Chapter 15
Ryen drove us through the sprawling woods, flashing the brights as we bumped along a poorly paved road. “Who the fuck’s idea was it to come to a haunted forest in Virgina?”
Jay’s face ashened as he looked out the window.
High from the edible we split, Milan cried, “It’s giving Get Out!!!” The back of her head in the passenger’s seat reminded me of a balloon.
We parked in a dirt lot, lights twinkling ahead. Jay stepped out wearing a white button-down. He was Obama for Halloween.
“You just look like a guy who’s going to work,” I said.
He frowned pensively. “What about now?”
“You look like Obama but if he pooped his pants.”
We walked toward the Halloween-themed town.
Milan was straightening the cat ears on my head when Ryen hooked an arm around her, pulling her to his side.
The entrance was a skull face grinning at us with broken teeth.
Beyond it: grass cradling ribbed pumpkins, striped-awning stands selling cider, fried Oreos, beer.
The air was crisp. Trees loomed like masked men on stilts.
When we were swept into a group toward the trail, the edible began to ravage me, the world too sharp, like I could cut myself on it.
A witch with white eyes dragged her feet alongside us, mutely, before jerking in Jay’s face.
He hid behind me, clutching my elbows. I patted his head like a baby.
Carefully, we stepped inside a ramshackle house that resembled a slave cabin.
Light shot through the dark, just enough so you could see all the creepy shit awaiting you, then was gone like a candle snuffed by a fingertip.
A chain saw wound and roared behind us. The group lurched forward, screaming, scrambling to escape.
This would’ve been a good time to run. Instead, I stared at the ceiling.
“Why are you just staring at the ceiling like that?”
I turned to find a man whose face was a coconut I wanted to slurp through a straw. Was this hell?
“How did you make your face a coconut like that?” I asked.
“Oh, okay, you’re high.”
I heard Jay’s voice, but then a girl appeared. Did she materialize from Jay’s voice? She was dressed as Western Barbie in hot-pink pants. What was a movie star doing in Virginia?
She said, “Don’t I know you?”
I nodded. That seemed right, that we all knew each other. That every living being, including me and Western Barbie, was connected. An evil clown grabbed my shoulders, but I felt no fear, only love.
“You know her?” said coconut-face, who I now understood was Tristan. He looked like a god in the glaze of my gummy high. My heart reared back against my rib cage. They both shot me a startled look.
“What?” I said.
“You just screamed,” Tristan said.
“Really?” Things came together slowly. “Wait. I thought you weren’t coming?”
“My evening freed up.”
When we stepped outside, I recognized Western Barbie as Nia from Janine’s office.
She laughed brightly at something Tristan said, and my insides rearranged themselves around the sound.
Why had this woman’s laugh burrowed itself inside me like this?
And why was she dressed as Western Barbie and Tristan as…
“What are you supposed to be?” I asked.
“A grain farmer.”
What?
Jay was leaning against a tree on his phone, his sleeves unbuttoned. When he saw me, he kicked off the trunk. Slipping his phone in his pocket, he cupped my face, fragile like porcelain in his hands. I felt like nothing could hurt me.
Tristan shouted, “Milkman!”
Jay let me go. They did their signature swaying hug.
“Did you see the chain saw?” Jay asked, delighted.
“Yeah, this place is fucking nuts. What happens if they chop your arm off?”
“That’s what the waivers are for.”
Tristan placed an arm around Nia’s waist. She fit perfectly in the crook of it, like a child’s drawing of their parents taped to the fridge.
“This is Nia. Nia, this is Jay and his girlfriend, Cat. I would’ve introduced you earlier but Cat was having some sort of stroke.”
“I wasn’t having a stroke!”
He looked at me without holding my gaze. “Apparently you two know each other.”
“She’s trying to get into my aunt’s class. Did it work?” Removing her cowgirl hat, she tousled her hair, a swift raking motion that made the back of my neck hot.
“Janine’s your aunt?”
“Great-aunt, but basically.”
Jay looked behind him. “Where’d Milan and Ryen go?”
“I haven’t gotten in.” I didn’t mention the email I’d failed to write.
“You will.” When she winked, her lashes looked like butterflies beating back the wind. Her cowgirl hat glittered white in the moonlight. This made me trust her.
There was still a stretch of haunted forest to survive—a ghoulish landscape, costumed monsters groping the dark for us.
Nia seized my hand when a masked man leapt from behind a tree, then laughed.
I felt her fingers braided through mine even after she pulled away.
I flexed my hand like I’d been burned, eventually forcing it into my pocket to kill the sensation.
The chain saw returned. I backed into Tristan, knocking a sharp breath from him, apologizing.
Flanked between him and Jay, I was painfully aware of the competing textures of their clothes, the scents of their colognes (Jay’s crisp button-down, Tristan’s woolly flannel; Jay’s spicy cinnamon scent, Tristan’s mossy rainforest).
I felt like any wild thing could happen then, even the three of us.
The trail ended abruptly, the edge of the forest exposed by the town’s artificial light. Everyone seemed self-conscious of how they were in the woods, the pitch of their screams, how they touched each other, and broke apart. Behind me, Tristan’s arm had found Nia’s waist again.
When we joined Milan and Ryen at the cider stand, Jay peeled away to use the porta potty. I said I’d find an empty bench. On my way, I was startled when I passed a group of women in MAGA hats. It wasn’t really something you saw in DC.
The bench shook when Nia straddled it. I stared at her, unable to stop.
She reminded me of a graceful llama the way her head tilted to eat her cotton candy.
She had full cheekbones, a dot of a nose.
As she rotated the stick, I thought of her fingers weaving through mine.
The memory was visceral, like she hadn’t let go.
“You didn’t want anything?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Not even an Oreo fighting for its life in a hot vat of oil? Shame.”
I laughed. “I’d rather not spend all night on the toilet.”
Her smile was too big for her face, her features shrinking to accommodate it—half-moon eyes, crinkled nose. There was something cartoonishly pretty about her.
Hoping to sound disinterested, I asked, “So, how do you know Tristan?”
“We were at Howard together before he left.”
I didn’t know he’d left.
“How do you know him?” she asked.
“Through Jay.”
“Oh, right! He talks about him all the time. It’s sweet. So, what do you think about the writing program? I’ve heard Milken is awful. Have you taken him?”
Talking to her then felt like I was one of a thousand toys glinting in an overcrowded trinket shop that she was running through. I didn’t particularly enjoy Milken’s workshop, but a strange defensiveness rose in me. “He’s actually a really great instructor.”
She twirled the pink cloud in her hand. “If he’s so great, why are you so desperate to get into Ford’s class?”
This cut deeper than it should have. I didn’t say anything. She seemed comfortable in the silence, surveying me with the placid eyes of someone taking inventory.
“You should let me paint you.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” She said it like it’d been my idea and she was only entertaining it. “Aren’t you curious to see what I’d do with you?” Cleaning her cotton candy stick, she left a wet mark where her mouth had been and flashed that big dazzling smile. It fell on me like a spotlight.
Jay and Tristan came over then. Milan and Ryen were in the car, ready to go.
I stood, feeling high even though I wasn’t anymore.
“I almost forgot,” Nia said. “We’re having a showcase. The grad art students. You should stop by.” She pulled a flyer from her purse and passed it to me. I told her I’d try to make it.
On the way to the car, I looked back to find Tristan in my old spot, picking a stray leaf from her hair.
While washing his face in the bathroom that night, Jay said, “I think Tristan likes you.”
My heart picked up. “What?”
“He wouldn’t shut up about our open relationship before, but since you two met he hasn’t said anything.”
I let the comforter swallow me. “Who cares what he thinks?”
“He’s my friend. I care.”
I paused. “Did the things he said used to bother you?”
Jay turned the bathroom light off and perched on the bed’s edge. “Yeah.”
This was news to me. Maybe I hadn’t paid close enough attention to Jay’s moods in the months after opening our relationship. Maybe I mistook concession for something more solid.
I touched his dry, hot back. “It’s not his relationship.”
“I know.” Jay shimmied beneath the covers.
“But as weird as it sounds, Tristan looks up to me. I was always the more, I guess, mature one. He was a little troubled.” Jay passed me a grave look.
“He’s better now. But I think he felt kind of let down by the open relationship thing.
Like, if I couldn’t have the perfect textbook relationship, then he’d never have it.
What I mean is, his remarks were always more about him than me. Or you.”
“But we do have a perfect relationship. It’s just not textbook. Do you know all the shit they’re taking out of textbooks anyway?”
Jay smiled. I caught the tail end of a sad tremor in his eyes. He stroked my jaw. “No one has a perfect relationship, Kitty Cat.”