Page 192 of Slashed Bonds

I know that voice. I know it from a hallway at three in the morning with a nurse’s shoes squeaking past, and from a bench outside a day room where two women who didn’t speak to anyone sat and didn’t speak to each other for a month until one of them did.

Maddie squeals.

A sound like a hyena being stepped on, pure joy, and I hear her boots leave the floor.

It takes me a hot minute to turn back over. The comforter’s heavy and so am I and the room spins when I move, but I do it, one shoulder and then the other, and I get my head around.

And at the door is someone neither of us expected.

Leaning on the frame. Arms crossed over a black envelope she’s holding against her chest. Leather jacket, leather pants, leather gloves she hasn’t bothered to take off, and above all of it the most violently neon green hair that has ever been done to a human head, cut blunt at the jaw, shining wet from the rain. Black lipstick. And the eyes, a flat pale gray, filled with a level of nonchalant foolery that only one person alive could produce without trying, over a smug grin that confirms exactly who’s in the room.

“VIPER, BITCH!”

Maddie hits her like a pink missile.

Viper doesn’t move.

That’s the thing about Viper. She is the dictionary definition of fuck around and find out, and she doesn’t have to say it, because her stance says it, the way she takes a pink woman at full speed into her ribs and doesn’t shift her weight an inch. Unmoved. Unbothered, probably. Letting Maddie hug her the way a tree lets a bird land.

The gloves. The jacket. She rode. In this. Four hours from wherever she’s been, in the rain, on that bike.

And the envelope. Black, heavy, the kind of paper you’d put a verdict in. She’s holding it against her chest the way she held her list at Bellwether, a thing that’s hers until she decides it isn’t, and I don’t ask. You don’t ask Viper what’s in her hands. She’ll tell you when it’s useful, and not a second before.

She gives me a side glance over Maddie’s shoulder.

Then she gets to the point, because Viper has never in her life not gotten to the point.

“You look like shit, Malice.”

“Fuck you too.”

It comes out a croak. My voice has rust on it from three days of not using it. But I manage half a smile, the first one since Sunday, and it hurts my face in a way I’d forgotten faces could hurt.

“Fuck.” I close my eyes. “I need to shower.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Maddie, detaching from Viper, flapping a hand in front of her nose with the full drama of a woman who’s been waiting three days to say it. “You reek, girlfriend.”

“Don’t go saying that,” I whine.

And I try to sit up.

Which is a mistake. The room tilts and my arms go out from under me and the comforter comes with me, and I’m sliding, and then I’m on the floor. On the rug. The soft one. Face down with the green comforter over my legs like something that’s been shot.

Maddie shrieks.

Viper sighs.

It’s a long sigh. A whole sentence of a sigh. And I hear her boots come off the frame and into the room, and I hear the door close behind her with a click, and I hear the black envelope land on the lounge, and then there’s a leather glove under my arm.

“Come on, bitch. Let’s get you sorted.”

I let them.

Viper under one arm and Maddie under the other, one in leather and one in pink, hauling me up off a rug I didn’t buy in a room I didn’t furnish in a house full of men who’ve been leaving soup by my bed, and the three of us go lurching toward the bathroom in a knot, and I’m laughing. Or crying. Or both, which is a thing I’ve learned to do this month.

Two women from a facility. Three men from a roster. A dog on the bed. I had nobody for five years. I had a door with four locks.

I guess this is what it’s like to have friends.