingo and Carmen flips her off. She doesn't need Mildred or some petty drug dealer judging her.
It dawns on her that she doesn't have anywhere to go to and a guy honks at her but she flips him off too. Maybe one day she'll be desperate enough to get in such a car and she'll end up on a Crime TV special. Maybe they'll make a Lifetime movie. It does make a perfect fucking Lifetime movie, she thinks bitterly, the daughter of a wealthy New York family, with two nannies and horseback riding lessons and cotillion dresses leads a double life as a lady of the night.
She always fucking ends up like this.
Tonight she values her life a bit more than yesterday so she lets the coins clink and picks up the pay phone.
"Mom, it's Carmen, I want to come home."
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
It's comforting, almost, Carmen muses to herself, how nothing has changed after she left home. Of course, she'd prefer for Mother to leave Dad who runs his fingers down his associate Martin's wife under the table as she giggles and for her to stop downing glass after glass but that's the thing, Mother pushing down every bad feeling in the house means Carmen doesn't have to explain herself or sit in some overpaid shrink's office like when she was ten and caught Dad and his secretary. They needed to get rid of Carmen's 'overactive imagination' and her 'compulsive lying'. She knows her mom will stop at nothing to keep the picturesque family thriving which is probably why she's trying to set Carmen up with Martin's son Brandon who holds all the charm of a lobster. She has to sit through his boring football game play-by-plays and nod, like a little dolt. Brandon is the perfect boyfriend in everyone's eyes, all blazer and ties and a winning smile but Carmen's mind keeps wandering back to the long-haired guy she met in the bathroom. Trent, she tests his name out silently, and she remembers the smell of his cologne, the dark circles under his eyes and the playful smirk on his face. “Carmen?” Brandon says softly and Carmen coughs, maybe a little too fake and gets up.“I'm sorry, Brandon, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, I think I'm coming down with something. I'm going to lay down.”It lasts for all of three days before Mother starts packing Carmen's clothes furiously and pacing around her room, huffing.“Your drug tests came up positive. I will not have an addict lowlife living in our house. I'm done with you, Missy, I am done being your mother.”“Were you ever?” Carmen snarls and takes the trunk out of her mother's hands and storms out of the door, running to the elevator. The high of doing this and trembling fingers pass as soon as she winds up on the bus stop. All the fight leaves her body and she knows that now she'll have to sell everything she has to her name because her cards were cancelled a long time ago and none of her friends would let her crash, not after her family denounced her and she was just another addict living on the streets.“I always find you in trouble.” a husky, low voice says and she turns to find herself face to face with Trent and he whistles. “I guess you've seen better days.”Carmen knows she looks as shitty as she feels, cheeks stained with mascara, lipstick smudged but she still flips him off. “Fuck off. Are you on your way to deal drugs?”“You sound like a posh grandmother.” he jokes and lights up a cigarette as they sit. “I have classes. Computer Engineering. My folks will kill me if I don't get my degree.”Her mind is so garbled from all that's happened and the fact that the coke dealer she met is apparently an aspiring engineer so instead of telling him she's surprised he's in college she blurts out a 'you have parents?'“No, I sprouted from the ground like a fucking daisy. 'Course I have parents. They are not some uppity millionaires like yours, though. They divorced when I was around five, right after my sister was born. Shit wasn't working out between them but they still took care of us, I guess, when they felt like it.”“Mine never feel like it. I caught my dad fucking his secretary when I was ten.” she doesn't know why she's telling him this but it feel liberating, like a group fucking therapy thing where you're miserable but at least you know there are others at least half as miserable as you. “They sent me to a shrink. She said I was a compulsive liar and that was the end of it. My mom will never leave him, that would make her a pariah.”“That's fucked. You got a place to stay?”“No.” she admits, defeated and he puts out the cigarette and puts his headphones from around his neck into his bag and gets up, picking up her suitcase. “Don't you have class?”“Class has been cancelled, princess.”
***
His apartment is small and has one bed right by the windowsill and a carpet that hasn't been washed in centuries. He has one old dumpy computer and a pull-out couch. It still has some charm to it, adds to his whole tortured artist thing(he's not a tortured artist and you're not his muse, Carmen, he's a fucking street dealer), posters stuck on the walls, books strewn all around the place, Nietzsche, Camus, Vonnegut and an old record player, covered in dust. Something soft touches Carmen's leg and she lets out a high-pitched scream.“What the fuck, dude?” Trent says, fixing the couch and Carmen looks down to see a gray fat cat purring before it jumps on the bed. “That's Fuckchop. You're not allergic, are you?”“N-no. Fuckchop?” she asks, sitting down on the chair at the dining table, fiddling with a notebook.“She was a gift. Could you not touch that?” he says when he notices her fiddling with it and she stops, she had to respect his space, he did let her come here, didn't he? Carmen wonders if he has some ulterior motive, if he'll try to make a move on her when it gets a dark or if he'll lock her in here, do unspeakable, gory things and ask her family for money, delivering her piece by piece to them.“So the bed's yours, I'll sleep on the couch. There is some food in the fridge, just don't drink the milk, pretty sure it's expired. Coffee's in that drawer and so are the spices and shit like that. I'm warning you, I'm a terrible cook, I manage to fuck up boiling eggs sometimes but feel free to cook too. I know it looks a mess but I'll clean up, don't worry. And I won't let Fuckchop hang on your bed.”Her bed, she thinks, eyes pricking. He was a stranger who sold drugs for a living and a broke college student in a one room apartment and he still let her in, he still set up a bed for her and let her eat his food. Uncomfortable heat and bile rise up in her chest and suddenly the dam bursts and she starts sobbing and that makes Trent leap up and goes to her, kneeling down, shushing her. “Look at me, kiddo. Look at me! You'll never go back to black card shopping and maid service, your parents will probably write you out of the will but this is better than living out on the street. I mean it's not much and it's not your home, I understand that, but you have to get used to it. I'll help you out as much as I can as long as you don't get yourself in trouble, promise, princess?”“Promise.”