Miami at 2 A.M. wears a damp mask. The air presses in through the cracked jalousie windows, sweet with rot and salt, a throatful of heat that never learned to cool. The apartment is a shoebox with peeling paint and a carpet that forgot its color years ago.
A neighbor's TV laughs through the wall—static-laced sitcom applause, like the ocean clapping for nothing. In the kitchen, a stubborn drip keeps time, and on the table a small city of bills leans into the fan's slow, uneven breath. Lucia knows the city by its noises: the distant siren that never arrives here, the tired elevator in the hallway chewing itself floor by floor, the hiss of someone's smoke curling under a door that doesn't quite shut.
Sofia isn't home. The clock on the stove—green digits bleeding light—hums 2:00, then 2:01, climbing. Lucia has two hours before the morning shift, and the thought lands like a coin dropped down a well: you wait, you listen, you never hear it hit bottom.
The uniform hangs from a chair like an accusation, grease-stained gold arches smiling with all their teeth. Her bike helmet sits beside it, cracked along the foam like a spider's web. She should sleep. She should call. She should do a thousand small things responsible people do. Instead she walks to the bathroom and leaves the door open, because the apartment is too small for secrets and too hot for shame.
The mirror greets her with a pale, sleepless stranger. The medicine-cabinet glass is warped, bending her at the edges, like the world can't quite remember what shape she's supposed to be. Black hair damp at the tips, bangs pasted to her forehead. The rings on her fingers flash cheap chrome under the bare bulb's tremble. She turns her shoulder to catch the light and the collarbone flares—purple shadowed, lip of skin opened in an ugly smile where tonight's arithmetic got messy.
The kind of mark the hotline never mentions. The kind of cut the pay never covers.
The bathroom smells of bleach and mildew, warring perfumes. On the tub's rim, the cheap plastic curtain sticks to itself in gummy folds. Lucia steadies her breath. She is sixteen, built slim and stubborn, and her body has never asked for permission to keep going. But pain has a way of speaking you can't talk over.
It licks her nerves, a bright, metallic hum that crowds out every other sound until the drip, drip in the kitchen becomes a far-off metronome to something else: perseverance, maybe; penance, more likely.
She sets what she needs on the sink: a small constellation of objects that glitter without joy. She doesn't think about the first time she did this. She doesn't think about the second.
She thinks about the rent.
The way the landlord knocks has a different rhythm when he knows you're behind.
She thinks about Sofia's new shoes, how the box was light as a lie, how Sofia laughed with her friends and never looked back long enough to see Lucia looking forward.
There's a pressure in her throat like unshed words; she swallows and it burns.
The mirror tilts into a thin, haunted frame of her mouth. She bites the inside of her cheek and tastes copper. The bulb above her hums, a halo for saints no one prays to anymore.
Outside, a motorcycle coughs awake and tears through the street, a stitched line of noise that unravels into quiet. Lucia draws another breath. She has learned to move like a baton passed between disasters—clean, precise, unhesitating.
The wound protests in bright syllables that don't need a dictionary. She answers with the only language she trusts: control.
Her eyes are steady when her hands aren't. She braces an elbow against the mirror frame, damp forearm slippery on the flaking paint, and angles her shoulder so the cut looks back at her like a narrow, watchful eye.
In the glass she is multiplied: Lucia on Lucia, each one a fraction of the real thing, each one pretending not to flinch. She hears the phantom ringtone in her head—clean tone, hot line, a voice that stains without touching—three rings like a ritual, then the breathless quiet after acceptance.
The jobs never ask for more than you can give until they do. And then they keep asking.
She thinks of the ledger anyway, because numbers are kinder than faces. Hours traded for dollars; skin traded for hours; sleep pawned and never redeemed. The math stacks itself: a tower of sums that sways but will not fall yet.
She swallows again. A drop of sweat crawls from her temple to her jaw like a hesitant insect, then disappears into the hollow of her throat. Somewhere in the apartment, the fan clicks—click—click—like a metronome teaching you how to be calm.
Lucia leans closer. The world narrows to a coin-sized circle of skin and the heartbeat behind it. Her gaze goes long and thin. She does not look away. She will not. The girl in the mirror follows her movements with the same grim tenderness she uses on everything that refuses to break: the bills, the bike chain, the cracked helmet, the sister who won't come home, the body that is not a temple so much as a stubborn machine.
When she works, her mouth goes soft, slack with concentration; her eyes turn into something older than sixteen. Something you don't forgive or punish, only note and pass by.
A siren unspools in the distance and fades, a ribbon snatched by the dark. The apartment breathes. The hallway coughs. On the stove, the numbers climb to 2:12. Lucia counts to five and doesn't know why. She hums, the way she did as a kid when storms smacked the windows and the power died: a nothing tune, a streetlight lullaby.
The rings on her fingers make their small, secret music whenever she flexes. The mirror fogs, briefly, with her breath, and for a second the wound vanishes in clouds. She could let it stay gone. She could. She wipes the glass with the back of her wrist and brings it back.
Her face, when she finishes, is the blank face of a girl who has outlived too many midnights. She tips her chin, examining the line she's written into herself, the compromise between damage and denial. It isn't pretty. It's neat enough.
She sets the last gleam of metal down on the porcelain and the sound is a tiny bell rung for no one.
— "You're fine," she tells the mirror.
— "You've got work," the mirror tells her back.
She turns the water on and lets it run cold over her hands until the sting steadies into something she can name. The bathroom door stays open. The empty apartment listens. The clock keeps going.
Two hours shrinking to one, then less. Lucia watches herself watching herself, a loop with no exit, a girl she recognizes and doesn't. She dries her hands on a threadbare towel, rolls her shoulders, and looks straight into the glass as if it were a window to weather. The city hums approval. The night does not.
Lucia towels her hands dry until the sting goes blunt, then steps back into the apartment's stale heat.
The uniform waits on the chair, a cardboard smile in cloth. She slides into it piece by piece—shirt first, then name tag with its chipped edge, then the hat she refuses to wear until the threshold.
The fabric smells like fryer oil and lemon cleaner; it clings in places the night has already claimed. She smooths the collar once, a small ritual of order, the way you make a bed in a war zone because it's the square inch you can win.
Her motorcycle helmet sits on the table, its matte shell scribed with thin white scuffs like chalk marks left by speed. She lifts it, feels the hairline crack in the foam with her thumb, feels the weight of all the streets it remembers.
Keys in one hand, helmet in the other, she angles toward the door and stops at the shoe rack: mismatched sneakers, a pair of Sofia's heels abandoned like a joke that never landed. Tucked beside them, a zip pouch waits in obedient gray.
She draws it out.
Plastic teeth unstitch with a faint rasp. Inside: sertraline in a pharmacy bottle that clicks like a metronome;
lamotrigine scored down the middle, white and decisive;
bupropion tablets that look like someone's idea of optimism;
quetiapine for nights that won't unclench;
clonazepam in a blister card, last row already shy;
hydroxyzine like dull pearls for the days she doesn't trust the stronger ghosts.
Paper leaflets folded into origami lies about side effects and sunsets. All the names sound like different kinds of weather.
She stares at the array the way you stare at a locked door, aware of both sides. A month of copays she could have spent on something visible. Something Sofia would have understood.
She imagines the bottles as tiny foremen barking schedules: swallow at 9 A.M., at 9 P.M., with food, without light, with silence. She imagines them as sandbags on the edges of her emotions, tamping the swell before it floods.
Control is a beautiful word when you're drowning. It's a chokehold when you need to scream.
The stove clock clicks to 2:19. The fan ticks. She hears her breath and doesn't like the sound it makes.
She rethreads the zipper a quarter of the way, stops, then opens the pouch wider. The choice is a short hallway with no windows: take them, carry them, pretend your spine is steadier; leave them, prove you can white-knuckle the tide alone. Her thumb rests on the bottle cap and stills.
— "You don't have time for this," she tells the neat, patient labels.
She waits for the rebuke that doesn't come.
The silence is a coin that refuses to choose heads or tails. She pictures herself at the register under fluorescent sun, counting change with hands that want to shake, a voice that wants to scrape. She pictures the bathrooms she'll mop later, the concrete she'll lift later than that, every hour asking her to be softer, then harder, then softer again. She pictures Sofia's empty shoes and the way they look like footprints walking away.
Lucia tucks the pouch under her arm, then changes her mind and slides it into the helmet—safe, close, hidden.
She kills the lone kitchen light, and the apartment folds into a dim aquarium of street-glow. Lock, check, lock again.
She steps into the hallway's sour chill, the kind that smells of wet carpet and old arguments, and pulls the door shut behind her until the latch clicks bitterly into place.
No neighbors out. No witnesses to the way her shoulders reset like a weapon being holstered. The corridor stretches to the elevator, a tunnel of humming fluorescents and scuffed arrows pointing nobody anywhere.
Her sneakers whisper over the cheap tile. At the far end, the call button waits, a little circle of hope that never learned better. She presses it with a knuckle.
— "Basement," she tells the air, as if the building were a chauffeur.
The doors part with a breath that tastes of metal. The car is empty—mirrored walls, gum-blackened floor, the faint cologne of a stranger long gone. She steps inside and the doors close their silver mouths on the world.
The elevator hums a tired note as it drops, a cable hymn inside the shaft. Lucia leans her back against the cool metal wall and slides the gray pouch from her helmet.
Plastic teeth rasp; little suns of white and off-white watch her from their bottles and blisters. She doesn't count, not tonight.
Caps click, foil sighs; she takes them one by one with dry swallows, each pill a bead added to a rosary of storms. Sertraline's steady promise, lamotrigine's sharp half-moons, bupropion's chalky resolve, quetiapine's velvet surrender, clonazepam's borrowed hush, hydroxyzine's dull anchor—weather systems lining up, asking for permission to pass over her without landing.
She stares at her shoes.
Scuffed rubber, black laces gone gray at the tips. The floor's stainless steel mirrors a ghost-pair back at her, walking nowhere. She tries not to think, which means she thinks about everything. Rent due. The janitor shift that will smell like bleach and swallowed pride.
The site foreman's jokes that aren't jokes. Mostly Sofia: 7 A.M. pickup, the plastic promise of attendance, the way the school portal will still later show absent in a neat red font. She sees the text she won't get, the apology that will never sound like one, the half-smile from a kid who's already halfway out the door of her own life.
She rubs the heel of her hand into her temple until light prickles at the edges of her vision.
— "Hold, just hold," she whispers to the lift's hum, as if the building could keep the night from sliding.
The doors part with a soft hydraulics sigh. The basement breathes damp and oil, a concrete lung full of old rubber and colder shadows. She steps out into the stripe-painted gloom, lines on the floor pointing like sermons.
Rows of cars sleep with their alarms ready; somewhere, water ticks from a pipe into a stain that knows its shape. Her bike waits where it always waits, slouched against a pillar like a patient animal. She fits the key, the helmet, the chin strap's scratchy kiss beneath her jaw.
The visor lowers; the world grows smaller and louder, a drum around her head.
She turns the ignition. The motorcycle shivers awake and the sound threads through her chest. Half a beat later, pain spears from the base of her skull up behind her eyes—hot, bright, total. She folds forward until her visor nearly kisses the tank, breath snagging.
— "Come on," she grits, the words fogging the plastic.
Her fist finds the helmet's crown, a blunt, rhythmic knock—once, twice, again—matching the throb until the inside of her head flinches to a different rhythm.
The migraine stutters, then recedes by inches, a tide dragged backward by something unseen. She holds still, counting the aftershocks. The ache settles into a lower, livable growl.
She exhales. Shoulders unlock. The engine's idle steadies like a hand on her back. She straightens, rolls the bike out of its painted stall, and angles toward the ramp's bare mouth and the ribbon of night beyond, where the city waits to test her promises.