“I live with my mom.”
Should I explain that it’s only temporary? What if she asks about the rest of my family? Do I tell her about Uncle Bill? Do I try to distract her with a summary of my father, which is, according to my mom, that he was a singer with bad eyesight and a worse haircut and enough charisma to make the whole party revolve around him, that he wanted a life with her and she picked up and left as soon as she could because that life would have ended in sharp fangs and ruin? Do I tell her that my mom is a liar, that I started to disbelieve that story when I was twelve and since then have simply stopped caring?
“You like it?” she asks when I don’t keep talking.
“I guess.” I want to say something trite, but I can’t think of the right combination of words. I don’t need to like it. That’s not the point.
“Yeah,” I correct, and focus on the mile markers zipping past the window. “She’s good.”
The wind picks up, tapping Morse code signals into the car frame. Betrayer, the gusts murmur to me. Shirker of duty. Ungrateful.
This is duty, I try to argue back. All of this is because of my mom, because she trashed a freezer full of blood in a few flailing minutes. I’m real because she needs me. What’s the point of having no purpose?
I just wish I weren’t so tired.
The congealing burgers in their Styrofoam prisons irritate my nose. I smell the grease soaked into cheap white buns, the cook’s boozy breath, the waitress’s constant hollowness.
Oh. That too. The hunger.
I glance at the gas gauge, but we’re still three-quarters full. I pull up Google Maps and search for fast food ahead, an excuse to bury myself in a grimy bathroom and do what I need to do. The next hundred miles shows up a dead beige expanse.
Just ask her to pull over. Make something up. But every time I open my mouth, I end up spinning off into what-ifs. What if she refuses? What if she demands a reason to stop?
Veer reaches across me to tap the window. “Beautiful, huh.”
Ahead, a pile of rocks juts proud and grinning, smoothed by wind and time into the shape of a sinking ship. The gold brown of the desert around it is dappled with sage-gray creosote bushes, their spindly shadows painted long and lovely by the sinking sun.
The desert and I aren’t so different: both hiding brutality, both survivable at best.
There’s an exit coming up. The pressure in my sinuses breaks through my paralysis. “Can we take a bathroom break soon?”
“Sure.” Veer swerves onto the off-ramp. No hesitation. “Let’s take it now. I want to climb these fuckers.”
We bump onto a strip of dirt so apologetically narrow I’m not sure it even counts as a road. Veer bounds out of the driver’s seat and into the calf-high scrub, and I mumble, “I’ll go behind the car.”
When her back’s to me, I unzip my duffel bag and remove my last vial and a fresh disposable syringe. Crouched in the shadow of the car, the ridge of the door digging into my spine, I pop the cap off the vial. I can hear Veer scrabbling up the rocks.
Needle meets skin. Veer crows, “Ellis, look!”
Pull back. Stand up, wave. She’s poised on the top of the pile, wriggling in time to music no one else can hear, or maybe just the wind. Silhouetted in the golden-hour glow, grinning so wide her face looks ready to split.
“Everything’s bullshit!” She shrieks. “Nothing’s worth dying for when the world is this beautiful!”
My chest squeezes in something like recognition. I give her a thumbs-up and drop back behind the car. Needle meets skin again and I’m lightning inside, and I want to live, yes, that’s it, I want to live in a world as beautiful and solitary as this one, where there’s no one to demand anything from me, just someone eager to share it.
My feet slip out from under me and I’m on my knees in the dirt, doubled over, incandescent, when Veer screeches suddenly, a high, panicked noise like a kicked animal.
Then a thud.
Surprise jolts the syringe from my hand. A sick pinch as it slides from the vein, drops into the dirt, still half-full. Shit. I wrench open the barrel and pour the remaining liquid into my mouth. I can’t bring myself to waste it.
“Veer?” I call, to buy time as I tug a sweater from my bag and hide the dirty syringe and its curling plastic packaging. I hear movement, but she doesn’t answer.
“Veer?” I’m shouting now, brush scraping my ankles. Her dark head pops up from behind the rocks.
“I’m good.” She’s a little out of breath. “Just, uh, lost my balance.”
She dusts off her knees, and I smell broken skin somewhere under the dark billow of her T-shirt. Don’t think about last time. Don’t think about what you’d like to do to her, or your animal hunger.
