For a few weeks, they were inseparable. After school, Angie drove them around town in the Impala. Though it was cold, they rode with the windows down, drinking gas-station sodas from cups the size of oil cans. Jess would pop in cassette tapes of music Angie had never heard on the radio—R.E.M., the Velvet Underground, X, a Patti Smith mix she called Plush Patti. She talked about Phoenix, the desert city down the hill, a place that in Angie’s imagination was as large and dangerous as a samurai sword, lawless and glinting with cars and malls and desert parties, radio stations and rock concerts and movie theaters with first-run films, worldly-wise girls and boys who had the inside scoop on the world. But Jess made it seem much more normal. She talked more about her childhood than anything: riding the roller coaster at Legend City or the carousel and paddleboats at Encanto Park, pedaling bicycles up and down the graveled paths along the canals. She talked about watching British sitcoms and Saturday Night Live late into the night on weekends with her parents, all three of them together. Now the two of them.
“You’re a good listener,” Jess told Angie. “A good friend,” and Angie nodded in agreement that Jess was too, a friend, a good, good friend.
Weekends, Jess often spent the night at Angie’s. Angie stayed at Jess’s only once, tucked in a sleeping bag next to Jess’s twin bed. Jess’s mother, Maud, ordered them pizza for dinner and then disappeared into the bedroom before the sun had set. Jess explained that her mother had to get up at four thirty to get to the post office, so she went to bed early. Angie had nodded. Her father had to get up early, too, so she understood. But at Angie’s house, Papa cooked dinner for them after he cleaned his hands, washing them over and over with orange-pumice soap though he still wound up with grease in the cracks. He fixed them quesadillas or breakfast for dinner, their favorite, stacks of pancakes and huevos, all served on yellow melamine plates. Papa stayed up late with the girls on weekend nights when he didn’t have to open the shop in the morning. They played gin rummy, pinochle, or Texas hold ’em, or watched TV until the sun peeped through the curtains.
They slept in Angie’s double bed, which sagged in the center. When Jess’s knee grazed Angie’s, Angie almost fell off the side. Sometimes, when Angie knew Jess was deep asleep, snoring a little, she would dare to touch her. Trail her fingers down her cheek, along her bare thigh. She’d slide her pinkie under the rubber band at Jess’s wrist, feel the pulse against her knuckles. The glass inside her swelled. She imagined them hopping in the Impala and driving off down the hill to Phoenix, or to California, or to some town in Colorado. Angie would open an auto shop, and Jess would go to college and work in a record store. They could make do. Angie worried sometimes that her father knew her secret, what she was imagining for herself and her friend. A few times he caught her staring at Jess. He tilted his head, a frown between his brows, and she blushed and looked away.
Late one night, something woke Angie. She jumped out of bed, disoriented. Jess wasn’t in the bed, or in the room. Angie stumbled into the hallway. A light was on in the living room.
Jess was curled up asleep on the couch, a magazine dangling from her fingers, the lamp on low on the side table. Angie plucked the magazine from Jess and started to cover her with an afghan. As she did, she kicked over a tumbler of water Jess must have put on the floor next to the sofa.
Angie got a towel from the kitchen and knelt to sponge up the water. Her arm bumped Jess’s bare knee. She sat on her heels as her stomach twinged, as heat spread everywhere. She reached out and touched that knee deliberately, cupped it in the heart of her palm, holding her breath and watching Jess’s face. She moved her hand up Jess’s thigh and under the blanket, her fingers as directed as a trail of ants. She kneeled closer, lifted her other hand toward the curve of Jess’s shoulder. She wanted all of her under her hands. She thought her body would crack open from the pleasure of this sensation, from the bright discovery of this feeling in herself.
Jess opened her eyes. Beneath the lamp, they seemed dilated, space-black. She blinked at Angie. “What are you doing?”
“Angela,” Papa said.
Angie yanked her hands away and scrambled to her feet. Her father stood in the darkness of the hallway. He leaned on the wall, his face unreadable in the shadows.
Even if she had the words, she couldn’t have spoken them.
Jess sat up, yawning. “I couldn’t fall asleep, but I guess I did. What’s going on?”
Papa stepped into the room, and Angie saw his face then, except it looked nothing like his own. It looked locked up tight. Lights out, no one home. A stranger who wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Go back to bed,” he said. “Vas. Ahora.”
Angie started to shake. The glass moved onto her tongue. She coughed and then spit onto the brown carpet, next to the damp spot under the towel.
Angie ran to her room, locked the door, grabbed her coat, and climbed out the window. She ran to the Impala, and when she turned on the headlights, she saw her father in the doorway, Jess standing next to him. She gunned it down the drive and into town. She drove up and down Main and through the District in a trance, not glancing at the closed-up shop windows, her eyes on the yellow and white lines of the road. She didn’t know where to go. She wanted to leave, but she didn’t know where, and she had no money anyway. She wondered how far those pavement lines stretched, where they would take her if she followed them past the outskirts of town—south to Phoenix, north to Flagstaff and to the reservations. And then to where?
Finally she drove across the bridge to Arroyo Lake, parking in the dark pullout with the engine running, huddling for warmth in her coat. She didn’t sleep, the images of her father’s face, of Jess’s knee, fluttering behind her eyes. At dawn, stiff with cold, she got out of the car and climbed to the solace of the lake.
The lake was gone.