Chapter 2
“MO!” DEZ SHOUTS, HOLDING HER stoned and swaying brother in the doorway, trying to get him to notice, to act as the masked man leaps over Dez’s mop and skids on the wet floor toward the kitchen. The cash register.
But Mo doesn’t budge. His arms clasp her waist more tightly, she realizes, holding her still.
I had to, Mo said when she’d unlocked the door.
Her brother has tricked her. Betrayed her. She’s being robbed.
“Mo,” she says again, softer this time, though her fists begin to wail against his chest. “How could you?”
“Please, Dez.” His grip cinches tighter, until it hurts. “This will only take a second.”
Hell no. She squirms and kicks and presses her cheek hard against Mo’s head. Being high makes him more limber, less sensitive, harder to overcome.
Through her fury, Dez can’t help feeling a familiar sorrow, the very specific pain she’s felt often recently for Mo.
Her mother, Uncle Bob? They’ll be so disappointed.
“Is this worth it?” she demands, trying to reach his windpipe with her elbow. “For one high?”
“You don’t understand,” he says, both his hands gripping her shoulders, turning her swiftly so her back is against his chest. He bends at the waist, folding her up against him.
“I understand that you’re a giant piece of shit,” Dez grunts, feeling immense pressure in her ribs as both of them drop to their knees on the wet floor.
“Just open the till, Dez, please,” Mo says.
“No fucking way.” She’s lost sight of the man in the skull mask. She needs to get to the register to stop him.
“I owe them,” Mo says. “I can’t pay.”
“Yeah, well, neither can I.”
As kids, they used to wrestle on the living room rug whenever their mother wasn’t home.
By the time Mo turned ten to her fifteen, he was bigger than she was, stronger.
But Dez always had more drive to win. She used to narrow her eyes and pretend Mo was one of any number of kids at school who’d been cruel to her.
Then she could pin him in under ten seconds.
The worst thing about tonight is Dez doesn’t have to pretend Mo is anyone but himself to feel the drive to waste him.
She twists underneath him, gaining enough distance to raise her Doc Marten and kick him in the groin.
He scuttles into himself, off her, making sharp, coughing sounds. Dez fights the urge to look at him. She can’t afford to feel sorry right now. Should she grab her brother, drag him out to her car and away from this mess until he sobers up? Call the cops and let them handle the guy in the mask?
No, he’ll be long gone by the time they get here. And this is her family’s place, her family’s livelihood. A fight flares bright in Dez. She’s on her feet in a flash and using her hands to vault over the counter. Adrenaline pumping, she lands next to the register, next to the guy in the mask.
He’s grabbed a heavy-duty grill spatula and is using it like a crowbar on the prehistoric cash register. Dez hasn’t balanced the receipts yet, but she’d guess there’s close to three hundred dollars in there. Three hundred dollars of her family’s money, and this guy isn’t getting his hands on it.
She’s one for one on dick-kicks tonight, so she decides to go for two. She grips his shoulders from behind—so much narrower than Mo’s. A stranger’s body. She thinks: frail. She can take him.
Dez narrows her eyes. Readies her foot. And bam. She nails him in the balls. She knows she does.
But he doesn’t double over, makes no choking cough like Mo. He lets out a soft, almost sensual moan, and then—where his hoodie has slipped back—he meets her eyes.
Dark eyes, inky, like a squid washed ashore. A glint in them like he’s out for something more than money.
Blood?
The man blinks for longer than seems reasonable, and when he opens his eyes again, he punches her in the stomach with a force she didn’t see coming.
She stumbles backward, into the warmer, still keeping her fucking brother’s burger at optimal temperature.
The bulb of the heater singes her cheek, and she hisses.
The pain is invigorating. Like a boxer emerging from her corner, she charges the junkie.
He’s fixed his hoodie so she can’t see his eyes anymore. She gets her hands around his neck. He flails to fight her off, but she puts all her strength into squeezing him. Her nails dig into the sinews of his throat.
He jabs at her, elbows to her ribs, her kidney, her breasts. But the pain feels good because she’s winning. Any moment now, he’ll need air. He’ll stagger downward, and all she’ll have to do is hold on and watch his lights go out.
But the choking takes so long that Dez’s arms throb from her fingertips to her triceps. He isn’t even trying to wrest her hands from around his neck. Something else, then. New strategy.
He’s got the cash register open now. Dez sees the neat rows of green. Remembers the hundred-dollar bill some tourist from Orange County had used to pay for a Diet Coke that afternoon, pissing her off.
His hands are on the money now. And Dez has to stop him. From behind, her hands crawl up his face, up the mask, angry, probing. Until her thumbnails find his eyes. She presses as hard as she can.
In the movie of Dez’s life, this moment makes sense, connects to something later in the story, tracing the outlines of a devastating theme.
She glances at the security camera on the ceiling, which hasn’t worked since Uncle Bob installed it on opening day.
No one’s filming her right now, so what she’s doing only feels feral and psychotic.
She can’t stop. She presses harder, feeling something in the thug’s face give way, followed by a fibrous wetness.
She has no idea how this scene is going to end.
On the left side of his face, something loosens.
His … eye?
Dez almost throws up, but she bites it back.
The masked man yelps like a wounded wolf and then goes still.
It’s so weird, and it’s also all the permission Dez needs.
Like the time she reached into the garbage disposal to fish out her mother’s one good ring, Dez plunges her fingers into this punk’s eye socket and yanks.
She screams. He screams. And then it’s in her hand. His eyeball. Staring blankly at her. Black iris on one side, dangling optic nerve on the other.
“Dez, what are you doing?”
She looks up and sees her brother on all fours, breathing deeply, still recovering from the kick to the groin.
“Stay down, Mo!” she screams, her voice wild and made of rage.
Her focus snaps back to the one-eyed man. He clutches a hand to the bleeding hole she left in his face. With the other hand, he raises a strange antique pistol to Dez’s head. The weapon has a circular cartridge atop its long barrel, like a machine gun.
A memory comes to her. Asher in the parking lot of the Ventura dive bar where they stayed until the owner kicked them out.
She was sitting in the passenger seat of Silas’s car, window rolled down, her arm dangling out.
Standing on the curb, Asher took her hand in his, low enough that Silas couldn’t see it.
He held her gaze as he pulsed his thumb against her palm.
She knew it was a message that he couldn’t say aloud.
She knew what it meant, too, if not precisely, then essentially.
Pulse. Pulsepulse. Pulse.
She nodded at Asher, and their fingers slipped apart as the car began to dive away. And she wanted him then, would have run through fire to take him to bed, and spill their clothes, find out exactly what his skin felt like against hers, but also …
What Dez remembers then, now, at gunpoint, is another way that moment had felt: Enough.
Even if she never saw him again, what they’d shared that day had been enough for him to mean something to her—and maybe enough for her to mean something to him—for the rest of Dez’s life.
If that moment hadn’t happened, Dez might feel differently now, on the brink of death. Instead, the thought that comes to her, quite peacefully, is enough.
But then she looks down at the eyeball and changes her mind. She’s come this fucking far in this hideous fight. That has to be worth something. She’s not going to let this one-eyed freak win.
She moves to the deep fryer. The gunman watches her, follows her movements with his strange gun, but he doesn’t shoot.
Quickly, she grips the basket like the pro she is, and heaves it up out of its basin.
It’s only been thirty minutes since she turned it off.
The oil will still be north of three hundred degrees.
It’s the deadliest thing in this kitchen, and maybe it is her friend, after all.
“Dez?” She hears Moses’s voice.
But Dez can’t stop what she’s doing. She has to protect her brother as much as she has to protect herself. No matter what cold or foolish decisions either of them will ever make, Dez loves Mo, and he loves her back. When it really comes down to it, they’re on each other’s side.
She spins and flings the full pan of boiling oil at the one-eyed man.
And she hears her brother scream.
The sound is bottomless and never-ending, and when Dez finally works up the courage to look at what she’s done, it’s exactly as she feared—and so much worse. Mo.
Smoke from the oil rises off him, and as it clears, Dez seizes at the sight of his burns. Her body goes completely still as she struggles to absorb the situation.
Moses had leapt in front of the gunman.
Moses had thrown his body between the bullet and Dez.
The bullet that never fired.
Because Dez shot her shot first, pitching a vat of scalding oil onto the kid she loves most in the world.
The pain he’s feeling right now—it’s a tunneling, rib-roasting agony that Dez knows all too well.
She can still call it up in her nightmares from when she was a four-year-old girl.
Dez’s third-degree burn had taken six months and two skin grafts to “heal.” It never really healed.
And it had spanned two inches of her wrist.
Not the entirety of her face and neck.
Moses is on his knees, and the noises coming out of him are inhuman.
The skin on his face and neck sizzles. He makes a wet, sputtering sound like he’s struggling to breathe.
Dez doesn’t recognize his face, mottled and angry, a flaming almost purple color, the skin sliding off in places like paper in the rain.
Dez can’t move. Can’t look away. Can’t retch up the bile in her throat. Can’t go to him. Can’t even reach for her phone in her apron pocket to call for help. She wants to say she’s sorry, but the words won’t come. She feels everything slipping away into black. She will never, ever forgive herself.
Mo reaches up to the gunman for help. “Am I dying?” he whispers in a ghastly voice.
She watches his eyes drift closed.
Dez wants to go back in time, for it to be one a.m. in their kitchen, Mo wasted but happy, tearing into his bacon cheeseburger, while she snacks on their mom’s instant-coffee crystals, and he tells her every stupid and hilarious thing that he and all his friends did that night.
This isn’t Mo, gasping for air from a burn-ravaged throat. This disfigured thing cannot be her brother.
“Mo,” she finally hears herself say.
The gunman has her brother under his arm and is still pointing the gun at her. He pushes past her, out of the kitchen, taking Mo with him toward the front exit. Her knees are locked. Her keys are still in the door.
“He needs help,” Dez says. Her words feel cloaked in needles in her throat.
The man points the gun at Dez’s left eye. She still holds his in her hand. She stares into the sickening, oozing hole she’s left in his face. She realizes, in all this time, he’s never said a word.
She looks at Mo, but he’s turned away, all his weight against the gunman, his forearms up to shield his face. His feet move clumsily, ankles rolling, like the ground is grease beneath him.
The gunman kicks open the door. It’s a hundred degrees outside, and even from here, Dez can feel the blast of heat. The shriek of pain Mo makes upon feeling the outside air is debilitating. Dez feels it all the way into her toes.
Now she can no longer see her brother. Adrenaline kicks in. She charges after them, out of the restaurant, into the heat of the night.