The best they could come up with was: “What?”
“You’re obviously going somewhere.” Charlie’s pale eyes bulged in a way that suddenly reminded Mal of Mrs. Glover. “You didn’t think about telling me? We just had that entire discussion about abandonment triggers and you weren’t even listening.”
“I was going to tell you—”
“Why the fuck should I trust you? You lied about your date with Lillith, you lie about money, you lie about food—”
Mal grasped for words. “I got a call,” they said, and their voice sounded as though it were coming from behind a thick stone wall. They watched themself speaking and thought how strange, how artificial their body language looked. Hadn’t they been loose, once? A clown. Now their arms were folded tightly, their shoulders hunched. “From an old friend, Felix Vargas. We grew up together. Someone … someone we knew back then is in trouble.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Right, fine, because I’m not allowed to say anything. I should just shut up and let you do whatever you want, let you forget I exist. You use me to get better, use me to sleep around, but I can’t have anything because I’m so terrible.”
He had moved closer, his spit on their cheeks. They stood, slinging their bag over their shoulder. “I didn’t say that.”
“Because it’s my fault,” he shrieked. He stepped back to block the door, blotches of color in his sunken cheeks. He had such beautiful cheekbones, sharp as cut glass. “Everything is my fault. You’ve never done anything wrong.”
“I’ll only be gone for three or four days,” they said quietly, hoping and dreading that soon the crying would start, the pleading for forgiveness and the perverse feeling of power that came with it. Like looking down from a crucifix on their weeping executioner. “They need me. I promised I’d go.”
“Why? Why do they need you?”
They thought of Abby, of a kid with Nadine’s crooked smile and wheat-blond hair curled crying in a narrow bunk bed. They thought of the pallid monstrosity unfolding itself in the dark under the farmhouse, of how they’d stood frozen, doing nothing. Of Nadine swallowed by a wall of rippling light.
“I can’t tell you about it,” they said. Their voice shook, and with every fiber of their being they wanted to shrink back small into the corner, to apologize and cry and say they wouldn’t go, it didn’t matter, they’d been selfish and thoughtless and awful. “It’s something we went through together, when we were younger. I—when I get back, I can try to explain.”
“You’re gonna get raped,” he spat at them. He stepped aside to let them through the door, then fell in close behind them. They blundered through the kitchen, banging their knee on the edge of the rusted gas stove with the faulty pilot light as he ranted at their back. “Do you even care how I feel? Do you care how much I worry about you when you’re out there? What are you going to do for money? What are you—Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
He hit them on the shoulder. It wasn’t hard, more of a faggy little slap than any kind of punch. They yelped in surprise, wheeling to face him and retreating at the same time until the backs of their legs hit the threadbare sofa under the front windows. “You hit me,” they said. Their voice trembled. The darkness outside their apartment seemed suddenly incalculable, huge and yawning and unsafe. At least in here they knew what came next. At least it was safe.
Charlie’s expression curdled in an instant from shock and guilt into one of pure contempt. “Oh please, I didn’t hurt you. Are you gonna start crying now? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo, poor baby.”
They broke for the door, Charlie stomping after them. Down the stairs past the reggaeton blasting on the second floor and the furious screams from the first and out into the cool, dark night with Charlie still ranting at them from the window above, screaming that they’d never loved him, that they wanted him dead, that they owed him four thousand dollars for rent from when they’d first moved in together. Silence, then the sound of canvas filling with air and the painting arcing out over the street to bounce off the curb. Mal started walking, their thoughts blazing with static. They headed up the street toward the lights of Sacred Conception, trying to ignore the eyes that followed them.
“Dykes are fightin’,” laughed one of the men on the steps of the building across the street. There were two of them they knew by sight and one they didn’t. “Trouble in pussy paradise.” He raised his voice. “You all right, girl?”
Charlie was still screaming. Mal, not slowing, looked at the man. “Nothing your sister can’t fix!” they shouted, and burst out laughing at his shocked expression. They picked up their pace. The night seemed to open itself up around them, the smells of rain and garbage and late-blooming snapdragons in the overgrown yards of foreclosed houses twining together, the light mist brushing their bare skin—they’d left the apartment in a tank top and loose drawstring pants.
“Use your eyes, stupid,” said the hard-faced white woman sitting on the steps with the men, ashing her cigarette onto the sidewalk. “Those bitches are transgendered.”
XVIII THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD
Someone was jiggling Shelby’s ass, gripping a handful of soft flesh and shaking it gently so that waves rippled across her cheeks. It was getting her hard, a breathless heat poised on the edge of dysphoria. She reached under herself to stroke it, the morning sunlight warm on her bare back as the sheet slid down, her breathing coming faster. Cool silicone between her legs. Leather and skin against the backs of her thighs.
God, breathed a voice Shelby knew, husky and raw. The hand kneading her ass tightened its grip until she gasped, stroking herself faster, the heat rising until her face burned. Your ass got so big.
A playful slap. Her breath caught in her throat as she arched her back to meet the next. Harder this time. Hard enough to sting. She could see the red palm print forming in her mind’s eye. Another, the lubed head of the strap pressing hard against her asshole, Nadine’s lips on the edge of her ear and that voice, grown up now but unmistakable.
You want to know what it feels like? the other woman whispered. You want to know what you’re trying to take from us?
A white-hot flare of pain as something sharp and cold cut her across the taint. She opened her mouth and someone forced a wet cloth into it, the rough fabric soaked with iron-stinking menstrual blood. Hands gripped her right arm and leg, dragging her off of the bed, the sheets sliding off her body. Enoch and Dave pulling her down the front hallway away from Nadine, who sat burning alive at the kitchen table, hair a torch, skin blackening and cracking, peeling back from muscle and bone beneath, lips splitting over shining teeth.
Help me.
Shelby woke, her T-shirt soaked with sweat. The alarm clock on the motel room’s bedside table read 6:13 a.m. Pale light filtered through the dusty Venetian blinds and in the other bed Jo was mumbling to herself, her calves sticking out from under the tangled sheets and ribbed green blanket. Had their blankets at Camp Resolution looked like that? Shelby thought they might have. She rubbed her own between thumb and forefinger. The texture was wrong; the blankets at camp had been broken in, soft to the touch. These were new and coarse. She sat up and peeled the wet shirt off, tossing it in the general direction of her suitcase. She ran her thumb idly along the faded ridges of the scars from her breast augmentation, first under the right, and then the left. Her Jessica Rabbit job, as her girlfriend at the time had called it. That had stung.
Never been an hourglass, never will be.
She got up and made coffee in the tiny electric pot on the room’s dresser, her reflection staring blearily back at her from the water-spotted mirror on the wall. Nose piercing infected again. Two days of personal time left before the studio canned her and she went back to doing key frames for Cheerios commercials. She’d burn through her savings in a month. Things were already rocky with Christa and now she’d fucked it up worse by sleeping with Jo. Maybe Felix had finally gone off the deep end and none of this was real anyway. Maybe the Cuckoo had died of the world’s biggest melanoma back in the Utah desert and there was no little sister of Nadine’s getting force-fed mushrooms and trained to recite gibberish from a textbook with a lighthouse on the cover. Maybe it was all a bad dream, and tomorrow they’d all go their separate ways and everything would be like it was: two or three of them getting together every couple years, less now without Akira to mortar the cracks between them. A few texts, a few emails. Just six kids who’d been at camp together, once upon a time.
She slipped into ratty sweats and took her coffee outside in a Styrofoam cup. It was dry and cool in the shade of the motel’s overhang. Concrete walkway, then a strip of dead brown grass and then the crumbling pavement of the parking lot and the front fender of her rented Honda. She’d texted Felix their room number after they checked in last night. He replied see u soon, but there’d been no trace of him since. She plopped herself into one of the sagging, sun-bleached deck chairs and checked the charge on her vape pen before taking a long hit. Fuck it. As long as she was throwing her life’s work away chasing ghosts in Reno, she was gonna get baked and take the edge off her stupid carpal tunnel.
No one else at the motel was up. Cars whizzed past on the main road and by the concrete divider she could just see what looked like a jackrabbit dead and mangled and crawling with flies. She blew out a long plume of smoke. What if he just doesn’t show? I guess this turns into the world’s shittiest, most expensive vacation and then we go home. Back to drawing Princess Sadako’s moon-steel katana until I start having sex dreams about her. And Jo. That apartment. Bills piling up. Empty bottles. Living like a freshman, except we never went to college.
The motel coffee tasted like bitter wallpaper paste, but it was hot and between it and the weed she was starting to mellow out, the nightmare fading into a collage of vague, unpleasant shapes and half-remembered scents. Maybe she could loan Jo a little money, just enough to get her through losing Oji. She could make it work if she paid her electric bill with her Discover card, maybe. Maybe. Her friends had told her more than once to cut Jo off, but hadn’t the other woman been there for her more than anyone else, except maybe Oji, when she’d tried to kill herself for the first time? She could still remember the look of pure, vacant horror in Jo’s eyes looking down at her, the bathroom ceiling receding down a long black tunnel and Oji slapping her face, saying her name, slapping her face.
She had her own apartment. She had friends, lovers, a job that didn’t pay under the table or in free drinks. So what if Jo was a mess? She’d gotten them out, after the house went up. She’d saved them all, led them into the forest and across the desert, killed that thing when it came after them in the flickering lantern light. Sometimes Shelby still dreamed about those long, slavering jaws, those scaly talons and the soiled fringe of its shaggy coat. She realized she was crying and wiped her eyes, sniffing. She shot Felix another text—where the fuck are you?—and finished her shitty coffee. Before she could go in, Jo came out. The other woman looked tired, her hair flattened on one side, dark circles under her eyes. In her baggy pajama pants and ratty T-shirt she looked, just for a moment, like a teenager again, and Shelby thought her heart might break.
“How’d you sleep?” Shelby asked, coughing.
Jo took the pen and sucked on it, cheeks hollowing. At the far end of the lot a hunched old woman shuffled from her room to her car, the aluminum storm door clattering behind her in a sudden gust of warm, dry wind. Shelby hated the heat. It was why she’d moved to Rhode Island in the first place, to get as far away as she could from all those beige flyover wastelands with their endless howling wind and the shadows of their circling buzzards and the dead white smiles of their Mormons.
“I’m afraid,” said Jo, smoke pouring from her nostrils and uncoiling from between her lips. She blew a ring and stared past it with unseeing, glassy eyes as it came apart in the fading breeze. “I don’t want to see it again.” Her voice was far away, a little higher pitched than usual. A child’s voice. “I don’t want it to be real.”
“I know,” said Shelby.
Jo sank down onto the ground beside the chair and leaned her head against Shelby’s hip. They stayed like that for a while as the little old lady got into her car, started it after a few clunking coughs from the engine, and pulled out of the lot, joining the light traffic on the main road. Everything was the same out here. Chain gas stations. Office parks. Flat-roofed buildings and beyond the few bland streets of the city’s edge, the desert stretching dead and vast and featureless to the distant purple blush of mountains. Little brown birds perched in rows on the telephone lines. It could take a place like this so easily.
