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Authors: Adam Mansbach

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Andre pushed off the bed and stood up, laying an open hand against his gold-and-purple Lakers jersey. He dipped his fingers momentarily into the crinkly vinyl pocket of black Raiders track pants, then bent and pulled up his L.A. Kings socks. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Come on now.” Macon grinned and hunched forward, antsy with the suspicion that he was seconds away from planting his flag in a patch of common ground. “You’re talking to the only kid from the Bean who was up on L.A. hip hop before Straight
Outta Compton.
I used to get KDAY tapes from my man’s cousin.”

“Word?” said Andre, eyebrows disappearing into the low-leaning forest of his hair. “KDAY, huh? That’s some O.G. shit.” The outlines of a context into which he could fit Macon were beginning to come into focus.

“Man, I was out here talking about Mixmaster Spade and ‘can’t get enough of everlasting bass’ and cats were looking at me like I was stone crazy,” Macon recounted, pleased that he had found a pore in the conversation, however imaginary, that led to hip hop. If only the world were as simple as it had been back in the day, when a shared investment in the still-invisible culture had granted two people a rare, automatic intimacy, laid an immediate foundation for a friendship.

They both smiled, and a moment of silence descended like a velvet stage curtain. Andre eye-checked his roommate and floated him some grudging props. Macon might be a lunatic, and his blood-lines were certainly polluted, but at least he was hip hop enough not to view black people as an alien species—even if he was the type to assume that any black kid he met was a rap head. Andre’s worst roommate fear had been averted: a ten-gallon-hat-wearing good ol’ boy who’d greet him with a “Howdy, pardner,” crank up some Garth Brooks, and start pinning his Confederate flag up next to Andre’s swap-meet African masks, explaining that he wasn’t racist, just proud.

Macon used the lull in conversation to replay the robbery in his mind, and a new shudder of excitement suffused him. He felt rubbery with glee, almost flip now that he’d stumbled through the awkwardness of revealing his ancestry to Andre. “Okay,” he said, “enough with all this trivial cosmic-connection shit. You blaze or what?”

Funny how green always brought black and white together, thought Andre. At least until the green was gone. “Hell yes,” he said, erasing that appointment with the housing office from his mental blackboard. Macon was a pothead: Things would be all right. “And not that dirt weed fools be smoking out here, neither. Strictly the California chronic.”

He darted to his luggage, pulled a large shampoo bottle from the bottom of a full-stuffed duffel bag, unscrewed the cap, and extracted a gooey sandwich bag. He wiped it clean on a Dodgers towel, wrist-flicked it across the room for inspection, and sat back down. Macon pulled the closing strip apart, and the sudden pungency of Andre’s stash lit up their room like Little Amsterdam. It was insanely green, a joyous neon hue Macon had only seen in
NationalGeographic
photo essays about preserving the coral reefs. Tight saffron-haired buds and strong, thick stems and no seeds. No seeds?

“Hydroponic,” Andre said. “Act like you know.” Macon stared at the herb, overcome with the bounty of nature’s blessings, and nodded respect. “Wait until you taste it, dude.” An orange pack of Zigzags flashed in Andre’s hand.

A few moments later, Macon had to give the credit where it was due. What now burned evenly between his unmanicured fingertips didn’t even seem like the same plant as the shit he, in his Bostonian ignorance, had once called marijuana. Macon exhaled a slow plume and smoothed down his elation like a cowlick. Getting doe-eyed over ganja was for hippies with black-light posters who read fan ratings of Grateful Dead shows on the Internet, ratings that ranged from A+++++++
(Jerry’s spirit left his body and fellated me
in the bleachers while his physical shell remained onstage playing
“Turn On Your Love Light”)
to A+
(the band didn’t show up and
cops teargassed the parking lot).
A fair number of the white kids he’d grown up with, Macon’s friends from the time when friends were defined as kids whose houses were close enough to bike to, had slid Deadward. They had racks of concert bootlegs and books of tour photos just like he had crates of vinyl and a shoe box stuffed with graff flicks.

He’d hung with those kids occasionally through high school, although their entitlement and lack of chops—the rugged brain-mouth world-collaging quick wit that hip hop beat into you— bored him. Macon was a product of the same white-collar suburb they were, but while he was nuzzling up against a world clenched tight in struggle, fly as fuck, hell-bent on schooling technology in its own backyard, these laconic stoners couldn’t even wrap their minds around the notion that a human being might
not
like Jerry and them. Macon had been forced to listen to the Branford Marsalis/Dead tape—what Deadheads played people who liked black music to prove the Dead were down—in more tapestry-sheathed bedrooms than he cared to recall. Deadheads always had better cheeba than hip hoppers, though—expensive aesthete bud stored in film cases and thumb-pressed into glass bongs imbued with personalities and christened with goofy names.
Careful, dude.
Oscar, like, sneaks up on you.

Regular hip hop motherfuckers smoked like they did everything: repurposed something cheap, useless, and available to suit their needs, and turned the process into an art form along the way. They said, “Yo, kid, let’s burn this branch / twist this L / blaze these trees / hit this blunt / steam this broccoli / spark this lah / smoke this shit.” They split a fifty-cent Dutch Master cigar with two thumbnails, slid the cylindrical clump of cheap, stale tobacco to the pavement, dumped a brown-green stick-seed-and-shake-laced nick bag casually into the empty paper, picked out the unsmokables, twirled it up, dried it with a lighter, lit it, hit it, ashed it, passed it, and went about their business if they had some. Build and destroy.

Andre’s chronic, though, knocked even Deadhead herb straight out the box, made you look at the City of Angels in a whole new light. Even made you understand their music better. This was some ol’ “diamond in the back / sunroof top / diggin’ the scene with a gangsta lean” shit, Macon reflected as he turned the tiny joint between two fingers, took a rich pull, and returned it to his roommate. Habit forced Macon to hit a spliff as hard as he could every time it touched his fingers; he was accustomed to smoking with three, four, five necks crowding the cipher and everybody trying to get as high as possible despite the rigorously enforced take-two-and-pass-so-the-blunt-will-last protocol.

Andre sidelonged his roommate from beneath low-slung eyelids. “Kinda name is Macon for a whiteboy, anyway?” he drawled, holding his hit in as he spoke.

Macon shrugged. Kinda whiteboy is Macon’d be a better question, he thought, one lip corner curling in a smug smile. “Macon, Georgia,” he said. “Where I was allegedly conceived. Parents drove cross-country in a VW bus for their honeymoon.” He shook his head. “I hate it.”

“It’s not so bad. If they’d gotten it on a couple hours earlier, you woulda been Buckhead.”

Macon steadied his eyes, which seemed to want to roll back in his head, and rubbed a palm against his stubbled chin. “Easy for you to say. Nobody called you Bacon in grade school.”

“True,” said Andre. “Between all those seventies Black Power Back-to-Africa names—which I blame on drugs in the drinking water at Wattstax—and all that ghetto-fabulous eighties insanity, naming mufuckers Lexus and Guccina and Dom Pérignon and shit—black folks got kind of a dozens moratorium on names.” He felt a pang of guilt for making such jokes in front of a whiteboy, and winced as if the red-black-and-green Afropick of race pride had just flown across the room and jabbed him in the ass.

Andre bent to ash the joint into a plastic garbage can, and missed the size-up glance his roommate threw at him. Macon was as attuned to signs of black acceptance as a dog was to the scraping of a can opener. Willingness to tweak the foibles of black people in front of him was a clear one; it implied that Macon was hip enough to get the joke and down enough to be unguarded around. The only thing better was when black folks started railing against the White Man in his presence, thus granting Macon transcendent status. When he felt needy or insecure, which was often, Macon resorted to initiating such discussions by ripping into his private stash of paper race tigers: Quentin Tarantino, Rudolph Giuliani, Elvis Presley. It usually got the wrecking ball rolling.

Andre inhaled sharply, pulled back his lips, and offered the joint, almost gone now, to his roommate. It was an elegant pass, thumb pressed securely to fingertip, the handoff of two experienced smokers. “Yo,” said Macon, kicking his legs out as the toxicants streamed through him, thrashing like salmon, and settled in the cool underwater grotto of his stomach, “you ever seen—”

A loud knock at the door wounded their buzzes and killed the conversation.

“Hello?” Insistent, female, whiny. “It’s Olivia, your R.A.”

Andre leaped to his feet and flicked the roach toward the open window. It hit the top ledge, showering sparks down the pane, and whipped out into the wind.

“Shit.” He reached for a can of Right Guard and sprayed a loud, wide arc around the room. Macon, dazed by the whirlwind his roommate had become, grabbed his own deodorant, realized it was a roll-on, and felt stupid.

“One second,” called Andre, wading through the knee-high detritus that had somehow managed to accumulate in just three hours. “Wonderful,” he muttered, “not even here a day and already I’ma be the stereotypical fire-up-the-spliff natty-dreadlockinna-Babylon Rastaman-vibration nigga and shit.”

He yanked open the door and a short, mousy-haired girl stared up at him through fingerprint-smudged glasses. She looked like she wanted to come inside, but Andre blocked the entrance with his body. A lecture on Knowing Your Rights given by some haggard ex–Black Panther at a weekend retreat his mother had sent him on because she worried he wasn’t black enough came back to Andre:
A cop can only come inside your house if you give him permission.
The knowledge was intended to prevent the pigs from fucking with young revolutionary brothers, but he had only used it when the Santa Monica PD busted up the keg parties his football teammates threw when their parents were out of town.

The girl crossed one slippered ankle over the other and pursed her downturned mouth to speak.

“Hi!” Andre said before she could, pursuing a policy of jaunty innocence. He grinned, orthodontized teeth gleaming, and extended his hand, forearm swollen from a summer of weight lifting; Andre hoped she’d notice but she didn’t. Beyond offering his body for perusal, he never quite knew how to flirt. “Andre Walker. Wow, I— Those are really cool sweatpants.” Behind him, the sizzle of aerosol indicated that Macon was freshening the air with an entire semester’s worth of Right Guard.

The Resident Adviser looked him over with authoritarian disdain and Andre’s arm fell to his side. “First floor meeting’s in ten minutes,” she said, then paused and frowned. “What’s that smell?”

“We can’t make it,” Macon squawked, lunging to his roommate’s side and dropping a buddy-pal hand on Andre’s shoulder. “We’ve scheduled on-line appointments with Career Counseling.”

She cast a doubtful squint at them, then reeled it in. “See me tonight to find out what you missed,” she relented. “And don’t let me smell that smell coming from your room again.” She padded off with nary a farewell.

Andre closed the door. “Where the fuck did you come up with that?”

Macon pointed to a blue booklet lying broken-spined on his desk. “
Columbia Guide to Living.
An invaluable resource.”

“Well, it’s definitely time to be out. I’m supposed to meet my man Nique downtown. You wanna roll?”

“Sure. I was gonna hit this poetry slam at the Nuyorican later, anyway. Who’s Nique?”

“My boy from high school. He’s a junior at NYU. Completely nuts. You’ll like him.”

Andre yanked open a dresser drawer and plucked a folded red shirt. “Soon as I decided I was coming to New York, I went down to Blood In Blood Out on La Brea and scooped hella red gear.” He shucked the Lakers jersey and pulled on the polo. “I’m so sick of wearing neutral colors I could shoot somebody in the face. Preferably some mark ass set trippin’ buster ass fool.”

Andre opened the door and he and Macon phased into public post-smoke mode, flipping up their cool like trench-coat collars. “Listen . . .” Andre said. He stopped talking as they passed the TV lounge housed in an alcove between their room and the elevator, already full of lame kids killing the eight minutes before the floor meeting by soaking flaccidly in talk shows, then resumed as they reached the elevator bank.

“. . . don’t mention this Cap Anson shit to anybody else, okay? Especially not Nique.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” said Macon, caught off-guard. “But why not?”

“Because it’s fucking weird, dude. I hope you don’t need me to tell you that.” He’s already checked it off his list, Andre thought. A little weed, some hip hop, he thinks it’s all good. “Plus, I don’t wanna be known as the guy who’s rooming with his—” Andre broke off. “His whatever.”

“Fair enough,” said Macon quietly. He jabbed at the down button for the second time. “You ever heard that story,” he asked after a moment, “about these Bloods who bailed into a gay S&M club in L.A. by mistake, rocking red flags?”

“Nah,” said Andre. They stepped into the lift. “Do tell.”

“Apparently, in that scene you rock flags to show what you’re into—yellow means piss on me, white lace means submissive, whatever. A red flag means beat my ass, make me bleed. So cats beat their asses silly. Supposedly.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me,” said Andre.

Macon nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” The doors closed.

Chapter Three

Peep game, Macon ordered the world, pushing the front door so hard it one-eighty slammed against the dorm’s facade. By the time it slow-swept backward, clicked and froze at a welcoming seventy degrees, he and Andre were in the wind, weak sunshine on their cheeks and the building’s long five o’clock shadow behind them like getaway music.

“Campus or the streets?” asked Andre, posing what Macon took at first to be a philosophical conundrum, with whom you rollin’ when the comedown come down, edumacated shot-caller big-baller types or the untalented nine-tenths with unknockable hustles, unprintable résumés? But naw, fool, the question is which route to walk.

Not that streets versus campus connoted the old, traditional, good-natured, spite-filled townies-against-college-boys fair fight regardless. Columbia owned every damn thing in sight. Why be a mere institution of higher learning when you could also be Harlem’s number-one slumlord, second-largest landowner in moneymakin’ Manhattan after the Catholic Church? Andre hadn’t toured the campus yet, so they ignored the street exit and strolled down College Walk.

A domed building with the air of a state capitol, protected by a row of pillars, sat atop a long sprawl of shallow stone steps: Columbia’s gleaming white administrative black box. The steps sloped down for days, giving the building a distant, unapproachable aura, as if to say
the road to knowledge is long, laborious, and gradual,
or
each one you climb represents a grand you owe us for your education,sucker.
The steps bottomed into an open plaza, flanked by giant granite fountains. Outreach to the heavily encroached-upon community took its best-financed form on these few hundred square feet: biannual free concerts featuring mainstream bohemian rap acts and second-string alternative-rock bands, overseen by tripled security but open to neighborhood residents if they somehow managed to find out about them. Milking the college cash cow by rote, the performers usually kicked lackluster forty-minute sets in fulfillment of their contracts and bounced, forty thousand dollars richer and muttering about lame college audiences. The only exception had been when the Events Committee unwittingly booked the Boot Camp Clik, a camouflage-rocking bevy of lyrical gunclappers from Brooklyn. Macon had caught the concert as a high-school junior on the requisite college-road-trip-with-the-parents. It had influenced his choice of school as much as anything.

Half of Bucktown had journeyed uptown for the concert, and a sixteenth had made it past the rapidly retripled security in time to see the spot get blown. Grimy, reconstructed drums had boom-clacked through the rarefied air, gotten even non-heads nodding, and the next thing Macon knew, Boot Camp’s five-foot microphone don Buckshot was rocking his verse from atop an eight-foot vibrating speaker:
How the fuck did money climb up there and
how come I ain’t see it?
Macon had snapped a flick of Buckshot’s cornrowed head sandwiched between the engraved names of Plato and Sophocles, etched into the stone above the columns on Butler Library across the plaza.

After Plato and Sophocles came Herodotus, Aristotle, and three or four more Western Thought All-Stars. As Macon had found out that weekend, Columbia shepherded all incoming students through two years of comprehensive Western literature and philosophy courses, the cornerstone of the famed Core Curriculum despite being taught largely by underqualified and overtired grad students while the actual professors labored over their forthcoming books in the well-heeled privacy of Riverside Drive faculty apartments. The courses, intended to allow young scholars to drop cocktail party references to Adam Smith’s economic theory and jest fraternally about Aristophanes’ sex comedies, bonded the university community by ensuring that all Columbia graduates forgot the same things.

Andre and Macon turned left onto a cobbled pathway and headed toward the high black iron gates that announced the street entrances and allowed Columbia to shut out interlopers and imprison residents in times of trouble, i.e., the student uprisings of the 1960s and more recently the ethnic studies protests of 1996. The University, as the administration was called, exercised a subtle yet totalitarian control over its population, low-key enough to convince naive students that threatening to sit in Hamilton Hall until they were allowed to study the contributions of people of color to American life might catalyze a conversation with the administration. Instead, the stunt prompted a call to the police, a series of arrests and unfavorable editorials, a tacit backpedaling compromise to drop the charges and develop a research committee, and finally the quiet dissolution of said committee once the attentions of the media had waned and the angriest students had left for the summer, graduated, or found girlfriends.

Andre and Macon passed through the gates and into Morningside Heights, a neighborhood semantically divorced from Harlem, rechristened to convince jumpy suburban parents that their children didn’t live in the Capital of Black America and would be as safe at college as they had been at their prep schools. It was a virtual bubble of safety, except for the occasional date-rapist football player. Even the bums, thought Andre as he and Macon descended into the cleanest subway station in Manhattan, seemed handpicked for their effusiveness.

They stepped off the train at West Fourth Street and crossed Washington Square Park, New York University’s no-campus-having answer to Columbia’s pristine, sequestered lawns. Students, locals, and outtatowners shared twilight space on the green wooden benches and around the central fountain. Backpacks nudged briefcases, and fresh-cut grass mingled airborne with pretzels and cigarettes. Rastafarians in red-green-and-gold tams leaned together over one chess table, gesturing at the wooden pieces with long fingers. A crew of high schoolers held down another, sneaker treads gripping the smooth marble as they chewed brown-bagged soda straws and girl-watched. Mutts and pedigrees sniffed each other’s asses with studious democracy inside the fenced dog run; the owners greeted each other’s dogs with enthusiasm and each other with indifference.

“So what kind of job did you find?” Andre asked.

Macon watched a yellow cab tear past the park, swerving to avoid pedestrians, and bang an illegal right turn as the traffic light clicked red. The driver conducted a symphony of angry horns with his middle finger as he caromed out of sight.

“I drive one of those,” Macon said with pride.

“Word? You must overhear some interesting shit. People probably assume you don’t speak English.”

“You’d think so, but so far it’s been pretty boring. Lot of single fares.” Macon fingered the wad of bills clogging his pocket and wondered what he was going to do with the money, nearly two hundred bucks. He considered buying Andre dinner, then worried his roommate would think he was trying to pay reparations.

“Huh,” mused Andre. “You didn’t want to wait and get a campus job?”

“I’m not work-study eligible. My grandfather put away dough for my education back in the day, so no student loans. I’m still broke on the day-to-day tip, though.”

“Parents won’t help you out?” asked Andre, wondering whether to take Macon’s stark financial portrait with a grain of salt or an entire pillar. Those suede Tims his roommate was rocking looked about a week out of the box.

“I won’t let them.” Self-reliance had been Macon’s economic policy since leaving home, and like communism it worked well in theory. In practice, he had shame-facedly accepted cash infusions twice so far: once just after bouncing to Lajuan’s crib, so he’d have weed throw-down scratch—the definition of a good houseguest in Macon’s circle being a cat who sponsored blunt sessions—and again only two weeks ago, when he’d wanted new gear for school. Macon soothed himself with the knowledge that Cuba had been surviving on handouts for damn near forty years now.

They made their way across the park, movements tracked by more than two thousand hidden security cameras installed by the City of New York for an amount of money that, had it been distributed amongst the ten to twenty drug dealers the cameras were intended to monitor, would have allowed all of them to retire in comfort.

It seemed to Andre that a different homeless cat approached them every few feet to request assistance, as if the park were sectioned into tiny, invisible fiefdoms. He brushed past each supplicant without bothering to slow his pace or eye-flicker an apology. Macon, meanwhile, threw on the brakes at every timid “Excuse me.” Three times, Andre realized he was walking alone and doubled back to gather up his roommate, only to find Macon listening with botanically enhanced patience to whatever involved plea or bogus medical history the guy was running down. Macon’s sidewalk manner was impeccable: constant eye contact, sympathetic head-nodding. He let the vagrants run through their whole spiels and make their requests before letting them know he had no money and wishing them well. Their eyes hardened with disappointment, but each one left Macon with a “God bless you,” to which Macon responded, “You, too,” smiled a good-bye, and walked on secure in his compassion for his fellow man.

“It’s not like this in L.A.,” Andre explained as they exited the park, feeling like a callous asshole.

“Car culture,” Macon replied absently. He was busy trying to balance an internal triple-beam scale laid heavy with luck, greed, and pragmatism, calculating how much loot was clockable if he robbed motherfuckers for an entire shift.

Andre nodded. “Yeah. L.A.’s not too big on chance interaction. Or humanity. But we’ve got Shaq and Kobe.”

He double-checked the directions he’d scribbled on the back of a matchbook. They turned left and walked past hot-dog and hot-nut vendors, a sidewalk bookstand, knots of students sucking cancer sticks beneath the purple flags rippling from NYU’s main library. Nique’s high-rise was on the corner. Andre called his boy from the dorm’s cramped lobby, and seconds after he’d replaced the courtesy phone, a lanky, dark-skinned dude barreled down the side staircase, holding on to the rail bars like parallel beams and swinging himself down four steps at a time. He cleared the last set, landed clean on burgundy-and-black suede Pumas, pushed his metal-framed sunglasses up onto his forehead, and gangled an arm around Andre’s back as the two exchanged the standard shoulder-bang embrace.

“Wassup, fool,” Nique exclaimed, reverting to Left Coast slangisms in the presence of a Westside homey. He pulled away without unclasping Andre’s hand and ended the shake in a finger snap, gold bracelet sliding halfway up his arm as he recoiled from the motion.

“You
know,
” bayed Andre, voice plummeting two octaves on the final syllable. It was an expression seldom heard so far east; Macon knew from listening to old Mack 10 records that it was roughly equivalent to
I’m chillin’
or, in the parlance of those old school enough to get away with sounding corny,
livin’ large.
“This my roommate,” said Andre, tapping him on the chest with the back of his hand, “Macon.” Their eyes met, and each one wondered whether Andre would appendix an endorsement. “He’s cool,” Andre finished at last.

“Whaddup, dude. Dominique Lavar.” Intelligence lit his long, smooth face powerfully from within as he offered Macon a thumb-topped fist and they exchanged a one-potato-two-potato pound. “Come on upstairs, y’all. The kid finally scored a single this year.” He tossed a head nod at the brother working security, and the man tossed one back, withdrew the sign-in sheet and pen he’d slid toward Macon, and gestured
Go ahead.
Andre smiled to himself: Leave it to Nique to get cool with the guard right off the muscle, thus deading the minor hassle of visitor sign-ins.

“Good lookin’ out, Felix,” Nique said over his shoulder. “California love,” he explained to Andre. “Homeboy’s from Inglewood.” He took the steps two at a time and pounded open the stairwell door.

Nique’s room was immaculate and tiny, smelled of clean bed linen. A portable refrigerator doubled as a nightstand for a low-slung bed that almost touched three walls. There was space for a desk, but Nique worked on the fly and so he’d marooned the extra furniture in the hall. “I haven’t finished freaking the place yet,” he apologized, leaving Macon to wonder what further freaking could be done. Every inch of wall space was covered; there were movie posters for
Coffy, Truck Turner,
and
She’s Gotta Have It,
and a reproduction of the famous photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the ’68 Olympics with heads bowed and Black Power fists held high. Tupac Shakur gangster-squatted against the floor, shirtless, tattooed, and defiant, both hands twisted into W’s, and above Nique’s bed was framed a blurry black-and-white freeze-frame of a scene Macon had never forgotten: six of L.A.’s Finest, so murky that they might be figments of imagination, swinging billy clubs with pickax motions as if the huddled mass of Rodney King might be a craggy slab of granite or an arid patch of land.

“Nice picture.”

Nique turned and scowled. “Nice? Either you got a real limited vocabulary or a serious problem. Ain’t nothing nice about the shit.”

Macon shook his head. “No, I mean, of course not. I— What I meant was . . .” He gave up on speaking and pushed the left sleeve of his T-shirt to his shoulder. Tattooed on Macon’s biceps in small green characters was
4-29-92.
It was the day the verdict had been handed down, the day Los Angeles had burned. Andre and Dominique peered in to read it, then looked up at Macon.

“A Jewish kid with numbers tattooed on his arm,” said Andre blankly, taking the beer Nique passed him. “Now I’ve seen it all.”

Macon lifted one mouth corner in a half-smile that looked more like a twitch. “That’s exactly what my mom said.” The numbers glistened slightly on his skin, bathed in the soft light of Nique’s halogen. “She started going off about the Holocaust. I was like, ‘Please. Nobody in this family has been inside a temple in three generations. How am I supposed to be Jewish enough to know better?’ ” Macon broke off, accepted a bottle from Nique, and plugged his mouth with it, swigging until he trusted himself not to speak.

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