CLOAK/3.6iv

Trishna, likewise forbidden further access to the drug, used the Internet to track down black market suppliers, and was always riding buses or begging rides from friends to dingy dives in prep school towns in other sections of the state.
In Trishna's sculpture A Fresh Look at Food Additives of the Roman Empire, a small glass freezer case hold three open quart-sized cardboard cartons of ice cream that she's labeled for the powdered precious gems they're laced with—Pralines 'n Amber, Rocky Ruby Road, Pistachio Emerald Swirl. Tiny paper cups, pastel-stained and poison-sticky, lie in heaps about its base.
Early on in his last year of art school, her brother fell—for the first time since high school, as Cloak had spared him this—in love, with a painter, whom Trishna disliked:
- For her famous self-portrait in oils tell me she didn't copy a flattering photograph—she reproduced the fucking flash shadows—tell me you're the last person she's ever going to force to hang it in their living room.
After graduation, she'd moved into the apartment he and Trishna shared. The atmosphere was often tense. The girlfriend, who enjoyed telling people that Trishna's brother was in recovery, adopted mocking tones which failed to help the situation:
- Trishna, you and your friends, dancing on pinheads until all hours, toe-feeling for thresholds as if all the lights were out—the lights are not out, comrades. It's just as bright as it is disappointing.
So draw the blinds, nocturnalize, retreat into photography. From his position on the sofa he'd try to mediate, but mostly failed. Then, to his enormous shock, his girlfriend left him—she'd met someone better, someone who worked and didn't live with his sister. It was some time that week that he first contacted the Cloak dealer he'd met down in Providence, that weekend when he'd come along for the ride, the one who'd told him, 'Not the worst way to make money, with all your local suppliers for shit.' He was thinking about the carton of placebos the guy had intercepted—he was thinking vengeance, and salvation.