The verdict comes back unanimous. The phone goes in the cooler with the wine until morning, which is the legal system we have out here. Stevie takes it better than expected, meaning she calls us all bitches and accepts a marshmallow as damages.
“Speaking of.” Joss has that face on, the gossip face, the one that means she’s been sitting on something all night and the wine finally pried it loose. “Did anybody else see Dale try to talk to the new girl this week? The redhead?”
“Oh my God,” Crystal moans. “The sweating.”
“He had a whole sweat situation happening,” Joss says. “Like a back situation. You could see it through the shirt.”
“He always has a back situation.”
“Not like this. This was a personal-record back situation.”
“That poor girl.” Stevie shakes her head like she’s at a funeral. “Somebody should warn her. We should have a pamphlet. Welcome to the club, here’s your locker, do not be alone in the office with Dale.”
“Do not accept a ride from Dale,” Crystal adds.
“Do not let Dale buy you a smoothie,” I say, and Crystal points at me like I’ve said something wise, because there’s a whole story behind the smoothie that we are not getting into tonight.
This is what I love. Not the wine, not the desert, not even the stars. This. The five of us talking trash about a man with a back situation, laughing so hard Stevie nearly falls off her cooler, the firelight making everybody’s face look soft and a little bit unreal. We’re broke, we’re tired, most of us are nursing some kind of heartbreak or a bill we can’t pay, and none of that exists right now. Right now we’re just girls in the dark being mean about Dale, and it’s perfect.
I drink more wine, and for a minute I forget about my rent, my busted left knee, the whole holding pattern I keep telling myself is temporary.
This is the thing nobody warns you about working at a club. You think the job is the hard part. It’s actually fine. Sticky floors, bad music, Dale. No, the worst part is also the best part, and it’s these girls. These loud, broke, ridiculous women who became my family, because my actual family is a thing I left behind in a town so small it doesn’t get a dot on the map. Promise stayed back to hold the bar tonight, on the grounds that nothing good has ever happened to a woman in a desert.
Crystal came up through foster care and built her family out of us. I built mine the same way. We don’t talk about it. We just show up to the desert trips.
Crystal scoots over next to me, finally, leans her head on my shoulder, and I can feel her shivering through the crop top. I peel off the jacket and drape it over her without saying anything, because if I make it a thing she’ll refuse out of principle. She just burrows into it and sighs like a cat in a sunbeam.
“You’re my favorite,” she mumbles.
“You say that to everyone.”
“I say it to you the most.” She tips her face up at me, all big eyes, smudged mascara, total sincerity. “I mean it the most with you. You’d tell me if I had something in my teeth. You’d tell me if a guy was bad news. You’re the only one who actually tells me stuff.”
“That’s because the rest of them are cowards,” I say. I kiss the top of her head. She laughs, and I don’t know how to explain what this girl is to me. She’s the softest person I know in a world that isn’t soft to soft people, and some animal part of me has appointed itself her bodyguard. She tells everybody everything. She trusts the entire planet. Someone has to watch her back, and it might as well be me.
“Okay.” She sits up suddenly, all business, clapping her hands. “Marshmallows. Who’s doing the marshmallows?”
“The fire’s basically dead, Crystal.”
“The fire is resting.”
“That’s what Joss said an hour ago, and then it died.”
“The fire is fine,” Joss says, wounded. “It’s low-maintenance.”
Crystal spears a marshmallow on a stick anyway and holds it a foot above the embers, rotating it slow, achieving nothing. It does not toast. It does not even sweat. She eats it cold and declares it perfect, because that’s Crystal’s whole entire thing, loving whatever shows up in front of her exactly how it is.
The wine’s catching up with me, which means my bladder is catching up with me, which means I now have to make a decisionI hate. There’s no bathroom out here. There’s the dark, and there’s farther into the dark.
“I have to pee,” I announce, because we’re past dignity.
“There’s literally a whole desert,” Crystal says, generous as a queen.
“I’m not peeing where you can see my ass, Crystal.”
“I’ve seen your ass like four hundred times. It’s a great ass.”
“That’s at work. Work ass is different from desert ass.”
