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 needair. 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, isenough.
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.
