Re: Upper West Side: West 81st.
[There's an ugly lurch upward. Sailing. The kind of movement that would trigger the sweep of the boom, a bark of laughter, Pepper has her eyes closed in the dark. If it wasn't for the smell of decay and depression, she could almost imagine it.
Startled, she turns her head in the pitch-black. No night-vision goggles, just a now very much stained white shirt, denim and bare feet, but the blackness isn't true dark. She can see the shape]
I've had better. [Acerbic; there's another girl nearby, weeping softly. Her hand is curled somewhere near Pepper's knee. She closes her own around it, warm squeeze of fingers. There's not much else, but they're all together in the dark.
Her head knocks back against the wood, the headache is pulsating in time with her heartbeat, and there's a damp, seeping kind of feeling at her hip that lines up too neatly with where the phone had been.] A lot better.