"Oh. My. God. My head is killing me," Rizzo thought to herself (She said it out loud too, but she was too hungover to notice.) She was sitting on a Baker Street sidewalk, leaning against a brick building while her tongue hung lazily out of the corner of her mouth. A drop of saliva rolled off her tongue and onto her hand which was perched under her head for stability. It didn't seem to be helping much though. Her head rolled right and left, whichever way gravity took it. It was almost like falling asleep during class when your head jerks and wakes you up, bringing you back from your colorful dream to the cold, dreariness of a classroom.
What seemed like hours passed as the bleakness of morning began to turn on Washington Heights. In actuality, only about 15 minutes had gone by and that bleakness was Rizzo's thought of starting life over... Again. After collecting the few thoughts she had, Rizzo slowly opened her eyes and noticed a disgusting green foam on her forearm. Hmmmmm... "Where is this from?"
She thought. "I am such a lightweight that my memory is completely gone. That is ridiculous. I'm screwed again. Back to AA..." Snippets of last night began to return to Rizzo. First, came the green goo. It was that wierd alien kid, Naublus! That nasty shit came out of his ears! "No, that's really not possible..." Rizzo thought, and she moved on. Next came the thought of Fil. She remembered the night's faint talk of his death. It seemed plausable at the time that it was all a joke. Kind of like that time he put his own obituary in the Washington Heights News. Anyway, Fil was an alright kid in Rizzo's book. Whenever he rode car #1, he smiled and offered to help Rizzo to roll up her sleeping bag.
Suddenly, Rizzo burst out into convulsive tears. She had worked so long and hard to better herself, to bring herself back from the edge of death. And it was all for nothing. The blueberry bagels with strawberry cream cheese sucked her back in.
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Ryan stepped out into the warm, sunny day, the air tainted with the scent of death- innocent death. "Fil died, last night; apparently Grandma Pearl found him." None of these names or these people were familiar to Ryan. The voice identified itself as Rizzo Sprayberry. Clio was leaving, and Ryan would be left all alone, to fend for himself. She'd explained to him that she wasn't his emotional life support. The chaotic swarm that engulfed Washington Heights seemed to speak to Ryan. For a split second he felt the pain caused by the club that struck him in the back of his head. The next thing he knew he was at the bottom of an unknown body of water. There was no question in Ryan's mind that the same people who had killed his family were behind this. In the present situation his mind slowed down time long enough for his dying thoughts. Would anyone know that he was gone? Any heart feel pain as a result of his absence? Clio was leaving. She would never know he was gone. What about the red girl, Nicole? "What, the one that you had meaningless sex with?" His mind seemed to argue. No, she would never know he was gone, or care, for that matter. Life had given Ryan a chance, a chance to be loved, but he had pushed away those who could potentially have cared about Ryan; hell, he pushed away those who DID care about him, so that he could focus on how angry he was. Suddenly, time released itself upon Ryan and everything happened at once. Water began to fill his lungs as anger began to yield itself to the sweeping current. Wherever Ryan had been dumped, he had been miraculously placed next to the remains of his car, with only one of the tires ruined by the explosion. Ryan fought against the water and the ropes that bound him to the metal chair keeping him submerged, and managed to extract the air out of the tires and into his lungs. This bought him valuable time that he used to locate a sharp rock with which to free himself. Ryan swam to the shore, released and ready to begin a new life.
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