Free When Everything Feels like the Movies by Raziel Reid Page B

beneath the counter. I picked up my glass of water and started sucking on the straw, slipping my lips down it inch by inch until my eyes started to water. His face got red and blotchy, like he was almost there. I bit my chipped nails as he rubbed his palms on his jeans and panted.
    Then I saw Angela through the window and jumped out of the booth, knocking into the table and spilling coffee over the edge of my cup. I air-kissed the trucker as I walked past, like he was a fan. I put my glasses back on and stopped Angela before she came through the door. The trucker spun around so fast to see me leave that he almost broke the seat.
    “Where are we going?” Angela asked, pulling her arm away as I dragged her down the street. “I’m hungry!”
    “I have no money,” I said. “I tried to steal some of my mom’s tips, but she was too busy playing housewife for me to get a chance.”
    “Fuck it,” she sighed, “I have booze bloat. I shouldn’t eat anything anyway.” Angela pulled her phone from her purse to check a text and asked me, “Do you know Mikey K?”
    “The dealer?”
    “Yeah, Mike Johnson. His mom’s a vet. He has the best Special K.”
    “I prefer Cheerios.”
    “He’s at the mall. We can meet him.”
    “I don’t like Mikey. He poured a can of Pepsi over my head once.”
    “Yeah, because you told him you wanted to have sex with his dad.”
    “Whatever. He’s an asshole.”
    “So forget the asshole,” she smiled, crossing the street to the bus stop. “And fall into a K-hole.”
    When the bus came, we sat at the back near a homeless man and some boys who were a few years older than Keef and a few years short of a criminal record. They stared at me for the entire ride, like I was some exotic animal at the zoo. I didn’t know whether to growl or start signing autographs. Angela didn’t say anything about my nose. I don’t think she noticed. Angela didn’t notice anything except missed periods and how many Likes she was getting on Facebook.
    We met Mikey K in the mall food court by the photo booths. He was wearing a baseball cap backward, and his jeans were so low on his hips that his ass was hanging out. He had on Bart Simpson boxers, and when I said, “Oh my God, are those Jeremy Scott?” he looked at me like I wasn’t speaking English. Angela hugged him, and he put his hand on her lower back. I tried to remember if his name was written under the table at our booth. He nodded his head at me, the way some guys do instead of actually speaking, and tried to shake my hand. But I couldn’t do the handshake—I could never do them. On the rare occasion that someone was willing to touch my hand, I’d always end up embarrassing myself. I don’t know why Mikey even tried. I guess because I was a client and everything, but he was still kind of awkward, like he was worried I wouldn’t let his hand go.
    “So what do you have?” Angela asked.
    “We’re thinking of trying K,” I said.
    “I won’t have any K until career day.”
    “But you’re Mikey K ,” Angela whined, like she didn’t believe him, like she thought he was keeping it all to himself.
    “So what do you have?” I asked.
    “Just some bud and a couple hits of acid.”
    “Acid!”
    “Acid?”
    “Five bucks a hit,” he said.
    “I have twenty bucks,” Angela said, pulling her makeup and cigarettes out of her purse to find the bill.
    They went into the photo booth to do the exchange and were in there for so long that I wondered what else they were doing. I stood awkwardly looking out at the food court until Mikey finally came out. “Later, mang,” he said as he passed me, his jeans even lower.
    Angela and I went into the handicapped bathroom which we used to hot-box in all the time when Angela was being a monk or whatever and always wanted to get high and chant Hare Krishnas. She claimed the handicap bathroom at the mall had really good energy, at least when the pregnancy tests she took in it were negative.
    “Sink or