Chapter 15
THE HIGHWAY KEEPS STRETCHING ON FOREVER, AND Veer starts asking me questions.
“How long have you lived in Northtown?” is one.
“Since I was fifteen.”
“Your folks still there too?”
“I live with my mom.”
Should I explain that it’s only temporary?
What if she asks about the rest of my family?
Do I tell her about Uncle Bill? Do I try to distract her with a summary of my father, which is, according to my mom, that he was a singer with bad eyesight and a worse haircut and enough charisma to make the whole party revolve around him, that he wanted a life with her and she picked up and left as soon as she could because that life would have ended in sharp fangs and ruin?
Do I tell her that my mom is a liar, that I started to disbelieve that story when I was twelve and since then have simply stopped caring?
“You like it?” she asks when I don’t keep talking.
“I guess.” I want to say something trite, but I can’t think of the right combination of words. I don’t need to like it. That’s not the point.
“Yeah,” I correct, and focus on the mile markers zipping past the window. “She’s good.”
The wind picks up, tapping Morse code signals into the car frame. Betrayer, the gusts murmur to me. Shirker of duty. Ungrateful.
This is duty, I try to argue back. All of this is because of my mom, because she trashed a freezer full of blood in a few flailing minutes. I’m real because she needs me. What’s the point of having no purpose?
I just wish I weren’t so tired.
The congealing burgers in their Styrofoam prisons irritate my nose. I smell the grease soaked into cheap white buns, the cook’s boozy breath, the waitress’s constant hollowness.
Oh. That too. The hunger.
I glance at the gas gauge, but we’re still three-quarters full. I pull up Google Maps and search for fast food ahead, an excuse to bury myself in a grimy bathroom and do what I need to do. The next hundred miles shows up a dead beige expanse.
Just ask her to pull over. Make something up. But every time I open my mouth, I end up spinning off into what-ifs. What if she refuses? What if she demands a reason to stop?
Veer reaches across me to tap the window. “Beautiful, huh.”
Ahead, a pile of rocks juts proud and grinning, smoothed by wind and time into the shape of a sinking ship. The gold brown of the desert around it is dappled with sage-gray creosote bushes, their spindly shadows painted long and lovely by the sinking sun.
The desert and I aren’t so different: both hiding brutality, both survivable at best.
There’s an exit coming up. The pressure in my sinuses breaks through my paralysis. “Can we take a bathroom break soon?”
“Sure.” Veer swerves onto the off-ramp. No hesitation. “Let’s take it now. I want to climb these fuckers.”
We bump onto a strip of dirt so apologetically narrow I’m not sure it even counts as a road. Veer bounds out of the driver’s seat and into the calf-high scrub, and I mumble, “I’ll go behind the car.”
When her back’s to me, I unzip my duffel bag and remove my last vial and a fresh disposable syringe. Crouched in the shadow of the car, the ridge of the door digging into my spine, I pop the cap off the vial. I can hear Veer scrabbling up the rocks.
Needle meets skin. Veer crows, “Ellis, look!”
Pull back. Stand up, wave. She’s poised on the top of the pile, wriggling in time to music no one else can hear, or maybe just the wind. Silhouetted in the golden-hour glow, grinning so wide her face looks ready to split.
“Everything’s bullshit!” She shrieks. “Nothing’s worth dying for when the world is this beautiful!”
My chest squeezes in something like recognition.
I give her a thumbs-up and drop back behind the car.
Needle meets skin again and I’m lightning inside, and I want to live, yes, that’s it, I want to live in a world as beautiful and solitary as this one, where there’s no one to demand anything from me, just someone eager to share it.
My feet slip out from under me and I’m on my knees in the dirt, doubled over, incandescent, when Veer screeches suddenly, a high, panicked noise like a kicked animal.
Then a thud.
Surprise jolts the syringe from my hand. A sick pinch as it slides from the vein, drops into the dirt, still half-full. Shit. I wrench open the barrel and pour the remaining liquid into my mouth. I can’t bring myself to waste it.
“Veer?” I call, to buy time as I tug a sweater from my bag and hide the dirty syringe and its curling plastic packaging. I hear movement, but she doesn’t answer.
“Veer?” I’m shouting now, brush scraping my ankles. Her dark head pops up from behind the rocks.
“I’m good.” She’s a little out of breath. “Just, uh, lost my balance.”
She dusts off her knees, and I smell broken skin somewhere under the dark billow of her T-shirt. Don’t think about last time. Don’t think about what you’d like to do to her, or your animal hunger.
“Did you hit your head?”
She crinkles her nose, looking sheepish. “Like, barely. I’m fine.” She shakes her head like that proves it. “Look, Ma, no concussion.”
“Okay. Can we just, like, double-check?”
Her grin falters. I shouldn’t have second-guessed her. I wrap my arms around myself. The air gets cold fast in the desert, with the sun going down.
Then she pushes her hair off her forehead, and the wary snap to her gaze dissolves. Before I can stop her, she scrambles back up the rocks.
“Fine,” she gloats, patting the smooth stone next to her. “Come up here and check.”
The rock is gritty and harder to climb than it looks. Veer laughs a bit, watching me skid on the slick parts, but she reaches a hand down to keep me steady for the final stretch. I cling to her, feel the tendons flexing in her wrists.
“The doctor is in,” I say solemnly as I settle next to her, and she laughs.
“Good news, Doc. There’s only one of you, and you look great.”
“So, not blurry.” I haven’t done this since nursing school. Veer probably knows how to test for concussion a lot better than I do.
She sticks her tongue between her teeth. “4K, baby.”
I snort. Oh, hand-eye coordination. I remember that from the textbook.
“Touch my finger, then touch your nose.” I hold it out in front of her face. She rolls her eyes, but taps my finger, her nose. I shift my finger side to side, and she does it again.
After a few times, she flicks my outstretched finger. “Want to do a balance test up here too?”
I laugh. “Fine, okay, you’re not concussed.”
“Told you.”
She musses my hair, tongue still wedged under an incisor. She smells like scraped knees and the primal grit of the desert. She smells like that lemon hair gel I want to bury my nose in. This feels good, sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere with her.
I like her, I realize with a nauseous twist. I really like her.
Liking is dangerous. With love, at least it’s easy to know what’s owed. There’s no precipice of longing, no swirl of what does she think and what if I’m wrong, no constant kinetic whisper that if she leaned in, she’d be close enough to kiss me.
I want Veer to kiss me.
The sun blazes orange as it sinks into the mountains, runny like an undercooked egg, furious as a funeral pyre.
Its aftermath paints the mountains a wistful blue that fades suddenly into velvety blackness, and we’re still up here, watching it happen.
I’m not ready to come down just yet. But it’s cold, and Veer’s restless beside me.
I hear, rather than see, her scramble down to safety.
“Just climb down where I did,” she hisses out of the darkness. “It’s not scary, I promise.”
It is, though. The knot of hope tangled in my chest is scary, and the way it might gum up the lock on the cage inside me is terrifying.
Also, I can’t see. The toeholds I used to climb up are invisible in this light.
I smell the creosote opening its arms to the night, but smell isn’t going to stop me from a misstep that ends with my face smashed in.
Veer’s phone lights up, giving shape to the rocks and casting her face in ghoulish black-and-white planes.
“Just a couple steps.” She’s softer now, less teasing, more encouraging. “Then I’ll get you.”
I take a few tentative steps, then end up sliding on my ass the rest of the way, almost directly into Veer’s outstretched arms. I freeze for a second, not sure whether I’m supposed to use her as a step stool or what, but she’s already wrapping one arm around my lower back and the other around my knees and I guess it’s a princess carry.
When my arms settle around her neck, I find the phone light is very bright and our faces are very close. She’s also, I notice, very strong.
Then my feet are on the ground and she’s kissing me, quiet and tentative, like groping for a handhold in the dark.
She pulls back, and I chase after her, pushing my fingers into the softness at the back of her neck.
This, too, is what I want, the freedom to close my eyes, to kiss her slow without worrying that life will interrupt us.
When we’re done, she leans into me, her forehead meeting my cheek.
“Let’s get back to the car,” she mumbles. “There’s a hot shower waiting for us an hour down the road.”
A hot shower, and a motel room, and I don’t know what else, but I want to find out.
We don’t talk much the rest of the drive, but Veer settles her hand on my thigh and leaves it there until we pull into the parking lot of the motel.