There's going to be the feeling that you missed something... that you didn't experience it at all. (Chuck Palahniuk)

Instead of bothering to go to his bedroom that night, Tommy stayed in the kitchen with his brothers and did heroin until dawn. Rider had built quite a tolerance since they had been separated.

Tommy slept for a few morning hours with his legs dangling off the too-hard, too-short sofa Rick’s girlfriend had purchased. When he emerged from his fleeting glimpses of rest, he went to the jewellery store.

Penny emerged from her bedroom with her school books under her arm.

“You were out late last night,” her mother commented cautiously.

“I was at Tommy’s.”

Her father tipped the morning paper away from his face but didn’t say anything.

“You know better than that Penny,” her mother scolded. “You still have school to attend to.”

“I know.”

Penny got a bowl of cereal and sat beside her father at the table.

“Be careful,” he told her sternly.

“I am,” she promised.

“Your sister comes home tonight for the weekend,” he mother said in a brighter tone. With a cup of English Breakfast tea, she joined them at the table.

“That’s nice.”

“She works so hard, it will be nice for her to get away from the hospital and spend the weekend at home.”

Penny nodded. Her noble sister, the nurse, had a new job and a new one room apartment and her mother was always pining for her to be home. She pretended to be proud and maybe she was but she always worried about her and how hard she worked. Most of all, Penny believed her mother worried that her sister would work so hard that she would never have time to meet a man and have a family. Penny, on the other hand, believed that working would be a beacon of hope to salvage her sister’s chances of procreation. In Penny’s mind the only way her sister would be able to keep a man in her life would be by staying away from him as much as possible.