Track 9 Delilah
Delilah
delilah cohen [@heytheredelco]
[a series of photos: an open highway beneath a clear blue sky; a takeout cup of coffee; the bookshelves at Giovanni’s Room; a plate of dessert; Roscoe’s interior, bathed in golden light]
Let me stay grateful—amid, despite, because.
Lisa Cohen [@lisaco]
So proud of you, my baby.
iris [@akasibirica]
honeypie we’re all on our private accounts here u can post the angry poems
By the time Delilah clambers out of Roscoe in the morning, Emmett is awake and sitting by the ashes of the fire with a book in their hands.
That’s all Delilah manages to see before the brightness of the sun hits her hungover brain. She squeezes her eyes shut behind her sunglasses, resisting the urge to hiss and recoil back inside the van like a vampire with a faulty alarm clock and wishing she hadn’t had quite so much wine last night.
“Good morning,” Emmett greets her, putting a finger in their book to mark their page as Delilah slumps down onto the bench of the picnic table. “Did you sleep well?”
“Oh my God,” Delilah mumbles. “Are you a morning person? Emmett, if you’re a morning person, I don’t know if this friendship is going to work out.”
“Should I find you some coffee?” Delilah moans out what she hopes is an intelligible affirmation. Emmett laughs. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Delilah buries her face in her arms and waves a hand at them—more of a flopping gesture than any kind of coordinated movement—wondering if she can snatch a few more minutes of sleep before Emmett gets back.
Unfortunately, the clean, crisp air and fluttering birdsong around her are too wholesome for her to really sink into wallowing.
She vaguely regrets not having gone with Emmett, since at least that would be something to do, but hey, she’s breathing fresh air and not hiding under a pillow.
She turns her head to rest it on one forearm, idly watching a squirrel investigating the grass around the other side of the picnic table, sniffing out potential crumbs from campers who didn’t see the leave no trace memos posted around the grounds.
She entertains herself by recording a video, quietly narrating the squirrel’s actions in her best David Attenborough imitation.
“And here,” she whispers to the camera, as the squirrel wriggles under part of the table to get its tiny paws on what looks like an abandoned piece of trail mix, “we can see the ingenuity of the species as it—oh, hel-lo, beautiful.” The recording captures Emmett’s startled laugh as they approach with a takeaway cup, looking deeply amused, before she cuts the video off.
“Is that for me? Please say it’s for me. ”
“It’s for you,” they say, handing it to her and sitting down beside her on the bench. “This is the largest cup they had, but I’m sure we’ll be able to stop for another one if you inhale it before it’s time to leave. Are you branching out into nature documentaries?”
“I was avoiding the siren song of social media,” Delilah says, taking the lid off the cup so she can hold it up to her face and inhale the steam.
Today’s wine-and-Xanax hangover isn’t quite as bad as yesterday’s vodka-and-Xanax hangover, if for no other reason than because she hadn’t sobbed herself to sleep and woken up completely dehydrated, but she still craves the sweet comfort of caffeine like other people crave heroin.
She inhales coffee-scented steam until she’s confident she won’t burn the roof of her mouth off, then drains a third of the cup in one go.
“Did you sleep okay?” she asks when she comes up for air. “You weren’t too cold?”
“I was fine,” Emmett says, sitting down across from her.
Delilah squints at their face, looking for any sign of exhaustion or dark shadows under their eyes or any other hint that they’re lying to make her feel better, and comes up empty.
They look more rested than she does, honestly, even still dressed in yesterday’s clothes and with their hair mussed up on one side, as if they slept with their hand as a pillow.
Currently, Emmett is holding said hand out to the squirrelly subject of Delilah’s abandoned documentary as it sniffs at their fingertips, nose nearly touching their pale skin.
Of course they’re a friend to woodland creatures, she thinks. One more tick in the too freakishly cute to be real column. “See anything interesting overnight?”
Emmett sits up, abandoning the squirrel, who scurries back under the table. “Like what?”
“Hell if I know,” she says. “Mountain lions?”
“Do they have those in Pennsylvania?”
Delilah blinks. “You know, I have no idea.”
That leads them down an internet rabbit hole. Emmett scrolls through Wikipedia articles on animal sanctuaries on Delilah’s phone while Delilah chugs coffee in an attempt to resurrect her sparkling personality from its alcoholic grave.
It turns out that there are no mountain lions in Pennsylvania, though there are bobcats.
There are also, apparently, bears. That takes them on another tangent wondering about what kind of bear would be the most terrifying to meet in the wild, and that leads to the revelation that Emmett has never heard of Fat Bear Week.
Delilah demands that they rectify this oversight immediately, and she takes her phone back just to make sure Emmett doesn’t miss any of her favorites.
By the time she finishes her coffee, Emmett has come up with some of their own opinions on the best fat bears, Delilah has ignored two calls from her mom, one from Alex, and about six texts from various people who probably only have nice things to say even though she’d rather die than hear them, and she feels human enough to get behind the wheel.
“We are stopping for more coffee, though,” she says as she helps Emmett finish neatening up their campsite.
“You have an addiction,” Emmett says, tucking their backpack and sleeping bag behind Roscoe’s passenger seat. “You know that, right?”
“It’s my emotional support drink.” Delilah settles herself in the driver’s seat, checking the mirrors and wrinkling her nose slightly at the state of her hair.
She tugs the elastic out, sticks it between her teeth so she can gather her hair up into a new messy bun, and talks around the tie as she works.
“Consider it progress, honestly. Back in college I just drank nonstop energy drinks, and half the time I mixed them with vodka.”
Emmett climbs in next to her. “That doesn’t sound healthy.”
She loops her hair back up, checks her reflection, and decides it’s as good as it’s going to get. After all, it’s not like she’s trying to impress anyone. “It’s all relative.”
“If you say so.” Emmett hesitates. “Do you need to return any of those calls before we leave?”
Delilah rolls her eyes, but plucks her phone from where she dropped it into the cupholder. She flips on the forward-facing camera, angling it so that they’re both in the frame. “Smile,” she tells Emmett, then starts recording. “Hi, Mommy! It’s some horrible time in the morning—”
“Eight,” Emmett says.
“—and I’m reporting in to let you know that Emmett didn’t murder me overnight. Say hi, Emmett.”
“Um,” Emmett says, looking alarmed, “was she worried about that?”
“The fact that they just asked that question,” Delilah says, half to the camera and half to Emmett themself, “really makes me worry that I’m the potential serial killer in this situation.”
Emmett considers her for a moment, then shrugs one shoulder. “You’ve only had one cup of coffee so far, and your cardigan’s on inside out,” they say. “I think I could take you.”
“Wait, really?” Delilah twists to look down at her sleeve, then grimaces.
“Wow, okay. I can’t even feel judged right now.
Well, now that we’ve established that Emmett isn’t going to murder me and might actually be the person keeping me alive, I think that’s proof of life taken care of! Chat later, love you, say bye, Emmett!”
“Bye?”
It’s definitely more of a question than a statement, but Emmett gives a bewildered little wave toward the camera anyway, and Delilah laughs as she blows a kiss at the screen and ends the recording.
“Perfect,” she says, sending it to her mom along with a string of heart emojis.
“Do exactly that every time we do one of these. She’ll be trying to adopt you by the time we’re halfway to LA. ”
“Is that good or bad?”
Delilah shrugs, tosses her phone into the cupholder, and turns the key in the ignition. Roscoe hums to life, and she pats the dashboard. “Depends on how you feel about Chinese food, reality television, and lengthy dissertations on the sociology of public health.”
Emmett’s blank look is enough to set her off laughing again, and that lasts her all the way through checking out of the campground and getting back onto the highway.
They stop for breakfast at a roadside diner, the kind with laminated, slightly sticky menus, endearingly mean waitresses, and no-frills bottomless coffees in heavy mugs so old their logos are barely legible anymore.
“Don’t fill up too much,” Delilah says as they flip through the menu. “We’re doing brunch in a few hours.”
Emmett peers at her over the top of their menu. “We are?”
“Drag brunch,” she clarifies. “In Pittsburgh.”
“Oh.” They study the menu again, then lower it. “Why are we eating breakfast now, then?”
“Because I will be an absolute bitch if I don’t,” Delilah admits.
“I thought that was what the coffee was for.”
“You think you’re so cute,” she says, and Emmett ducks their head to hide their smile.
It’s not until after breakfast, as they’re getting back onto the road, that Delilah thinks to ask, “Have you ever been to a drag brunch before?” She weaves Roscoe between two cars as she switches lanes with a twist of the wheel that makes Emmett wince and grab at the dashboard.
“I mean, I’m guessing no, but I don’t want to assume. ”
“You’d be assuming right,” Emmett says.