“I don’t know.”
Teague nods. She doesn’t offer solutions. She doesn’t tell me it’ll work out or to be positive or to try harder. She just nods and leans on the bar and lets me sit with it.
The playlist is playing something slow. Tom Waits, maybe. Gravel and piano.
“You know what I like about punk?” Teague says after a while.
“What?”
“It doesn’t guarantee you anything. It just says you have the right to try. To show up and be loud and take up space and demand what you want, even if the answer is no.” She picks up a glass and starts polishing. “Punk never promised a happy ending. It just promised you the stage.”
“That’s depressing.”
“That’s honest.” She sets the glass down. “You’ve been showing up. You’ve been loud. You took the stage. That matters regardless of what the captain decides.”
“It doesn’t feel like it matters.”
“It matters to me.” She says it quiet and quick, like she didn’t plan to, and then she picks up another glass and starts polishing and doesn’t look at me.
I sit there with my Moscow mule and my five days and the sound of Tom Waits and the thing Teague just said that she’s pretending she didn’t say, and I don’t push it. I’ve learned not to push with her. She gives things when she’s ready and trying to take more would break whatever this is, this thing between us that I don’t have a word for yet.
I stay until closing. Teague counts the register and I sit at the bar and we don’t talk much and the silence is better than most conversations I’ve ever had. When she’s done, she turns off the overheads and the neon stays on and the bar goes blue and pink.
“Go home, Zoe.”
“I know.” I stand up. “Teague?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for the prescription. The Replacements. It helped.”
“That’s what music’s for.” She’s wiping down the bar, not looking at me. “Get some sleep.”
I walk to the door. Stop. Turn around.
“It matters to me too,” I say. “This. Whatever this is.”
She looks up. The neon makes her face half-blue, half-pink, and her eyes are steady and her mouth doesn’t move and she doesn’t say anything.
I leave before she has to.
Chapter Twelve
Teague
I don’t sleep well.
This is unusual. I always sleep well. I work until two, walk home, eat, shower, sleep. The routine is airtight. I built it that way because sleep is fuel and fuel is non-negotiable and I don’t waste energy lying awake thinking about things I can’t control, because I don’t allow things I can’t control into my life.
But I’m lying in bed at three-fifteen staring at the ceiling of my apartment above the laundromat, and the washing machines are quiet and the street is quiet and my brain is loud.
It matters to me too. This. Whatever this is.
She said it and then she left. She didn’t wait for me to respond. She just said it, clean and honest, the way she says everything, and then she walked out and the door swung shut and I stood there with a rag in my hand and the neon going blue-pink-blue across the bar and I didn’t move for a long time.
I could have said something. I could have said “it’s nothing” or “you’re a regular” and she would have gone and theboundary would have held and I’d be sleeping right now instead of memorizing the cracks in my ceiling.
I didn’t say any of those things. I just stood there and let her leave and that silence was louder than anything I could have said because Zoe reads silence like she reads everything, with her whole self, and my silence told her that what she said landed.
