Night Light by Terri Blackstock

occasionally one would get stolen and turn up at a pep rally or a football game, or on the principal’s desk. Usually the perpetrator returned it to its yard the next day. Who would want to keep it, after all?
    Poor Lacy. She must have been constantly embarrassed.
    Deni and Mark pulled into the driveway. They rolled their bikes with them up the sidewalk to the front door. Mark knocked. A woman in a cotton housedress answered the door.
    “Yeah?”
    Deni recognized the woman. She was the one who was always out tending the haphazard garden.
    “Mrs. Frye?” Mark asked.
    “Yes.”
    Deni spoke up. “I’m Deni Branning, and this is Mark Green. We went to high school with Lacy and were wondering if she still lives here.”
    Her mother turned back and yelled over her shoulder. “Lacy! For you!”
    Deni looked at Mark. They’d hit pay dirt.
    They heard footsteps coming down the stairs, then Lacy came to the door. Her eyes were dull as she regarded her visitors.
    She had changed. In high school, she had dyed her dishwater blonde hair black, but now it was bleached to a platinum color. Her gold roots had grown out about an inch, giving it an interesting two-tone color. She was skin and bones — not the hard-work kind of skinny, but the kind that accompanied sickness.
    “Yeah?” she asked.
    “Lacy, do you remember us? Deni and Mark from high school?”
    “Yeah, I remember. What do you want?”
    Her tone was hostile, suspicious. For a moment, Deni wondered if she’d ever been rude to the girl. She probably had, back when her head was bigger and she thought more of herself than she should.
    “We were wondering if you still hung around with Jessie Gatlin,” Mark said.
    Lacy’s expression tightened. “Why do you want to know?”
    “We’re worried about her,” Deni said. “My family found out that her four children have been living by themselves since right after the outage. Jessie’s disappeared, and we think something might have happened to her.”
    Lacy peered at them from between her long bangs. “How do you know she wants to be found?”
    Deni stared at her. “We don’t. But she has a responsibility to her children. If she doesn’t want them, we need for her to designate a relative that we can get in touch with. Do you know where she is?”
    Lacy glanced back over her shoulder. Her mother was listening from a few feet behind her. “I haven’t seen her since before the outage.”
    Deni wasn’t sure she believed her. She glanced at Mark and saw doubt on his face as well. She turned back. “What was she like the last time you saw her?”
    “What do you mean, what was she like?”
    “I mean, was she still on drugs after the outage? Was she withdrawing?”
    Lacy glanced back again, then stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind her so her mother couldn’t hear.
    Now maybe they’d get somewhere.
    “It was bad,” Lacy said in a quiet voice. “She woulda gnawed off an arm for a fix.”
    Deni tried not to linger on that image. “We found syringes in her purse. What was her drug?”
    “Crank,” Lacy said.
    Just as Deni had thought. Crank was one of the street names for heroin. Besides her acquaintance with a classmate who used the stuff, she’d done some research on the drug for a speech class in college. Heroin was one of the most difficult drugs to detox from.
    “So, let me ask you this,” Mark said. “If she was addicted to heroin when the outage happened, and she couldn’t get anymore, what do you think she did about it?”
    “Same thing the rest of us did,” Lacy said. “She spent whatever cash she still had on getting what she needed, and then she ran out. And like the rest of us, she was out of luck.”
    “What happened?” Deni asked. “Did you get sick?”
    “Sick isn’t the word,” Lacy said. “It’s painful and miserable. Your bones and muscles hurt, you vomit, you can’t sleep, and you think you’re going to die. Nothing better get between you and the needle.”
    “How