Chapter 7
I LEARN THAT THE TATTOOED ONE IS KELSEY AND THE green-haired one is Lasso, and we’re heading to someone’s friend’s old roommate’s house party. Kelsey’s car is clean enough, but there’s a lingering smell of rancid oil and hot sauce.
In the passenger seat, Lasso kicks their sneakers up on the dashboard. “Vera. Veronica. Veruschka. We can’t take you anywhere, girl.”
Veer mutters, “Then don’t.”
“Be nice,” Kelsey warns in her low gravel voice.
Lasso clicks their tongue. “Just saying.”
Veer scrunches herself up against the door, forehead pressed into the window, and ignores them both.
Kelsey says something about a job interview, and Lasso giggles and folds forward and launches into a story. But there’s a scent in the air, faint under the takeout-and-plastic odor of the car. Worry. Unspoken, unheeded. Kelsey is gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles blanch white.
Veer keeps her face to the window as we speed past flickering streetlights and neon-lit liquor stores. All the lights seem to be green.
A Chinese restaurant flies by in a flash of yellow and black, and Kelsey grumbles, “Worst fried rice of my life.”
Lasso cackles. “Okay but, hear me out, have you ever been to this place downtown called Nice Restaurant #2? The fried rice there will drive you literally insane…”
Veer runs a palm over her skull, pushing her slicked-back hair even flatter. Did she only invite me along out of kindness? Was I supposed to say no? The headrest is tilted forward at a weird angle, and a meningitic stiffness has started to creep through my neck.
Fine. I’ll say something.
“He had a gun.” It sounded better when I was thinking it.
Veer doesn’t shift, and I wonder if the words got lost in Lasso’s chatter and the whir of rubber on asphalt. Then, right when I’m about to repeat myself, she shrugs herself around to face me and says, “Sure.”
She flares her eyes as she says it, not quite an eye roll but the same idea. From the front, Kelsey hisses “Fuckin’ dumbass” in a tone of flat, familiar warning that tells me it’s meant for Veer, and beneath it is a whole continent of hurt and rage and fear.
“Okay,” Veer says. “Okay, I’m a dumbass.”
Up ahead, the light turns yellow. Kelsey speeds up. We fly through as the light blinks red. We cut through a gas station to avoid another red light, and Veer leans over to me so abruptly it looks stop-motion in the blue-white wash of the gas station lights.
“I’m sorry,” she says under her breath, and I realize she doesn’t want her friends to hear. “I’m sorry again. I’m sorry I have to keep apologizing.” The car bumps back onto the road, and she pulls away. “I’m a real fuckup, okay? Kels will tell you.”
“She’s a good kid,” Lasso interjects. Veer punches the back of their headrest.
It’s okay, I almost say, an automatic response.
But I hold back, because what I want to say is: She loves you, your friend, I can hear it in her words, I can smell it on her breath.
She loves you, and she’s scared that one day she won’t be able to pull you back from the edge.
You don’t know what I’d give to have someone care for me like that.
Don’t talk about her love with such bitterness.
In the end, I just smile and say nothing.
The car shudders to a stop outside a flat-roofed bungalow, pockmarked with grime blown in from the desert.
The front yard is yellow grass crowned with a constellation of equally yellow plastic chairs, some upright and gathering dirt in their seats, some face down or knocked on one side like sad bowling pins.
A pair of girls in frayed jeans and flannels lounge in the pushed-open window, legs flung over the sill for balance.
As we approach, I smell Mountain Dew and the electric fuzz of appliances left plugged in as the house baked in the sun.
This isn’t right—going to a party, going to this party, shutting the door on my mom and my problems for a night, even if she did shut the door on me first—but Veer turns around and slips her arm through mine, and I can’t disengage now. Her skin is comfortingly cold, or maybe mine’s just warm.
Veer drags me through the door, Veer who maybe can’t stand me, or maybe wants something from me.
Or maybe something kinder, but I never learned to look for the good in people.
Past piles of purses and backpacks, sweatshirts flung on a side table, their arms twined together like an afterimage of an embrace.
Inside, the lights are down and the music’s up.
Loose-limbed people fling themselves into and out of my field of vision, and Kelsey and Lasso disappear into the swirl.
“Let’s get a drink,” Veer whispers in my ear.
We maneuver over sprawled legs and around two figures in matching crop tops, making out in the hallway.
The kitchen walls are a quilt of taped-up flyers, amateurish risograph prints, and Sharpie scrawls.
Half-empty liquor bottles and beer cans litter the counter, flanked by abandoned plastic cups.
Someone’s doodled a floppy-eared dog and a speech bubbling reading “I love you!” on the nearest one.
Veer scans the bottles. “What do you like?” Her voice is loud and surprisingly close. “Tequila?”
“Sure.”
She smacks her way through the forest of glass and plastic. The cup with the dog drawing topples onto its side with a mournful plop.
“What did he say to you?” I ask. “Back at the bar?”
Orange juice sloshes over the red lip of the cup. “Huh? Oh. Not, like, a slur, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, I—” I’m suddenly off-kilter, not sure what to say. “I’m sorry. This is weird.”
Veer’s hands freeze midair. “For you?”
“No. For you. You don’t have to—”
You don’t have to do this, whatever this is. You don’t have to spend all night with me just because you ran into me at a bar. Just because I’m still stinging from my mom’s rejection doesn’t mean you have to be gentle with me.
She doesn’t know that, of course. About my mom. But that’s not the point.
“Do I look like someone who does stuff because she has to?” She sneers and shoves a drink that smells like citrus and turpentine into my hand. “If you want to leave, go for it.”
Her jaw is a tense line, her eyes dark rimmed and defiant. There’s eyeliner on the bridge of her nose. I could reach up and wipe it away. I could cup her face in my hands and breathe her in. I could snarl my way into her bones.
A howl of laughter from some other room of the house. Veer breathes out, hard, the sure line of her pressed-together lips twisting. Not a smile. A grimace. Self-recrimination. She doubles over and digs her elbows into the tiled lip of the counter, slides her hands into her hair.
“Jesus,” she mutters. “I’m sorry. Like, I know, I know I can be such a fucking freak show sometimes.
No, don’t be freaked out, it’s seriously fine if you want to leave.
You always look like you’re, like, expecting a punch in the face, and I’m not that guy, I swear to God, I just. I don’t know.
I—” She slides her face into the crook of her elbow, muffling the rest.
It takes me a second to piece together what she’s trying to say. “Like I’m—”
Her face pops up again. Her eyes are big, a little too big, like she’s on the edge of panic.
“Like you’re expecting a punch in the face.
” Her voice, too, has a breathlessness, like now that she’s started, she can’t stop.
“I see you all the time in the ED. That kid who shot himself in the leg, remember? And the guy who had a heart attack, with the wife who kept claiming she should do the CPR instead of me. And the lady who went into labor on the side of the road. And Oscar and Yvonne and the rest of our frequent flyers, and those kids who lost control of their bonfire, and—”
“And the mom who flipped her car,” I finish for her, trying not to remember her shaking hands as she bent over the little girl, her venom in the break room.
“No.” That same venom is back, but fainter, softer, like sunlight filtered through a gauzy curtain. “You were different that time.”
I was different. I was hungry.
She shakes her head, clearing a thought away maybe. The panic’s gone. The venom too.
“Ellis.” She makes my name sound like a full sentence. “Can I try again? Start over from the beginning?”
I nod. She steps closer. I suffocate on the smell of her curiosity, like anise and black pepper cracked between her molars.
“Okay. Good. Okay.” A twitch of a smile, like she’s nervous about letting it all the way onto her face. She tugs the cup from my hands and finishes it in one go. I imagine her tasting remnants of me amid the plastic and alcohol. “Wanna dance?”
The empty cup joins its brethren on the counter. “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”
Veer holds out a hand and I take it, and then we’re threading back toward the living room with its blaring speakers and twisting bodies.
She walks fast, like she’s worried that if we slow down, I’ll change my mind.
I remember the wailing wife, her insistence that she’d sue the medics for negligence.
I remember the kids and the acrid smell of smoke.
But I don’t remember the others, and even if I did, I definitely don’t remember which medics brought them in.
But Veer noticed me, all those times. She remembered.
That shouldn’t make me feel warm, but it does. Or maybe the two drinks I had at Rosy’s are starting to get to me.
The living room is lit blue green by LED striplights, punctuated by the glow of phone screens.
The music roars and warps, going fuzzy where the song is too loud or too low for the cheap speakers to handle.
We swerve around furniture shunted into corners to make way for unapologetic bodies, and Veer tugs me out of the way of a trio in combat boots and cartoon character backpacks who are shoving each other to the pump of the bass.
“Watch it.” But she’s smiling, like it’s less a warning, more a suggestion. Watch them. Wouldn’t that be fun?
In front of us, someone in a hot-pink T-shirt screeches and runs full tilt at someone else. They collapse to the floor together, a swamp of limbs and laughter.
“Shithead,” Veer calls to them, and they swipe giddily at her ankles. Another partygoer tips head over heels as we pass, Doc Martens barely missing the back of Veer’s skull.
“Are you sure—”
Her teeth flash, and she steers me toward the wall. “It’s cool. I’ve got you.”
The song switches, goes slower and sludgier, and Veer pushes her fingers into the spaces between mine until we’re twined together, swaying. She leans in, so close I can smell the orange juice and cinnamon on her breath, and whispers something.
“What?”
She pulls back a bit. Repeats it, louder. “Ever been to a party like this before?”
“No.” I’m sure she knew the answer before she asked the question.
She looks at me, and the air grows heavy with the smell of sweat and spit and rapture.
“Me neither,” she whispers, so quiet I see it in the earnest curve of her mouth more than hear it. So quiet that it might be just for me, that I might be the reason that she, too, has never been anywhere like this before.
Her chin is tilted up. I think she wants me to kiss her.
I think I want to too.
The song ends, and another one starts. Veer shrugs her fingers out of mine and throws her head back, howling or laughing or singing along, I’m not sure which. She dances a few steps back, beckoning me to follow.
“Come on!” she insists, but I’m frozen. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be the way she wants me to be.
Her friend in the pink T-shirt is back, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, and Veer holds up one finger and mouths something.
“It’s okay,” I shout back. It doesn’t matter what she said. That’s always the right answer.
Veer shrugs and follows her friend, but she’s easy enough to track among the other dancers, her white tank top stained blue by the lights. She whips in tighter and tighter circles, wild and feverish, and when the song slows, I watch the ecstatic heave of her shoulders as she catches her breath.
She glances back at me, her gaze like searchlights tracking the night sky. Like I’m a skeleton key, and she’s a door that’s never been unlocked. Like something I could reach out and grasp, if only I were willing to put my hand out for it.