Las Vegas
Pan in to show the flash and glitter of the Strip—eight lanes, twenty thousand people, a wide, unholy slice of magic. A miracle of color.
The boulevard runs the stretch of desert like a vein, pumping with the fast, fierce pulse of cars and crowds and money. Promising festivals, carnivals, a horde of newly minted millionaires, a sea of glossy beauties and slick, smiling criminals. Luck that always comes through.
Follow the camera as it moves, soaring down scorching avenues, finding its way through a sea of palm trees and swimming pools.
The air is dry and hot, the city an impossible oasis, jeweled with pirate ships and castles. Oceans of bodies, waves of cars, a crush of neon lights and flying paper.
The camera winds along narrower streets now, following cracked sidewalks, rows of stucco houses. It pans through low, sunbaked neighborhoods, sliding between chain-link fences and parked cars, and finally comes to rest on one small, knobby girl, so wild and electric she almost shines.
She’s quick and fearless, hair a tangled nest. A slash of joyful noise and dirty jeans against the dull brown backdrop of the neighborhood, in the dusty yard under the acacia.
Inside, her house is perfect, a confection of pastel-painted walls, fairy lights, gingerbread. Ancient pink refrigerator, swirling red carpet. A row of Aerosmith posters in the hall.
In the summer, water beads on the air conditioner like sweat.
Her mother comes home after bedtime, smelling like flowers and smoke, and kisses her. The kiss is a tiny, cherished gift. A ritual. It lands on her cheek like it’s landing on the girl in a story. One day, she thinks, she will be like the people on the billboards—lucky, gorgeous, dangerous.
The city is a promise. A fantastical landscape of winners, beauties, criminals.
She will belong here forever.
Elle
Most days, to most people, I was Elle, like the magazine, a smoky-eyed glam goddess, all smiles and wicked edges. Lizzie to teachers and kids at school. Libs, if Wendy was happy, and Elizabeth Marie when she wasn’t—a name like the clock ticking on a pile of dynamite, a tangle of rainbow-colored wires. Those days, the explosion could be for anything. Breaking the good casserole dish, crossing the street without telling her. Calling her Wendy instead of Mom.
To Alex, though? To Alex, I was always Betsy.
From outside, the house on Vine Street was as ugly as a codfish. Ugly as a potato. But the inside was beautiful and bright, and every night, Wendy came home from the High Roller Club wearing her spangled uniform, bringing candy-red cherries and tiny paper parasols. Her hair smelled like cigarettes and Aqua Net.
She sat at the kitchen table, counting her tips into two piles. The big one for rent and gas and groceries, the smaller one for the mayonnaise jar on top of the refrigerator. The money in the jar wasn’t for anything. It was a just-in-case, a backup plan for the chance that maybe something good would happen.
When I was little, I liked to sit and stare into the jar. It looked impossible. It looked like so much money you could own the world.
“Whenever you win a hand,” Wendy always said, pressing the crumpled dollars flat, “you just take your chips and then walk away. People are so stupid about luck. They think when they’re up, they’ll always be up. Get all bent out of shape when their hot streak ends. Start thinking the world is against them when it’s not. The world doesn’t give a shit about you. Remember that, you’ll do just fine.”
But Wendy was hard and quick and practical. She didn’t believe in luck or signs. She believed in staring down into that swiftly spinning wheel, and knowing your number when it came up. When she came home from work, the skin around her eyes was tired.
I sat at the table and watched her count. I opened and closed the tiny parasols until the paper tore. When I put the wooden sticks in my mouth, they tasted like pennies. I knew that if I wished hard enough, someday my number would come up and something good would happen. I would do just fine.
“And don’t be spending all day next door with that weird little Reilly boy,” Wendy said, but I always did it anyway.
Alex was the one who taught me about magic, believed in it when no one else did. He was just that soft, awkward way, though, always ready to believe in something brighter and bigger.
We played pretend and built fairy towns, sitting in his mother’s garden, where flowers spilled over the beds and the broken-down fence like a party, a flood of confetti and bloodred crepe paper.
Your best friend is supposed to be the girl who sits next to you in math and has the same lunchbox as you, but a better haircut. Not two years younger, not a boy, not skinny and strange, with all kinds of ideas about magicians and G.I. Joes and God.
His brother, Milo, was loud and mean, but Alex never tried to be like him.
Sitting under the acacia tree, he’d reach his hands around to the back of my neck and press his forehead against mine, trying to make me see his thoughts, but I never could. When he leaned back, I would look into his eyes and see a pair of dark silhouettes, two tiny Betsys floating there, one at the center of each pupil.
There’s a certain kind of magic to being a kid with someone. They always have this little private piece of you. They own your heart, even if you don’t remember giving it to them.
There’s no point arguing, it’s how things are. You’re stuck together by all the things you’ve seen and shared—the day Max Holbrook said he saw John Cena at the gas station on Tropicana and everyone went down to look. The way the leaves flutter like pale green dollars in the spring, and how they turn all brown and crumpled in the fall. The time I cut my lip on the skate ramp and had to get four stitches.
The day that Alex and Milo’s dad left, loading all his things into a U-Haul, and Alex climbed through my window and curled up in my bed and couldn’t stop crying.
I was twelve, still too young to know how to act when things stopped being okay. And anyway, the difference was hard to recognize. It seemed like he’d already been leaving forever.
Next door, the house didn’t explode or collapse. It just got quiet. I had nothing to say. At my house, we didn’t whisper our sorrows.
After that first night, Alex stopped acting like it mattered. He didn’t talk about it and I didn’t ask, because what was there to say? My dad had been gone since I was born. I had never lost anything.
We grew like weeds in the heat, cooking like the dahlias that Donna Reilly planted in the gap between our yards and then let die when her husband left. We sat with the fence between us, trying to see our own blurry futures in the garden.
“I’m the sunflowers,” I said, pointing to their stalks, how tall and strong they grew.
Alex shook his head. “I’m morning glories.”
The day was ungodly hot. The morning glories had all been dead for months.
Their dad had always been the beigest, heaviest thing about their house, with sandy eyes, like the saddest dog. He sent a postcard once from Malibu—just once. A picture of surfers, sunlight washing out their faces. In it, everything was pale, the sky and water and sand. Even the paper was soft, all frayed edges and bent corners.
I sat in the dirt, drawing fluffy clouds with a stick.
“I hate it here,” Alex said, in a way that made me think he meant it.
I leaned against the fence and hugged my knees, ashamed because I loved it.
Wendy said that this was just the way things went. She put her cigarette out like the period at the end of a sentence. “Everybody leaves,” she said. “It’s good while it lasts, but everybody takes off eventually.”
“If they just wait, though. If they wait for him, maybe he’ll come back.”
But I could tell she thought the idea was a stupid one. She didn’t believe in people coming back.
In the middle of the night when I was honest, I didn’t either.
All that was before, though—before I got tall and heavy eyed. Before I got a waist and hips and a job at the outlet mall. Before I got untouchable and sharp.
The days got short and the years got even shorter, like every part of me was speeding up.
Summers were bright and brutal. Too hot in the house or at the pool or in the shade. Too hot to move, too hot to breathe. I didn’t mind. The sun felt like the stare of some giant, benevolent god, and anyway, the night would always roll in again, bringing a dry, flickering wind—not cool, never cool, but wicked and electric, making the city feel wide awake.
Sometimes in the afternoons, Alex and I would walk along the Strip, not quite holding hands. The sidewalk was crowded.
At Treasure Island, we stopped and leaned against the railing, looking out over the water.
The lagoon was lined with plastic, full of scummy water and fiberglass frigates. The sails were ragged from the breeze that blew all summer. It had leached the color out of the mast flags, turning the boats into ghost ships. The air smelled black and greasy like gasoline. After a minute, I lit one of Wendy’s cigarettes.
“That’s so bad for you,” Alex said. It was the first thing he’d said in a while. “It’s like sucking on a can of Raid.”
“I wish I was a pirate,” I said, not meaning it, but just to say something. “I’d be a pirate captain with a parrot and everything. You could be my guy.”
“The first mate?”
“Yeah, that. We’d go all over the ocean and loot stuff.”
“I don’t want to loot stuff. I think it would scare people.”
“That’s kind of the point.”
He didn’t answer, just leaned his chin on his hand.
I’d started kissing boys. It didn’t matter where. In the backseats of cars, in the front seats. On the hoods at night, when the heat pressed down in waves. They never cared when our elbows made dents. They just pressed harder, and I pressed harder, waiting for summer to end.
Alex didn’t know. Or maybe he did, but he never said anything.
It wasn’t like the kissing meant something. They weren’t anything I wanted to keep. They were mouths, hands, shoulders, hips, but not like people.
Some of them had bruises. Their eyes glittered like armor. Some of them shook like birds, electric, pulses racing.
Under the streetlights, I would look down into the hollows of their palms. In the lines of their hands, I saw all the things they did to keep themselves from crying. When they drove me home, I never let them come up to the front door.
Out in the lagoon, the frigates looked broken down and pathetic. All the mannequins were chipped and wore eye patches.
Alex slid his hand closer to mine, like he was reaching for me and didn’t want to be reaching. His wrist was thin and freckled. His hand on the railing was palm down. I knew that if I took it, I’d be able to read the sadness there, so I didn’t. But he told me anyway.
“I think Milo’s going to join the navy,” he said, all in one long breath. “He said if Mom doesn’t kick her stupid, scuzzy boyfriend out, he’s leaving.”
That was pointless, though. We both knew Milo wouldn’t join anything. “Will she, do you think—kick him out?”
Alex shook his head. “I think they’re going to get married.”
I touched the base of my throat. “Oh.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“Except that Milo will leave, right?”
“Probably.”
I looked out at the water and imagined seagulls picking over the wreckage. “I didn’t know he was thinking about it.”
“Yeah. Neither did I.”
“Maybe he should be a pirate too. He’d make a good one.”
“But you wouldn’t.” Alex turned to look at me. I’d always thought he’d wind up taller than me eventually, but he was fifteen now, and still kind of like a kid. “You should be a mermaid.”
“And sit out in the middle of that pond, with everyone’s Coke cans and candy-bar wrappers floating around me?”
“Mermaids don’t live here,” he said. “I mean real mermaids, wild and rare.”
“Real mermaids.” I laughed, blowing smoke out toward the water.
“If I could do anything,” he said in a strange, husky voice, like he was trying hard to make me see, “anything in the world, I’d make you a mermaid. You could live in the middle of the ocean with the dolphins and the whales.”
“That might be nice,” I told him, grinding out my cigarette on the railing.
He nodded and moved closer, but we didn’t touch each other.
After a while, we walked home.
We went to parties, drank rum and Coke in crowded rooms. Not together, but not exactly apart.
A small but certain distance had opened between us, the way planets orbit but never touch. The rum tasted sweet and poisonous.
I never imagined I was in love with the boys I held down in cars, the ones who held me down in parks at night, the trees throwing heavy shadows. Cigarettes, cuts on their knuckles, a smell like tar, aftershave, exhaust. Breathing against their necks, I breathed asphalt, basketball courts, laundromat detergent, the wet ground, pressing up against my back. It was like the end of the world or something just as comforting. I breathed it in huge, rocking gasps.
Alex was different, though, addicted to the girls who ran their fingers through his hair, sprawled in his lap. Their eyelashes were long and brittle, black spiders on their cheeks. To kiss them, he had to imagine he was in love.
The party was at some rickety loft near downtown, all exposed concrete and empty, echoing ceilings.
I was dancing right up next to the DJ, eating Skittles, wearing a sequined halter, cutoffs, and not much else.
Alex was on the couch with a girl in a vinyl dress. I’d seen her at Crave and in the mosh pit at Hurricane. She was cute, in a squirmy puppy kind of way, with sweet, shiny lip gloss and high black boots. Skinny legs, okay face. They laughed, Alex stroking her hair, the outside of her arm. There was a greasy smear from the corner of his mouth to halfway up the side of his face. It was clear and colorless, but I knew that up close it would smell like candy.
I watched them. Her cheeks were round and berry pink, but her eyes had a hard, hungry look.
When Milo came slouching over with his collar up and his hair gelled all the way to heaven, I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t sad. He hadn’t left town when he said he would. He was never going to leave. He was taller than Alex, with a mouth like a dangerous magic trick.
He slid his arms around my waist and whispered, “You look hot.”
The room was a hundred and ten degrees. “I always look hot.”
He laughed, and his breath felt like static on my cheek. He was a game I liked to play sometimes.
There was a little coatroom in the back. He bit my neck and then it was all dark room and hands and teeth and the high, white voltage of my skin.
In the morning, I woke up on a dusty couch with stuffing spilling out. Milo was already gone.
Alex and I drove home in the pink-gray dawn.
He looked strange, hollow around the eyes. I wondered if that was how I looked when I came home in the dark with teeth marks on my neck, my mouth bitten, my arms bruised. I didn’t think so, somehow. I think I just looked normal. I think I felt okay.
“Have fun last night?” I asked in a scratchy voice, full of gravel and rust. I sounded like I’d been screaming.
He made a noise from the passenger seat, but it wasn’t a word.
“Are you okay?” My voice was clearer, and I glanced over.
He was staring out the window, watching the palm trees wash by in waves. He sat with his arms crossed and his elbows cupped in his hands. “That girl,” he said.
“She didn’t look so bad.” The light glowed red, and I braked. On the radio, someone was singing a song about a girl who gets kidnapped by pirates.
Alex cleared his throat, staring out the window. “I guess she used to . . . be with Milo.”
I didn’t tell him that sometimes you just wanted to kiss someone who didn’t matter to you. How it was just a rule that where there were parties and drugs, you ran into all this other stuff too—lonely, hateful people standing on the edge of whatever thrilled or hurt them. “Everyone’s been with Milo.”
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 uncertain, 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.
My reflection in the window told a different story. Fierce, fearless girl, dust sticking to her skin, smoky eyes and too-sharp teeth.
But that’s not right.
A black-haired girl who sat in the dark once, with a very hurt, very sad, used-to-be-small boy, and cried hard mermaid tears into his T-shirt, which was crunchy with dried blood.
Vega
The wind comes sweeping over the asphalt, hot as burning houses. It gusts between casino signs, between the blank-eyed gamblers who roll and roll for a lucky break that never comes.
The girl is alone, counting her chips in a city that never wants you to stop moving long enough to count. Here in the dark, the silence feels like an empty church, an echoing. No one has to be alone, and everyone is.
In her car, she cranes her neck to look at her reflection. Ravenous eyes, a raw red mouth, cherry chapped from biting her lips. There is a girl in the rearview mirror who would burn down everything if she got the chance.
Luck is a kind of magic all its own, a full and blooming promise. But here is a secret: it always runs out.
She leans her cheek against the glass and remembers how she used to dance and play her mother’s CDs.
If she were living someone else’s life, her mother’s maybe, the ending would be different. It would be easy to let go. She’d never feel sad for no reason. She’d make a playlist of all the superhero songs she can think of.
But even in the bright, dishonest history of her mind, the ending is the same. She could be her mother, her alter ego, her own skillfully invented self, someone else. The sadness doesn’t leave. When she turns the knobs in the bathroom, a rattling noise leaks out of the faucet like crying.
She presses her forehead to the steering wheel and tries to see her thoughts. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she can almost picture it. Vega is a sleek and sooty mirage, a gorgeous beast. Vega is her, and those, and them. She wonders if she’s scared to leave because Vega might come with her.
It’s forgivable to love something so much that it becomes you. The transformation happened years ago, and now she and Vega are like a glossy, monstrous pair of sisters, dripping black. She is just another fierce, mythical creature in this land of winners, beauties, criminals.
The part of the story she has never doubted is the house and the garden. Alex. The way they always found each other’s eyes. The way they loved each other more than family. And when she’s waited long enough, she turns the key. In the end, it’s not that hard. For the first time in her life, she knows what happens next, knows what she’s going to do.
Drive west like someone flying away from the devil.
Drive to the edge of the world, all the way to someplace softer, and not look back.