The CTA train screeched into the Howard station, its graffiti-tagged windows reflecting the Sickie Souse Club’s leather-clad silhouettes. Graylyn adjusted her lace gloves—dyed black with Rit, still staining her fingertips—and smirked at Drake’s latest vandalism: REAGANROIDS EAT SHIT scrawled in Sharpie across a campaign poster for the Republican senator whose Vitalis-slick hair she could still smell.
“You’re obsessed,” she said, her voice a cigarette-rasp as the train doors hissed open.
“And you’re complicit,” Drake shot back, hoisting a stolen bottle of his father’s Glenfiddich. His combat boots echoed on the platform, daring anyone to confront the Wolf Pack in their natural habitat: the liminal space between Evanston’s manicured lawns and Chicago’s throbbing underbelly.
They slipped into the cemetery first—their ritual. Beneath a moss-crusted angel, Chuck Crown spread a Persian rug looted from his mother’s Lake Forest mansion, its patterns swallowed by candlelight. The others arrived: Jules with his contraband VHS tapes of Labyrinth and In the Realm of the Senses, Felix tuning a thrift-store Stratocaster to the dissonant key of Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Graylyn lit a clove cigarette, the flame trembling as she recounted her latest family dinner. “Mother said my paintings ‘lack commercial appeal.’ As if I’m supposed to peddle sunsets to golf widows.” She exhaled sharply, the smoke coiling like the skeletal lovers in her latest canvas—the one she’d later burn on Chuck’s houseboat.
Drake snorted. “Commercial appeal’s for politicians and pornographers.” He tossed her the Zippo he’d stolen from his father’s NSA-locked desk, its surface engraved with coordinates to a bombing site in Hanoi. A relic, a rebellion, a fuck-you.
The senator found them at Neo hours later, his tailored suit clashing with the club’s black-lit fog. “Marshall,” he drawled, eyeing Graylyn’s choker. “Still playing Baudelaire with Daddy’s money?”
Drake’s fist connected before the insult landed. The bottle shattered, Scotch pooling with the senator’s blood as security dragged them into the alley. Graylyn laughed, loud enough to startle the rats. “You’ll never be him,” she whispered later, dabbing Drake’s split lip with her fishnet sleeve. She meant his father, the war hero, the monster. The man who’d called Ravenswood Academy to demand his son’s “moral realignment” after catching him with Ginsberg’s Howl.
By dawn, they’d defaced every campaign poster between Belmont and Fullerton. Graylyn sketched devil horns in Sharpie; Drake scrawled FASCIST TWINK beneath the senator’s smarmy grin. On the train home, she leaned into him, her Walkman sharing one earphone—The Cure’s Kyoto Song mirroring the syncopated clatter of tracks.
“Hollywood’s gonna hate this,” she murmured, nodding at Felix’s Polaroid of the vandalized posters.
“Good,” Drake said. “Maybe they’ll finally realize their rom-coms are lobotomy scripts.”
The Sickie Souse Club didn’t compromise. They corroded—wealthy, wounded, and forever seventeen in the shadow of Ravenswood’s bell tower, where the 19th-century ghosts of America’s ruling class whispered sellouts as they passed.
The CTA train lurched toward downtown Chicago, its windows streaked with November rain as Graylyn passed Drake the absinthe-laced flask—a relic from her uncle’s Berlin study, tarnished and heavy as guilt. “To mediocrity,” she drawled, her fishnet knees brushing his torn Levi’s. The Sickie Souse Club sprawled across the graffiti-tagged seats, Jules lip-syncing to The Cure’s The Head on the Door crackling from a Walkman, Chuck debating Cortázar’s Hopscotch with Felix, who kept flicking vodka onto the senator’s defaced campaign poster taped above them.
By the time they stumbled into the cemetery crypt—their “clubhouse” since freshman year—Drake’s vision swam with clove smoke and stolen Glenfiddich. Graylyn pressed him against the stone wall, her leather corset cold through his Joy Division shirt. “You’re still pretending you’ll outrun him, aren’t you?” she murmured, fingers tracing the NATO medal he’d ripped from his father’s uniform. The one he wore as a dog tag of spite.
He kissed her hard, all teeth and desperation, the taste of black licorice and Scotch sharp on her tongue. Her laugh vibrated against his mouth. “See? This is your manifesto. Not that Kerouac bullshit.” Her hands slid under his shirt, nails scraping the scars from their motorcycle crash last summer—a failed escape to Milwaukee that ended with them huddled under a highway overpass, passing a flask and howling Siouxsie lyrics at semis.
Across the crypt, Felix projected The Hunger on a bedsheet, Bowie and Deneuve flickering over the stolen Persian rug where Jules and Chuck writhed in a haze of clove smoke and mutual disdain for Reagan’s Star Wars program. “They’re rehearsing,” Graylyn whispered, biting Drake’s earlobe. “For the day Hollywood finally eats itself.” Her hips ground against his, the studs on her belt leaving crescent marks on his skin.
Drake’s hands tangled in her jet-black curls, yanking just enough to make her gasp. “You’d rather paint this?” he growled.
“I am painting this.” She tore open his shirt, buttons clattering against the crypt’s stone floor. “Every bruise, every fucking shudder.” Her lips trailed down his chest, lingering on the Zippo burn from last week’s confrontation with the senator’s lackeys—a “warning” that only cemented their status as Chicago’s prince and princess of decay.
When the absinthe hit its peak, Graylyn dragged him into the cemetery’s fog, their laughter echoing off mausoleums built by railroad barons. Under a leafless oak, she straddled him, her lace skirt hiking up to reveal the knife strapped to her thigh—a gift from Chuck after the senator’s thugs followed her home. “Still think I’m hiding?” she breathed, her breath hot against the NATO medal.
“You’re performing,” he shot back, flipping her onto the wet leaves. His mouth found the scar below her collarbone, the one her uncle’s signet ring left when she was twelve. She arched into him, not in pleasure, but defiance—a refusal to let pain be anything but fuel.
They returned to the crypt at dawn, soaked and shivering, to find the others passed out beneath Bowie’s frozen snarl. Graylyn sketched the scene in charcoal—Drake’s clenched jaw, her own smudged eyeliner, the empty flask glinting like a relic—while he scrawled MOLOCH LOVES MTV across the senator’s face on yesterday’s Tribune. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t sleep. They corroded, they collided, they etched their manifesto into the rusted heart of the ’80s.
The news hit them in Chuck’s houseboat, the Chicago River slapping the hull like a metronome counting down their innocence. Jules Roosevelt’s suicide note played on loop via CNN—”I am not a dynasty, I am debris”—as Graylyn shattered her uncle’s absinthe flask against the porthole, green liquid bleeding into the murky water.
“He was third in line,” Felix whispered, clutching a VHS tape of Jules’ 16th birthday at Camp David, where they’d all snorted stolen Adderall and mocked Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech. The footage now read like a eulogy: Jules in J.Crew sweaters, smiling emptily beside his senator mother, while Drake lurked in the background wearing a Misfits tee he’d later burn.
Drake paced, his father’s NATO medal digging into his chest. “They’ll say it was drugs. Depression. Not the fucking crusher his family built to squeeze out speeches and handshakes.” His voice cracked—a rarity for the Wolf Pack’s fearless leader. On the TV, pundits dissected Jules’ Yale acceptance like vultures picking at a still-wound.
Graylyn traced the Roosevelt crest on Jules’ old Ravenswood blazer, stolen from his locker the night they’d all skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan. “Two heirs on the list,” she said quietly. “You’re next, Drake.”
The room stilled. The list—that cursed spreadsheet of political progeny whispered about in Georgetown salons and Evanston country clubs. Drake’s grandfather had helped draft the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; his father’s shadow loomed over Langley. But Jules? Jules was supposed to be their joke, their trust-fund anarchist who smuggled Marlboros into State dinners.
Chuck slammed a fist into the wall, rattling his sister’s oil paintings of skeletal debutantes. “It’s the superstition. Two heirs collide, the universe fucking vomits.” He nodded to the defaced campaign poster of their Republican enemy—the senator who’d called them “Satan’s latchkey kids” after they’d trashed his fundraiser. “They’ll come for you now. For all of us.
Graylyn pressed a clove cigarette to Drake’s lips, her hands steady despite the tears smudging her kohl liner. “We’ll burn it down,” she murmured. “The list. The legacy. All of it.” On television, CNN was showing the crowd at the funeral, mourning a future president who’d rather paint his veins with pills than shake another donor’s hand.
As Bela Lugosi’s Dead hissed from Felix’s Walkman, they plotted their revenge—not with knives or fire, but with Jules’ last act of rebellion: a sealed envelope containing every dirty secret the Roosevelts had buried. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t mourn; they corroded. And Washington’s gilded rot had never tasted so bitter.
Regnum Somniorum 