“If anything feels wrong —anything, El — you call me. You don’t rationalize it, you don’t tell yourself you need the money, you don’t convince yourself that suffering is the price of survival. You call me, and you leave.”
“I promise.”
She holds my gaze for one more beat. Then downs the rest of her wine with a grimace.
“God, this is awful.”
The hours pass. Maren orders us another round. We talk about her job, her annoying coworker Greg, who microwaves sardines in the break room, and her sister’s wedding planning drama. Normal things. Fluffy things. I know she does this on purpose, filling the air so I don’t have to.
But within the conversation, I feel it. The hum. That low-frequency anxiety that lives in my chest like a second heartbeat. Always there, always counting. Days until the next payment. Dollars in my account. Hours until everything goes wrong.
By 10:30 p.m., I’m yawning into my hand, and she’s checking her phone.
“You should go home,” she says. “You look exhausted.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I mean it in the most loving way possible. You look like a beautiful ghost.”
I smile. For real this time.
“I sold the car,” I blurt out.
Shit. Maren has a way of making me spill my shameful secrets. Or maybe it’s the cheap wine.
“What? Wh—” She pauses. The flicker of pain that crosses her face is there and gone in half a second, but I catch it. She knows what the car meant.
It was a 2013 Honda Civic with a dent in the back bumper and a radio that only worked on one side, but it was mine. The one thing I owned outright. Gone now, sent off to sate the wolves’ hunger for another few weeks.
“I’ll get an Uber,” I say, already pulling out my phone.
“Let me pay for it.”
“Mare—”
“It’s an Uber, not a kidney. Let me.”
I want to argue, but the truth is my bank account has forty-seven dollars in it, and I need to eat this week. So, I nod. She taps her phone a few times, and the car is on its way.
We hug outside the bar. She holds on for a beat longer than usual.
“You’re going to be okay,” she whispers against my hair. “You know that, right?”
I don’t know that. Not in the slightest.
Still, I nod again. “I know,” I say, entirely for her sake.
If there’s one thing I learned from my father, it was how to lie to people I care about.
He was the best liar I ever knew, and he loved me more than anything. Somehow, both of those things were true at the same time.
The Uber drops me off twenty minutes later in front of my building, a narrow, brown-bricked walk-up on a quiet street that smells like dryer sheets and old rain.
It’s not much, but it’s what I can afford after the car money and this month’s payment. Third floor, one bedroom, a kitchen where I can touch both walls if I stretch my arms wide.
The second I step out of the car, the hairs on my nape lift.
The street is completely silent.
