If the nightclub was a marvel, the apartment was a sin.
The walls tarred black, with plastic curtains dishevel from the heat and soot. Bricks hung loose from their dispersed congregation, the cracked cement barely able to convince them to stay in place. The wooden floor was rotting, bleached—its original gleam long gone, the polish washed off, leaving only the dull gloom of untreated timber.
But most jarring was the calm.
The apartment was already buzzing when they arrived. A handful of people lay sprawled on beanbags, eyes glassy, giggling at nothing. The air smelled like moulded cardboard and burnt leaves. Greeting Rita, was a shirtless man heating a spoon.
"Gwen, is that dude doing heroine?" Rita whispered, clutching at her bag, eyes darting across the room, scanning for threats.
"No! He's obviously heating up his caramel toffee." Gwen replied, throwing herself onto a nearby beanbag, dragging Rita with her. Something shattered beneath them—a sharp pop. Rita looked down. Fragments of stained-glass, like pieces from a church window, lay like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the floor. A nozzle beside them, rust-brown and leaking a faint battery stench.
"Is that…crack?" Rita asked, horrified, eyes pointing at the wreckage.
"No, it's a… European inspired vape." Gwen shrugged, making eye-contact with one of the moving bodies, trying to signal them over. "Quite popular in Doncaster."
"I don't know... Gwen"
"Oh my god, stop being a square! Look around!" Gwen grabbed Rita's face and turned it toward the room. "You think these guys can harm you?"
Rita scoffed, trying to reply but came up empty. Just then, one of the men staggered over, unzipping a bag of rolled joints, it looked like it had been hidden in his shirt. He offered them to the pair. Gwen plucked out two, handed one to Rita, and gave the man's plastic chain mail a playful slap before he drifted away again.
"The less you think…the better." Gwen said, lighting her joint. "With that being said—" taking a long inhale, a laboured swallow, and a short exhale of smoke. "Stop thinking!"
Rita stared at the pile of bodies scattered across the room before slipping the joint into her pocket. Then, after a long beat, she reconsidered—snatched Gwen's joint from her mouth and took a puff.
The pair huffed and puffed for a bit, stargazing at the sooted constellations on the ceiling walls, until a figure loomed over the both of them, providing observational cover and funnelling their gaze like a telescope toward her clear skin.
"Ah—it's you. Club soda lady," the figure said. Rita, squinting and shading her eyes to make out their features. Doc Martens. Ripped denim. A striped seam down her thigh.
"It's Rita" she corrected, sitting up right. The woman adjusted, dragging a beanbag closer and kicking away shards of stained-glass to make space. She sat cross-legged, like a child at assembly.
"Cool, anyway who's your friend" she asked, nodding toward Gwen, who was tracing the smudges on the ceiling. Starry Night, if Van Gogh had been handed charcoal instead of oil paint.
"That's Gwen!" Rita said, snapping Gwen back into the moment. Her slit eyes widened, startled, body language spelling a quiet "huh."
"Hi," Gwen said, looking the woman up and down, her face contorting wickedly with a bemused scratch of her head, trying and failing to place her, even rubbing her eyes to gain extra clarity.
"Hello!" extending her hand out at Gwen, she shook flimsy using the tip of her fingers, tilting her head at the woman. "I like your skirt," she continued, causing Gwen to look at her skirt and wipe the fallen ash off of it.
"Thanks, it was thrifted." Gwen swiped the joint from Rita mid-sentence. Rita, unwilling to concede, tried to wrestle it back, and Gwen slapped her hand away, sending a few embers flicking into the dark like cake sparklers.
"Really, who'd throw that away?"
"Some idiot who hates paint splattered on their skirt, I guess" Gwen said, puffing with triumphant delight.
"But that makes it endearing. Gives it character—"
"I know right!" Gwen said, laughing, lighting up again.
"So...what do y'all do?" aiming her fingers at the pair, while sneakily stealing the joint from Gwen.
"I'm in sales," Gwen said, gesturing toward herself, hiccupping mid-sentence. "Rita works in insurance" pointing finger-guns towards Rita.
"A liar and a heartless thug" the woman declared, swinging back and forth in her crossed stance, puffing smoke to hid her smirk.
"Woah! What do you do, Mister Judgmental?" Gwen shot back, snatching the joint and exhaling smoke in the woman's direction.
"It's miss, and I also unfortunately work in sales." she replied, waving away the haze and half-curtsying in her seat, trying her best at femininity.
"Ah…a comrade" Gwen straightened up, saluting at the woman.
"Viva le bourgeois" saluting back, her French accent appalling. "Your friend doesn't talk much." switching to an even worse Russian one.
"Only in public!"
"I'm right here, you know," Rita shrieked, pushing past Gwen to take a drag, using her hands as a makeshift holster.
"Good!" Gwen said, standing and brushing spit off the beanbag. "I trust y'all be able to keep the conversation going as I go do my rounds." She finished the joint and passed the roach to Rita.
"Um—" Rita says, looking at the stub, debating where to dispose of it, until settling on the rogue shard of stained-glass. This shard, in particular, had the image of a woman in a white tunic praying.
"Yep!" the woman said with a wide smile.
Rita reached into her pocket and pulled out her own joint, lighting it to fill the sudden awkward silence that hung between them.
"So," the woman said after a few shared puffs, "we go McDonald's—what're you getting?"
"Probably a McFlurry and Big Mac" Rita said after a moment's thought, exhaling smoke and feeling her stomach growl at the idea of grease meeting mouth.
"What a childish order! What are you, fifteen?" the woman teased, eyeing her through the smoke.
"How's that childish?" Rita questioned, her tone slightly sharpened with offence as she passed the joint, passing the joint to the woman, who accepted it easily.
"You're drawn in by size and flash." she said, twirling the joint like a prop before taking a slight puff. "Not realising that the real value is in taste." Another puff. She tried to pass it back to Rita.
"And what do you get, Miss Connoisseur?" Rita rejecting the return, animatedly mocking the woman's theatrics.
The woman let out a small chuckle. "A cheeseburger, small fries and coke," grinning as she snuffed the joint out on the praying woman's glass face
"That's a terrible order," Rita cried. "So plain! And you had the gall to go after my club soda." Sinking further into the beanbag.
"Only because you have the taste buds of a toddler." the woman fired back, leaning forward now, her knees spread as she inched closer. "If you had a refined palate, you'd understand that the cheeseburger is the perfect ratio of sauce, gherkin, and meat." She mimed holding a burger and took a long satisfied bite "Plus," she continued, admiring her imaginary burger and Rita, who watched curiously from her cotton bed of sloth. "It's never over-done because the patty is perfectly designed to be grilled. Not like a Big Mac—" shaking her head. "—where it's unnecessarily oversized and one part is overcooked and hard and the other soggy and tasteless." She stuck out her tongue in disgust.
"You just haven't had a good Big Mac"
"But I've had plenty of perfect cheeseburgers."
As the silence settled. Gwen returned to the fry. With her shirt fully untucked, and her stance staggered. Tossing herself violently onto the beanbag, grazing Rita, who yelled "Ouch!" on impact.
"Y'all look like you're getting along" Gwen said, ignoring Rita's cries and readjusting her position on the beanbag. Fruitlessly trying to recreate her previous comfort, shifting restlessly.
"I wouldn't go that far," the woman said, grinning. "I think she just tolerates me."
"Tolerate is still going far." Rita said, turning away and looking at the two charred sticks on the stained-glass. Looking at how the ash had swallowed the praying woman, and all that remained was her tunic, ruined by the grey and black.
"Then what would you call it?" Gwen yawned, stretching. A brief silence washed over the pair, as the crackle of dying embers announced itself. The woman watched Rita with a half-smile, and Rita, despite herself, looked back.
"Situational social compliance." she remarked coldly, sitting upright from the beanbag, crossing her legs in return.
"I'd call it getting along."
"I'd agree with you" the woman said, still fixed on Rita. "Anyway, I didn't catch your guys is names" varying her attention back to the pair of them.
"I'm Gwen," Gwen said. "The deformed one's Rita."
"Hey!" Rita protested
"What's yours?" the said in unison.
"Aaliyah."