by Piper Lennox
My other hand is on the butter knife. I want to grab it. I want to use it to hurt him. My fingers refuse to move.
“It would be best if you did, too,” he says.
More hands appear and put me in the dress I sewed, and was punished for sewing, just hours ago. The hem has been shortened even farther by someone else.
On my head, they place a veil.
I wake slowly, not with a start. My heart still pounds, though, when I open my eyes and find hazy, swinging lights overhead.
Where am I?
Like I used to—like I haven’t needed to do in years—I pat the bed around me.
I turn my head and search for him.
Even just the sight of his shoulders calms me. For a long moment, I simply watch him drive.
The dream is not real. This is.
“Hey,” he says softly, startled when I appear at his elbow. I’m dragging the comforter behind me around my shoulders; he helps me pull the fabric closer so I can sit. Instead of the passenger seat, I choose the aisle.
“I had a dream.”
He clicks his tongue. “Nightmare?”
“I’m not sure.” It didn’t scare me while it happened, but does now. Was it the content, or the fact I dreamed of that place at all?
No…it’s that Mother refused to call me Juni. As though she’d forgotten who I really was.
“Jescha.”
Van shoots me a look, his face glowing orange on the right from the radio, and white from the string lights still buzzing at the back of the Transit. “Huh?”
My fingers dig the gunk from my eyes. I drop the blanket from my shoulders, then reach for his soda in the cupholder just above my face.
“My birth name wasn’t Juniper.” The bubbles sizzle down my throat. “It was Jescha.”
He’s quiet. The radio hits static, a dead zone between the last station and whatever will come next.
“You show me yours,” I whisper, pressing the cool metal of the soda can rim to my bottom lip, “I show you mine.”
“Eye for an eye,” he says, his exhale turning into a whistle as he thinks. I didn’t give him what he asked for—the full story of what I ran away from. But I gave him what I could: a piece.
Now he has to decide which piece of his story to give me.
“Dad was loaning you some of my mom’s old clothes until we could take you shopping, and you asked what happened to her. He told you about the brain aneurysm. That it was sudden.”
Van reaches for the soda that isn’t there. I lift it slowly, until he can grab it. He takes a long gulp and passes it back.
“You said that was awful, not getting any warning. But Dad said no, the worst part for him was knowing I was there when it happened. Do you remember that?”
Even with the lights, the darkness feels almost too thick to nod.
I remember it perfectly. I just didn’t know he’d been listening.
Maybe I should’ve guessed as much, though. Van was always nearby. Always near me.
“I wasn’t there with her,” he says, and thumbs his lips when he forces out a laugh. Probably so I won’t hear how hard he swallows afterwards.
“I’d gotten mad at her about something and left,” he whispers. “She was alone when she died.”
My limbs feel like a new calf standing in its first blast of spring air. When I try to climb into the passenger seat, the task suddenly feels impossible. I stay where I am.
His elbow brushes the top of my head as he reaches for the radio and turns it off, the static silenced.
“There,” he says. “We’re even.”
I nod. “Balance.”
He drives on. I stay awake and sit with him.
Through the windshield above, I watch the stars. Eventually, I realize they’re just the reflection of the lights behind us.
Nineteen
In the morning, I skip my usual Instagram post to edit Van’s video from Ohio, showing him the results over breakfast.
“Good editing.”
“That compliment looked like it killed you.” Smiling, I pull the laptop back towards me on the bed. He’s lying sideways across the foot, sleepily chewing a hashbrown patty, while I’m cross-legged by the pillows.
All I can think about is him climbing in my bed at the ranch, and his silhouette against my doorway.
“Go back to sleep, Juniper. You’re okay.”
“Earth to Fairy Lights.” Van snaps his fingers between the laptop screen and my face. When I blink and look at him, he pulls the dream symbol guide out from under my foot.
“I asked,” he stresses, “is this any good? Saw you reading it last night.”
“Oh.” I shake off the memory. So what if we’re in a bed together again? Space is limited; it’s a matter of convenience. It means even less now than it did in the Hamptons.
Then why is your heartbeat going insane?
While Van opens the book at arm’s length over his head, I tell him my grievances with it: how everything means something, and nothing means what you think it means. “Which is stupid. I have dreams I’m posting to Instagram or driving because, like...that’s what I do during the day. It’s what my brain has to work with. But books like these insist there’s some deep psychological meaning behind it.”
“Yeah,” he sighs, “it’s annoying when some self-proclaimed expert analyzes everything about you, huh?”
I stretch out my leg to kick him. He catches my foot in his hand as easily as snagging a baseball in a glove.
“Listen to this one,” he says, flipping over onto his stomach. “‘Dreaming that you have a tattoo means you want something to set you apart from everyone else. It can be a sign you think you are better than those around you, and feel the need to show it outwardly.’”
“I’ll buy that, Mr. Arrogance.”
He squeezes my foot until it cramps. I yank it back. “‘However,’” he goes on loudly, “‘it can also be a warning. Perhaps an event occurring in your waking hours that you’ve deemed fleeting or insignificant will actually leave a permanent mark on you, in ways you can’t predict.’”
“See what I mean? Like, what if you just dream of tattoos because, I don’t know...you want more, or just got one, or because you drive past a tattoo parlor randomly? It’s so dumb.”
“Then why are you reading it?”
“I found it on a bench and thought it’d be interesting. All it’s done is make me mad at the waste of trees.”
He sits up. “I would’ve thought you’d be super into dream interpretation. But I also had you figured for a crystal-wielding, aura-reading—”
“I get it.” I wave off his laugh, which doubles when I hold up my rose quartz necklace from a shelf. “Alternative stuff is interesting to study, but I only buy into it when it makes sense to me. Dream symbolism does not.”
“But some giant, invisible scale in the universe does?”
“Yep.”
Immediately, I feel a current between us and know we’re both thinking of last night. We’ve yet to talk about our little confession swap. I can’t decide if I want to or not.
“See,” he says, swinging his legs so that his heels thunk the cabinets under the bed, “my mom was Catholic, and I always heard you got punished for bad shit you did, and that you had to atone…but not once did someone tell me you’d get rewarded for the good deeds you did. You were expected to do them no matter what. Maybe that’s why I’ve got trouble buying into your little theory.”
“I’d be more shocked if you did, actually. Doesn’t seem like your style.” I hop down to gather our breakfast trash. Really, it’s because I know my pulse won’t slow until we’ve separated. “But yeah, I was taught that same thing.”
“You were raised Catholic, too?”
“No.” I try to think of a way to elaborate. What was I raised as?
In the end, I decide to gloss over it and move on.
“Anyway, it never made sense to me that it wouldn’t work both ways. Because it’s not enough to just not be b
ad. People do that all the time. Just float through life, totally isolated, minding their own business—but never noticing the person beside them. Never helping out somebody else. It’s easy to be ‘not bad.’ Being actively good, intentionally kind…that’s way harder. So we should get rewarded for it.”
I ball up the fast food bag and pitch it into the trash.
“Even if the only reward we get,” I finish, “is that we feel good about being good.”
“Ah, see: that’s why they don’t include a reward system. Pride.” Van flops back on the bed again. “One of the seven deadly sins. There’s also gluttony, lust, wrath...all the fun shit in life, really.”
I nod while he speaks, only partially aware of it.
“You forgot avarita,” I add. “Greed.”
When he stares at me, I refuse to look up.
“Acedia: sloth.” My throat is every bit as dry as it was last night when I took his soda, so I grab his leftover coffee from the counter and drink before finishing. “Vanagloria. Vanity, which bears envy.”
He furrows his brow. “You sure you weren’t raised Catholic?”
“My house was just...strict.”
“I should say the fuck so, if you had to learn the heavy-duty Latin for everything.” He stands and follows me to the front, apparently forgoing his morning nap to keep me company. I don’t fight it, even if it’s obvious he needs sleep. “Is that why you ran away?”
My laugh feels like it cracks my chest open from the inside. “Sure.”
Van rolls his eyes, realizing again this wasn’t the whole story. Just one more piece.
About two minutes down the road, he sits up and says, “Oh, my turn.”
“Yep. Showed you mine.”
He settles against the door and taps his foot. “Let’s see, uh...well, I punched my childhood bully straight in the dick once.”
“Oof,” I laugh.
“Yeah. And instead of getting congratulated on standing up to him—which was my old man’s advice, by the way; he didn’t tell me how to do it, just that I had to—I got punished. As if it weren’t enough the dude kicked me in the balls twice as hard as I punched him, I got suspended for a week. And back home? My parents made me stand in the corner of our living room for, like, an hour, with my arms stretched out, holding a Bible in one hand and phonebook in the other.”
“Um...I can understand the Bible, I guess, but why the phonebook?”
“Mom couldn’t find a second Bible.”
I laugh again. It feels amazing, taking the weight of both my confessions and dissolving them into smoke.
“Dad promised me if I stood up to the bully, things would get better. But then I finally did, and all I saw was shit getting worse.” Van rakes his teeth over his lip as he grabs my iPod from the glove box, fishes for the aux cord on the floor, and hooks it up. Within seconds, the crime podcast floats from the speakers, right where we left off. “Learned a good lesson, that day. ”
“Not to trust promises,” I say softly, but Van shakes his head.
“That bullies always play to win.” He stares at the iPod screen like a photograph he forgot existed, but still has memorized. “And the harder you hurt them, the harder they hurt you back.”
Twenty
“Get some good photos?”
I try to tame the sarcasm when Juniper gets back from her stroll around the parking lot, but it’s tough. We’re parked at a Wal-Mart off some dead, rural route, and no matter how many times she repeats that crap about nature finding its way in, ugly outsides harboring little gems of beauty, I just can’t see it.
“I did.” She sits beside me and flips through her camera roll. Somehow, she got the last moment of the sunset without any evidence it was taken from a commercial mammoth’s parking lot.
“Your followers really love sunsets and sunrises, huh?”
“That one’s just for me,” she says, “but yeah, actually. And photos of the Transit, and the food I eat, products I use...that’s what lifestyle bloggers do. Post pictures of their life.”
“Just the pretty stuff, though.”
“Not always. I’ve shown the negatives of traveling, too, like when the engine’s messed up or a tire goes flat. Or when my solar water heater broke. Which, as you know, still hasn’t changed.”
Absentmindedly, I watch her open Instagram. My profile’s transformation is well underway, and I’ve yet to even glance at the damn thing. Juniper does it so effortlessly and fast, I’ve left her to handle everything for now.
“I’ll post your ride from this morning on YouTube before I go to sleep,” she tells me, “then a preview to your Instagram story, and a capture to the actual profile.” She tosses her phone up onto the bed. “We do need to get you on TikTok soon, though.”
“I’ll get on TikTok when you stand on a board.” I poke the sunburn she got earlier, when we found a trail at a local park. We spent hours there. Me, skating; her, filming my every move.
“Both those things benefit you, though, not me.”
“Beg to differ. You’d love riding.” I get up, dig out the board she likes best and hand it to her, then position my helmet on her head. “It’s freeing. The biggest rush you’ll ever get.”
Glancing around, she smirks, “In a parking lot?”
“Gotta start small. I shouldn’t have let you try on a trail, first. Too intimidating.”
As she steps on, knees shaking just a bit, she asks, “Even for you?”
“I’ve got a rare genetic mutation that doesn’t let me feel fear, anymore. Not enough to dictate my decisions.”
“Must be nice.”
“You’d think.” I take her hands and pull her along the faded lines of the lot while she finds her balance. “Fear is useful, though. It’s our most important instinct, being able to know what’s dangerous and what isn’t.”
“In that case,” she says when she wobbles, “I should get off this thing, because my instinct says I’m going to fall.”
“I won’t let you fall, Fairy Lights. Stop looking at your feet—look at the horizon. Pay attention to where you’re going, not what you’re doing.”
“It’s impossible not to. There’s, like, a hundred little things to do at once, just to stay upright.”
“Exactly. And you can’t very well think about all hundred things at the same time.”
With the hand not death-gripping her elbow, I lift her chin. She swallows and drags her eyes upward. First into my face, then out to the distance.
“So focus on where you’re headed,” I tell her. “Nothing else. All the little things will fall into place if you do that.”
As she steadies, I loosen my hold on her arm, but don’t let go. “That’s it. Now get some ground under you. Shift your weight to this foot, then use the other to push.”
“So I’m pretty much just balancing on one foot, then?”
“When you’re trying to gain speed, yeah.”
“Oh, kind of like the tree pose. Okay...okay, I can do that.”
“It is nothing,” I deadpan, “like the tree pose.”
Yoga terms must help, though, because she handles the board with more confidence after that. I tell her to try riding from the curb a few yards away, to the back of the Transit.
“All on my own?”
“All on your own.” Halfway sitting against the bumper, I fold my arms, cross one ankle over the other, and nod at her. “Go.”
“If I do this,” she calls as she trudges away with the board in both hands like a fire log, “you have to try yoga with me at least once, before we get to Colorado.”
“Why?”
“Anger management.”
My laugh’s too quiet. Slow-motion acrobatics and little stretches might keep her calm, but I’m pretty sure her anger rarely gets hotter than a candle flame. Try throwing a thimble of water on a fully engulfed building: that’s about all yoga could do for me.
“You forgot to teach me one thing,” she shouts.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“How to stop.” She blurts this just before landing directly on me, the board rolling under the Transit when I grab her hips.
We laugh. She’s breathless from the ride. I’m breathless from her.
When she quiets, I do the same. Her eyes trace my mouth.
“Good catch,” she exhales.
“Good ride. You feel like a god, yet?”
“Still human, unfortunately.” Her hands brace on my chest as she pushes off, back to balancing herself. I keep my hands on her hips just a second longer than necessary.
“I did feel a teeny, tiny rush, though,” she calls, as she crawls under the bumper to grab the board. I stare at her ass and hear, yet again, Dad’s advice to stop thinking with my dick.
Unfortunately, I’m not so sure my brain’s a decent substitute.
I’m not just imagining fucking her. At least that could be attributed to her extremely fuckable body, and good math—proportions and body parts my caveman instincts know will fit perfectly with mine.
No…what I’m imagining is much, much more dangerous.
My lips want the small of her back pressed against them. My skin wants endless contact with hers, until our sweat mixes and the world’s sharpest bloodhound couldn’t tell us apart.
Strangest of all, my arms want to hold her after we’re done—after I’ve taken so much from her body, all she’s got left to give me is her soul.
When she surfaces and puts the board back in its compartment, I stare at how her shirt rode up and her shorts rode down, leaving me to drown in the space between. I wonder how the nodes of her spine would look arching up from a mattress.
“Rush?” I repeat.
“Yeah. You were right, it is freeing. I see why you like it so much.” She nudges me back so she can shut the doors. Her fingertips on my chest might as well be a Pulp Fiction syringe. “Though I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest rush—”
I wouldn’t either.
Not once I’ve had you.
“—but I guess that’s because I was in a parking lot going, like, two miles an hour.” The dying light gets her face glowing when she spins to face me. “Thanks for making me do that. Don’t forget our deal, though. You owe me one really good, honest try at yoga.”