❝𝙎𝙃𝙄𝙏!❞

Taryn's sneakers smack against the sidewalk as she bolts, tugging her black hood up and over her head so her face is shielded. She avoids dumpsters and leaps over boxes lying in the alley. She doesn't look back once, knowing that it'll only slow her down.

Lights from flashlights shine on her back and the walls on each side of her as she sprints. A few shouts echo down the alleyway.

They're getting closer.

Taryn pushes over a group of three trash barrels and they clatter on the ground, spilling their contents in the path of her pursuers.

The end of the alley nears. Her heart rate speeds up as her legs do and she doesn't even look both ways—or even one way—before she runs straight across the road with cars zooming by at fatal speeds. If she got hit, she'd be killed instantly.

More shouts from behind as she runs across the flat road, narrowly dodging a sleek black car. The driver honks his horn but never slows.

Once Taryn's safely on the other side of the road, she takes off down another alley. Blue and red lights flash on the buildings surrounding her.

She skids as she turns a sharp corner, her heart beats loudly in her ears. Usually she's lost them by now.

"Damn," Taryn mutters, breathless as her legs continue to pump with adrenaline. "Why are they so persistent tonight?"

She turns another corner, almost dropping the full backpack slung over her shoulders, and stumbles to a stop as she stares up in panic at the fence before her. Everything pauses for a moment. A string of curses run through her mind as she takes in this unexpected situation. She knows these alleys like the back of her hand, stuff like this isn't supposed to happen. The fence must've been a new installment. The low streetlights glint off the shiny metal like the moon on water, only less poetic.

Nearing footfalls draws her back into reality. She hits her forehead with her palm and murmurs, "Thinkthinkthinkthinkthink," to herself as she assets the situation. Her eyes narrow in on a window ledge up where the chain-link fence ends. Perfect.

Flashlights shine on her once more and the sirens pierce the semi-peaceful New York night. Red and blue flash the brick buildings and the fence. She doesn't waste any more time before jumping onto the fence and climbing it all the way to the top. Instead of just hopping down to the ground on the other side, she heaves herself up onto the window ledge.

"Get down from there!" A police officer shouts.

Taryn ignores the threat and jumps upwards, reaching for the window ledge above the one she's currently balancing on. Her fingers slide before gripping on the ledge, her short fingernails scraping against the stone. In no time she's scaling the wall of the building like a monkey.

"Come down with your hands up!" comes another shout from below.

She climbs higher.

"We're serious! Stop! You're going to hurt yourself!"

She rolls her eyes and continues her climb. It's not like she is inexperienced; she does it almost every weekend. These people need to relax and let her concentrate. If anything, it'd be their fault if she plummeted to her death.

The shouts and warnings grow more distant as she heaves her legs one at a time over the side of the roof. Once Taryn's feet safely hit the top, she doesn't stop to catch her breath—she just continues to run. She hears the sirens from below, but they don't faze her anymore. She knows that she got away. As she realizes this, a grin slowly forms on her face and a small laugh escapes her lips.

There's just something about almost getting caught that makes Taryn feel alive. The rush that courses through her veins, the high that takes over her being, the adrenaline that makes her legs pump faster. She lives for that—and for the art that she spreads around the city, of course. She found a way to express her love for untraditional art while also getting that rush she can't live without, and that's through graffiti. Some call it vandalism, but it's really just self-expression on other people's walls. It's not like she's spray-painting penises or senseless curse words on people's houses or anything, if anything she's doing everyone a favor. She makes damn good art, and she knows it. It's not just aesthetically pleasing, it also always has an underlining meaning. Sometimes it's about how cruel our society is, how diverse New York is, how humans are killing the earth, and anything in between. Taryn makes art to make a difference.  The NYPD doesn't understand that, they think that she's just another vandal.

Taryn jumps from the fire escape of the building to another, and eventually, she makes it back to the apartment complex where she lives. She shares the small apartment with an older brother, Zach, and sister, Megan, the two siblings nearly a year apart in age. Taryn's only two years behind her brother. The three may all be close in age, but they don't get along very well. Someone usually ends up with a damaged ego and a bald spot—Megan tends to instinctly go for the hair, even when the three were younger. The apartment is also shared with Taryn's mother Maria, a Mexican beauty with cooking skills to die for. There may only be three bedrooms and one bathroom, but the four of them make due with what they have.

As soon as Taryn walks through the front door of the apartment, she pulls her hood down, strands of her black hair sticking up with static electricity, and is hit with a familiar, delicious aroma. Enchilada night.

"Eres tú, Taryn?"

"Sí Madre," Taryn replies as she pokes her head into the closed-off kitchen. She scans the small, but semi-functional, kitchen and smiles when she sees the mess her mother has made. A lot of mothers fuss about tidiness, but hers is just as bad as a teenager when it comes to cleaning and organizing.

Taryn's mother turns and smiles over her shoulder at her youngest daughter. "How was your day? Bien?"

"Estuvo bien." Taryn inconspicuously inches away from the kitchen doorway towards the bedroom she and her older sister share. "I'm going to go study now. I've got a big test tomorrow, you know?"

"Dinner will be ready in about twenty minutes."

Taryn turns and skips down the short hallway to her bedroom. "Gracias, Mamá," she calls, getting a short reply from her mother in the other room.

Swinging the door to her bedroom open, Taryn's eyes glance over her older sister reading a pop culture magazine as she's sitting on the bottom bunk of their bunk bed. Megan's eyes roll at Taryn's dramatic entrance.

"You're home pretty late," Megan says, suspicion dripping from her voice as she looks up from some shirtless white celebrities from the magazine pages. "Where were you?"

Taryn ignores her sister's patronizing gaze and heaves herself up onto the top bunk. As she peels her backpack from her shoulders, she mutters, "Like that's any of your business."

"It is."

"Is not."

"Fine," Megan snips and turns a page. "I don't care anyways."

Taryn mocks her sister silently as she goes through her backpack. The spray cans she used are all there, except for her blue. She must've left it at the site of her latest masterpiece during her rush to get away from the police. Taryn sighs in frustration when she realizes she'll have to go buy a new blue can. Even though she's only sixteen and doesn't reach the age restriction on purchasing spray paint of twenty-one in New York, she always gets away with picking some cans up at a particular store with mindless employees. She's only been asked for an ID twice, and she lied both times and claimed that she left it at home. They always fall for it—she looks a bit older than she really is.

No one knows that she goes out and graffitis the streets of Brooklyn. At home, she's just the baby of the family who isn't living up to her older siblings's image. At school, she's the loner who makes more enemies than friends and listens to her music through her headphones obnoxiously loud. But when the sun goes down and paint cans are in her hands, she's real.

And that's all she really wants to be.

"Man, I bombed that test," Ganke laughs as he leans over to take a sip of his soda. When he gets a lack of a reply from the boy shifting through his locker, he asks, "How'd you do on that test in Calculus, Morales?"

Miles shrugs, feigning slight disappointment. "Eh."

A paper slips from Mile's folder as he's sliding it in the top shelf in his locker. He drops his ofher folder trying to snatch it in the air as it falls, but he fumbles the paper and ends up on the ground. Ganke leans over and grabs it before Miles can.

"Bro," Ganke says, glancing over the red letter at the top of the page and turning it to shove it in his face. "You call a 103% eh?"

Miles hastily grabs the paper from the boy's hand and shoves it into his locker before slamming it shut.

"Whatever, man. I guessed on the whole thing," Miles claims, picking up his folder he dropped and turning to walk down the hall with Ganke by his side. "I just got lucky."

"I wish I got that lucky, I'm literally failing that class."

"Yeah, well," Miles says, and that's the end of their conversation before they spilt off to go to their next classes. Miles's eyes linger on Ganke as he departs from him, a feeling of nostalgia washing over him. The two used to be best friends in elementary, but then they were split up when Miles attended his old high school and Ganke started this one. Miles doesn't take it personally that Ganke has a new group of friends, but he does miss the days where the two would hang out in Ganke's basement and play video games and eat funyuns all night.

Miles shakes off the feeling and continues on his way towards AP Physics.

As he weaves through the crowded halls, he yawns. His father accidentally woke him up when he came home at midnight after a frustrating day patrolling the streets of Brooklyn. Miles sat up in his twin bed and listened as his father expressed his frustrations to his mother about chasing some tagger in the other room. Apparently he's seen the vandal on a couple occasions, but they get away every time.

Miles likes the idea of graffiti, but he knows that he'd definitely get caught and would never hear the end of it from his police officer dad and over-protective mom if he ever tried it.

AP Physics is located on the opposite side of the large school building, so he has to hurry to get to class to not be tardy. He's been late a few times, but that was mostly because he was new to the school a few months ago and it was hard to keep track of where all his classes are. After a while, though, he's gotten the hang of things. He's still not as popular as he was at his other school, but he's okay with that. It seems like almost everyone at this school is the same.

He walks into the classroom with one hand burrowed in his pocket and the other holding his folder and text book against his side. Miles hums a popular song to himself as he makes his way down the aisles of desks until he reaches his somewhere in the middle of it all. He sits and waits for class to start.

Taryn Merrick, who sits in front of Miles in this class and is in a few other classes with him, is sketching in her notebook with her headphones securely over her ears, music blasting. It's a song that Miles isn't familiar with, but he catches onto the tune and beat and hums along anyways. If he wasn't gifted academically, he definitely would be studying music instead of math and science. It's not that he doesn't enjoy STEM courses, he just doesn't particularly like only learning about them and nothing that he can think creatively about. All he does at school is equations and formulas and laws of nature and physics and rules. There are no rules in music.

Miles sets his feet on the tray on the bottom of Taryn's seat and leans back in his own as he patiently waits for the bell to ring to signal the beginning of class.

Once the bell rings, Mrs. Zimmer, a short and thin woman, stands from her desk in the corner and lets the class know that she's letting them have the first five minutes of class to study before she hands out the quiz. Miles sighs—he didn't need to study, so the five minutes is just going to be a waste of time for him.

Miles leans forward when he notices that Taryn isn't using the time to study, either, but she's also not doodling anymore. Sometime between when Miles entered the classroom and the start of class, Taryn has fallen asleep. Her head lies on her folded arms on her desk, her soft black hair moving slightly from the air exhaling from her nostrils. Curious, he leans his head sideways to get a better look at what she was doodling, but sits back when he realizes she's covering the entire page as she lies on it.

It feels like forever before the five minutes is up and Mrs. Zimmer passes out the quiz. As she nears Miles's row, he realizes that Taryn is still sleeping. There's only two things that Mrs. Zimmer gives detentions for on a daily—vulgar language and sleeping in class.

With his feet still on the metal tray under Taryn's seat, he bounces his leg. It shakes her chair enough for her to put her head up. He takes his feet off her tray then, watching Taryn spot Mrs. Zimmer approaching and sits up.

The teacher passes the papers out without noticing Taryn took a short nap. As Mrs. Zimmer sets the quiz onto Miles's desk, she says, "Don't deliberately get every question wrong this time, Morales."

Miles flushes in embarrassment. He hadn't realized she had noticed.

"Yes ma'am."

Once Mrs. Zimmer continues past him, he lets out a breath. He takes the quiz, only deliberately getting a few questions wrong this time so he doesn't raise her suspicions again.