Chapter 8
VEER FINDS ME AGAIN WHEN THE SONG CHANGES. WE go back to the kitchen, and she makes me another drink. Mostly tequila, with only a splash of orange juice.
“I can’t stay much longer.” Can’t is easier than shouldn’t.
Veer’s face goes expressionless. She thrusts the cup under my nose. “Don’t break my heart, now.”
It’s a cramped kitchen, made even more cramped by the cups scattering every surface like shiny red boils. There’s nowhere to retreat.
I take a sip. Taste wet earth with a muted citrus sting. She’s still watching me.
I want to see if I can still get it right, if I can prove to her I’m someone worth remembering. I press the pale plastic rim to my lips and hold her gaze and swallow the rest of the drink without pausing to breathe. Her eyes glitter like pools of ink, like twin oil slicks.
“I didn’t see you last night,” I say, swilling saliva over my tongue to dilute the harsh alcohol aftertaste.
Her crooked canine flashes. “Quiet night. We parked outside a McDonald’s and did nothing for, like, three hours.”
“Hanging out in a parking lot? What are you, fifteen?”
She snorts. “And who are you, the downtime police?”
“Where would I find the time?”
I forgot that I knew how to do this. Or maybe she just makes it easy.
Veer leans back against the counter. “Okay, so you get it. Nap or whatever when you can, right? I mean, I nap. Rodriguez studies.” She bends a little to scratch at her hip with her elbow. I’m not sure she even knows she’s doing it. “Philosophy.”
“No shit.”
Her eyebrows spring up, and she makes a face. “I guess that joke only works if you, like, know him. No, he’s getting a degree in computer science, gonna ditch me to be a software engineer or something.”
“He’s smart, huh.”
She bristles. “Paramedic cert isn’t easy.”
“Yeah, I know. I wasn’t saying that.” She grimaces as if to say, Sorry, I know. “But computer science is totally different, right? Lots of math.”
She wiggles a finger at me. “Hey, we do lots of math. 0.01 milligrams epinephrine per kilogram, which is 2.2 pounds, so the average anaphylactic ten-year-old takes, uh . . .” The noise of the party swallows the rest of the sentence, and she sticks her tongue out.
“Okay, fair, Rodriguez is really smart. So smart I get a little jealous sometimes.”
“Because of the math? Or because of the philosophy?”
“That’s my partner you’re talking shit on.” But she’s laughing. “And it’s not real philosophy. He just says crazy stuff sometimes.”
I shift, and an empty beer can topples over on the counter behind me. “Crazy how?”
Her face goes serious for a second, and she drops her voice to mimic Rodriguez’s even tone.
“Don’t waste your life trying to be good, good doesn’t exist on a personal level any more than evil does.
One person’s good deed might inadvertently generate a fuckton of evil in the world.
Same deal with one person’s evil deed. It’s all, like, cosmic.
Or karmic.” She runs a finger around the rim of the nearest cup. “He gets weird after midnight.”
“He sounds like my uncle.”
“Does he get weird after midnight too?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” I remember his jabs about what I should do with my mom.
How I’d better quit trying to be a good daughter and get it done.
My eyes feel shiny and clouded, and then I realize it’s because there are tears there, out of nowhere.
I’m suffocating very, very slowly, like gauze is being wadded up in my windpipe one strip at a time.
Veer makes a concerned noise in the back of her throat, and the gauze melts.
“Hey. I didn’t mean…” A twitch in her cheek.
“Do you want something to drink?” She glances at the empty orange juice container, then the various glass bottles surrounded by red plastic bodyguards. “Somewhere quiet? Fresh air?”
I swallow. The tears are gone. “I’m fine.”
“Okay. Good.” She scratches at her waistband again. “You just had a look, for a second.”
“An about-to-get-punched-in-the-face look?”
Her high-beam stare fades. “That was such a weird thing to say, wasn’t it.”
“It’s fine.” In the background, the music seems to have gotten louder.
Veer shoves off from the counter. We’re almost toe-to-toe. “Everything doesn’t have to be fine all the time. Come on, want to go out back and punch me in the face for real? Then we’ll be even.”
I almost start to laugh, but her expression’s dead serious. Like she’d let me, if I wanted to.
“I’m good.”
She cocks her head to one side. “Kick me in the shins?”
Maybe she’s a little drunk too. This time, I do laugh.
“What do you want to do, then?” she asks.
I slide my hand into hers. Her palm is clammy. “We could dance some more.”
Maybe I can remember how to do this, after all. Maybe I can still be what she wants.
“Okay,” she says as her fingers close over mine. “Cool.”
Back into the noise, the shoves, the swirl.
Blue-glowed bodies twist together, weight and counterweight.
An open hand ricochets out and catches my hair, whistling past my cheek.
Veer tugs me closer, her hand twined around my waist, her eyes like endless asphalt roadways.
The ground isn’t entirely steady under me.
I don’t know how to speak this frenzied physical language, so I push closer to Veer instead.
Veer, who remembered me. Who sought me out, who froze me out, who is now pressing me against the back of a suede recliner that’s been flipped to face the wall.
LED afterglow reflects in her eyes like northern lights.
Then it’s back. The gauze, the suffocation. Something sharp edged lodges in my throat. I close my eyes and try to swallow it down, and when I open them again, the glow of the striplights has a new, yellow tinge.
I smell the dust of the highway, the slow grind of sand against bone. And blood. Old blood. Sick blood.
“Let’s check out the backyard,” Veer says abruptly, and she shoves me toward the glitter of a sliding glass door. I don’t smell anything now except for sweat and soda and someone’s rancid cologne.
There’s less yellow grass and more gravel in the back.
A couple of people drift in circles, puffing vapes or cigarettes, kicking little sprays of pebbles at each other.
One of them waves to Veer, and she waves back.
The night air smells like cotton candy flavoring and not enough rain.
No blood. No sense of being plunged headfirst into a bucket of water.
“I have something to show you.” Veer steers me over to a dusty shed huddled against the side of the house, nighttime draining the color from it until it’s just a square-shouldered mass protruding from the stucco. “Think we can get up there?”
She drags a folding chair over, kicks it open on the gravel, then uses it like a step stool to hoist herself onto the shed. She didn’t notice anything, in the living room. Maybe it was all in my head.
“Oh shit.” Her voice peaks, excited. “Come on.”
I scramble up behind her and find Veer drumming on a thin metal ladder attached to the side of the house, obscured by the shadow of the roof.
“Is whoever owns this place okay with us going up there?” I whisper.
Veer makes a face that’s enough of an answer. “I’ll go first. If the ladder breaks, uh…”
“I’ll get out of the way.”
She chuckles. “What, don’t want me on top of you?”
I’m lucky that it’s dark and that she’s already started to climb, because I don’t want to know what my face looks like.
I don’t trust the ladder, but it holds together long enough for Veer to scramble onto the roof and for me to follow her.
At the top, I fling one leg over the edge and try to roll the rest of the way.
It’s harder than it looks. Veer tugs on my wrists and I come over a little off-balance, and suddenly we’re a tangle of arms and legs, tumbling across the sunbaked surface.
My head smacks the corner of a vent, and the world stops spinning.
She has me pinned, her chest on top of mine. Now is when I should kiss her. I want to, desperately, I want to grip her by the back of the neck and pull her into me, I want to—
Devour her, my mind supplies. There, above her eyebrow. Skin scraped off, pink raw promise beneath. My hands move of their own accord, snaking their way into her pomade-slick hair as I press my mouth to the cut and taste salt and dust and triumph.
Veer jerks away. My mouth goes cold.
Then she cups my face and kisses me like a dust storm, like a rattlesnake, with teeth and tongue and no room for breathing. I can barely keep up, not sure where to put my hands, brief moments of panic blotted out by her sheer intensity, like electric sparks in all the places our bodies meet.
When she pulls away, she’s breathless, eyes shining.
“Cool,” she whispers. She scrunches her nose and pushes off me, adding, “We came all this way, I guess we should check out the view.”
Veer kisses me again as we lean into each other on the edge of the roof. My arm around her shoulders, her fingers playing with my belt loops.
Her nose nudges the base of my ear. “Nice, right?”
The desert is a dark velvet expanse at the edge of the glimmering blanket of city.
I can taste the crystalline saltiness of the dry air, the dust that sticks under fingernails and in creases of skin.
Wide-open places always call to my family.
Places where it’s hard to live, and easy to die. Our hunger feels at home there.
There are more of us out there, I know. Scattered around, or skipping town to town, just like we used to.
But my mom says they’re shitty people and we don’t need them, and she’s probably right on at least one of those points.
We’re all just scraping by. We don’t have space in our hearts to help one another.
“Yeah.” It’s more than nice. It’s beautiful. “You should probably wash that.”
I gesture at my temple, to show that I mean the cut above her eye.
“Right.” She itches at her hairline. The cut stretches a little wider, glistens a little pinker, and I’m struck breathless by its smell, like scraped knees and pomade. Her gaze is a spotlight again, an interrogation. I watch her mouth a few versions of the question before she asks it.
“You’ve been through some shit too, haven’t you?” She jerks her head, like she’s defending herself from an inaudible retort. “You know what I mean.”
I don’t miss the way she adds too, and I can’t stop the sudden, overwhelming sensation that she’s looked right through me and sensed all the things I want to bury.
My pocket buzzes. Veer turns back to the desert as I tug the phone free, screen screaming to life in my hand. My mom’s face, upside down, but still instantly recognizable.
“Sorry,” I gasp—to Veer, to the desert, to myself, in preparation for whatever is waiting on the other end of the line—and pick up.