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July 07, 2017 - 207 words
“STEVEN!!!” she screamed into the dark quiet of 2:30am. She was wearing ill-fitting slacks and what looked like a slashed flag for a shirt. They’d clearly been thrown on recently.
“Hey! Shh!! You’re making a scene,” one of her friends admonished in an urgent, self-conscious tone.
“Honestly?” she retorted in a petulant whine, “I don’t even care right now. Where did Steven go? STEVEN!!!!!!” Her shriek reverberated down the suburban street and echoed off the parked cars and variegated buildings of Little Bangladesh, a compact neighborhood not regularly known for its screaming young women in the middle of the night.
“Haley!! Be quiet!”
“Why did he storm off? What did I do? Okay tell me, did I do something wrong? You can tell me. Just tell me if I did anything. Nothing, right?”
“Haley, it’s 2 in the morning, you have to be quiet. He’ll come back.”
“He’s drunk. He doesn’t know where he is.”
The two women were perched on the steps of an apartment building, directly blocking the entrance to the small courtyard that led to the building itself and illuminated by the dull copper sheen of the nearby street lamp. They looked like wraiths, both huddled and hysterical. They paid no attention to a