back. Len had been trying to move up, to get Eitan to let him take on more weight. Weed
paid the bills, but the private school kids at Buckley and Oakwood wanted Adderall, Molly, oxy, ketamine, and Eitan just didn’t trust Len with more than dime bags of green,
no matter how much he kissed up.
Len loved to bitch about Eitan, called him an oily Jewish prick, and Alex would squirm, thinking of her grandmother lighting the prayer candles on Shabbat. But Eitan Shafir had everything Len wanted: money, cars, a seemingly endless line of aspiring models on his arm. He lived in a mega mansion in Encino with an infinity pool that overlooked the 405 freeway surrounded by a crazy amount of muscle. The problem was that Len didn’t have anything Eitan wanted—until Ariel came to town.
“Ariel,” Hellie had said. “That’s an angel’s name.”
Ariel was Eitan’s cousin or brother or something. Alex was never sure. He had wide-set
eyes with heavy lids, a handsome face framed by perfectly groomed stubble. He made Alex nervous from moment one. He was too still, like a creature hunting, and she could
sense the violence in him waiting. She saw it in the way even Eitan deferred to him, the
way the parties at the house in Encino grew more frantic, desperate to impress him, to keep him entertained, as if boring Ariel might be a very dangerous thing. Alex had the sense that Ariel, or some version of him, had always been there, that the messy clockwork
of men like Eitan and Len could not operate without someone like Ariel looming above it
all, leaning back in his seat, his slow blink like a countdown.
Ariel got a kick out of Len. Len made him laugh, though somehow Ariel never seemed
to smile when he was laughing. He loved to wave Len over to his table. He’d slap him on
the back and get him to freestyle.
“This is our in,” Len said the day Ariel invited himself to Ground Zero.
Alex couldn’t understand how Len didn’t see that Ariel was laughing at him, that he was amused by their poverty, excited by their want. The survivor in her understood that there were men who liked to see other people grovel, liked to push to see what humiliations the needs of others would allow. There were rumors floating around Eitan’s
place, passed from one girl to the next: Don’t end up alone with Ariel. He doesn’t just like it rough; he likes it ugly.
Alex had tried to make Len see the danger. “Don’t mess around with this guy,” she’d
told him. “He’s not like us.”
“But he likes me.”
“He just likes playing with his food.”
“He’s getting Eitan to level me up,” Len said, standing at the chipped yellow counter at
Ground Zero. “Why do you have to shit on anything good that happens to me?”
“It’s garbage-can fentanyl, for fuck’s sake. He’s giving it to you because no one wants
it.” Eitan didn’t mess with fentanyl unless he knew exactly where it had come from. He
liked to stay off law-enforcement radar, and killing your clients tended to draw attention.
Someone had paid off a debt to him in what was supposed to be heroin cut with fentanyl,
but it had passed through too many hands to be considered clean.
“Don’t screw this up for me, Alex,” Len said. “Make this shithole look nice.”
“Let me get my magic wand.”
He’d slapped her then, but not hard. Just an “I mean business” slap.
“Hey,” Hellie had protested. Alex was never sure what Hellie intended when she said,
“Hey,” but she was grateful for it anyway.
“Relax,” Len said. “Ariel wants to party with real people, not those plastic assholes Eitan keeps around. We’re going to go get Damon’s speakers. Get everything cleaned up.”
He’d looked at Hellie, then at Alex. “Try to look nice. No attitude tonight.”
“Let’s go,” Alex had said as soon as Len left the apartment, Betcha in the passenger seat, already lighting up. Betcha’s real name was Mitchell, but Alex hadn’t known that until he got picked up on a possession charge and they had to scrape together bail. He’d