Chapter 14
Veer pops another stick of cinnamon gum onto her tongue and takes one arm off the wheel to stretch.
Gold sunlight catches on the dips and crags of her arms, the shiny circular patches and uneven lines of raised tissue knit over long-healed cuts.
She stretches wider, making a show of trying to sneak her arm around my shoulders like a teen at the movies, but she can’t quite reach.
Her fingers brush my cheek. For a moment, my curse and I are no longer adversaries, just two animals hoping that touch might linger, imagining the taste of her fingerprints.
We speed past red-scarred boulders and Joshua trees with limbs like broken fingers, and Veer tells me she’s only left Nevada once, a weekend trip to Flagstaff with Kelsey.
They took a detour through Sedona on the way back, slept parked on the side of the road in the back of Kelsey’s car and woke up at five in the morning to hike up into the canyons.
“All those red rocks, washed out and whittled down, and the sunrise made them look so eerie, like aliens.” She sounds enchanted, like she’s left the highway’s welcome mat of speed and asphalt and is kneeling in awe at the desert’s altar.
“Like angels, actually. Yeah. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. ”
She slides her gaze to me, eyes warm and liquid, and an answering greed growls to life under my tongue. I want to tell her to pull over the car, to pull off her T-shirt, and to let me taste where her heartbeat pounds its rhythm into her bruises.
“Anyway,” she says, and it’s gone again—maybe it wasn’t ever really there, maybe it’s just my want and the blood in my duffel bag that I’ve waited too long to inject—“I know all my people are here, but I can’t fucking die in Nevada.”
Then she reaches for the stereo dial and turns the music all the way up.
I don’t know where I’d want to die. With my mom and everything, it’s hard to think too far ahead.
The last time I drove this far, she was in the driver’s seat and I was fifteen and tangled up inside.
We drove from Colorado to Las Vegas without stopping, the seat belt working a welt over my collarbone.
She wouldn’t let me ride up front. You’re just a kid, she said, and I believed it.
I believed it, too, every time she swore we weren’t running away.
I was all she needed, and she was all I needed, and putting down roots was for people one season away from rot.
The school system wasn’t good enough, or the other kids’ houses were too nice, or the teachers were taking too much of an interest in me.
Even then, the boundary between real and not was hazy.
A lazy pile of sunset-colored rocks blurs past us, big enough to climb on.
Big enough to crush me. I imagine my mom pacing the kitchen, The Golden Girls reduced to muffled gibberish in the background.
I imagine her pinching the inside of her forearms as the bones of her face hum and warp, certain there’s something she needs to do but not knowing what.
Veer reaches for another stick of gum. Cinnamon and sugar light up my sinuses. And what would my mom think about her?
She’d see Veer as an enemy, poised to tear me away from her. And she’d see me again as the ungrateful child, throwing myself at anyone willing to spirit me away from a mother I resent, from a life filled with bitterness.
Is that all I’m doing?
So what if it is. Can’t that still be enough?
Maybe that’s all Veer wants, someone desperate to cling to her. She hasn’t tried to kiss me again. And I don’t know, anymore, if who I should be is the same as who I want to be. It’s been so long since I tried to separate the two. What if I no longer can?
The Joshua trees barely cast a shadow as they speed past. The wind doesn’t have an answer.
“You hungry?” Veer asks as we pass a sign that promises “The International Car Forest,” whatever that is.
“Yeah,” I say without thinking. I’m hungry for so many things, and food is low on the list. But I could stretch my legs.
At Tonopah, we pull up in front of a wooden building that rises out of the asphalt wasteland around it like a mirage, shrieking Hotel!
Food! Casino! in big block letters. A rusted mining cart and a statue of a rearing horse guard the entrance.
As soon as we step inside, I’m choked by the scream of slot machines and the smell of fried oil.
The restaurant is carpeted in the same crimson-and-mustard paisley as the casino.
The tables are wooden and too large for two, and there’s no one else but us and a waitress who looks like she’s more makeup than face.
We order cheeseburgers and fries, and Veer fidgets with the drawstring on her basketball shorts as we wait.
Her impatience smells like rancid vinegar.
When her fingers drum on the scarred tabletop, same as they drummed on the polished plasticine at Rosy’s, I recall the electric crackle of danger in the bar and the smell of her healing cuts as she bent over my car, of a cracked scab and the soft newness beneath.
That cut on her hip is healed, but remnants of the bruise still linger yellow tinted in the crook of her elbow.
My hand moves toward it without my permission. Veer is watching the waitress wipe down the other tables, and she flinches when I touch her.
I draw back. Shouldn’t have done that. “Sorry.”
She smiles and tugs my hand back into the warm bend of her arm. Her heartbeat flutters faintly under my fingertips. Or maybe it’s mine. “You’re good.”
“What happened?” I don’t mean to pry, only I’m already here with her, hours away from home, just the two of us and the desert. The waitress appears with two plates, and we snap apart like there’s something to be ashamed of.
Veer ignores my question. Maybe she doesn’t want to tell me.
I take a big bite of the cheeseburger and taste soil and char.
The ketchup leaves a sugary slick on the roof of my mouth.
Food never tastes quite the way it should for us, more texture than flavor, but even I can tell that this isn’t exactly quality.
I take another bite, try chewing it fast and swallowing faster, to see if that makes it easier.
Veer puts her burger down, checks over her shoulder that the waitress isn’t looking, and grimaces. “Maybe we should have ordered something else.”
“Not sure if that would help,” I whisper back.
She laughs softly, the orange light from the old-fashioned chandelier making her eyes gleam. “Let me be an optimist.”
I think about the taste of her broken skin, about pressing my tongue to the cut above her eye. Does she remember that? Did it scare her?
It scares me a little that I want to do it again.
Veer’s water glass tinkles as she raises it to her mouth. When she puts it down again, she says, “A kid overdosed. Well, not really a kid, someone, like, our age. How old are you again?”
“Thirty-one,” I reply automatically. What’s she talking about?
“Oh.” She smiles, rubs sheepishly at her temple. “Like my age, then.”
I realize first that she’s gone back to my question, that this is the start of what happened.
And I realize second that I took it for granted that she was in her thirties, but she must be younger.
I rewind through the life story she told me in the car and peg her for twenty-six.
She just looks worn, lines around the eyes and a sad, sardonic edge to her smile.
Is that what I look like too? Is that how she knew I had something dark in me?
“Anyway, we get up to this condo, and he’s lying on the rug in front of the TV.
Football player–looking dude, and his pupils, you know”—pinpoint, probably—“and hypoventilating. And his friend’s totally freaking out, so I push the Narcan while Rodriguez preps the bag valve and keeps the friend calm.
” Her nose crinkles. “He’s good at that. Guys respect him.”
I wash another bite of the burger down with water. The ice makes my teeth ache.
“So he’s on his side, I’m counting, friend’s yelling at us, Rodriguez is doing his thing, and eventually I put him on his back again for oxygen and maybe a line, and, boom.
” She slams her hand on the table. It’s not loud, but I still jump.
“Up he pops, this huge guy who was barely breathing, like, a minute ago, and throws me right into the TV stand.”
She grins like that’s funny, and adds, “The best part is, he had a fucking katana up there, and I got this close to a surprise appendectomy.”
Her voice and her face are making it a joke, but the oversalted burger can’t hide the lingering fear on her breath.
“And then what?” I ask.
She shrugs. Pushes a couple of fries around on her plate. “And then we took him to the hospital. It’s not his fault. If I woke up with a stranger in my face, I’d start swinging too.” She flags down the waitress. “I think I’ll get the rest of this to go.”
I ask for a box too, even though I don’t plan to eat any more of it.
“Together?” The waitress asks, and Veer nods before I have a chance to ask for separate checks. In my lap, I dig the ridge of my thumb into the divot above my wrist joint.
Without warning, Veer leans across the table and sweeps my hair behind my ear. The edge of her fingernail scrapes my temple. It’s still tender from my encounter with the freezer door. There’s no bruise there, just a faint line of mottled red marks.
“Work got to you too?” Her voice is low, her eyes lingering on my hairline.
I want to shrink into my seat, but I force myself to stay still. Don’t act ashamed. Don’t make your mom sound like a monster.
“Got in a fight with the fridge.” I hope I give it the same lighthearted ring as she gave her story. But her eyes sharpen like she knows there’s something I’m not telling her.
The waitress runs her card and Veer signs, and I itch with uncertainty. What does she want me to do? What do I owe her now?
As we wind our way through the smoke-choked hotel hallway back to the parking lot, she leans in and mutters, “Not exactly where I envisioned taking you out, but hey. Could be worse, right?”
When she grins with all her crooked teeth, I wonder if I owe her at all.