# What If Chapter 3

Chapter 3
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Past Skin Row: That is what the vendor had said. Anon walked quickly through his old neighborhood, quietly wishing that he still had his old knife to protect himself, especially now that it was getting late. Those two seemed perfect for each other, knife and neighborhood. That little blade had felt out-of-place anywhere else he carried it, back then, and Skin Row had been unwelcoming to anyone who dared cross through it without one. As Anon stepped by another homeless human, closing his nose to the man’s filthy stench, his hands flinched in his pockets, instinctively wrapping around his keys, ready to use anything to protect himself.
Skin Row itself had gotten worse over the years, if that was at all possible. Even more windows were boarded up, even more trash had accumulated in the street. Fragments of memory bubbled at the familiar sights, and Anon found himself passing his old apartment building, the brick façade crumbling from age and mistreatment. It looked like it still was in use, given the lights on in the windows. Tracking his head up, Anon could see the small window that used to be his own, the only dark window on that row. Did anyone live there, anymore, wallowing in loneliness as he did so long ago? Hearing Trish talk about high-school had stirred up some painful memories for Anon, memories of his life before he met Lucy. Anon was so sure he was going to coast through life back in those days, unaware and unbothered by anyone else. It was Lucy who had helped pull him out of that hole, helped him experience life as it should be lived. And now she was gone, disappearing out of his life like a ghost.
The crazed ramblings of a drug-addict snapped Anon out of his reverie. Skin Row was no place to take a walk down memory lane, and he still had a ways to walk before he got to the right part of town. In the past, Anon rarely visited that part of town, the neighborhood that sat on the opposite side of Skin Row as Little ‘Troon, but he vaguely recalled that it was even worse than Skin Row, a ghetto where the poor dinosaurs and humans intermingled. Racial violence was high there: While you could get jumped for your clothes here in Skin Row, there you could get jumped for your skin alone.
A few blocks further down, Anon reckoned he must be close, the ever-present graffiti in this part of town displaying an equal amount of anti-human and anti-scalie epitaphs. Feeling the suspicious stares of the dinos track his progress down the cracked and refuse-covered streets, Anon pulled the collar of his jacket up higher, not wanting to give them any excuses to stop him. The hunger in his belly had been replaced, driven off by the stolen chili dog and replaced by something else; an aching, burning desire to see Lucy again. Anon knew he could walk forever with that to sustain him, so long as it brought him closer to his love.
Anon nearly past the pub at first, walking by the nondescript building that sat on the street corner. Any sign the building had at one point was long gone, only the skeletal remains of a pre-fabricated sign sitting above the faded door, the name “DeVito’s” barely legible on the rough, splintered wood. Peeking through a grimy window, Anon could make out a few shapes mingling inside, patrons of scales and skin alike easing the passage into night with a few pints of cheap liquor. But no Lucy. Anon hesitated at the threshold, his stomach a tight ball of nerves and desire, before pushing the heavy bar door open.
Anon grimaced, the smells of stale beer and cheap cigarettes assaulting his nose as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. A long bar ran the length of one side of the room, where a scarred Triceratops flashed Anon a cold stare, his hands busy polishing a set of chipped mugs with the cloth that hung at his waist. The rest of the bar’s open space was spotted by a few small tables, the small chairs in front of them mismatched as often as no. Few of the patrons bothered to look up at the newcomer in their midst, preferring instead the lonely company that can be found only at the bottom of a glass. Even this early, several of them were amassing quite a retinue, empty bottles littering the tabletops and bar in front of them. His eyes finally fully adjusted, Anon could spy a small stage set up at the back of the bar, several pieces of cheap sound equipment already set up around one lonely stool.
Suppressing for the moment a flutter of hope, Anon made his way to the bartender, stepping between a drunken, snoring man and another who seemed eager to catch up. “Excuse me, who’s playing tonight? The stage, it’s set up for tonight, right?” Anon asked quickly, eyes flickering between the bartender and the stage, keeping his thoughts calm. The Triceratops behind the bar had arms as thick as Anon’s legs, and the last thing he needed was to be run out of bar with another errant “trigga” comment.
The bartender glowered at Anon, his dark eyes tracking up and down. One of the man’s horns was broken, and a few others were tipped in black ink, a new fad that had arisen since Anon was off at college. It was supposed to display how many kills you had, a practice Anon seriously doubted until now.
“They’ll be on later tonight. You wanna watch, you buy something. Got it skinny?” The gruff voice of the bartender brooked no argument, and Anon passed a few bills across the counter, not caring how many he got in return. A mug of warm beer smelling faintly of piss later, Anon was settled at the end of the bar closest to the stage, desperately willing the minutes to tick by faster. He didn’t have to wait long, however: Perhaps twenty minutes later, the back door of the bar opened, revealing Anon’s quarry at last.
Lucy was… different than Anon had seen her last. Gone was her flowing grey hair, her head shaved down instead, and gone were the professional-looking clothes, replaced instead by a grimy black tank-top displaying what was no doubt some band’s slogan and a ratty pair of old black jeans. Lucy’s wings looked thin, as if she had been preening again, and had been preening for some time; in fact, her entire frame seemed dangerously thin, like she didn’t get enough to eat. Her face was gaunt, and dark, poorly applied make-up stifling her features. Her eyes were heavy, glancing at everything with the same disinterested stare. Tattoos patterned her arms, black twisting designs of various crudeness, matching similar ones that flashed on the backs of her hands as she fumbled with her bass. Not a guitar, but a bass, just like the one she had been forced into playing, all those years ago.
“Lucy!” Anon sprang to his feet, leaving the untouched beer on the counter as he ran over to her. Confusion ran across her face momentarily as Lucy turned his direction, confusion that was replaced by anger in a heartbeat. Something in Lucy’s eyes nailed Anon’s feet to the floor, causing him to stop a few feet in front of her. Rage, raw and heavy, flashed in her amber eyes, her frown quickly turning into a sneer of disgust.
“Who the fuck do you think you are skinny, calling me that?!” One sharpened claw pointed accusingly at Anon, the others clenched in a fist. “NO one calls me that, got that, shithead?!”
Anon couldn’t believe it. When he saw Lucy come out of the back room, he had excused her appearance as an anomaly, something she had adopted at the last moment like a poorly thought costume prepared the night before Halloween; but her eyes held no recognition for him, her voice none of the usual tenderness. It was as if she was seeing him for the first time, and did not like what she saw.
“I-it’s me, Anon… Don’t you recognize me, babe?” Anon’s hand shook as he reached out to Lucy, faltering half-way at her withering stare. “You… you left this morning, and I’ve been looking everywhere for you to-“
A sharp slap resonated throughout the bar, interrupting Anon’s words and sending him stumbling into an empty table, the bartender’s cocked eyebrow the only reaction from the others assembled in the bar. Anon could feel his face stinging from the blow, feel hot tears starting well up in his eyes. Lucy’s shoulders were shaking, her wings outstretched and bristling, pure murder radiating from her lithe frame. Lucy understood what she was seeing, now.
“How. DARE. YOU. Showing up here, talking to me, after all these years! Like, like nothing even happened, like we were still TOGETHER!” She was yelling now, a shrieking that finally managed to pulled a few patron’s attention away from their liquor. “You fucking piece of shit, after what you said to ME?! I should fucking kill you Anon, for what you did!” Lucy took a step towards where Anon had slumped over the table after her slap, and then another, her fists clenching and unclenching. Her voice had dropped into a frenzied whisper, just loud enough for Anon to hear, the words cutting into him like the finest knives. “I told you Trish was right about you, how you’re just a no good spear-chucker, a skinny fuck who means NOTHING to me. Get the fuck outta here, right fucking now, or so help me…” Towering over Anon now, Lucy’s eyes narrowed in pure malice, her claws fully extended: Clearly, it wasn’t going to be a slap next time.
Wordlessly, Anon stared at Lucy, the woman whom he loved for so long, hesitating for a few moments before another scream of “GO!” snapped him back to reality. Letting the tears run down his face, Anon turned and fled out of the bar, running past the junkies in Skin Row, past his old apartment, past all the people in the world who didn’t matter so long as Lucy was away from him. Anon ran back to his new home, the one he had intended to share with Lucy, weeping the whole while as barely managed to unlock the door in time to vomit up what felt like everything he had every eaten onto the cold hardwood of the entryway, retching and gagging on his hands and knees as tears poured out of his eyes. Anon was utterly, entirely spent, his world ripped apart in the span of a few hours. Curling into a fetal ball, not caring if he wallowed in his own vomit, Anon sat there alone, crying until he had no more tears to shed, a quiet wail escaping his lips.
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“Lucy…Lucy…Lucy…”