She looks away from the screen. "A what?"
"A punk show. In a lot. There were nachos."
She studies me. The dirty sneakers. The damp shirt. The grin I haven't been able to get rid of since the first song.
"You smell like a barbecue," she says.
I grin wider. I probably smell amazing.
"Was Teague there?"
"Teague took me."
Mom nods. Slow. Processing. She's not there yet, not all the way, but she's processing. Teague took her daughter to a thing and her daughter came back smiling and smelling like charcoal and she's processing. I wish she would process faster, but it's something. She's trying. I know she is.
"There's steak in the fridge," she says, and turns back to her show.
I eat. I shower. I get into bed and the glow-in-the-dark stars are on my ceiling and I can still feel the bass in my chest and Cal's voice in my bones and Teague's mouth on mine in the middle of two hundred people.
I text Teague:best night. cal's voice is still in my skeleton. also britt loves me.
She responds in forty seconds:britt doesn't love you. britt thinks you have good energy. there's a difference.
there's no difference.
go to sleep, Zoe.
I laugh.You first, girlfriend.
She doesn't respond to that one. She doesn't need to. I can see her in her apartment above the laundromat, reading the word on her screen, letting it sit, letting it stay.
I close my eyes. The stars glow. The sirens pass in the distance, Engine 11 heading somewhere, and I count them the way I've always counted them, one two three, and then sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Teague
Zoe invites her parents to the next Scorched Ordinance show and tells me about it after she's already done it.
"They said yes."
I'm just blinking at her, sure I haven't heard her right. "To a punk show?"
"To a Saturday night with their daughter and her girlfriend. I framed it correctly."
Of course she would think that. "You framed it as a date night."
"I framed it as a cultural experience. Dad's interested. Mom said she'd bring a jacket."
I'm behind the bar, Friday night, and Zoe is on her stool with her mule and she's telling me this with the bright certainty of a person who has never once considered that a plan might fail because she's never let one fail. She invited Martin and PatriciaKimball to a warehouse lot punk show and they said yes and she sees no reason to worry about it.
I see several reasons to worry about it.
"Your mother is going to stand in a lot next to a charcoal grill and listen to Cal scream about tenant rights."
"Mom cares about tenant rights."
"Your mother has a strategic lighting crime prevention program. She's going to see that lot and calculate the lumen deficiency."
