Page 45 of Vasily the Nail

I turn to apologize to Alessandro about my mind drifting, and the neon lights shift from lines to giant blocks of color.

“She’ll sit on your dick if you want,” he says with another gesture to the poor girl in the corner.

Yet again, I say, “I’m gonna miss her.” And yet again, my water bottle leaks.

I hold the bottle up to the light to see if there’s a hole in it or if I’m so incompetent I can’t drink water properly. Sure enough, there’s a pin hole up near the neck so it wouldn’t have leaked when it was just sitting in the pack but does when I drink from it.

“He’s on his way,” someone very far away says, but when I look through the plastic bottle, I see it’s my escort and she’s right next to me.

I kind of feel like I’m inside the bottle.

I should say something to Alessandro to warn him that the bottle is leaky, but as it starts to slip from my hand, I notice a white film has collected at the bottom of it.

“Looks like you’ve had enough,” Alessandro murmurs as he takes the bottle from me.

“You son of a bitch,” I groan as my eyes roll back and silence takes over.

Day 8

Analiese

“I want to die.”

“Aww, poor Laces.”

I want to yell at Camilla not to ‘poor Laces’ me, but I’m scared the words will rattle around in my brain until I puke.

I did enough of that last night.

“Why does it hurt so much?” I whimper as I throw the hood of Vasily’s sweatshirt over my head to hide my eyes from the sun as I plod into the kitchen.

My feet hurt. The carpet is too scratchy, the wood laminate is too cold. I don’t understand how this was all fine yesterday, but it’s trying to murder me now, I’m sure of it.

“You took four shots of vodka. What did you expect?”

I see the offending bottle on the counter. I’m not even sure it’s vodka. The label isn’t in English. It looks more likeBoAKaif the first A had decided to squat down and do a funny dance. Why does it look like that? Is it even legal to sell this in America if you can’t read the label?

Oh right, Vasily’s a criminal. A terrible, horrible, awful, very bad man who does terrible, horrible, awful, very bad things.

Like not coming home last night.

“Aww, Laces, don’t cry again.” I want to tell her I’m not going to cry, that I hate Vasily and this is all his fault and I do need to be really mad at him, but then she adds, “Not until you drink a big glass of water. You sound like you drank sand last night.”

“I can’t even tell I drank anything,” I pout, yet another attempt at punishing Vasily by taking a prized possession from him failing. The first was the cookies. Now, this bottle of vodka. It’s gigantic, so the shots I drank only dropped the level an inch, if that. “I’ve literally watched Tony drink this much at the dinner table andthengo out. Why do I suck so bad?”

“Sweetie, it looked like you sucked really well, in fact—oh oh oh, no, I didn’t mean that.”

Too late. Tears are streaming. My best friend saw me suck that stupid idiot’s dick, and now I’m going to be tormented for the rest of my life by her.

And he didn’t even come home.

I don’t know what I was thinking last night. I was mad, I wanted to be reckless and show him how stupid he looked on drugs by being . . . I don’t know, stupid on drugs, I guess. Except everyone talks like drugs are so much worse than alcohol, and I’ve only ever been tipsy on watered-down wine before. I didn’t want to go straight to drugs.

Vodka was a terrible choice.

And then he never even came home, and I had to call Camilla so I wouldn’t feel so pathetic drinking by myself. She did shots with me over video chat, but she’s fine this morning.

Sort of. The phone screen is shattered, another casualty of Vasily’s stupidity last night, so now Camilla kind of looks like she’s shattered, too.

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