Cherry

by Nico Walker

He had me do push-ups till I reached muscle failure. It didn’t take three minutes to get there. Still I did a lot of push-ups. I was good at them. Most of us could do push-ups. And were the outcomes of all the wars decided by push-ups and idle talk, America might never lose.

I owed some dope boys some money. I didn’t give a fuck. Fuck Black and his fucking money. He could get it how he lived. I was only ever afraid of one thing in my life, that I wouldn’t be able to get heroin. I wasn’t ever more than twelve hours from total collapse. And there was the desperation. I was compromised.

No plans. No stopwatch. No ski mask. No gun. Because I didn’t like shit like this I didn’t give a fuck about doing it the proper way. Emily was sick and all it was was I had to rob the bank or go to jail and I could say I had tried. I figured the best thing would be to just go ahead and do it so I could find out what was going to happen.

My dad was in a good mood that day for some reason I couldn’t have guessed at and my mom was trying to be cheerful and fussed over me and I felt bad. I was uncomfortable in comfortable places. Nice people looked so nice when you were on heroin.

I had a theory. My theory was that I was a piece of shit and deserved it when bad things happened to me.