They sat on the top step of the staircase, the candle between them. Rain lashed the windows.
Her stepmother, Lena, stood in the hallway’s shadows, arms folded tighter than a sealed evidence bag. She’d been waiting.
“I’m not playing your game tonight, Bianka.”
Lena nodded slowly. “Fair. But I confiscate this stuff because I found my own mother dead of an overdose when I was sixteen. It was a different drug, but the same stupid, shiny little object in her hand.” She held up the vape. “So when I see you with this, I don’t see a rebellious teen. I see a body on a bathroom floor.”
When she came back, she didn’t say sorry. She just sat down an inch closer to Lena on the step, their shoulders almost touching.
“Hand it over,” Lena said, her voice low, calm, and sharp as a scalpel.
Bianka’s lower lip quivered. “I didn’t know.”
The grandfather clock in the hallway struck midnight, its chime swallowed by the thick silence of the suburban house. Bianka Blue, eighteen and terminally bored, leaned against her bedroom doorframe, arms crossed. In her right hand, she held a sleek, black vape pen—the size of a finger, the guilt of a felony.