the youngest floor of the bottom
None of the boys was over like twelve. They used a M. Fizzy bottle instead of a pipe, and the smell of burnt plastic hung mixed with the sicksweet smell of overcarbonated rock.
Context
The street bottom shown at its lowest register — children, none over twelve, smoking rock from a melted soda bottle in a truck hitch — filed past by a relapsed man who has words only for how ratty they look. The gallery of the second city is a ladder of the same disease at every rung, and the scene's cruelty is that the man walking through it recognizes nothing of himself in any of it.