BOYS OF SUBURBIA [boy x boy] [Wattys 2018]

✗ TWO ✗

Niko didn't know why he felt the need to just take the bottle of vodka like that, so rude and so blunt, but lately, he'd been seized by the impulse to just do whatever felt right. 

At least, he was nice enough offer some to the cashier. Besides, that poor kid looked like he'd been working for endless of hours. He needed a good drink. Or five.

Niko dumped all of his lighter fluid and fire shit inside the back of his brother's- no scratch that, dead brother's truck and leaned on the chassis, examining how dead quiet the whole town once dusk fell rapidly onto the skies. 

He liked the isolation sometimes, surprisingly so- away from the madhouse of partying it up with Roger Salsky and the rest of his mates, mainly because it was something he'd always did, something so part of the routine: get up, survive school, go fuck shit up at some party, come back wrecked, sleep, repeat. For a while, it became escape. The perfect distraction from all the shit- Dad absence, Mom's spiralling drug addiction to cope with her crippling depression, Mika dead, dead, dead and Rae sleeping around with half the university to get rid of her problems- but now it felt like all the partying was starting to grow into a trap, a cage he would never get out of.

I need something to burn, thought Niko immediately, hands itching to just grab the lighter fluid from the car and burn one of his neighbour's trash cans or something, so he could just char all of his issues into ashes. It was his latest addiction lately and every time life was stinging him like lemon juice and salt in papercuts, he'd take off running into the woods towards his spot, a private crook in the forest where nobody can find him, there'd be a patch of dry ground and a lattice of tree leaves protecting him from plain sight. No grass, no stupid fallen branches; clean dry soil- well, except when it rained, which was often but it was a good spot nonetheless. He gathered sticks, timbers from the fallen branches and the wood chips he'd buy from the convenience store, then he would doused them in lighter fluid and with a quick flint of the lighter in his pockets, the teepee he had recklessly built would ignite and he could feel his stress melting away with the burning wood.

But since he was on the fringes of society and he was too lazy to trek all the way towards the woods, he'd figure he would make do with those handy cigarettes weighing themselves in his pockets. Niko rummaged and extracted a packet, then he lit up, and let the tension in his shoulderblades release as the smoke broadened in his lungs. He uncorked the vodka and sat by one of the bus stop benches outside the convenience store, watching the shattered glass gloves of the traffic lights flashed red even though there were no cars around. Sweet old suburbia, Niko thought glumly. 

Niko took a heavy gulp, grimacing at the sour taste of the ledger, and winced as it seared his throat when it went down, but it elicited a fiery headrush- one that sent his whole earth tilting and rushing. Another one of his guilty pleasures.

Bored, he turned and craned his head towards the convenience store, noticing how there were no more lights inside and the shutters of the glass door entrance being drawn. But then the doors were opening- revealing that skinny dark-haired cashier kid exiting out of the store. The dark haired kid turned around and with a shiny jostle of keys from his pockets, locked the entrance to the store and begin heading towards the bus stop- towards Niko.