Sarah flicks at her septum ring with one chipped black thumbnail. “You’re both my best friends. I don’t want to think about my birthday without either of you.”
I hand Sarah her dad’s Walkman cassette player—the small, simple connection between Sarah and her obsession with terrible music from the nineties. With a quiet glance at the door, Sarah takes a second to pop the Antestor cassette into the cradle before she clips it onto her hip.
I’m the first to march to the door. Sarah’s reflection in the closet door mirror breaks my heart: She rubs her face with both hands and swipes under her lower lashes with her middle fingers to tidy the liner rimming her eyes. Her shoulders tug toward the floor, and with a frown, she grabs her keys from on top of the microwave to lock their dorm room door behind us. When my phone finally pings again with a Slash/Spot notification on the way to the car, I’m in no position to answer it.
CHAPTER 2
RHODES
We all have that one friend we make poor choices with, one who gives you permission to leave your problems in the rearview mirror and only focus on what’s in front of you. The kind that wouldn’t know a good decision if it slapped her in the face, that pulls you into her vortex of weird ideas, and family drama, and cassette tapes of nineties Christian metal bands because they’re the only topic she and her dad know how to talk about.
She’s my roommate and my “manic pixie dream girl.”
It isn’t flattering for either of us to admit I think of her that way, even if it’s only a 99 percent platonic MPDG situation and I’m not actually objectifying anyone.
But still: I know it.
She knows it.
And I also know that tonight I chipped off a little piece of her “manic pixie dream girl” heart earlier. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I act that way, and I don’t know why I lash out at her when it’s Iliana I hate, and I don’t know what I’m doing here tonight at all.
I don’t deserve to be her friend, and I wish she would have just done what I feel like she probably wanted to do (and the thing I know Iliana would have wanted): to tell me to stay home.
Sarah’s eyes are rimmed in heavy black liner that screams against her pale skin, and she seems to have largely forgotten about our three-way suckfest back in the dorms before dinner. She’s a peroxide-bleached blur in the dark, running and laughing with the handles of painter’s buckets swung over each arm, her dad’s red-and-blue flannel button-down billowing behind her with each blast of chilly autumn wind. Iliana Vrionides’s short legs pump twice as fast to get her half as far as the rest of us, and her body practically vibrates with tension: Her shoulders are tense, and her hands are balled where they swing at her sides. She’s Venus of Willendorf, short and strong and feminine in shredded jeans and a shirt that reads “unapologetically fat.” Ninety-seven percent humidity has given her honeyed curls sentience.
I don’t need to be Iliana’s friend anymore to know what she’s thinking: Not again.
She’s eighteen now, and trouble will stay with her forever.
On the other side of the fence, crowds press into metal bleachers, against concession stands, through parking lots. The sky is as wide as it is dark over our heads, spangled with stars, like diamonds scattered in blue velvet. A perfect night for a high school football game—even if neither football team belongs to the Conservatory, since we don’t have one at all.
This is the song of the South: cheerleaders chanting, trumpets blaring, and a referee’s whistle punctuating another down.
It’s Sarah’s birthday, and it’s homecoming at the high school Sarah—and Iliana—left after their freshman year for higher ground where we all go to school now, the Alabama Conservatory of the Arts and Technology. According to Sarah, Iliana left Victory Hills High School like she leaves everything else: scorched earth, dousing every bridge with gasoline, and dropping matches on her way out. Sarah told me once that she doesn’t know which came first: Iliana hating, or being hated.
Sarah’s experience was different, and tonight feels more like catharsis than birthday shenanigans.
“Rhodes!” Sarah calls to me from the field house. “We’re going to get caught! Come on!”
Iliana is a smaller shadow to Sarah’s left, stooped with her hands pressed into the tops of her thighs and panting. I fast-walk to keep up, but the very thought of running is exhausting on an existential level.
My therapist likes to tell me there are two kinds of exhaustion: one for your body and one for your soul. I like to tell her she’s full of crap—I’m just tired.
I don’t care where my exhaustion comes from. I want to go home. I want to work on the next update for my Alice in Wonderland fan fiction comic, Hearts and Spades. I want to spend the night talking with Cheshire—my coauthor—about everything and nothing. I don’t feel much these days, but I ache for this.
“This is a terrible idea, Sarah—” Iliana’s nasal-heavy voice carries down the hill. “I can’t—”
When I finally reach the top, Sarah is squatting with both buckets positioned in front of her, and Iliana’s stooping over the top of Sarah’s head. The field house is spectacularly unspectacular as far as school architecture goes: It’s cinder blocks on four sides, built like a little LEGO house complete with rusted metal doors. At the bottom of the hill, the game continues.
The first bars of “Dirt Road Anthem” echo up from where the football field recesses into the valley below. A glance at the scoreboard, and we have five minutes of play before halftime—more like fifteen, given the fact that both teams are playing dirty and the referee’s throwing penalty flags approximately every eleven seconds.
Sarah pries the lids off the painter’s buckets and pulls a paint roller for each of us from the bag slung over her shoulder.
“We’re going to get arrested,” Iliana says.
Her lips are pressed together, and her brows are high on her forehead, and everything about her is the fly in this night’s chardonnay. Her eyes shift to me, then to the thin, rectangular profile of my phone in my front pocket.
“Good thing your brother’s an attorney,” Sarah says. Iliana makes a face.
It wouldn’t be the first time Iliana’s oldest brother has gotten any of us out of hot water.
I wish I’d thought of the barb first.
Instead, I dutifully take the roller from Sarah’s hand. Our eyes meet.
That thing between us—the wildness in her and the numbness in me—finds where it puzzles together, and before I know it, her grin spreads across my face. I grab a handful of the stuff that sloshes in the bucket and sling it into Sarah’s hair; she lets out a shriek of a laugh and dumps a handful of the slimy substance down the front of my shirt. Iliana and Sarah share eye contact for the slightest of moments, Sarah grinning and Iliana frowning, but after a split second Sarah slings the substance onto the wall instead.
“What is this?!” I yelp, pawing at my cheeks and squinting in the dark for a better view of the grit that covers my hands.
“It’s, like, blended-up moss,” Sarah says, dipping the roller into the mixture. She applies it to the cinder blocks, instead of me, this time. “And liquid fertilizer.”