Veer runs a palm over her skull, pushing her slicked-back hair even flatter. Did she only invite me along out of kindness? Was I supposed to say no? The headrest is tilted forward at a weird angle, and a meningitic stiffness has started to creep through my neck.
Fine. I’ll say something.
“He had a gun.” It sounded better when I was thinking it.
Veer doesn’t shift, and I wonder if the words got lost in Lasso’s chatter and the whir of rubber on asphalt. Then, right when I’m about to repeat myself, she shrugs herself around to face me and says, “Sure.”
She flares her eyes as she says it, not quite an eye roll but the same idea. From the front, Kelsey hisses “Fuckin’ dumbass” in a tone of flat, familiar warning that tells me it’s meant for Veer, and beneath it is a whole continent of hurt and rage and fear.
“Okay,” Veer says. “Okay, I’m a dumbass.”
Up ahead, the light turns yellow. Kelsey speeds up. We fly through as the light blinks red. We cut through a gas station to avoid another red light, and Veer leans over to me so abruptly it looks stop-motion in the blue-white wash of the gas station lights.
“I’m sorry,” she says under her breath, and I realize she doesn’t want her friends to hear. “I’m sorry again. I’m sorry I have to keep apologizing.” The car bumps back onto the road, and she pulls away. “I’m a real fuckup, okay? Kels will tell you.”
“She’s a good kid,” Lasso interjects. Veer punches the back of their headrest.
It’s okay, I almost say, an automatic response. But I hold back, because what I want to say is: She loves you, your friend, I can hear it in her words, I can smell it on her breath. She loves you, and she’s scared that one day she won’t be able to pull you back from the edge. You don’t know what I’d give to have someone care for me like that. Don’t talk about her love with such bitterness.
In the end, I just smile and say nothing.
The car shudders to a stop outside a flat-roofed bungalow, pockmarked with grime blown in from the desert. The front yard is yellow grass crowned with a constellation of equally yellow plastic chairs, some upright and gathering dirt in their seats, some face down or knocked on one side like sad bowling pins. A pair of girls in frayed jeans and flannels lounge in the pushed-open window, legs flung over the sill for balance. As we approach, I smell Mountain Dew and the electric fuzz of appliances left plugged in as the house baked in the sun.
This isn’t right—going to a party, going tothisparty, shutting the door on my mom and my problems for a night, even if she did shut the door on me first—but Veer turns around and slips her arm through mine, and I can’t disengage now. Her skin is comfortingly cold, or maybe mine’s just warm.
Veer drags me through the door, Veer who maybe can’t stand me, or maybe wants something from me. Or maybe something kinder, but I never learned to look for the good in people. Past piles of purses and backpacks, sweatshirts flung on a side table, their arms twined together like an afterimage of an embrace. Inside, the lights are down and the music’s up. Loose-limbed people fling themselves into and out of my field of vision, and Kelsey and Lasso disappear into the swirl.
“Let’s get a drink,” Veer whispers in my ear.
We maneuver over sprawled legs and around two figures in matching crop tops, making out in the hallway. The kitchen walls are a quilt of taped-up flyers, amateurish risograph prints, and Sharpie scrawls. Half-empty liquor bottles and beer cans litter the counter, flanked by abandoned plastic cups. Someone’s doodled a floppy-eared dog and a speech bubbling reading “I love you!” on the nearest one.
Veer scans the bottles. “What do you like?” Her voice is loud and surprisingly close. “Tequila?”
“Sure.”
She smacks her way through the forest of glass and plastic. The cup with the dog drawing topples onto its side with a mournful plop.
“What did he say to you?” I ask. “Back at the bar?”
Orange juice sloshes over the red lip of the cup. “Huh? Oh. Not, like, a slur, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, I—” I’m suddenly off-kilter, not sure what to say. “I’m sorry. This is weird.”
Veer’s hands freeze midair. “For you?”
“No. For you. You don’t have to—”
You don’t have to do this, whatever this is. You don’t have to spend all night with me just because you ran into me at a bar. Just because I’m still stinging from my mom’s rejection doesn’t mean you have to be gentle with me.
She doesn’t know that, of course. About my mom. But that’s not the point.
“Do I look like someone who does stuff because she has to?” She sneers and shoves a drink that smells like citrus and turpentine into my hand. “If you want to leave, go for it.”
Her jaw is a tense line, her eyes dark rimmed and defiant. There’s eyeliner on the bridge of her nose. I could reach up and wipe it away. I could cup her face in my hands and breathe her in. I could snarl my way into her bones.
A howl of laughter from some other room of the house. Veer breathes out, hard, the sure line of her pressed-together lips twisting. Not a smile. A grimace. Self-recrimination. She doubles over and digs her elbows into the tiled lip of the counter, slides her hands into her hair.
“Jesus,” she mutters. “I’m sorry. Like, I know, IknowI can be such a fucking freak show sometimes. No, don’t be freaked out, it’s seriously fine if you want to leave. You always look like you’re, like, expecting a punch in the face, and I’m not that guy, I swear to God, I just. I don’t know. I—” She slides her face into the crook of her elbow, muffling the rest.
