“Family’s complicated,” I echo.
Veer raises our intertwined hands to her mouth and kisses my knuckles one by one. “It’s not fair.”
“Nothing’s fair.” They’re my mom’s words. But they’re also true: there’s no balance to any of this, no reason. It just is.
“Do I scare you?” Veer murmurs.
I pull back without thinking. Her grip tightens into something demanding. Her front teeth trace the curves of my tendons.
“Or”—she twists my hand, so the pad of my thumb sits between her canines—“do you wonder what I’d be like, if it had been me with the bat?”
“No.” I wish she’d bite down. I wish she’d eat me alive.
“It should have been.”
“Veer.”
Her nostrils flare. “If he did something, I could have.”
“You were eleven.”
“And my brother was fifteen. Come on.” She nips my thumb. “You know the most pathetic thing? It never even occurred to me that I could. Or should. I thought that was just what it was like to be a kid.”
An abyss in the shape of my mom’s voice clogs my throat.
“We have to take the good with the bad,” she’d hissed. “We take care of each other, no matter what. That’s what families do.”
She’d said that on the drive to Vegas, that first one, while I hunched over a math workbook in the back. She knew I didn’t want to leave Colorado Springs, and maybe that was why she kept talking for hours about how good it would be, how happy Uncle Bill would be to see us. How this was the start of a new life. Maybe that was why she accused me of deliberately forgetting my workbook at a rest stop. Maybe that’s why she still remembers that one moment, that one story, even as the rest of my childhood fades.
I don’t think she remembers the look on Uncle Bill’s face when we pulled into his driveway that first time. The disappointment, and resignation. But I do. It became a part of my armor: the understanding that it was always like this for us. For all of us.
“Does that freak you out?” Veer’s voice is casual, her eyes pinpoints of intensity.
“No.”
Her jaw tightens. “It should. I’m all fucked up inside, Ellis. I keep trying to unfuck myself, but it’s, like, built in. Like there’s poison in my blood.”
I press my lips to the base of her thumb and look into the black holes of her eyes. “I’m not scared of being poisoned.”
Veer catches me by the chin, and for a second, I’m scared I’ve said too much. Then she pulls me into her and kisses me like a tidal wave, like an unfurling of compressed pain into my mouth. When she lets me go, I’m gasping.
“You’re one deep, dark, scary girl, Ellis,” she whispers. Her fingers find the bruise on my hip and press, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to feel her presence. “I’ve never met anyone quite like you.”
I shiver. I’m supposed to smell danger, to panic that she’s feeling around the edges of the truth and that my throat aches to tell her the rest. I’m so tired of secrets and manipulation. I’m so tired of being alone.
It’s too much to grapple with, this and my mom and Uncle Bill and the future, and suddenly my throat is filled with metal spikes and each breath catches on them and I will myself not to cry, but my eyes sting and then it’s too late to stop. Veer’s arms are around me, her fingers stroking evenly across the back of my skull, and I cling to her as she pulls me in tighter and tighter, the vise of her arms the only thing keeping me from fracturing.
“Hey,” she murmurs into my hairline. “Fuck everybody, okay? Fuck love.”
I sniff, then laugh, horrible hiccuping sobs that feel like absolution.
“Fuck love,” I repeat. It feels good. “Everyone I love makes me feel like shit.”
“Goddamn right.” Veer laughs and kisses me again.
We fall asleep like that, tangled up in each other, and I dream of things I don’t remember.
17
