Last Love, Everlasting

“Here,” Dash says quietly and sets down the two Styrofoam cups full of coffee. “Tastes like shit but at least it’s hot.”

Pinkie nods, but doesn’t look her way. She was drawn and pale, staring at the white wall unseeingly, shivering underneath the thick, scratchy-looking wool blanket. Her pajama top matches her pajama bottoms. Pink with white stars. Who wore actual pajama sets nowadays? Dash thinks they’re cute. Childish, too, but cute. They’re not the sort of pajamas that should be worn in February, though.

God, God, all of this is just so fucked up.

She tries not to lose her composure, and to distract herself from doing just that, picks up the chair that’s on the other side of the interrogation table and brings it next to Pinkie’s. She sets it down, sets herself down on it. Her knee immediately starts bouncing. She’s cold, too, clad only in a pair of sweatpants and a thin long sleeve shirt. The cold is humid—the type that sinks into the stomach and makes her shiver from the inside out. She wonders where Pinkie got the blanket and if she could get one, too. Then she remembers that she’s a murderer and that cops probably would give blankets to murderers.

She wants to wrap herself around Pinkie, to share their body heat and to comfort the both of them. She’s afraid that Pinkie would draw away from her and reject her, though, so she sits there and tries not to think about Isaac Pierce’s hot blood and brain matter falling onto her face.

She’s probably going to get PTSD from this.

“You just couldn’t help yourself, huh?”

The words jar her back from her mental replay of the scariest moment of her life, and she’s grateful for all of the three seconds that it takes for the words and the tone to register.

“What?” she asks dumbly.

“Couldn’t help yourself from being a hero, and all that.”

She leans forward a little to stare past Pinkie and at Maggie Pierce. Pinkie’s twin is also wrapped in a wool blanket, and her pajamas are also a matching set, but not the ones Pinkie wears. Maggie’s are red with little black hearts on them. They look even more childish on her than the ones that Pinkie wears look on Pinkie. Way less cute, way more awkward and laugh-worthy. If she hadn’t just murdered a man, Dash would probably make fun of Maggie for them.

“I don’t—” Dash closes her eyes and tries not to vomit from the memories of the past three hours. A fucking hero? What? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Our lives were fine!” Maggie screams suddenly and slams her hands on the table. Dash notices that her eyes are red and puffy, and feels wretched when she realizes that the girl had probably been silently crying for God knows how long now. She tries, really tries, not to bristle at Maggie’s insinuation and tone of voice. She dips her head, stares at the steam lazily dancing from the cups of coffee. She thinks she’s still in shock because she can’t summon any words. What words existed to explain or defend what she’d done? She touches the garish, blue-and-red hand marks on her throat.

I didn’t mean to kill him?

It was self-defense?

It was him or me?

He was a monster?

The silence stretches on while she bounces possible explanations around in her brain, scoffing at the inadequacy of every one. At her side, Pinkie doesn’t say anything or move anything. She barely blinks. A part of Dash wants to shake her from her stupor. The other part of her is scared to fucking death of the moment when Pinkie finally wakes up from her shock and turns either hurt or angry or blaming eyes on Dash. What would Dash say then?

The scrape of the chair legs against the floor is loud and jarring. Dash’s head snaps up, but it’s only Maggie getting up from her seat. She meets Dash’s eyes, glares at them for one silent moment, and then shuffles out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Dash stares at the door and then looks back down to the table. Maggie’s coffee still stands untouched and chilling rapidly in the cold interrogation room.

Dash takes the cup for herself and downs it. Her throat still aches from Isaac Pierce’s attempt to collapse her windpipe. She closes her eyes against the assault of vivid memories and finishes the coffee. It really is shit. When she puts the cup down, she feels an unfamiliar weight on her knee, halting her bouncing leg. She stares dumbly at Pinkie’s small pale hand against the gray fabric of her sweats, but when she looks up Pinkie’s face is unchanged.

Dash swallows, trembles. Her leg starts to bounce again unconsciously, but she stops it. She realizes that she can’t feel her toes because it’s so cold. She only has an old pair of Pumas on her feet and no socks. The coolness of Pinkie’s palm bleeds through her thin sweatpants and onto her thigh. Dash bites her lip and reaches her hand down to lay it on top of the one on her knee. It’s almost pathetic how nervous she is, how slow and cautious her movements are. She’s held Pinkie’s hand plenty of times before.

Well, no. Dash scowls, guilty again. That was not the type of relationship they shared. The Dash of five hours ago would never have stood for something as lovey-dovey as holding hands. Unless it was with AJ, of course.

Pinkie’s hand is frigid against her own and Dash’s brows shoot up before furrowing with worry. She gently pries Pinkie’s hand from her knee, flips it to the side and laces their fingers together loosely. It’s weird, and a part of her squirms in distaste because a part of her still thinks herself way too cool for this type of PDA. But she’s also killed Pinkie’s father, so the last damn thing she can do is hold her hand and provide what comfort she can.

She keeps coming back to it, the killing. It’s like her mind is on a leash, not permitted to stray too far from it before snapping back to it. Pinkie’s mere presence is a reminder. The small ache in her throat every time that she swallows is a reminder. The cold interrogation room is a reminder.

Dash gnaws on her lip, just shy of drawing blood. The pain clears her mind, and she brings her left hand to hold onto Pinkie’s, covering the back of it while her right holds the palm until Pinkie’s hand is sandwiched between her two.

The door opens and Dash jumps, taking her hands away as if scalded. She looks at the doorway, expecting to see Maggie, but it’s just one of the younger officers. He looks not much older than them, with dark hair cut in a military high-and-tight, his uniform neat and pressed. He doesn’t enter the room, standing just inside the threshold with his hand on the doorknob keeping the door only halfway open.

“Hey, the Chief said you guys are good to go. You got a place to stay for the night?”

Dash furrows her brow at the question because of course she has a—and then she remembers that her house is currently a crime scene. Her mind jumps to the other alternative: AJ’s place. Except she wasn’t entirely sure that she was welcomed there, either, after the other night. Pinkie’s place is wholly and completely out of the question.

She shakes her head after a long hesitation. “No, I really don’t,” her voice sounds weak, squeaking and hoarse all at once.

“She’s staying with me,” Pinkie says, and Dash jumps at the sound of her voice, glancing to her side at the other girl. She is? Pinkie stares at the officer calmly, her face relaxed but her hands laced tightly together on the table.

The officer glances between them and shrugs. “Well, I’m ready to take you, whenever you wanna go.”

“We’ll go now,” Pinkie says, rising from her chair. Dash stares up at her for a long moment—her voice and posture are so different than what Dash is used to that she has a hard time reading her. She speaks like an adult, calm and controlled and not at all high pitched. Dash’s hackles rise, knowing exactly what Pinkie is doing.

“C’mon, Dashie.” Pinkie reaches a hand down to her as if she needs assistance getting up. Dash glares at the hand, suddenly irrationally angry. Or rather, it’s not irrational. It’s entirely rational because she’s told Pinkie time and again to not do this dumb shit. She gets up on her own and glares into Pinkie’s eyes when she’s at full height. The effect is perhaps ruined because Pinkie has a full seven inches on her, but Dash doesn’t care. Pinkie drops her hand, stares back into Dash’s eyes calmly.

The officer clears his throat from the doorway and Dash turns her glare on him. He points a thumb behind him and says, “All ready, then?”

Dash opens her mouth hotly, but a cold touch to her hand interrupts her as Pinkie steps into her peripheral vision. She laces her fingers with Dash’s and squeezes once. Her temper simmers down, just like that.

“We have to talk,” Dash spits at Pinkie. She’s still irritated, but not enraged anymore. Pinkie nods and silently tugs on her arm. They join the officer at the doorway and then go through it and down a corridor.

The corridor is even colder than the interrogation room, and Dash huddles a little closer to Pinkie and wonders how the police officers don’t freeze to fucking death working here. It’s still and quiet, and the sound of their footsteps echo as if they’re the loudest things in the world. The walls are painted tan and made out of those ridiculously large cinder blocks. It reminds Dash of the school. A lot, since the floor is very similar to the one at the school, too. And, jeez, school—that was still going to happen, huh? The educational system wouldn’t care that she now has a good excuse to be unfocused.

They take a left at the end of the corridor and walk down another, shorter one that has a metal door at the end. The illuminated word exit hangs on the ceiling right before the door, and the small square of glass above the long, push-in handle reveals the absolute blackness of the world outside. Dash wonders what time of night it is, and then decides that it can’t be that late since she killed Isaac at about six and it’s been something like four or five hours since then. The interrogation room that she was in had a clock, but Pinkie’s and Maggie’s didn’t.

Pinkie’s thumb slowly strokes the side of her’s, almost absentmindedly. It’s comforting, kind of ticklish, but the PDA is still weird. What even are they now, her and Pinkie? Dash isn’t with AJ anymore. Never again will be, either—she gets that now. She gets that Anna-Jane and her are going different places in life, and yet…

Well, they’re just not together anymore. And Dash just killed Pinkie’s abusive father for her. So…?

Maybe she should just lay off the girls for a while. It seems like a prudent idea. Just focus on racing and running, keeping her head down for the rest of the school year. Like it’s always been; just the track and her car and girls. Except without the girls. Music, too. Maybe she should put some actual practice hours into the six-string instead of letting it gather dust at the corner of her bedroom.

The officer opens the door for the both of them, and a blast of cold wind pushes a few dead leaves inside. Maggie stands beside the building, just a few feet from the door. She sobs and hiccups, the blanket wrapped tightly around her as tears freely fall her face in streams. Wordlessly, Pinkie lets go of Dash’s hand and goes to her sister. They hug, and Maggie’s cries become louder until Pinkie tucks her face into her shoulder and muffles them.

Dash and the officer stand with the door at their backs, trying not to gawk awkwardly. Or, at least, Dash is trying not to gawk, but the officer is clearly also uncomfortable—he puts his hands into his pockets and stares at the ground, looking all the world as if he’s having a personal silent moment for the fallen, or something. Again Dash feels wretched. Maggie practically hangs draped on Pinkie, and Pinkie strokes her hair and mutters things to her in such a quiet tone of voice that Dash can’t make out any words even though she stands not three feet from them.

“Let’s wait in the car,” she mutters to the officer and then walks towards one of the two police cruisers in the almost-empty parking lot. She doesn’t even know if it’s the right one, and she tries not to think of herself as a coward or as heartless for running away from the scene like she is. But, the fuck was she supposed to do? Or say? Nothing would make anything any better. She’s the reason that four women don’t have a father anymore.

She really, really doesn’t want to go to Pinkie’s house with her. Spending the night at the station sounds preferable to it.

She gets into the police cruiser. It’s a Ford Mustang, one of the older models, and she smiles a little when she thinks that if she were ever to lead the police on a high-speed chase, they wouldn’t be able to catch her. A mustang had nothing against her S7. She wonders if she could grab her car from the house in the morning, or if it was also somehow a part of the area of investigation. And if it was, did that mean that police officers were poking around inside her car right now?

It pisses her off and worries her at the same time. She has weed in her car. Underneath the driver’s seat, since she wasn’t stupid. It’s not even enough to roll a proper blunt. She and Pinkie had smoked pretty much all of it. Still, though. Was there a minimum on how much weed you could get caught with and not get charged? If there was, she was sure she was within the minimum; there was barely a thumbnail’s amount in the bag. Shit. Shit and fuck. That thought was probably going to keep her up all night. They’d find it, wouldn’t they? They were cops, of course they would.

She laces her fingers together tightly and puts her hands between her knees. She wants to ask the cop if her car is being searched, but he’d probably get suspicious of the random question and call up his other cop buddies and specifically tell them to search Dash’s car.

She sulks and wishes that Pinkie would hurry the fuck up. She also wishes that the officer would turn the car on so that she could stop shivering from the inside out.

“I went to his church, you know.”

She looks up and meets the officer’s eyes. Her mouth goes dry and her throat closes up. It feels like she’s being strangled again. ‘I’m trying not to think about him right now, you know’, she wants to snap back.

“Yeah?” she croaks instead. A horrifying thought comes to her—because what if this guy was Isaac’s friend? One of his ‘followers’. Isaac Pierce was a powerful man. Respected.

Shit.

The cop gives a tsk as if he’s disgusted. “Yeah. Few times. My wife and I were looking around the churches, trying to find one that fit us, you know?”

Dash nods, even though she doesn’t know. She’s never gone to church a day in her life. But at least it sounds like the cop isn’t one of Isaac’s regulars.

The officer rubs his clean-shaven jaw. His thick eyebrows knit together and furrow. “He was a good speaker. Whipped the congregation into a fervor with his preaching—” He cuts off and his nostrils flare. He shakes his head. “—but every once in a while there was this…look on his face. Wild and insane. Crazy. I liked him just fine except in those moments. I’m a vet, yeah? Iraq. Some of the locals had looks like that—you learn to read people’s character really fast when every fifth person you meet is trying to kill you, maybe. Sonovabitch.” The curse word is hissed out with a surprising amount of anger as if the cop blames himself. Dash decides that the cop is alright, as far as cops go. And she’s relieved that he’s not on Isaac’s ‘side,’ as it were.

“What’s your name?” he asks her. He places his left wrist on the steering wheel and turns his body a little to the side to face her in the passenger seat.

“Dash,” she says. “Uh—Rae. Rae.”

She hasn’t introduced herself by her birth name in years and wonders why it slips out now. It feels weird on her tongue, a little alien. Somewhere along the way she stopped thinking of herself as Rae altogether. It doesn’t take much soul-searching to pinpoint the moment when it happened.

The cop smiles at her stumble. “Two names, huh? That’s okay—I’m Corporal. It’s my slave name. Also, Daniel.”

“I’m Dash,” she clarifies. She knows that he’s trying to make her feel better, and while usually it would make her roll her eyes and close up more, this time she makes a conscious effort not to. She wonders when it was she got so unfriendly. “Rae was my mom’s name. But we don’t talk about her.”

“’We’ being…?”

“My dad and I.” Shit. And now all that she can think of is her father coming back to find the police ransacking the house and a corpse in the middle of the living room. But, the police called him, didn’t they? She vaguely remembers ratting off his cell number to one of them. She thought that she had even talked to him for a few seconds—her memory of the last few hours is hazy at best. Maybe she’s not okay.

“So, is she your girl?”

She blinks and looks at Daniel. He has a good sense of timing, she decides. That’s twice now that he’s brought her back from thinking about things she’d rather not think about.

“The blonde one,” he clarifies.

“Um.” The noise escapes her mouth before she has a chance to stop it, and she leaves it at that for a few seconds because she doesn’t know how to answer the question. “Not…really? It’s complicated. We’ve just kinda been fucking around.”

“And he had a problem with it,” Daniel finishes.

“Yeah,” Dash says.

There is a tap on the glass and Dash jumps a little and looks up at Pinkie’s face staring at her through the window. She opens the car door.

“Hey,” Pinkie mutters. “Mags and I are going to take the truck. You want to ride with us?”

Dash furrows her eyebrows and wonders how she missed the truck in the parking lot. She can see it little ways away behind Pinkie. She can even see Maggie huddled inside of it, and the prospect of an awkward and tense journey all the way out of the town limits doesn’t interest her at all. She knows without a doubt that she’s made an enemy of Magdalene Pierce, but she also knows that—well, that she wants Pinkie with her. She wants to comfort her, and get comforted in return. Except that being around Pinkie and Maggie constantly reminds her of what she did.

“Nah, I’m good,” she says. “We’ll follow you guys.”

Something flickers in Pinkie’s expression for a second, and then she nods. “Okay. I’ll see you at the house, then.” She pauses, and their eyes meet and hold, and Dash suddenly and simply wants to kiss her. Pinkie smiles a small smile at her and closes the door. Dash watches her walk to the truck. Daniel finally starts up the car.

“She’s taking this very well,” he says quietly. Pinkie gets into the truck and it sputters to life, the headlights snapping on. Dash looks away and back to Daniel.

“Too well,” she agrees. She decides with a certainty that she likes Daniel. “I don’t like it. She’s suppressing it. She does that, even though I told her to stop. It pisses me off.”

“It’s not healthy,” Daniel concurs. They follow the Pierces’ truck out of the parking lot and onto the deserted road. “But, people deal with things their own way. And the stuff she’s had to deal with, living in a house like hers—no offense, but I don’t think you’ll be able to break her of the habit, no matter how much she likes you. It’s a survival instinct, now.”

“I get it,” Dash concedes, because she does. She wonders if Pinkie lied to her about just how much Isaac Pierce knocked her around. She said it wasn’t that much, but if it led to her developing a survival instinct, then it must have been a lot more than ‘not much’.

“So what do you want to do when you graduate?” Daniel asks her, again doing that trick he does when she gets too far gone within her own head. She appreciates it. She appreciates him.

She shrugs. “I want to get out of this town.”

“College?”

She snorts in answer.

He glances to the side at her. “What’s wrong with college?”

“It’s for dweebs and eggheads. I’m not going back to school right after I’ve escaped it. No thanks.” They slow down as they go through Main Street. Her eyes linger on Burt’s Garage like they always do.

“You’ll regret it one day,” Daniel promises her. “College girls are hot—and college parties are awesome. It gives you an excuse to be young for four more years.”

“No thanks,” Dash maintains.

He laughs. “Okay, so what then? Where are you going, what are you doing?”

She wonders why adults are always so focused on teenagers’ life plans. She was eighteen, for fuck’s sake, why did they demand that she know what she was going to do for the rest of her life?

She throws out, “NASCAR.”

“You want to be a race car driver?” He says as if he would never have guessed it. “Well, shit, alright, then.”

They pass the post office, the unofficial end of Main Street. The light ahead turns yellow, and the Pierces’ truck speeds up to make it through. Daniel starts to slow. “Dammit. I hope I don’t lose her.”

“You’re driving a Ford Mustang, and she’s in a fifteen-year-old Chevy. I think you’ll be fine.” She smiles. “Floor it when the light turns green.”

He raises his eyebrow at her. “The speed limit is thirty-five, and I’m a cop.”

She smiles a challenging smile at him. “It’s the dead of night. And you’re a cop.”

He eyes her and then shakes his head. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Just this once. So you like cars, huh? What kind of car do you have?”

“Saleen S7 Twin Turbo,” she responds proudly.

Daniel says, “I have no idea what that is, but cool, I guess.”

“All you need to know is that it’s hella fast. Zero to sixty in three point three seconds.”

“You’re kind of a speed devil, huh?” When he smiles a dimple winks on his right cheek.

“I’m the speed devil,” she says, and he laughs. She frowns at him and wonders why he laughed since she had been completely serious.

The light turns green and Daniel floors it like he promised. Dash sits back and enjoys the burst of speed, the feeling of the car coming alive under her. She thinks that it’s a shame that the transmission is automatic—automatic was for pussies. A delighted laugh bursts from her lips. They speed through a gradual turn before the road straightens again, and the taillights of the Chevy appear in the near distance.

“See? What’d I tell you?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

They catch up quickly. The Chevrolet greets them with wisps of black emerging from its tailpipe. Damn thing is in a sorry state and needs to be put out of its misery, really. It’s a 1995 C/K, and probably doesn’t even have passenger airbags. Also, she hates it. She’s never hated a car before in her life, and maybe it wasn’t healthy to hate an inanimate object, but the sight of it intimidates her—scares her—like nothing she’s ever known before. It’s like an echo of Isaac.

“So, why ‘Dash’?” Daniel asks.

“I get that question all the damn time,” she mutters. Not that she minds telling the story, but her mood is sour and not productive for telling it with any flair like she usually does.

“It’s a cool nickname. And every cool nickname has a cool story.” Daniel shrugs.

She rolls her eyes at his attempt to stroke her ego, even though it works. Kind of. The story isn’t really that cool, but she could make it so with a few white lies and exaggerations.

“I used to want to go into the Olympics. Track. I’ve been running since I knew how to. I broke all of my middle school’s track records.” She pauses and purses her lips, and then adds, “also, The Incredibles.”

“The movie?”

“Yeah. We went to see the premiere. My parents and I and a couple of my track friends. I was like, twelve? Anyway, the ‘Dash’ character resonated with me, ‘cause he was fast as fuck, and I was also fast as fuck. My parents started calling me Dash; my friends started calling me Dash… It just kinda snowballed.” She pauses, shrugs the memories off. “Seven months later my mother went to the store and never came back. Just, poof—gone. Left. So I started calling myself Dash, too, ‘cause I didn’t want to be Rae anymore.”

Daniel says, “Oh.”

“It’s whatever,” she dismisses. “I’m over it.”

Daniel stays silent for several minutes. They pass the middle school and drive out of the town limits. Dash’s leg starts bouncing again. She shouldn’t have told the damn story—now June 15th is all she can think about. Coming home from school to find her father crying over his glass of gin, reading her mom’s note. How he’d crushed her to him and sobbed. He hadn’t shaved that day, and he always, always shaved. His stubble scraped against her forehead when he kissed the top of her head, and she didn’t know why he was acting like that or what she could say or do to make him feel better.

Just, shit. She passes an angry hand over her eyes. She hadn’t thought about that moment in years.

“I lost my parents on 9/11,” Daniel sighs. He says it as if it is the culmination of a lot of internal debate. Dash looks at him. He keeps his eyes on the road. “I had an uncle, so I didn’t go to foster care or anything, but my uncle was a drunkard. He kept getting fired, we kept moving. He was temperamental, always angry at something, and worse when he was drunk. Put his hands on me, knocked me around a lot. I tolerated it. As soon as I woke up on my eighteenth birthday I enlisted in the Marines and left for good. I don’t know what happened to him. He could be dead for all I care.”

She slowly returns her eyes to the road. They would be turning onto the highway soon. There were no buildings anymore, just trees, and they rose up on both sides of the road like walls, boxing them in. She flexes her hands in her lap, rage slowly bubbling over.

“The world we live in is shit,” she spits. “Pure shit. And people fucking suck.”

Daniel laughs, but not the kind of laugh that one emits at something funny. It’s bitter, angry, resigned. Sharp. Insincere. A bark of a laugh.

“Daniel, did I do the right thing?” she blurts. Her hands are sweating, but they’re cold. “I killed him, and now they don’t have a father anymore. He was a monster, but he was their father. I keep going back and forth in my head about it. Maggie said that their lives were fine.”

“I wasn’t there, Dash. I can’t tell you.” He shrugs and passes his tongue over his teeth. “But it’s not like—it’s not like you came after him like an angel of justice or something, right?”

“No. Of course not, he came to me.” She takes a breath. Her hands shake in her lap, and she drums the fingers of her left hand on her knee. “Pinkie and I skipped school for a few days straight. When he found out about the lack of attendance, he locked her away in the basement for a few days. She got bit by a spider, didn’t tell anyone, passed out during class and got rushed to the hospital. I went to visit her, and I guess he saw me because the next night he was sitting in front of my house in that goddamn truck.” Said truck turns onto the highway. Dash watches the ‘Chevrolet’ printed on the back of it until it’s out of sight. They wait for a few cars to pass, and also turn onto the highway. “He told me to stay away from her. And I tried, but I couldn’t—I can’t just turn my back on someone who needs me, you know? Call it altruism, or loyalty, or whatever the fuck. I just can’t. She’s my friend if nothing else, and I don’t have almost any other friends in this fucking town.”

“Do you love her?” Daniel asks, and breath whooshes out of her. Its the very last thing that she expects him to ask, and it completely blindsides her and stuns her into sitting in silence for several seconds.

“I—no? No,” she says with more conviction. Because she doesn’t love Pinkie, but she could, probably, in the future. Yeah, she could see it happening. Maybe it’s time for her to admit that to herself, and to a total stranger if no one else. “No, I have—had—I had a girlfriend. Until about two days ago. Anna-Jane.” It still hurts that she lost her—she’d been a bit too preoccupied the last few days to notice it, but it comes back with a passion and fervor as if to make up for lost time.

“Wait, I thought you said that you and Pinkie were fucking around. You were cheating?”

“No, AJ and I broke up,” she dismisses.

Daniel glances at her with furrowed eyebrows before returning his eyes to the road.

“Maybe you should tell me the whole story.”

“Fucking cops and your interrogations,” she grumbles. “I’ve told the story like twenty times already.”

“Then tell me the parts that you didn’t tell anyone else. I know you left stuff out.” He was right about that if nothing else. She sighs. “Get it all off of your chest. I promise you’ll feel better,” he coaxes.

She sits back. She doesn’t know how long it’s going to take them to get to Pinkie’s house, but she hopes it takes a while because if Daniel wanted the entire story, he was going to get it in explicit detail. And maybe it would make her feel better like he said.

“Okay, then, but I need you to listen as a guy. A-a friend, not a cop,” she says.

He glances at her again and switches lanes. The ‘Chevrolet’ of the Pierces’ truck comes back into view.

“Okay,” Daniel says. “You have my word.”

“Really?” she asks, surprised at the short amount of time it took him to decide. “Aren’t you, like, under oath? What if I told you that I was a drug dealer or something?”

He shrugs. “Oaths are nothing.” He pauses, almost a hesitation. She sees his jaw clench. When he speaks again, his voice drops into something grave and bitter. “I know what it’s like to be eighteen and have to put a bullet into somebody’s head, yeah? And it was somebody that I didn’t even know, someone who hated me and who I was supposed to hate back. So, yeah, you have my word.”

She nods slowly. She can’t even imagine—except that, well, she obviously can. She looks down at her lap and thinks. “Okay. Um. So I guess it all started on the day before school began. I was running on the mountain—driving really, really fast, not actual running…”