I swallow. The tears are gone. “I’m fine.”
“Okay. Good.” She scratches at her waistband again. “You just had a look, for a second.”
“An about-to-get-punched-in-the-face look?”
Her high-beam stare fades. “That was such a weird thing to say, wasn’t it.”
“It’s fine.” In the background, the music seems to have gotten louder.
Veer shoves off from the counter. We’re almost toe-to-toe. “Everything doesn’t have to be fine all the time. Come on, want to go out back and punch me in the face for real? Then we’ll be even.”
I almost start to laugh, but her expression’s dead serious. Like she’d let me, if I wanted to.
“I’m good.”
She cocks her head to one side. “Kick me in the shins?”
Maybe she’s a little drunk too. This time, I do laugh.
“What do you want to do, then?” she asks.
I slide my hand into hers. Her palm is clammy. “We could dance some more.”
Maybe I can remember how to do this, after all. Maybe I can still be what she wants.
“Okay,” she says as her fingers close over mine. “Cool.”
Back into the noise, the shoves, the swirl. Blue-glowed bodies twist together, weight and counterweight. An open hand ricochets out and catches my hair, whistling past my cheek. Veer tugs me closer, her hand twined around my waist, her eyes like endless asphalt roadways. The ground isn’t entirely steady under me.
I don’t know how to speak this frenzied physical language, so I push closer to Veer instead. Veer, who remembered me. Who sought me out, who froze me out, who is now pressing me against the back of a suede recliner that’s been flipped to face the wall. LED afterglow reflects in her eyes like northern lights.
Then it’s back. The gauze, the suffocation. Something sharp edged lodges in my throat. I close my eyes and try to swallow it down, and when I open them again, the glow of the striplights has a new, yellow tinge.
I smell the dust of the highway, the slow grind of sand against bone. And blood. Old blood. Sick blood.
“Let’s check out the backyard,” Veer says abruptly, and she shoves me toward the glitter of a sliding glass door. I don’t smell anything now except for sweat and soda and someone’s rancid cologne.
There’s less yellow grass and more gravel in the back. A couple of people drift in circles, puffing vapes or cigarettes, kicking little sprays of pebbles at each other. One of them waves to Veer, and she waves back. The night air smells like cotton candy flavoring and not enough rain. No blood. No sense of being plunged headfirst into a bucket of water.
“I have something to show you.” Veer steers me over to a dusty shed huddled against the side of the house, nighttime draining the color from it until it’s just a square-shouldered mass protruding from the stucco. “Think we can get up there?”
She drags a folding chair over, kicks it open on the gravel, then uses it like a step stool to hoist herself onto the shed. She didn’t notice anything, in the living room. Maybe it was all in my head.
“Oh shit.” Her voice peaks, excited. “Come on.”
I scramble up behind her and find Veer drumming on a thin metal ladder attached to the side of the house, obscured by the shadow of the roof.
“Is whoever owns this place okay with us going up there?” I whisper.
Veer makes a face that’s enough of an answer. “I’ll go first. If the ladder breaks, uh…”
“I’ll get out of the way.”
She chuckles. “What, don’t want me on top of you?”
I’m lucky that it’s dark and that she’s already started to climb, because I don’t want to know what my face looks like.
I don’t trust the ladder, but it holds together long enough for Veer to scramble onto the roof and for me to follow her. At the top, I fling one leg over the edge and try to roll the rest of the way. It’s harder than it looks. Veer tugs on my wrists and I come over a little off-balance, and suddenly we’re a tangle of arms and legs, tumbling across the sunbaked surface. My head smacks the corner of a vent, and the world stops spinning.
