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I don’t release my hold on her. I don’t trust the seat belt and I…like having my hands on her.

I love having my mouth on her.

“Corners next,” Tina requests.

“I’m dropping you guys off in the middle of the fucking ocean,” I threaten.

Suddenly up in my fucking personal space, Tina taunts, “You don’t have the proper vessel or navigational skills to pull that off,” before turning to Kota and telling her, “Listen, forget Guy. You’ll find another cat—”

“No, Khaos is the one that bought me the cat.”

Tina’s head rotates back in my direction.

“Did he really?”

“Middle of the ocean,” I mutter.

She singsongs, “If you do that, I can’t tell you Lisann’s deepest, darkest secret.”

“That she’s been screwing my boyfriend behind my back?”

“Ex,” I say, just so we’re clear. That douche is old news.

“No, not that. That was hardly a secret. You just had to, like, look at those two to know there was something going on there.”

Kota scoffs while Dex scolds his sister for being insensitive, except he says insistence, the word he needed earlier.

Nobody bothers to correct him this time. I understand what he means and the other two are just as wasted as he is.

“Anyway, Lisann once told me…” Tina pauses for dramatic effect. “That she doesn’t think the moon is real.”

Without even seeing everyone’s faces, I know for a fact we’re all wearing the same frown.

Kota voices what we all gotta be thinking. “What does she think it is?”

“A projection.”

“Like the Bat-signal?” Dex questions in the most high-pitched voice I’ve ever heard him use. Dude is incensed—another word he probably couldn’t pronounce right now.

“Yes. She thinks someone shines it up there every night. Unless it’s bad weather.”

There are so many reasons why that doesn’t make any sense.

No one says anything for a while.

Kota’s the first to break the quiet.

“I can’t believe I lost my boyfriend to someone that thinks the moon is a projection.”

Personally, I don’t see the breakup as Kota losing anything but I keep my mouth shut.

Tina, however, doesn’t. She smacks Kota’s shoulder, and I think it’s to offer some words of wisdom, but she actually just says, “At least she has boobs big enough to motorboat,” giving what has to be the worst consolation in history.

“Dex,” I say.

“Tina!”

After dropping off Tina and Dex to their house, we ride the rest of the way home in silence. I may not always like what comes out of my friends’ mouths but at least they keep the conversation flowing.