BulimicSpacePug

    I am a fraud. We are all frauds on this street corner, standing out in the late October wind holding cardboard signs that advertise good Christian girls and clean-and-sober men who don't exist. This is how we spend our Sundays: sluggish, hungover, feigning a weary optimism as we vie to con the church hypocrites into opening their hearts and their wallets. We have a system. Rand stays watch on the curb while I run the lights, calling out police cars as he sees them and cleaning up the traffic that I miss. This goes on every Sunday at eleven until the sun dips low in the sky and the traffic becomes irritated and unwilling to heed our pleas

    All things considered, the two of them are doing fine. Robbie certainly can’t complain, even if the frequent vanilla pound cakes do start to wear away at his nerves after a time. There are the occasional ups and downs, of course, the odd argument here or there, but nothing more serious than the trivial quarreling of roommates. For all intents and purposes, they’re doing precisely fine—no better and no worse.    And sure, maybe things could be better. The whole crushing on his roommate situation is less than ideal, and maybe he doesn’t know why exactly Jeong-Hui adores long sleeves and looks just the slightest bit

     The first is a cold, dreary Thursday, and it’s raining when Helena Sutherland makes her way from the back door of the brothel to the main road out front. She’s flanked on either side by Annabel and Ruby, as she most often is on nights like these, with Ruby’s girl Evie trailing two steps behind. Their shoes leave dark, muddy footprints in their wake as they saunter down the streets of Whitechapel.     “Did you hear about the double event?” Evie asks softly from the rear of the group. She’s the youngest of the four, with a head full of ginger hair and wide, timid eyes. Her voice trembles a bit at the w

     The phone rings.     Blake jumps, the stiletto blade slipping through his grasp and hitting the bottom of the tub with a loud, metallic clang. It’s three in the morning—he knows this, somehow, but he can’t place his finger on how—and he’s half-clothed on the bathroom floor with blood on his wrists and his cell phone is ringing.     He plucks his phone from the vanity and squints at the too-bright screen. Ray’s picture greets him in the dark, deadpan, elegant, his hand entangled in his silvery-blue hair. Blake fumbles around, his hands trembling violently, until his thumb finds the answer button.