Her shoulders hunch, her legs curl up and in, her hands cover her face, but she doesn’t roll away. She bunches up like a hood ornament and waits for me to finish. She doesn’t understand; I’ll never finish.
“Hey, now! Stop, now!” Jeremy is yelling. He scrambles out of the car, but I ignore him and keep whaling away at her. I am crying and she is crying out. Her sucker drops onto the hood and rolls away. I see it as a splash of orange falling away in my peripheral vision. Then Jeremy wraps his arms around me from behind, pinning me to his chest. He pulls me back and off her.
“Stupid—stupid—” I hiss at Candace, too squeezed and clamped by Jeremy to scream it. She shouldn’t be here. They are not allowed to be here. I lash out with my feet, trying to kick her in the face as he drags me backward.
“Don’t hurt her!” Candace calls to him, uncoiling, worried.
We are frozen there for a timeless span, Candace watching with her flossy hair in a muss, her eyes stinging with tears. Jeremy holding me, my breath heaving against his restraining arms. He doesn’t let go until he feels the need to beat her leave my body.
What’s the point? It’s done.
Kai and I have been here less than a month. She came back from prison different, but hasn’t this always been her way? New location, new Kai. Always before, I changed myself to fit the narrative, the yang to her selected, shifting yin. But we are living under our real names now; her parole ties us to our true history. Karen Vauss sings less, tells fewer stories, drinks more wine than any Kai that I have ever known. Karen Vauss is too broken and world-weary to ditch parole and run.
I slacken in Jeremy’s arms, and I think, I can do that with her. I can be silent on the sofa and not deviate until Kai does. I can, and I will, because my ever-changing mother is the only presence in my life that has been constant. I wrecked it, sent us both to separate institutions, but I have her back now. I have to let her know that I can stare like a sad-eyed orphan at Marvin, if that’s what she wants. He owns the diner where Kai works. He’s started sending home bacon-stuffed biscuits for me at the end of her shifts, and one morning, soon, I know I’ll wake up and find him in pajamas and bare feet, eating them at our small dining table. I can back her play, if only she forgives me.
I swear this to myself, though I’m scared to see the Kai who’s waiting for me inside. The truth she knows now may have already changed her. Fine. I am making promises to every god who ever walked: I’ll be her match no matter what it is, when she forgives me.
Jeremy steps back from me, and I stand trying to stop crying in the road in front of the car. Candace clambers down off the hood and gets her sucker off the curb, inspecting it. She picks away a piece of grass, a bit of leaf. I can see my handprints all on her pale face.
“You should of took me with you,” she says, as if I could have, even if I’d wanted to. She puts the dirty candy in her mouth. Her eyes are wary and unsorry and something else. Something I can’t read.
“You should get off of my street,” I say, scrubbing my last tears away.
“You don’t own it,” she says, but not like it’s a dig. She’s stating a fact. “You don’t own nothin’ here.”
She’s right. We are renters. Kai and I have the dim basement apartment of a three-unit house that is the biggest eyesore in the neighborhood. The rent is low, especially for Morningside, which is not our kind of place. It’s full of blond people who buy name-brand dogs and care about their lawns. But it’s safe, and the schools are good.
“We got to go,” Jeremy tells Candace, shifting uneasily from foot to foot.
He speaks only to her, as if the second I stopped hurting her, I stopped being relevant. I look only at Candace, too, as if he stopped existing when he took his arms away.
“I was going to call,” I tell her. It’s not true.
I’d hoped that once I was gone, Candace would forget me. She’s such a creature of immediacy, she might well busy herself blackmailing Shar and Karice to be her replacement friends, or swapping Jeremy for someone who had pot as well as candy. If that failed, I’d hope she wouldn’t be able to find me. I told Mrs. Mack and my caseworker and my guardian ad litem that I didn’t want them passing on my contact info, and they said I had that right. But Candace is so good at weaseling and snooping, one big ear pressed to any closed door she comes across, sugar-sticky fingers creeping through other people’s private things. She found me, and she had Jeremy get a car someplace, so she could get to me and ruin me.
I have myself in hand now. I’m done crying in front of her. I don’t even want to hit her more. Candace is a well with no bottom. I can throw endless sorrow or violence at her. I could even throw in love, if I had any to spare. She would take it all, disappear it down her blank, black mouth hole, as if it were the same. None of it would ever fill her. It would hurtle down and down forever, falling through her endless, hungry depths.