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He had learned sometime during his masters that the worst variables didn’t announce themselves as catastrophic. They usually slipped in at the margins—small fluctuations easy to miss, background noise happily ignored—until suddenly the whole model collapses on you. Angel knew it in math, and he had learned to know it in people.
Which was why, when Vox approached him with his slick grin and a crisp glass of Negroni, Angel’s stomach sank before the first word left his mouth.
“Angel,” Vox greeted, clinking his glass lightly against Angel’s. “Didn’t know Val was bringing accessories tonight.”
Vox regarded him with a confident face, with a laugh that was too sharp and low. He always sounded amused, like the whole world existed under him and for him. Mommy’s family inheritance, media-empire-tycoon pushing his late-thirties—polished down to the decimal and ruthless enough to make it look effortless.
Angel knew him and Val went way back, however he didn't possess enough details to piece their dynamic together. Where Val exuded chaos, Vox radiated precision. And Angel wasn’t stupid, he had known from the beginning Vox didn’t like him. Maybe it was that Angel talked too much, laughed too loud, made too much of a mess. The representation of an uncontrolled excess that went against everything Vox’s image was. Perfection.
And yet Val loved him. Called him brother. Trusted him with deals, and parties, and the people inside them. So Angel learned to smile, to play nice, to pretend the static in Vox’s presence was just background noise.
“Arm candy is important, Vox,” Angel smirked, eyes narrowed daringly.
Vox's laugh was light, easy. From afar his face would even pass up as friendly.
“Oh sure, sure. That’s what he tells you, huh?” His blue eyes flicked to Val across the room, already mid-conversation with some investor. “Shame he’s been rotating his ‘arm candy’ in every shitty party he drags me to. Tiffany, was it? Last Saturday?”
Angel’s gaze snapped to stare daggers into Vox’s side as he took another sip from the melting Negroni.
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he gritted between teeth.
“I usually do,” Vox said, nodding to himself, still looking at Val and ignoring Angel’s heterochromatic eyes. “Don’t take it personal, Angie. You’re good at what you do. Gorgeous, mouthy, fun—he will keep you around until you are not. Trust me. That’s how it works.”
Angel clicked his tongue, looking away from Vox and to Val across the room. Tall, lean and dazzling. Val knew how to make himself the center of attention in a room that demanded it.
“You’re just jealous.”
“Jealous?” Vox chuckled, head tipping back. “Sweetheart, please. I’ve got half the city begging for my time. I don’t need to fight you, or anyone, for Val’s.”
That one stung, sharp and mean. Angel laughed it off a little too loud, sipping his drink just to have something to do with his hands. He wished Cherri was here with him and not two blocks away as he had read through the screen of his flip phone.
Vox turned to stare at him. The hunched, freckled shoulders, the big gulps of the sleek Cosmo, the anxious bite of plumb lips. He was satisfied with his work and so he pressed on.
“You ever think about why you’re here? Why he brings you to nights like this?” His voice soft, almost friendly, as he snuck a hand to rest on Angel’s lower back. “It’s not because he needs you, Angie. It’s because you are easy. Easy to dress up, easy to parade around, easy to replace. Low variance, high yield. That’s your niche isn’t it?”
Angel’s throat constricted at the uncomfortable flare from the humiliation. Vox mocking him so openly made his skin crawl.
“And yet here you are wasting your breath on me,” he said through his last ounce of bravado with the sweetest smile he could muster.
“Mm, not a waste. Just entertainment.” Vox’s smile was razor-sharp. “I like watching the cracks form. Makes the break far more interesting.”
Angel’s grip on his cup tightened, knuckles turning white, and the fear of shattering the tall glass in his hand nowhere in sight. The music throbbed around them, too loud, too bright, the club lights pulsing like they were laughing at him. He couldn’t stand still anymore, couldn’t take the data Vox was feeding him and how neatly it lined up with the doubts he’d been calculating for months.
“I need a smoke,” Angel muttered, already slipping away.
Vox’s fetal hit chased him down and away from the VIP section.
“Don’t take too long, Angie. Would hate for Val to notice you are replaceable."
The music was too fucking loud, all bass and static rattling through his bones as he shoved his way through the dance floor. Glitter and sweat spread against his naked arms as strangers pressed on all sides. Every laugh sounded pointed, every heel stepping over his own, every shove from careless shoulders, every side glance a confirmation of what Vox had said.
Easy. Replaceable. A crack waiting to give in.
“Fuck that. Fuck him. I’m not replaceable. I’m…I’m the goddamn money shot,” his voice wavered, drowned by the bass and dismissed by the faceless crowd.
A girl in a sequined get-up bumped into his chest, slushing her drink onto his velvet heels. She didn’t even look at him. Just kept laughing, moving on.
Angel’s jaw clenched at that. See? Nothing.
He cut towards the wall, towards the dark hallway he knew led to the bathrooms, but even then bodies kept pressing, faceless and glittering under the neon. It felt like the crowd was swallowing him whole. Like the probability of slipping under, unnoticed, was one hundred percent.
“M’not gonna crack. Not gonna break. Fuck Vox and every single one of ‘em. They don't know me. They don’t—”
But the edges of the words were unraveling, fraying in the end. Every thought circled back to the same denominator. Maybe Vox wasn’t lying. Maybe Val didn’t care. Maybe all Angel ever was—what he’d always been—was easy.
And by the time he reached the bathroom, door slamming shot behind him, heart hammering through his ribcage—his hands were already trembling towards his purse.
He just needed to powder his nose. Smooth it all out. Make himself shiny again.
Every time Angel visited his friend coke, he told himself he was doing a simple experiment: input, output. Remove the noise, watch the function even out. It was the same logic he used to rationalize everything—until that night when the math stopped working and his hands did the deciding.
The bathroom light was too white, too clinical. His reflection in the stained sink was cut out: fizzy hair, pale skin, hallowed cheeks, and smudged eyeliner. He felt psychotic. His green eye was almost translucent with the harsh overhead light, while the brown one was a black hole in contrast.
He set the rolled paper near his face and tipped his head down, like a ritual, with practiced ease. The first burn was a promise, while the second was dishonest. The third told him it could be done, that the edges would dull and Vox’s voice would slide away like water.
But then there was nothing to count. Counting would be tidy. Counting would imply control. Instead he worked by rhythm—acrylic nail, dip, breath, scrape, inhale, rub—repeating until rhythm blurred into a throb. Until the 2g bag was emptied out with only dust to prove what it once held. The air tasted metallic. The tiles under his palms felt colder than they should have. The room moved in slow, dramatic concave arcs, like if someone had set the whole world inside a funhouse.
At first the noises beyond the bathroom door smoothed into something bearable. Music up at the club thinned to a hum. Laughter became a waypoint he could ignore. Angel felt a hot, stupid swell in his chest—a bubble of relief that made his tongue feel heavy and thick. He smiled truly into the mirror and believed, for a small, dangerous second, that he had patched that ugly crack.
Then something else crept under the edges. Heat bloomed behind his eyes, a pressure that wasn’t like any hangover he’s ever had. His heart stuttered every couple beats. Sounds misaligned—tinny, then too loud, then muffled as if his skull was filling with cotton. He tried to steady himself, bony hands grasping onto the sink, knuckles whitening, but the tiles tilted sideways and his knees let go. He had the ridiculous thought that gravity had chosen the worst possible minute to learn aggression.
Vision split. The light in the mirror doubled, then smeared. Colors bleeding beyond borders, reds turning into whites like spilled watercolor. He tasted nothing and everything at once: stale perfume, copper, the ghost of cranberry juice on his tongue. Words from the hallway reached him like someone shouting through a thick door—muffled, urgent, then distant.
He tried calling back, to say his name or that he was fine, but the syllables would be badly mouthed and no air was present to punch them out of his throat. Oxygen seemed wrong—it came hard and sharp, then not at all. Panic. That’s when panic rose like bile, but even that felt flattened by the current haze. His limbs felt borrowed, shapeless and too big. He reached for the doorframe and missed, fingers skidding off tile into nothing.
Someone pounded the metal door.
“Angel! Open up, now!” Cherri’s voice shredded the fog, sharp enough to cut the buzzing. Had he locked the door? He really tried to answer. He really tried to tell her he was fine. The brain that usually assembled witty comebacks and extensive probabilistic models could only send up blanks.
The world folded in on itself with a wet, obscene slide. There was a weird slow-motion to the last seconds—a tiled floor edging under his cheekbone, a fluorescent glare flattening into a white that was beautiful iridescent. He felt—no, thought—something like an apology. Regret, as a physical thing, pooled in his stomach and spilled out through his body like a tide.
Then hands were on him. Solid, not gentle. Cherri’s face in the doorway was a wrecked mirage of terror and fury. She had her phone in one hand, keys in the other, eyes frantic and hands gripping the broken door handle.
“Anthony!” She was saying—screaming—voice breaking
Her fingers were cold and quick across his face, then at his throat, lastly lingering on his left wrist.
Angel was barely aware of her shouting for help, calling his given name as if saying it louder could stitch him back together. Her fingers pressed into his arms and he felt the squeeze like an anchor. He heard other noises: a man’s voice through the door, someone hitting an alarm of some sorts or just loud serious sounds, boots on tile.
A slit of light. A blur of shoulders and hair and mouth. Uniforms. Then Cherrie’s hot breath in his ear.
“Don’t you dare—don’t you fucking—stay with me, you cunt.”
Her hands worked mechanical, fierce tenderness, and for a moment the white that had swallowed his vision didn’t seem so infinite anymore.
He tried to focus on the hand that held his wrist. On Cherri’s curses under her breath, and slam of doors and stalls. The world hit him at an angle—too bright, too loud—and then he felt himself being weightless, lifted into the air.
Somewhere in that ragged, echoing room of doom, he registered a siren. So distant and then scarily closer. He hears, impossibly, Cherri’s voice again. Steady and commanding.
“Breath, Angie. Breath, please. Don’t leave me.”
And then there was nothing. Numbers felt silent. The equation balanced itself to a flattening zero—no remainders, no probabilistic noise. Then the whole model folded shut. Neat, final and conclusive.
Angel used to think probability was magic.
Not the kind with wands and sparkles, but the kind that lived in dice cups and shuffled jacks. A secret hiding inside the chaos. He remembered the first time he felt it, really felt it—sitting crossed-legged on the kitchen floor while Molly and his older brother bickered over homework at the table. The numbers on the page looked like clutter to them, but to him? It was the key written down. Roll a die enough timed and a pattern hummed to life. Flip a coin, track the heads and tails, and the noise smoothed into symmetry.
He loved the curves, the histograms, the way the world could be plotted, predicted, understood. How a variable, no matter how small and insignificant, could shift outcomes, sending an avalanche of consequences down a chain he could trace with precision. He remembered the thrill of calculating odds for a game of cards with Nico, and the thrilling triumph of being right. Of predicting a hand nobody else had seen coming.
The memory made him feel untouchable. Alive. Like the universe had handed him a secret key, if only he knew how to read it.
His chest rose and fell, slow and uneven, as another shard of nostalgia pierced the fog: Ma’s voice in the kitchen, warm and sing-song, calling them for dinner. Ma who had always cooked for them when she was still there. He could almost see the sunlight slipping through the curtains behind her, the hum of the ceiling fan lulling him, specks of dust flying in the golden rays. For a heartbeat, he was eight again, an untangled mess of safety and curiosity.
Then reality bled in. The hum of a different machine. A rhythmic beep, sharp and insistent. The tang of antiseptic in his nose. Sheets tucked around his arms and torso. The ceiling not the soft yellow of his childhood home, but harsh white panels.
Angel’s eyes fluttered open. Not fully awake, not fully dreaming, just suspended between two worlds. And that’s when reality hit him—the world had rolled the dice, and somehow, improbably, he had been given another trial.
A choked sob sounding to his left and a shadow moving at the edge of his vision and over the bridge of his nose.
“Tony?”
Blinking again, he saw her, partially with his uncovered eye—Molly hunched over the bed, her brown eyes wide and careful. Relief hit him in tiny pulses, like the tick of a stopwatch. His throat was dry, but he tried anyway.
“Hey, Mols,” he whispered and offered a small smile. “Can I borrow your phone? It has an antenna. Better reception.”
She paused for a second, looking down at the cellphone clutched in her pale hands. Eyebrows knitted in an unsure frown as he met Angel’s face once again.
“Jesus, Tony. Just…breathe.”
He extended his arm, covered in wires and stabbed with an IV, towards her.
“Yeah, breathe. Probability of not being dead is one hundred percent,” he said as he held the phone in trembling hands.
“You are impossible,” Molly said, rolling her eyes but smiling fondly at her twin.
Angel offered a flirty wink and turned back to dialing the familiar number.
“Cherri, where are you?” he said after the second beep.
There was a slight crackle of static before a woman’s voice came through, calm but stern.
“I went home to take a shower. I’m on my way.”
“Okay, good. Just…I needed to hear your voice.”
“Uh-huh,” Cherrie said, a little hint of annoyance laced in her tone. “Now, what exactly did you do to yourself? Y’were supposed to wait for me outfront.”
Angel squinted, gesturing vaguely at his face.
“The brown eye…what—”
“It’s gone, Angie. It’s not there anymore.”
“Well, how did that happen? You know about this…stuff. Chemistry and shit.”
He could hear Cherri sighing over the line, followed by her clearing her throat to jump into a chemistry lecture.
“Okay, so this is the deal when you OD like that. Your body experiences a massive systemic stress—cardiovasc pressures go way up, your heart rate spikes and your blood vessels contract and dilate unpredictably. So, that sudden fluctuation can cause hemorrhage or—um, ischemia. Specifically in your retina and optic nerve. Basically, the tissues can’t get oxygen fast enough. Combine that with the load of chemicals your dumbass took, your coagulation becomes chaotic, and sometimes the retina and surrounding tissues just…fail. The optic nerve itself was intact—that’s what the Doc said or whatever—but the trauma to the surrounding tissue made restoration impossible.”
Angel looked down at his free hand playing with the blanket draped over his lap, letting the information sink in. His good eye scanned the ceiling like it was a scatterplot he could figure out.
“So, the probability of, like, losing an eye after an OD is…pretty low.”
“Extremely low,” Cherri sighed. “But you are—hum, how would your nerd ass call it? An outlier. Your body threw a curveball none of your textbooks could predict. Just…don’t try and test the limit again, Angel. Please.”
He wished she was here. That he could hold her and console her for scarring her and ruining her night. For being a terrible friend and for ditching her to do something he knew was wrong. Something he didn’t even want to do.
Angel smirked faintly at nothing despite the throbbing pain.
“Well, at least I kept the pretty one. Green’s always been the better one.”
There was a short pause. Then, soft and resigned, “Damn right it is, you lucky fuck.”
Angel ended the call and handed the phone back to Molly, fingers lingering on the plastic gadget as if to send a hug to his best friend. He let his gaze wander over the hospital room—pale walls, machines humming, sunlight slicing through the blinds. All of it was data, patterns he could read, interpret, even if his new body felt unpredictable.
He thought about the night before, about the high, the conversation with Vox, the coke, the spiral. About the on-in-a-million roll that had left him bleeding on a bathroom floor, about Cherri dragging him to safety. He had been the outlier, statistically insignificant, but alive. Surviving. Against the curve, against the odds.
That thought made him smile, fragile but real. Outliers weren't always disasters. Sometimes they were signals, warnings, yes, but also reminders that the model could be skewed in unexpected ways. And sometimes they were proof that the system wasn't determined. That there was room for chance, for change and for new probabilities.
Angel flexed his remaining eye, testing the focus, then rubbed at the corner of his face feeling the tape of the eye patch on the other side. One year. Two years. The future was uncertain, yes—but now he could map it, one variable at a time. One choice at a time. One day at a time.
He thought of his first AA meeting. Nervous, sweating under layers of winter clothes, terrified that everyone would notice he didn’t belong. But he probably would. One day, one meeting, one counseling sesh at a time, he would learn to plot his steps with as much care as he plotted regression curves. The odds of relapse would always be high—but he would learn to work the new model. To read himself and to shift his own probabilities.
He closed his eye. He thought of a future in which even chaos, even after disaster, he could still find order. He could still plot a new equation. He could still find…hope.