Do not put on the official playlist.

Do not pass go.

Just take a moment.

Remember, the last moment you felt young. Alive. Vibrant. Like you could run out the clock on the jetfuel of your endless ambitions.

Now remember that with every breath you’re aging. Growing older.

How are you spending your youth?

Before you embark into the depths of darkness where avocado toast goes to rot, you’re required to put on the MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND SPOTIFY PLAYLIST.

Read the previous chapter here. See all chapters here.

…

The photos from Keke’s account were posted in front of one of those dumb Instagram popups that are like Catnip for Influencers and the wannabe-crowd.

I’m not even trying to be judgmental or anything. If you like taking the same photo everybody else is taking in a ball pit filled with sprinkles… well, that says a lot about you as a person. And you go can fuck right off my timeline, okay?

Trigger told me to calm down with that kind of language as we sped over to La Brea, but I was fired up. Maybe from this wild goose chase, maybe from the sinking feeling that Keke hadn’t just texted us the wrong address for the show.

That somebody had actually been after her. Had taken her.

“I’m just saying, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Trigger said, sliding through the LA streets. “She just posted a photo on Instagram.”

“You don’t think kidnappers can type?” I shot back.

“If you really think that’s what happened, let’s go to the police and call it a night,” Trigger said.

I stared at him as he drove, the streetlights passing light and shadow across his angular face.

“What the fuck are you scared of, Trigger? This isn’t you.”

Trigger shifted, uneasy. “I’m in a bit of trouble, Misty. Money trouble.”

“What, the mob after you or something?” I laughed.

Trigger didn’t.

“Weren’t you just at John Stamos’ party in the hills last night? Can’t you ask him for money, or at the very least, steal something? I bet his handsoap is worth more that what I make in a shift.”

Trigger started talking. And I’ll be honest. I blacked out a little, from how angry I was at him. I made him repeat his story, again. And again. And his words still bounced off me like a force field of oh-no-you-didn’t.

So.

I’ll summarize.

Trigger was at one of those LA clubs where people sweat champagne and cocaine and it’s like a sauna of sin on the dancefloor. The walls drip with lust just like the ice slicks necks and palms. People wear their wealth, peacocking in a gigantic dark room and trying to guess each other’s worth.

Now, this particular club was known for its exclusivity, celebrity clientele, and date rape drug problem. (The horror stories in the Yelp reviews were enough of a reason to stay away, yet somehow the starfuckery types still came back in droves.)

Trigger sailed through the line with his backup dancer pals. They knew enough starlets and had danced in enough rappers’ music videos to become regulars here, and the bouncers nodded in acceptance as the boys rolled in.

It was a high Trigger loved. Grinning at the dolled up women and fuckboi-wannabes as he passed them all in line. They’d be outside for hours: he just walked right past.

People like Trigger come to Los Angeles because it gives something their hometown would never cough up: status. The glittering stars on Hollywood Boulevard flirt with your ego.

Join us. Join us and you’ll be loved forever. Immortalized on a grimy street next to dead homeless and druggies who maybe one day tried to be just like you. Join us.

And here, Trigger had a status he flaunted. He’d flirt with the bartenders to get free drinks to flirt with the women. His fluidity made him the instant king of the party, star of the show. He was safe and edgy, androgynous and romantic, feminine in his movements and masculine in his desires.

Trigger loved the club, and the promoters hated him. The women at their tables absconded to Trigger’s; he was like a star, and they were his satellites. He broke business just like he broke hearts.

He was at the bar closing out to go home with a reality show starlet — a failed Bachelor contestant, I think — and was closing out at the bar when the bartender handed him his check.

$50,000

Trigger laughed. “This can’t be right.”

“You brought in those three tables, right?” The bartender pointed at the champagne lounge.

“Dude, it’s me,” Trigger said. But the bartender didn’t smile.

Suddenly, Trigger realized what happened. One of the promoters had dined and dashed — and probably paid off the bartender to stick him with the tab.

“This is a mistake — ” Trigger started, just as several burly bodyguards headed toward him.

Things didn’t look good — and Trigger had spent enough time around the club to know that this territory? It was beyond LAPD jurisdiction. Here, you settle your scores with fists. Or, if it’s an upscale enough club, hired hitmen.

Without thinking, Trigger ran.

He’s been running since — and knows that at any time, they could come and collect. Who are they? He isn’t sure. It’s the underground: pick a group. Anyone will enforce the dollar if they get a cut.

“How could you be so stupid?” I yelled at Trigger in the car. My anger at him was coming from a place of love. I had yet to find the place in Los Angeles that put me on a pedestal: when that time came, I would probably be just as stupid as he was. Acceptance makes us do dumb things. That didn’t change my anger toward him, though.

Trigger’s eyes kept flicking to the rearview as I told him off.

“Trigger, what is it?”

“That sedan has been behind us since Silverlake.”

I checked the mirrors. “It looks like every black car on the road. Are you high?”

“No. I swear,” Trigger said. I believed him. For now. If he was hiding this bombshell from me, what else was he hiding?

“It’s probably just an Uber. They’re always lost as all hell,” I said.

Trigger took a sharp left, swerving down a dark road. He pulled into an alley, and turned off the lights. Dousing us in darkness.

Behind us, we heard a screech of tires.

The same black sedan came speeding down the street.

Someone was following us.

Next.

…

Eaten Alive by the Millennial Underground is a multimedia fiction series written daily by writer Amy Suto for National Novel Writing Month. Check out the rest of her blog here for more about her nocturnal excursions and writerly pursuits. Read the full Millennial Underground series as it’s coming out in the month of November at: AmySuto.com/underground, and be sure to subscribe via email so you don’t get #cancelled.

Before you embark into the depths of darkness where avocado toast goes to rot, you’re required to put on the MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND SPOTIFY PLAYLIST.

Before this chapter, start the song BODEGA by YOUR NEIGHBORS.

Read the previous chapter here. See all chapters here.

…

Before Jedi was a DJ, he was Jedidiah, a boy at a bodega.

We lived down the street from each other before we had even known each others deepest, darkest flaws. Before the confessions between the sheets, the shots kicked back at the Scorpion Bar across from Midtown Wig.

Usually, when you move out here you end up in the Valley or NoHo or maybe even Glendale.

Not Jedi and me. We picked the cheapest fucking apartments right in the middle of the city. I lived in an apartment that was really just some rooms that had been walled off from what had been a full apartment. To get to my front door, you had to snake your way down a dark alley and up a rickety pair of rotting steps.

I liked it: the guts and grime of the city, the baked concrete, the corner bodegas, the pawn shops and Happy Plazas. It wasn’t Beverly Hills, and that’s what I loved about it.

Jedi, on the other hand, hated it. I met him when he tripped over a chunk of concrete being ripped up in a perpetually under-construction block of city. He skinned his leg pretty bag, and his bag of groceries went skidding — and got run over by a bus.

I couldn’t help but laugh. He flipped me off, and I yelled back, “fuck you!” but when my giggling subsided I walked over and helped him up. This wasn’t New York City, after all: we’re civilized people.

“This is a fucking waste,” he spat out. “I have to be at an audition –”

“You’re an actor?” I asked, wary. I didn’t associate with actors. They had to be exceptionally self-involved to survive. I was plenty self-involved, I didn’t want that in any kind of potential friend or romantic relationship.

“DJ,” he responded.

“Nice, I was thinking of doing that instead of waiting tables,” I said.

Jedi sighed. “People like you are what’s wrong with the city. You think spinning beats is some kinda fun thing to do for money. It’s a goddamn art, but now every genius with a spotify account calls themself a DJ.”

I laughed. I liked this boy who took himself too seriously. Nobody in LA took themselves seriously. We let our ambition wash over us like waves. Let the universe take the wheel. Used blunts to blunt our passion, our hard edges. Jedi defied that. I liked that. It was like sniffing smelling salts in a steam room. An unexpected sensation.

“I have antiseptic back at my place,” I offered.

So we walked back to my place. Darting through that small alley (Jedi making a comment about there was easier ways to lure men to murder them rather than waiting for them to fall outside of bodegas. I shot back that the road construction was merely ~a trap~ and part of my master plan.) We got to my front door.

I lead him inside, and flipped on the lights — and neon glowed from every corner of the room.

Neon signs, neon lights, neon plants. (The only kind that wouldn’t die on me.)

Like I said. In Los Angeles I’m Misty, the neon artist.

Jedi stepped inside, circling slowly as he took in all the neon.

“Wow.”

I got the first aid kit, handing it to him.

“I know, right?”

“This is incredible.”

“Of course it is: it’s a manifestation of what I do best.”

That’s when he turned and kissed me. This, I would later discover, was partly a manifestation of what he did best.

Over the next few months, we criss-crossed like power lines, intertwined currents of energy. We were inseparable, intense — and primed to short-circuit.

He was moody, intense, brooding: I was reckless, lost, unavailable. Going to Keke’s shows and ignoring his texts, or pretending I wasn’t mad he was ignoring mine. Arguing over what we wanted. Arguing over what we didn’t. Then, I saw him out at a bar with another girl, and it was over.

Just like most LA love stories, ours was killed by misunderstandings — but most of all, governed by the number one rule when it comes to dating in Los Angeles:

Don’t let them see you feel.

So we didn’t. Escalating our battle of unfeeling until we were simply satellites passing — at the Satellite. Until tonight. When Mercury must have been in a helluva retrograde or Jedi had some reason to try and bring me back to him. Ego, loneliness, regret — maybe a mix of all of the above.

I was tipsy in a photobooth, but I hadn’t forgotten the cardinal rule of friendship in this city of angels:

Never abandon your friends.

So I handed Jedi my empty shot glasses, slipped my arm around Triggers, and walked out into the cool November night to find Keke.

Jedi watched me go. Behind him, the dancefloor lost their shit to the utterly incoherent strains of LCD Soundsystem’s Dance Yrself Clean. He took a step forward, as if to follow us into the starless night, but he couldn’t cross the threshold where his world ended. Tied to rule over a domain permeated by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and endless Robyn remixes.

He will be missed.

Next.

…

Eaten Alive by the Millennial Underground is a multimedia fiction series written daily by writer Amy Suto for National Novel Writing Month. Check out the rest of her blog here for more about her nocturnal excursions and writerly pursuits. Read the full Millennial Underground series as it’s coming out in the month of November at: AmySuto.com/underground, and be sure to subscribe via email so you don’t get #cancelled.

Before you embark into the depths of darkness where avocado toast goes to rot, you’re required to put on the MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND SPOTIFY PLAYLIST.

Read the previous chapter here. See all chapters here.

“What are you wearing? Is this supposed to be an Ironic “Sexy Dwight from The Office” Costume?” Trigger asked me.

Despite that being an accurate description of my thrift-store wardrobe, I attempted to shove him into oncoming traffic. (Failing, because Trigger has a good few feet on me.)

I was offended. It was November 1st, people don’t wear costumes, only the masks of our day-to-day existence. Our month-long Halloween holiday had come to an end: it was basically Christmas.

It was also the night of Keke’s disappearance, but we didn’t know that yet. We were just kids with stupid names we picked for ourselves when we sold our belongings and moved into six-bedroom Highland Park homes with other artists trying to make it in the city, or city-adjacent.

When you move to Los Angeles, you offer up who you used to be to the pavement gods, and in return you’re given a new life, a new identity, for sacrificing your old self on pedestal at the feet of sweeping skyscrapers.

I became Misty, a neon artist learning how to be a DJ so I can pay the bills doing something other than serving $4 coffees to people who can’t be bothered to turn on a coffeemaker at home.

People’s eyes glaze over when I say the phrase “neon artist,” but it’s why I’m here: I’m a moth attracted to the bright neon lights, pulsing like the city’s heartbeat. I like pouring light into shapes it wasn’t meant to fill.

Trigger’s a dancer. His gangly form doesn’t look like it now, but he can shape himself into pretzels so gracefully I’d assume he doesn’t have a spine. Well — maybe he doesn’t. Trigger can be a slippery one: I don’t know if I can always trust him and his sly smiles.

Lethal like the curve of a trigger.

“So, where’s the show?” I asked, just along for the ride up until this point. We had gotten hot dogs at Pink’s, and were walking down La Brea back to Trigger’s beat-up silver Prius. (Eco-Friendly, he’d remind me, shoving it in my face. I didn’t care, I’d drive my Ford F150 to my grave, even if it meant I was always circling the block for parking. Our small towns stay with us in weird ways.)

“Animal Style,” he said. He took in my blank look. “You’ve been there before — it’s the place with the green door behind the In N’ Out parking lot where all the high school kids smoke by cars that aren’t theirs. The one with the single stage and the dude selling beers underneath the staircase?”

“I’m not dumb, Trigger. I remember. That place was shut down years ago.”

“If Keke says that the show’s there, that’s where it is,” Trigger said, shrugging. “Maybe they fixed it back up again. I trust her.”

It was true, we trusted Keke. Everyone did.

Keke was orbited by the universe — we were just living within her starry dreams.

I’m not even trying to wax poetic or anything. It was the fuckin’ truth.

Keke was one of those rare souls who wasn’t snuffed out by the suffocating smog. In her music, we could hear a kind of life that felt just out of reach. She transported us, allowed us a space to feel and heal and… just be.

But more than that, she was our best friend. The three of us had weathered heartache and loss and — well, we never missed a show. Keke always showed up for us, so we showed up for her. No matter what.

“Here we are,” Trigger said, pulling his car into the back of the In N’ Out. He parked, and I felt a current of dread tickle my nerves.

“Are you sure this is the right In N’ Out?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Trigger said, unbuckling his seatbelt.

As I stepped out of the car, I didn’t see anyone in the parking lot. Below my feet, piles of cigarette butts squished like soil.

A cool fall chill had just started to settle across Los Angeles, and a wisp of fog — or smog — was slinking through the air.

I looked around. The parking lot was dead. This was unusual for both a show and an In N’ Out.

“Text Keke,” I said. There was something horribly wrong, here. But I couldn’t tell what it was, and didn’t understand why Trigger was being so nonchalant. We were at the wrong place, why didn’t he see that?

“She didn’t respond to me. She’s probably getting in her zone or something. Let’s go.”

Trigger stared to walk toward the green door set into the cement wall of the

But then, as we started to approach —

The green door creaked open.

Beckoning us.

Darkness on the other side. Not the darkness of a show, but the darkness of desolation. Emptiness.

No one’s on the other side.

Trigger started to walk toward it. I grabbed his sleeve.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m going to find her.”

“We’re at the wrong place, Trigger.”

But he’s determined. Walking toward the door. As we get closer, I can see the signs of rot, splintered paint, a stench of the forgotten. My heart started to pound.

I reached into my pocket, pulling out a glowstick. Unwrapping and cracking it — it’s deafening, it sounded like a gunshot — and Trigger shot me a glance but let me light it. My fingers itched for the neon light. Trigger made fun of me for carrying them around, likening me to an addict needing her next fix of glow, like some kinda drug. I didn’t correct him, he wasn’t wrong.

As we got to the door, I held up the green glowstick. We couldn’t see very far in the thick, muggy darkness.

“Abandoned. I was right. You owe me a milkshake,” I said, hoping to shake him.

“Fine,” he said, giving in. He started to turn away — and then the neon caught something.

I held up the light.

There, hanging a few feet in front of us from a nail in a wood beam that lead to the ceiling, was Keke’s favorite necklace.

Next.

…

Eaten Alive by the Millennial Underground is a multimedia fiction series written daily by writer Amy Suto. Check out her blog here for more about her nocturnal excursions and writerly pursuits. Read the full Millennial Underground series as it’s coming out in the month of November at AmySuto.com/underground, and be sure to subscribe via email so you don’t get #cancelled.

Special thanks in this edition to Shilah Stanford who plays Keke. Thank you for lending your talent to this project ❤