When he turned to look at me, I could see something dark floating in his eyes, and I looked away. “That’s kind of the problem.”
I sat with my hands on the wheel, waiting for him to tell me how Milo and I were a problem.
“She wants to be his girlfriend,” Alex said. “She only picked me because she wanted to, like, punish him.”
The idea was weird and sad. It seemed probably true, but I couldn’t see the appeal of being Milo’s anything. I didn’t say that maybe she’d picked Alex because he never called anyone a slut, or because his jokes weren’t at the expense of someone else, or even just that he always had clean fingernails and smelled like gum.
“It’s so stupid, though,” I said, trying not to sound impatient. “Why does it matter?”
“It doesn’t,” he said. I could tell he meant it shouldn’t but it does. “She just seemed nice. How can she be nice and still be trying so hard to hurt someone else?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because the alternative was to tell him all the ways people were nice and the ways they were still just horrible.
We were quiet the rest of the way home.
On our street, I killed the engine. “Do you want to get some pancakes?”
He shook his head. “I need a shower.”
“Hey,” I said, reaching for his arm. “Hey, it’s going to be—”
“Don’t say okay,” he said. His voice was hard and hoarse. “Because it’s not.”
My fingers touched his T-shirt and he pulled away. I stopped talking.
“I don’t feel good at all,” he said in a voice I could barely hear. “I need to go in and shower.”
I sat behind the wheel and watched him walk, faster and faster, until by the time he reached the door, he seemed to be floating. Every time I blinked, he would be farther away.
I didn’t notice when he stopped calling. When he stopped coming over. Let my texts go unanswered for way too long. I told myself I didn’t notice. After a while, he didn’t answer at all.
I wasn’t hurt, though. I wasn’t lonely.
There were parties to rage at and people to see. I had the constant, jittering hum of the city. The colored lights, red and green and blue.
Alex
For a second, there was nothing.
Only tires hissing, lights that passed in flashes. A noise like the end of the world.
Then the window splashed into my lap in a shiny, crunchy wave and a billowing white wall exploded in my face.
No.
Back up.
Before that, there was everything. The house. The garden. My mom, digging holes to plant butterfly bushes. My dad, painting sad, twisted faces. I was dumb and little, the kind of kid who believed in world peace and the Easter Bunny and all that other stupid shit.
Talking to Elle—Betsy—through the backyard fence, with her tangled hair and her fierce heartbroken face, I was so in love with her, but not the love that TV and movies talk about. That came later.
The way I left home was almost an accident. It wasn’t because of her—not the parties or the guys or the way I felt when all her recklessness and noise started to look dangerous. And it was all because of that.
Vegas was a murky ocean of porn and dirt and greed, and every time the bad parts showed, I hated it more. The movies and commercials make it seem like some ecstatic celebration, but the secret is, winning never feels as good as the moment right before. No one wants to admit it, that they come here for that moment, crave the ugly free fall of not knowing. That they come here to lose.
Betsy loved it too much to ever really look at the bad parts.
But I was starting to think they were all bad parts.
The day I moved in with Milo was the day I stopped being soft.
Betsy was sitting on the floor of my new bedroom, helping unpack my clothes. She’d been seeing some guy from downtown with bloodshot eyes. Some guy who liked to party, which could be taken however you want to take it. Mostly, it meant he could get drugs. Milo could get drugs too. By then, everyone we knew liked to party.
“Do you love him?” I said.
She was smoking something without a filter. Her nails were a bright glittery green, the color of poison. The look on her face was tired, like the idea made her so bored she could taste it. “Who’s going to love a train wreck like that?”
“What about Milo, then?” It wasn’t like I thought she’d say yes, or that I had to compete with him. I loved Milo, but still. Milo wasn’t good for anyone.
She laughed, and it was like something breaking.
I didn’t trust myself to say the real thing, the one you can never actually say. Do you love me? I said something else instead, raw and tight and almost the same. “Do you love it here?”
And she didn’t have to say anything, because I knew.
After that, I didn’t know how to be around her. I couldn’t blame her exactly, but I couldn’t be a good friend, either.
Moving was the only way to leave behind the quiet that had filled my mom’s house and gotten inside the walls. The whole place had turned jagged, like a piece of glass stuck in my throat.
And anyway, it’s what you do when you turn eighteen. You move out.
There was a small voice in me that said the place with Milo on North Jones wasn’t enough—go farther, drive west until I hit ocean. I wasn’t brave enough.
Instead, I followed Milo. It seemed my whole life, I’d always been following someone.
I didn’t say a word when he did shots before work. When he drove too fast or got in fights, when he made every bad decision the city was offering. I just sat and waited till it was over, like I was watching the movie through my fingers.
Nights were long and sprawling. Every place we went felt sticky. When we stood in the mosh pit at Seashore, I saw girls with plastic smiles. Milo at the bar. Lights so dark and bright it made my eyes hurt.
I leaned against the wall and tried to picture what Betsy would do. It wasn’t like I thought I should be someone different or needed to love all the things she loved. It was more like if I could find some way to live how she lived, I’d be stronger. If I could just give up, things would stop feeling so bad all the time.
The night was dry and slow and heavy. We went out, because we were always going out.
In the crowd around the back bar at the Vault, Milo was doing flip tricks with his lighter. “Want to hit Crave?” he said. He smelled like smoke and tequila and bad decisions begging to be made.
“Sure,” I said, and even saying it felt like a widening crack inside me. “What the hell, right? I’m here to lose.”
“What?” he said, but he didn’t wait for me to answer.
I got in the car because why not and because he was my brother. We never planned for anything or talked about the future anymore. I’d stopped imagining one. And anyway, it wasn’t like it mattered. Or else, it mattered so much I thought my heart would break.
It didn’t break though.
We were on Casa Buena Drive, with the radio off. The wind was hot and frantic. It sounded like the ocean.
“Watch this,” Milo yelled, and I thought of Betsy like I could almost see her next to me—like the dry, tarry air was blowing in her face instead of mine.
I saw it suddenly, the ways she thrashed and raged—all those times, I’d tried so hard not to dive in after her, and now here I was in Milo’s front seat with the needle climbing, looking for the rush, the jolt, the thing that made my heart beat faster.
The city swept by in flashes and when we blew the stop sign at Clemont Street, my pulse felt like a bird trapped inside a bottle.
I told it to slow down.
Buildings whipped past. Milo was driving stupid and loose, the way he did when he’d been drinking—this easy daredevil indifference, where you couldn’t tell if he was just that good, or just that lucky.
I didn’t tell him to slow down.
The anxious clanking of my heart only made it clearer, how lost I was, how small and unce
rtain, and I made fists, thinking of Betsy. Thinking of the brave, unbreakable person I didn’t know how to be without her. The city was a glittery nightmare, and this whole time, maybe I’d only ever been brave because of her.
Milo threw his head back and howled into the dark, his grin like a white slice of victory. A hazard sign. Lights and cars flashed by in neon smears, like this was all some kind of fast, blinking game, and I closed my eyes.
For a second, there was nothing, just me inside my head. Then it all crashed in again—Milo howling next to me, pounding on the steering wheel, the tires whispering against the road. The city around us roaring like the sea.
“Go faster,” I said.
When the truck hit the passenger side, I don’t remember anything but the sound of breaking. A noise like the end of the world.
A white wall billowed up in my face and then broke over me. The window splashed into my lap and then so did a whole lot of blood.
The ambulance came after that. There was blood on my shirt and in my mouth. My shoulder felt like a bomb had gone off.
These are the parts I remember most: the sirens. The way the paramedics stood over me, businesslike and blank, then the hospital, the lights, the clean, stinging smell. It was numb, painful, over, and anyway, the ending didn’t matter.
I came here to lose.
At the place on North Jones, no one was home. Our roommate, Darryl, was in Tahoe. Milo had flunked the Breathalyzer.
I had a sling for my shoulder and a bottle of pills, but I couldn’t figure out the dosage. I couldn’t get the cap off the bottle. I couldn’t take a breath without sounding like I was crying.
I called her.
Elle
His voice on my phone was muffled, low and lost and half underwater. A message in a bottle, the call of someone out to sea.
“Betsy,” he said, careful and flat. “Please, when you get this, please come over.”
His apartment complex was the cheap, dingy kind. All the buildings were stucco, and even in the dark, they all had the same burned feeling, like they’d shriveled in the sun.
It was after midnight. The air felt used up. There was a streetlight shining down onto the stairwell and the patio, but the corners were dark spaces. A coffee can sat next to the railing, full of ashes.
I let myself in. When Alex was home, he never locked the door.
For a minute, I stood in the hall, feeling like a criminal. All the lights were out.
The air smelled like old cigarettes, and I could hear music, playing low in the living room. I followed it.
I came into the room Gunslinger Elle—bandit jeans and Marlboro Man bravado—and all that disappeared so fast. Instead, just picture Betsy, standing with her hands shoved down in the pockets and her eyes wide and dry and burning.
When Alex looked up from his phone, the sight of him made me flinch.
One side of his face was a purple wreck. The skin looked dark and tight and swollen. There was blood crusted under his nose and cracking on a cut beneath his eye.
He was wearing a white shirt, but it was dark in places, and I stood in the doorway thinking, Say something, say something.
The only thing I could think was, “You shouldn’t still be wearing that.”
He made a face and shook his head. “I can’t take it off. It hurts to move my arm.”
There was a bottle of something prescription on the coffee table like he’d been staring at it.
“Can you open that?” he said.
I sat down and popped the lid, letting pills spill into my hand.
“Water?” he said, sounding slow and tired. “Cold?”
In the kitchen, I took all the ice cubes out of the tray and put them in a glass. Then I stood looking at them while they melted slowly and sweat ran down between my shoulder blades.
My reflection in the window was shock eyed, tangle haired. I went back out to the living room, carrying the glass like a prayer.
Alex drank and swallowed pills. He laughed the nervous, eyes-down laugh that used to make him seem so old when he was twelve. Now, with his face turned away from me, and his eyelashes making shadows on his cheeks, it sounded young.
“How come no one’s here?” I wiped at the blood underneath his eye, and he winced.
“You’re here.”
“You know what I mean. Where’s Milo?”
“Police station. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How’d you get home?”
“My mom. She got me from emergency, but she . . . uh, she had to work.”
“At one in the morning?”
“Tomorrow. I said I don’t want to talk about it.” He leaned back until his head rested against the couch.
“Did a person do this to you?”
“A car.”
I didn’t look anymore, like maybe if I didn’t, he’d change back to normal, but his voice kept sounding wrong, even when I watched the carpet. My skin felt brittle and weightless like ashes. “How does it feel?”
The question was a broken rule. A thing we never asked each other. Too dangerous, too private. Never say it out loud, because then the other one might answer.
“Like nothing,” he said. “Like I’m not really bleeding. Like it isn’t really my blood.”
The flatness in his voice was awful, and so I nodded. The blood had never been my blood. Sometimes, in crowded clubs at night when I was lit up with the wild manic rush of it, moving fast, fast, fast, I wasn’t sure I had any.
He bowed his head. “Will you stay here with me tonight?”
We leaned against each other. “I’ll stay with you forever.”
“For real?”
“No,” I said, because I couldn’t stand to lie to him. “But I wish I could.”
He breathed out, let himself sink deep into the couch. “Because you love it here.”
We sat with our whole bodies touching. “Yeah, I do.”
“Maybe Vega is a girl,” he said.
His voice had gotten slow and thick. I nodded. He’d called the city something mumbling and wrong, named it like a person, but I didn’t even know if he was doing it on purpose. Maybe all it meant was that the drugs were kicking in. I’d always been so sure he’d never actually see—not the way that I did—Vegas in all her shiny, messy glory. But now, in the dark, in the terrible quiet, I thought maybe he got it.
“I can’t survive,” he whispered. “She’s too hungry. Bright and glittery, but sick.”
And then I knew the magic still escaped him. We would never see the same thing.
“I’m poisoned,” he said. His voice was raspy and his face was pale. He looked poisoned. “It isn’t good for you here.”
I watched the side of his face, blood still crusted around his mouth like someone at the hospital had started to clean him up and then gotten bored. “You mean it’s not good for you.”
“Anyone,” he said. His voice was low, and he still wouldn’t look at me.
I had a sinking feeling that he was wrong. That certain people could survive it. That this place was a dirty, thrilling home for some of us. The hard-edged. The ragged, jagged losers and the criminals.
Everything seemed huge and powerful in the dark, the sweat soaking into his collar, his gently curling hair. I put my face against his neck and his skin smelled like salt. There, in the hot, dark room, I imagined that my tears turned to ice as soon as they touched his shirt.
“You can go,” I said, holding his good hand so tight it hurt my throat. “If you want to.”
He nodded and I closed my eyes, thinking that this was an unhappy ending. A moment. That maybe I finally got it.
The day I came home to Vine Street to see Wendy, there was a cigar box on the floor of my old bedroom. It was one of those vintage painted ones, with little hinges and a picture of a fifties-style mermaid on the lid. When I picked it up, it rattled like a tray of bones.
I dumped everything on the carpet. With my hands in my lap, I sat looking at all the things he’d left me with. A
dollar chip from Treasure Island, a handful of Skittles, a dead morning glory. The postcard from California—that pale picture of the ocean, soft and faded as old silk.
On the back, in smudgy pen, his dad had written:
Went out to see the waves before heading to Seattle. Saw these dudes and thought of you.
Venice ain’t my bag—still too much sun—but I think you’d like it here.
For a long time, I sat holding the postcard. Imagining the shape of Alex. The empty space where he belonged seemed to sit like a rock inside me.
The hinges of the cigar box were rusty and the label was rubbed off around the edges. I was almost ruined by the way you could fit everything you needed to say into a box the size of three stacks of twenties. And all those times we talked about this place, how much he hated it, I didn’t ever think he’d actually be gone.
“Everybody leaves,” said Wendy, standing in the doorway, and she sounded so sad. She sounded sorry, like she was giving me this one tiny apology for every day of my life.
I nodded, thinking about the bottomless uncertainty of disappearing. About staying. How hard I’d always tried to make myself believe that being dangerous is not its own kind of gamble.
Wendy leaned in the doorway, watching me gather up the bits and pieces of Alex’s good-bye—all the things he’d left me. Her expression was strange. Suddenly, she stepped fast and light into the room and did something she hadn’t done in years. She kissed me.
Later, I sat in my car in the hot, relentless dusk, holding my elbows in my cupped hands like I was holding myself together. The box sat next to me in the shotgun seat, a silent passenger, waiting for a sign.
I thought about mermaids, wild and rare, girls with muddy-colored scales and murky water plants tangled in their hair, their eyes reflecting pounding waves and schools of whales. Maybe I was never that girl at all, or else I was only that girl when I was with Alex.
In the dark, I felt small and angry suddenly, nine years old again, looking at Alex through the fence. A little girl with no friends or father or future, just hoping for some magic.
Three Sides of a Heart Page 26
