On February 26, 1970, General Motors introduced the second generation Camaro. It was what Kona called a “pony car”: lower, meaner, wider than the first generation. “A man’s car,” he’d told Keira, “meaner than anything on four wheels.”

One of those Camaros caught Kona’s attention when he was fourteen. He’d spent two summers riding past it at the junk yard on Lafitte street, he’d told her, desperate to have it, to bring it back from the dead. And so, Kona had explained, he washed cars and mowed lawns and didn’t buy comics for six months straight, begged off trips to the river with his friends and treks after the ice cream truck when it moved slowly Uptown, calling hungry, bored kids, itching for their quarters. Kona, even at fourteen, had plans for his nickels and dimes, and one late August evening, when he was sixteen, Kona walked up to the junk yard, smiling like a dog about to be thrown a steak, and laid down $1500 for that rusted, ugly Camaro.

 “Two years,” he’d told Keira one night when they sat parking in his baby just outside City Park. “I scrimped and saved and read and researched, bugged the shit out of every mechanic I met, asked how to use Bondo, how to ease out dents and get rid of rust, until I had her just the way I wanted.” He’d rubbed his hand along the dash of his baby, stroking her slower, petting her longer than he had Keira that night. “She’s the love of my life.”

Kona had been Keira’s.

She stood outside of the team house parking lot, ignoring the long looks she got, disregarding Nathan and Brian and the way they huddled on the front porch, seeming to debate the wisdom of approaching her. One quick, hard glare and both boys hurried inside.

Good, she thought. Let them hide.

She wanted to be alone for this. It would be the last play she made. The last score to settle before she took Mark Burke’s three grand and left New Orleans behind.

He had come to her dorm, telling her the news of her accident, and the baby, had traveled around the hospital quickly. Her silent, gentle savior, Mark had let Keira cry onto his chest. Had told her she would survive. Dried her face with his long, nimble fingers.

 “You’re brave, Keira. You’re so damn strong. Don’t let this break you.”

She’d wanted to believe him. She’d wanted to be as sure about her future as Mark seemed to be about it.

Leann and Keira’s aunt had offered her a home. They were still family. They loved Keira, and she knew she and her baby would be safe with them. They would be loved. But Keira couldn’t move around this city, couldn’t touch trees that she and Kona had leaned against, walk down sidewalks they’d jogged down hurrying to beat the rain, or to tear off each other’s clothes while they rushed into her dorm.

She couldn’t risk her mother’s intrusion on the life she wanted to give her baby.

Keira had to leave, and so she kissed Leann goodbye without telling her what she planned. She let Mark hold her, console her for the loss that had broken her down completely. She let him insist that she take his money, that she form a Grand Plan that didn’t involve their parents and the world they wanted them to emulate.

And then, just a few blocks from the bus stop on the CPU campus, Keira had made one last goodbye.

Keira thought that Kona should see. He should know what she meant; how destroying something so perfect, so beautiful, was the greatest sin anyone could commit.  After all, he had once done that to her.

His words were poison. His screams were a sharp point, piercing, tearing straight into what remained of her heart. This felt like a death. That great big solid thing in her heart had been shredded until only the fine wisps remained. It felt like she had been ripped apart, bits of her body and her spirit torn to pieces and then quickly moved together again, but wrong, not as they had been, not as they should be.

Her reflection in the driver’s side window of the black Camaro looked odd, unfamiliar, and Keira moved her head, inclined to see her face clearer against the yellow street light blinking in and out above her. She looked at her lips, the curve of her neck, felt the cold, untouched plane of her chest and realized, with a shudder, that was where Kona’s mouth would always belong. That was where he would never be again.

And then, just then, the elusive hook came to her. She wanted to smile, to let the bunch of worry tightening her shoulders free. It was a song she’d been writing for months. It was what she’d toyed with anytime Kona made her angry, anytime she felt the bite of his accusations, his anger. Staring at herself in the reflection of his car, the words trickled into her mind, swam around like a wave. She had it all. Kona had given her a child. He had given her enough heartache that her song came to her. 

 

How dare you

Trample with your words

Tatter who I am

Poison with your lips

Give it gram by gram.

 

How dare you

Steal what’s left of me

The parts already thin

Toxic to my heart

Broken through my skin

 

Pretty words hide the truth

Fracture all my hope

Poison in every sound, lies in what you spoke

How dare you?

 

She watched herself as though she drifted above, as though that was not her threading her keys between her fingers. That was not a calm, rational or even moderately sane Keira kneeling down next to Kona’s beloved Camaro.

She didn’t care that the letters were too big, white scratches against that midnight black paint. She didn’t care that she was destroying something precious, something that mattered because Kona had too. He had crushed her heart under his heel, and this act, this callous, juvenile act, would be a companion to her curse. He wouldn’t soon forget her words just as he wouldn’t be able to quickly be rid of the large letters marring his car.

Keira dug in deep, funneling her despair, the crushing bend of her heart into every line she made and when she was done, she didn’t look back. Just picked up her bag, stuffed her keys in her pocket, and left her mark on Kona’s heart, on the pristine effort he’d made to make that car beautiful.

The bus station was five blocks away, and despite the slow drizzle overhead, Keira set out on foot, leaving behind everything she knew and the one person she loved, with the angry letters—the solitary reminder of how much he’d hurt her.

THIN LOVE scratched into that black paint and “never again” whispered to her shattered heart.