“Why are you still here?” I ask her.
Candace gives Jeremy a look, and he walks over and folds himself back into the driver’s seat. He closes the door and sits inside the car, dead eyes front. I watch the window scrolling up, his arm pumping as he works the crank.
Candace says, “We ran away. Jeremy’s driving me to California.”
I peer at him through the windshield, not sure what story this boy thinks he’s in. Romeo and Juliet? Bonnie and Clyde? Maybe slouchy boys like him don’t read, so he can’t see how bad it’s bound to end. Does Jeremy even have a license? I think he might still be fifteen, but I’m not sure. Even if he’s legal to drive, there’s no way he bought this car.
I thump the hood and say, “This is going to land you both in juvie.”
Candace shakes her head. “We stoled it off some Mexicans. Illegals don’t report.”
“I report, Candace,” I remind her, frustrated. It’s been her leverage, so how can she not see the irony? “I dial 911, and I report shit.”
In the wake of this threat, she only sidles closer. “You didn’t take me, but I’d still take you.”
“Take me where?” I ask, uncomprehending. “You mean to California?”
She nods, and I realize she is serious. She’s done her level best to trash my life, and her left ear is bright red from where I boxed it. Now she’s inviting me along on her road trip?
“I hope you die in California,” I say, so cold it barely has inflection. “No, I hope you die on the way and never get there.”
I grab my backpack and sling it back up on my shoulders. I step out of the road, walking away toward the house.
She calls after me, “You should’ve seen your mama when I told her. She slapped me, too.” That stops me. Kai in every incarnation is nonviolent. A word person. A charmer who’ll kiss puppies on the mouth. Candace follows me onto the patchy grass of the rental house’s lawn. “They got sea lions out there, did you know that? They sit up on the same beach as where the people go. I saw it on a video in science class. You can walk right up to them, and they don’t mind it. Don’t you want to see that? Don’t you want to get up close?”
I understand her then. She didn’t tell Kai for revenge or even out of meanness. She did it because I am a Gotmama, and she can never join my tribe. She’s done this thing to move me into hers. I am floored at how much ugliness can be alive inside simple pragmatism.
“I hate sea lions,” I lie. The Kai who lives in this house—Karen Vauss—is sour and insular, so I will be, too, and she will forgive me. I can’t see this new us on a beach.
Candace says, “Well, where I’m going, I’ll see lots of things.”
“I hate seeing lots of things,” I lie. Karen Vauss rarely leaves the house, so I won’t, either.
I walk away, heading around to the side door that leads down into our apartment.
“Hey, you want me to wait?” Candace calls after me, and there is a desperate edge now to her voice. “In case of you need that ride?”
I don’t turn back. I barely hear her, because I will not need that ride. I am thinking to myself, My mother knows, and so the worst already happened.
I open the door and look down our dark stairwell.
I could put my game face on and lie. Right now, it is my word against Candace’s. Kai won’t want it to be true, and nothing helps a lie float like a hopeful listener.
I hear the shit car starting with a huge chugging noise. Its muffler is dead or dying. It is the roar of another lost girl on the move, hoping to go far enough to get up close to sea lions. Or past that, into the ocean. Or past that, right off the edge of the world.
I’m so relieved to hear her going that I know I won’t lie. Lies and California are not real. The only real way out is through the truth.
So the unthinkable has happened—Kai knows I broke our lives. Now I have to go downstairs uninvented and see what happens next.
I walk down with a changed future only a few steps before me. It is a wall of white without Kai’s handwriting on it. What if Kai hits me? She’s never hit me. She’s never let a boyfriend hit me, either. If she does, I’ll take it, like Candace did. I have earned it. I’ve earned any acts of penance that she might require, and at the end, I will be forgiven.
I want to be punished, actually. It would feel good to bow to it and say, This is what should happen now. When the awful part is done, she will fold me in her arms. She will say, Baby, baby, we will be okay. Not today, but one day, when I am fully punished and forgiven, she will say these words to me. I know she will, because us, together, is the driving repetition of our incarnations.