There was a girl back then. A senior. She wasn’t just a girl; she was a goddamn religion, and none of us were believers—we were just the sinners staring up at the stained-glass window, knowing we’d never get inside. She was beautiful in a way that made the air in the hallways go thick, the kind of untouchable that made you feel dirty just for looking. She moved like the world was her own private property, and the rest of us were just trespassing. She was for some other life, the kind we only saw in movies.
I never spoke to her, not really. Might have slurred a “hey” at a party once, a half-drunk prayer that went unanswered. It didn’t matter. We were different species. We were gutter rats, sharpening our teeth on the scraps of a life we hated; she was something clean, and that was the same as being holy.
I only bring her up because one night, in a place as far from holy as you could get, her name came up.
The place was Rick’s garage. Rick was our dealer, which just meant he was the one kid who had a slightly better connection than the rest of us. His garage was our clubhouse, a shithole that reeked of stale beer, spilled bong water, and the sour, desperate sweat of boys waiting for a handout. We’d hover around him like flies on roadkill, hoping for a freebie, a leftover line, some small sacrament to get us through another night.
Then a motorcycle tore the quiet night apart, a deep, guttural roar that vibrated up through the soles of our cheap shoes. We all turned.
It was Scott.
Scott wasn’t one of us. He was older, tougher, a ghost from a future we were all stumbling toward. He moved with an easy confidence that made you hate his guts and want to be him all at the same time. If we were rats, he was the wolf. Handsome in that scarred, lived-in way, with the kind of face that good girls wanted to ruin themselves for. He was what we all thought we wanted to be before we knew any better.
He slid off that bike like he was part of it, pulled a thick, dirty roll of cash from his jacket, and slapped it on Rick’s workbench. Over a grand. Rick didn’t flinch, didn’t ask questions. He just nodded, disappeared into the house, and came back with a bag of cocaine bigger than my own sad future.
Scott wasn’t a subtle man. He dumped a pile of it onto a broken mirror and, with the hard edge of his hand, carved the powder into a fat, perfect “S.” The room went silent. This wasn’t a party anymore. This was a ceremony.
He rolled up a C-note like it was a piece of scrap paper, leaned down, and took half the “S” up his nose in one long, violent rip.
His head shot up. His eyes rolled white for a second, like a man seeing God or the devil himself, then they snapped back into focus, gleaming with a raw, electric fire. He let out this howl, a wild sound from the back of his throat. Then he slid the mirror toward me.
You don’t think in a moment like that. You just act. It’s the law of the food chain. I grabbed the bill, snorted a line that felt like it was tearing a path straight through my soul, and for a second, I felt nothing at all, just a beautiful, soaring weightlessness. I passed the rest to Louis, who was already shaking, his hands twitching like a junkie at the gates of heaven.
Then Scott, high as a fucking satellite, started talking.
He was celebrating. His girl was pregnant. They were getting married. He was going to be a father. His life was a golden goddamn highway, and he was putting the pedal to the floor. You could see the joy on his face—that rare, stupid, magnificent joy of a man who truly believes he has won.
And then he said her name.
Her name. The goddess from the hallways. The untouchable one.
She was his. He hadn’t just talked to her; he’d conquered her. He’d done the one thing we all thought was impossible. Scott was the kind of man who walked into the world and took what he wanted. The money, the drugs, the future. And the girl.
He got back on his bike, revved the engine like a war cry that rattled the windows of the cheap houses around us, and roared off into the night to claim his kingdom.
The coke was still burning a hole in my brain as I skated home through the dark silence of Palm Park. For a few minutes, I was a god, too. Invincible. The world was sharp and electric. Every streetlight pulsed like a living thing. Then my front wheel hit a rock.
I was airborne for a single, glorious second, my body a weightless, silent twist in the dark.
And then—
Face-first into the unforgiving pavement.
The impact was a lightning bolt. The sickening crunch of my nose, the immediate, hot, coppery taste of blood flooding my throat. I rolled onto my back, the high still numbing the worst of it, and I started laughing. Laughing like a goddamn lunatic at the spinning stars, smeared across the black sky like cheap paint. Sometimes, the universe just hands you a piece of poetry like that.
I found out about Scott the next day.
He’d been flying down some dark suburban road, high, ecstatic, still the king of his own goddamn world. A pickup truck pulled out in front of him. He never even touched the brakes.
His body sailed through the air, just like mine had. Only he didn’t get up laughing.
Dead on impact.
The wedding, the baby, the future—all of it, gone. The untouchable girl was a widow before she even had a chance to be a bride.
Scott was gone.
And we never said it out loud, not once. But every last one of us rats, scuttling around in Rick’s garage that next night, we all knew the cold, hard truth of it.
If the wolf could get taken out that easy, the rest of us were already doomed. We were just waiting for our turn to hit the pavement for good.
Author’s Note
Don’t come looking for a moral to this story. There isn’t one. Don’t come looking for heroes, either. There are only gods and insects, and sometimes they get crushed all the same.
Every shitty high school has a guy like Scott. The wolf. The one all the other rats look up to because he’s already living the life they’re too scared to even dream about. He has the money, the confidence, the bike that roars like a promise of something better. He has it all figured out.
And then he gets it. He gets the girl—the goddess, the one who was never supposed to be for the likes of us. He wins the whole goddamn game.
And the universe, being the cruel, ironic bastard that it is, lets him have his victory lap right before it runs him over with a fucking pickup truck.
This isn’t a story about a motorcycle crash. It’s about the moment every kid in the gutter realizes the cold, hard truth: if the wolf is just meat for the grinder, then the rats are already doomed. It’s a story about borrowed time, and the quiet, terrible certainty that the clock is about to run out on all of you. It was just another Tuesday.
