“Plain Sight” by Leah Christianson

“That bag? That is literally designed to catch your attention? Is where the heroin is?” “I disagree,” says Anna, continuing to scan the road. “I think it’s hiding in plain sight.”

Today’s story from Leah Christianson is such a great example of an opening that grabbed my attention, pulling me in to a story that then never let me go. It throws us into the car with these two characters—Anna and the narrator, Trish—all but forcing us to wonder who they are, why they’re driving to Kentucky, why they have a bag of heroin with them (“hiding in plain sight” in a gift bag covered in silver glitter, with pink tissue paper poking out the top and a ribbon looped around its handles).

As the story progresses and builds, I found myself falling in love with these two characters on my first read, and then only more and more with each subsequent read. Their voices are so alive and distinct, the voice of the story itself so confident, the dynamic between them so real and engaging… I knew by halfway through the story, I was likely going to accept it, and by the time I got to the end, I was already so excited to get to publish it and share it with readers. I hope you all fall as in love with this one as I have!

—Aaron Burch

---

We’ve been on the road for about fifteen minutes when I ask:

“Where is it?”

“What?” asks Anna. She turns onto 71 South, avoiding my eyes.

“You know.”

“Do you mean,” Anna lowers her voice, as if the car is bugged. “The drugs?”

I do not ask: what the fuck else would I mean?

“Yes,” I say slowly. “The drugs.”

“There,” she says, tilting her head backwards. In the seat behind me, buckled in like a grumpy kid, there’s a gift bag. It’s caked in silver glitter. Pink tissue paper pokes out the top, and a perfectly curled white bow loops around its flimsy handles.

“In there?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“The heroin is in that bag?”

Anna readjusts the rearview mirror. Her hair is curling up around her hat in a way she usually hates. Mascara smudges below her eyelashes. I swipe at my own eyes, as if it will clean hers. Outside, its turning from fall to an early winter—snow hasn’t fallen but the trees are giving up. Leaves that should be boasting red and golds are browned and curling, ready to litter the dying grass.

“Yes.”

“That bag? That is literally designed to catch your attention? Is where the heroin is?”

“I disagree,” says Anna, continuing to scan the road. “I think it’s hiding in plain sight.”

“Anna.”

“What?”

She turns to me. Her eyes are filled with red pitchforks. We blink at each other. It’s a countdown we’ve done since we were kids. If after three blinks, no one wants to continue the argument, we both let it go, right there. I blink, count. Three. She sets her jaw, waiting to bat the next reproach across the highway. Two. I pick at the perma-hangnail on my thumb. One.

“Okay,” I say. “I see your point.”

“It’s a good idea, when you think about it,” Anna’s eyes swivel to the road. We’re on Brent Spence Bridge, crossing the Ohio River. Silky water ripples against both shores below.

“You’re right,” I say. “Now that I’m thinking about it.”

Then we are in Kentucky.

*

A week ago. Three calls roll in before the sun wakes up. On the fourth ring, I wiggle out from under Raj’s arm and grab the phone.

“Jesus fucking what?”

My anger slips away as Anna’s sobs cut through.

“It’s Kai,” she cries. “He ODed.”

Kai’s face swims up. Current-day Kai is grey-eyed and muted with scooped-out cheeks. But the version I see is all pudge. Tottering on a grainy beach, wearing too-small swim trunks. Crooked bowl cut from when Anna and I tried to fix his hair.

“AnNA,” he calls, running towards the water. “Slow down! Mom said you have to inclube me!” Six and wanting to stick his fingers into everything we do. She and I are ten with self-cut bangs we pretend to like, just starting to outgrow wanting to be unique.

“Where is he?” I ask, even as the Kai with untied shoes and a Slurpee-stained shirt trips towards me. “What can I bring him? How can I help?”

Anna chokes it out. Two syllables at a time.

“You can’t. He died.”

That can’t be right. My neighbor overdosed last month—he’s still swaying around. She’s wrong. Has to be.

“What happened?” Raj whispers, placing a hand on my back. I push him away.

“I’ll come over.”

“Maybe later,” she says. “I have to make sure my mom doesn’t jump out the window.”

“That’s not funny.”    

“It wasn’t supposed to be.”

She hangs up before I can say anything else.

“So,” says Raj. “It finally happened.”

His smugness snakes around my chest and tightens.  Stumbling to the bathroom, I heave spoiled love into the dirty toilet. It tastes like sour watermelon and old pasta.

I lay on the floor for a long time. A brick forms in my stomach. It hurts to touch, but I press anyway. Our town has a formula for losses like this one, but I can’t plug Kai into it. If I do, nothing will ever matter to my Anna again.

My phone rings. I get off the floor, start running towards her house.

The week after is not a blur. Why do people always say that? Nope. It’s too bright and antiseptic to smudge. At the memorial, the hem of Anna’s dress comes undone in the back so I sit on the floor and sew it while she thanks people for showing up. The Kroger cookies are stale, but the healthy food is healthy, so everyone’s constantly brushing crumbs off their chests and onto my head. Anna’s supposed to give a speech but can’t stand up. I offer to do it, but she starts crying into my shoulder. So, for the longest minute, the podium’s just empty. The pastor figures out that no one’s going to speak and the cries are getting louder so he hustles his way back up but it’s too late, the mood is shot, which is a wild thing to think at a funeral, but it’s true, it is so goddamn sad that no one can stand to be there anymore.

After, Anna goes home to be with her family. I go home and break up with Raj.

He looks how I feel when my sister’s toddler chucks his dinner. Like he can’t believe what I’m doing and isn’t surprised at all.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

 “No, you’re not. You’re fine.”

“That’s a shitty thing to say.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just—”

“What?”

“You’re always fine.”

That brick of air is still trapped under my ribs.

“That’s not true.”

“Okay.”

And then he says, “but we’re good together” and “I will do whatever it takes” and “maybe I should have seen this coming” and “I won’t beg you” and my brick of air gets denser and I cannot feel anything beyond these equal pulls of LOVE ME now LEAVE and before I can say I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, he walks out. The undelivered words swirl in my mouth, half-escaped, nowhere to go but back down.

*

A few hours later, Anna shows up, clutching a duffel bag. For a second, I think she’s heard about Raj somehow and, on the day we buried her brother, come to comfort me. But she hisses:

“We have to get rid of it.”

“What?”

Still on my doorstep, she unzips the duffel. A sharp, vinegary smell escapes. Inside are worn soccer jerseys and shin guards. Crumpled orange cones. Kai was the assistant coach for the high school girls’ soccer team. Before, he was so invested—knew each player’s family story and which position she should really be playing and whose shitty boyfriend wasn’t allowed to come to games anymore. Until he wasn’t allowed to come to games anymore. Anna pulls the gear out and drops it on my steps; white jerseys blow across her feet. Then, she pulls out cash. Rolled up like a cut log and held together with rubber bands.

It’s the most money I’ve ever seen. Makes me feel like it’s about to catch on fire. Then, she pulls out something else. A little bigger than a baseball, wrapped in pieces of paper stamped with times and locations. The team’s game schedule. She looks at it, at me.

“I can’t have this in my house.”

When I understand, my brain goes electric. I haul Anna inside. She shoves the baseball of heroin at me.

“I don’t want this,” I tell her, taking it anyway.

“I can’t have it there,” she repeats.

“Well, I can’t have it here,” I hiss back.

She flops onto my couch. I sit, very slowly. I know I’m holding a weapon.

“It’s so fucked at home right now,” she says.

“I know.”

“No,” she says. “You don’t.”

We stare at the floor. I resist picking open the package, peeking inside.

“Can you call that guy?”
I know who she means but pretend not to.

“You know. What did you call him? Meat Head Ed?”

“Because he was—”

“So skinny.”

“Right.”

“From all the heroin.”

“Right.”

“Can you call him?”

Ed’s number is still buried in my phone, but I don’t trust myself to dial. I was never fully submerged in the shit Ed sold. Just occasionally waded in. Didn’t mean I wasn’t juggling with a total fucking disaster. Can’t call Ed. My face says this.

“Please,” says Anna. “With Kai…without the money he was bringing in. We could lose the house. Alright? This could buy us a few months. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Anna,” I say. “Jesus. Take a minute.”

“I don’t have,” she hisses, “a minute.”

She runs her hands through her hair, gets angry when her fingers stick in a snarl.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says, even though her eyes don’t leave the floor.

Meat Head Ed picks up on the second ring.

“You got into the game?’’ he drawls. “Didn’t see that coming.”

I explain the situation.

“Aw shit. I’m damn sorry to hear that. But sure. Yeah, I’m interested.”

Anna sinks deeper into the couch.

“But you’ll have to come to me.”

He lives outside Louisville. We agree on Friday around 2 pm. Anna hides her face in a pillow.

“How long’s the drive?” she asks, muffled. “Two hours?”

“About, yeah.”

“Okay,” she says, standing and walking towards the door. “I’ll pick you up at noon.”

“You can stay,” I tell her. “I’ll make tea.”

But she’s shaking her head. “Gotta get back to my mom.”

“I could come—”

“She doesn’t want anyone but family around.”

This, I don’t understand. If I have to be around anyone, I only want it to be Anna.

The door swings open. The baseball begins pulsing in my hands, picking up speed the closer I get to being alone. Needles gather behind my eyebrows.

“Anna,” I say. I want to tell her don’t go and I did something and I can’t have this here either. An ugly part of me is seething. Waiting. She looks at the little package, up at my face. In two quick steps, she’s back across the room, shoving the mound back into her duffel. The needles release.

Anna looks straight at me. It’s only a few seconds, but when you’re being unpacked by the only person with your brain blueprints, a few seconds can feel like February twice. She’s got this strange look on her face. And then I’m back in the first night we got drunk, sophomore year of high school. She’d planned the whole night out. We were going to start with a classy glass of pink wine in her mom’s basement, and then she’d paid her neighbor five bucks to drive us to Aaron Kasock’s barn party, where we would drink vodka and pink lemonade cocktails that she had pre-mixed, “for safety.” But I fucked it up. I drank the wine too fast and was already wobbling when her neighbor showed. He didn’t want to take us, so she gave him another ten bucks. At the party, I stole sips from everyone else’s cups, then grabbed a bottle of rum and ran into the field, passed out for a while. When I woke up in the wet grass, bugs were chomping my legs, the first thing I heard was, “Triiiiishhh!” and I went stumbling towards the sound and suddenly there was Anna, right in front of me, throwing her arms around me. I felt everything I’d ever done in that hug, and knew I’d live to do worse.

Then I threw up pink on her shoes.

Anna pulls the door open. Outside, the soccer jerseys have blown across the street and footpath. The moon lights them up like lazy white flags.

“Friday,” Anna says, stepping onto the brightness. “Noon.”

I nod. She nods back, then snaps the door shut behind her.

On Thursday, I send Raj a message: going out of town for the day tomorrow

He sends back: I’m not sure what you want me to take from that.

In case you came by or something

Do you want me to come by?

No. I just didn’t want you to worry

OK. Consider me officially not worried.

I want to tell him to shove this fake stoicism, but I’m trying to take the high road before driving a bag of drugs across state lines.

*

Anna shows up 11:35am on Friday. I’ve got spicy chips and dollar store candy.

“Something’s wrong with the radio,” she tells me, so I grab the old boombox stashed in the back of my closet and two CDs: Stevie Wonder’s Number 1’s and Backstreet Boys’ Black and Blue. Anna rolls her eyes at my selections but cracks the babyest of smiles. I position the boombox by my feet and skip to track two on Stevie’s greatest hits. Drums lead into an insistent trumpet, and Stevie tells us: Baby, everything is alright. Uptight, out of sight.

“I mapped out some stopping points,” says Anna. “If our bladders aren’t cooperating.”

“It’s two hours.”

“Just in case.”

She starts driving. Unless you already know the way, it’s hard to find our town. I always liked that. Back roads bending like lines on hands, past more hidden places, trying to keep our small secrets. Anna’s shirt is misbuttoned.

We’ve been on the road for about fifteen minutes when I ask:

“So. Where is it?”

We arrive fifteen minutes early, even with Anna’s multiple stops. At each one, she brought the giftbag with us.

“What do you want me to do, leave it in the car?” she hissed.

“Oh no, this is much less conspicuous.”

Ed’s asked to meet us at a large parking lot near his work. It sprawls out empty, a few buildings sagging around the edges. This feels too exposed for anything good to happen, and I begin worrying that I’ve directed us to the wrong place. But then Ed’s Corolla rattles onto the scene. He sticks his head out the window like a happy dog.

“Trish!” his voice bounces across the pavement. “She is back!”

Ed loops the car around ours, cranking his music. The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” He pulls alongside us, so his driver’s side window is aligned with Anna’s, bobbing his head and wagging his tongue. Anna’s expression doesn’t change. But Ed is undaunted.

“Get out here, girl!” He steps out of his car and slams the door, holds his arms wide, pulls me in for a loping hug. He smells the same—like sweat and grass and something fried, covered by piney aftershave. Like the black hole I used to climb into when I wanted my thoughts to die.

Ed looks Anna up and down.

“Annie, right?”

“Yep,” she says, eyes squinting past him. They met once before—when? Either right after I left community or right before I started working fulltime at the preschool. Whenever it was, she didn’t like Ed and let him know. Probably remembering, Ed zaps back to me.

“How you been, girl?”

I am too keyed up for chit chat. But I say, “oh, you know” and cycle through the usual updates. Yep, still working at the school. Yep, still live there. Nah, don’t do that anymore. For real. For real. Yes. Nope. Yes. Yes. No.

“Well, that’s all good to hear,” he says, running a hand through his limp hair. “Me, I’m working for my dad’s moving company. It’s tough but, you know, pretty good money. I’ve got a good thing going with—”

“Do you want the heroin?” Anna interrupts.

Ed and I swivel around, even though the lot’s empty. Say what you mean; mean what you say—that’s Anna. Ed lets out a snort.

“All business with this one,” he says, jabbing a thumb in Anna’s direction. I raise my shoulders like, what can you do?

Anna gives a quick nod, then quickly grabs the shiny bag from the backseat of the car. Ed starts laughing.

“What? It’s in there?”

“Hiding in plain sight,” says Anna. She’s committed to this explanation. She won’t smile because it won’t make her feel better.

“That is oss-ten-tay-shucks,” he says with pride.

He roots around in the bag and lifts out the mound. He looks up with raised eyebrows, lets out a low whistle. Then he drops it back in, still smiling. Everything is fine.

“It’s good to see you girls again,” he says. “Y’all are goofy.”

I smile big; Anna doesn’t move.

“It’s good to see you too, Edster.”

He scowls for a millisecond. I forgot he doesn’t like nicknames. But then he’s back to that smile. Only now, a piece of it has snapped off. 

“You’re not trying to fuck me on this, are you?”

“What?”

“I said,” he says, broken grin still plastered, “you’re not trying to fuck me on this, right? I would not appreciate it if you were trying to fuck me over on this.”

He adjusts his shirt. When he does, I see the outline of a gun, tucked into the band of his too-big jeans. The world gets quieter. The highway noise stops grating, the Boys stop Beasting, and the gray sky ropes around our necks. Ed is still smiling, looking back and forth between us. He thinks he’s tough. But really, he’s still a gangly kid who used to give me free drugs because he thought I might blow him. Once, at a party where I didn’t know anybody, he listened to me tell a story about getting stuck in a tree with my childhood cat, Lizzy, for forty-five minutes. And he really listened; got worried about me falling out of a tree and bruising my kid brain, invested in our journey back down, and looked truly pained when I told him that Lizzy got hit by a car three months later.

I can see that Ed. Anna can’t. Her face is cinched tight, but I know she’s panicking.

“Ed,” I say brightly. I punch his shoulder, walk around the car. I reach through the open window and grab the bag filled with Dollar Store goodies. “Come on. We would never.”

I hold the bag towards him, feel a few chips crunch with accidental pressure. “Snack?”

He takes a big handful. Crumbs cling to his beard and shirt. When I look down, they’re on mine too.

“Spicy,” he says, nodding with approval. He wipes his hands on his jeans and digs a wallet out of his back pocket. Without counting, he pulls bills out and hands them over. I can feel Anna’s internal scream—count it! count! —but I don’t. This isn’t the movies.

The sparkly bag dangles from his wrist. I picture grabbing it, running. Spreading the powder around a bathtub and laying in it until I’m nothing but nails and hair.

We get back in our cars.

“Don’t be a stranger, now,” Ed calls. “I miss you, Trishy. Good to see that face.”

He gives a final salute and then he’s just taillights, carrying this infection off to another family. For a second, I want to press on the gas until we run Ed and everything in his car into the ground. But it passes.

We sit in the car for a while. The sun is pinned to the sky’s corner, not setting anytime soon. Still, I’m ready for bed. It’ll be a painful drive back.

“Okay,” says Anna. “Well, fuck.”
“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m, uh. I’m kind of freaking out.” She looks over. “Not you, though. You’re fine.” Her words are laced with blame.

“Well, it’s just Ed. I mean. Don’t give me too much credit—Ed’s not the kingpin he thinks he is.”

“You think that, but you don’t actually know. He’s a drug dealer.”

“Yeah, but he’s also Ed.”

She turns to look at the spot where his car was. Eventually, I tell her that we should get moving. But Anna keeps staring.

“Have you ever been to Louisville?” she asks.

“Aside from this?”

“I mean the city itself.”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Me neither.”

“Well, yeah.”

“We should go.”

Excuses pop up: where would we stay, what would we do, isn’t your heart too banged up for other people, wouldn’t you rather hide out on my couch forever.

Instead, I say, “I can’t afford it.”

Anna nods towards my hands and I remember the money clutched in my fist like keys. Anna blinks. I blink back.

“Ok,” I say. “Let’s go.”

We start at a brewery north of town. The bartender is funny and gives us free tickets to a distillery tour. The distillery’s walls glow orange and its floors are covered in red dust that catch gold in the sun. It smells like tang and salt and rotting sugar. Paintings of giant cats and fish stretch from dusty floor to exposed ceiling. We drink free samples of rose gin and brandy aged in bourbon barrels and sit on the roof for one more, giggling when no one is looking because how can this be the life some people actually have? We eat hot fried chicken at Royal’s and Anna refuses to laugh when I called it FC, because the K is implied. We share a boozy milk shake. We wander down the crackling street, drinking up the brick buildings, the purple moss, the smoky air. We stop when a bar looks loud and drenched in color, or when it looks dark and full of thoughtful people, or when it looks like they serve any sort of well-priced booze, until we end up at a karaoke spot.

“Yes! Treesh! We have to sing! Yes yes yes yes yes,” Anna squeals. She is drunk, maybe the drunkest I’ve ever seen her. The bar is paneled with dark wood and stale beer smell. It looks well-loved. There are a few regulars—they tilt their chairs onto their back legs and chat up the DJ; one woman easily hits a Whitney Houston high note. We can’t compete. Still, we join them. We sing Queen and Chappell Roan and AC/DC and Taylor Swift.

Some guys come in dressed in army fatigues. One jumps on stage to sing “You Oughta Know” with Anna. When the song ends, the guy extends both arms towards Anna like he’s presenting her as a big winner. She takes a little curtsy. He joins our table.

“You’re so good!” he tells her, giving me a courteous and dismissive nod. Beers magically appear in front of both of them; hands slap the guy’s back. I look around for my beer, but it must have gotten lost.

“Why are you all wearing the outfits?” I ask.

“What?”

“Did you plan that? Did one of you debate going home to change?”

Oops. Looks like I got ornery drunk on accident.

Anna swats at me. “Play nice, Trishy.”

Ugh. Trishy. Only calls me that when she doesn’t remember what she’s calling anyone.

“You mean our fatigues?” Anna’s singing partner asks earnestly. “Oh, they aren’t outfits. We’re in the army!”

“Oh, are you?”

He laughs uncomfortably. He’s a kid. He’s got these big muscles, but you can tell it’s a recent bulk up. They’ll fade fast.

“Are you girls from around here?”

Anna leans in to tell him no, we’re from Ohio, we’re just here for the night, it’s so fun, yes, it is, it is, we love it, we do, we wouldn’t mind staying here for quite a while.

“Not a bad idea!” he says. “Louisville would be lucky to have you.” He flashes a bright smile; a disco ball lights it up pink. He’s handsome, in a cardboard kind of way.

“I’m Jesse,” he says, sticking his hand towards Anna.

“Victoria,” says Anna.

“What?” I say.

“Fancy name for a fancy lady,” Jesse says.

“It is, isn’t it?” I ask.

“What can I say?” Anna tosses her hair over her shoulder. “I’m fancy.”

“Are you?” I can’t tell if I’m mad or completely entertained.

“What brought you to town?” He glances over at me. “Girls trip?”

Anna and I look at each other a beat too long.

“Yep!” we say together. 

*

Anna pulls me into the bathroom.

“I want to have sex.”

“With me?”

“No! With Jesse.”

“Ah, okay. Bit offended.”

“Shhhut up, you.”

“Ok, shutting.”

“But really. Just…a big bowl of sex. That’s what I’d like right now.”

I laugh. Anna’s never had a one-night stand.

“Okay. Well. That can be arranged. Sex isn’t that hard to come by…”

I raise my hand for a high five. Anna picks at her teeth.

“I don’t know,” she sighs. “You’re so much better at stuff like this. You don’t have—”

“Standards?”

“Yes!”

Oh.

“No obviously, I’m kidding. But you’re just…oh, I don’t know. This sounds all wrong out loud. In my head, it’s a compliment! What I mean is—”

But I know what she means. She’s got to feel some sort of connection to do anything remotely sexual with anyone and then she’s picturing trips together and then she’s buying a couch with the guy and then she’s imagining how he’s going to break her heart eight ways and wondering what she’s going to do about the couch. Which is kind of a mood killer.

 “Well,” I say, “Maybe we can find you, like, a really hot sociopath to fuck?”

“A hot sociopath?”

“Yeah! Someone without any feelings that you could never envision anything with, so future spiraling is off the table.”

“But I can’t have sex with someone I don’t trust.”

“You absolutely can.”

Anna looks horrified.

“Fine. A hot sociopath you can trust.”

She giggles, steadying herself on the sink.

“Alright,” I try. “Anna can’t have random sex. But maybe Victoria can?”

“Huh?”

“Why did you lie to Jesse about your name?”

 But she just goes, “Oh yeah,” and heads into a stall.

*

We rejoin the military guys, who have been waiting for us to come back and laugh at their jokes.

“Hey.” A woman at the table next to us leans over. I like her Frank Zappa t-shirt. “You look bored.”

“Not bored. Just,” I nod over to Anna. “Keeping an eye.”

“Is that why you’re so sad?”

“What?”

“You sad about that guy?”

Jesse is rubbing the back of his head, scratching his closely cropped hair. It makes his face look sheepish, but his arms look great. Which is probably the point. He leans towards Anna and she laughs into his mouth.

“I don’t know him,” I say. “I’m just watching my friend.”

“Oh, you’re the mom type, huh?”

I chuckle. “Not even a little. That’s all her. She’s…”

But I get stuck here. How can I explain the cocktail of love syrup and beating anxiety that is Anna? When I look around the room, Kai is slumped at a corner table. He’s got his arm stretched out and his head resting in the tattered bend of his elbow. His face has caved further into itself, even though he’s smiling real big, like he finally has everything he wanted.

Zappa t-shirt holds both hands up. “You don’t have to tell me.”

Then Anna is in my face, yanking my elbow towards the front door.

Out on the sidewalk, Anna does little pirouettes. It’s loud enough for us to hear someone singing, “Anyway You Want It.”

“Jesse wants to take me home,” Anna says, turning in little circles.

If I were Anna, I’d say, “You are not going home with him.” But I’m me, so I ask, “Do you want to go home with him?”

“I don’t know,” says Anna. “He’s kind of...” She moves her hand in as straight of a line as she can manage. “One dimensional.”

God, she’s mean. I love her so much.

“Think that means no, love.”

Anna slumps against the wall, nodding, then shaking her head.

“I’m a bad person,” she says. She’s gone all dead in the eyes.

“Anna. No. You are the opposite of that.”

“We did a bad thing.”

I pull her towards me so we’re leaning into each other. “A bad thing happened. It wasn’t your fault.”

She isn’t having it.

“I wish I was someone else.”

This unties a small knot in my throat.

“If you were someone else,” I say, pulling her tighter, “who’d be my favorite person?”

Raj told me once, You’d leave me for her, if she’d let you. He laughed afterwards, but his eyes gave him away. Or mine did.

Her hair is sweaty at the roots from too much time under the hot stage lights. I run my fingers through, trying to give it some oomph. But it stays flat. Even this, I can’t fix. So we stay like that, triangled into each other on the sidewalk.

She mutters something—it sounds like ‘choice.’ No one is harder on themselves than Anna. I can hear her thoughts: you passed on what killed him, you’re responsible, why can’t you be more responsible, why can’t you kill who’s responsible, why did this happen, why.

“Let’s go back inside,” she says, straightening up. “Jesse wants to buy us shots.”

*

After that, all I remember is Anna telling me that the bar is purple neon magic and we should stay forever. There’s some laughing, some yelling. The mic stand gets kicked over and hits an especially beefy dude. Jesse whispers something into Anna’s ear and she grabs my arm with both hands. The night becomes a vacuum, the way nights used to, and I try to push it away because no no no I’m supposed to be the one taking care of her for a goddamn change, but the night wins like it always does, swallows everything up. 

Not before Jesse yells, drops of spittle bombing towards me, “The fuck is wrong with your friend?” and I punch him in the face.

We wake up in her car, all hungover.

“Why did you let me sleep like this?” Anna croaks. Makeup has settled into every wrinkle she’s earned since high school. If she looks like that, can’t imagine how I look. My hand is a watercolor, burgundy blurring into green. I pull my sweatshirt sleeve long, tuck it away.

“We shouldn’t have spent all that,” Anna says, face buried in her hands.

“The army guys paid for most of it.”

“Oh god,” she says. “I have never felt this awful.”

We sit there for a while, letting blood hammer around our skulls for a while. Then, Anna gives her face two little slaps and straightens the driver’s seat out.

“We need water,” she tells me.

“We need McDonald’s.”

On the way, I think I see Ed’s car twice. But it’s just my dehydrated brain playing tricks. We ride in silence for about half an hour before we remember that radios exist. Anna rustles around in the glove compartment and a unearths a CD with “Jamz 4 Anna” dribbled across its shiny surface in my teenage scrawl. “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs starts playing. The drums are Too Much for a hangover This Magnitude. I skip ahead, but I must have been angrier in middle school than I remember. Everything is so loud.

“Do you remember telling me that I have no standards last night?” I ask once I finish my Egg McMuffin.

Anna tilts the corners of her mouth down into her oops face.

“Sorry.” She pauses. “I do like Raj.”

Which is when I realize that I haven’t told her.

“No more Raj.”

She inhales sharply, face flooding with accusation.

“Trish. You didn’t.”

It’s the same way she looked at me in the parking lot.

“How do you know that I did it?”

“Didn’t you?”

“…yeah.”

“Well.”

We both go quiet.

“You’re mad,” I say.

“No.”

“Why are you mad?”

“Who said I was mad?”

“Me.”

“Well you don’t know everything.”

I try the blinking game, but she won’t even look at me.

“It’s just. For a while. The guys you picked. Like Ed—”

“I was never with Ed.”

“Okay, but others. Dean. Oh my god. And Nicky. What grown man is named Nicky?”

“This is fun for me. I am enjoying this.”

“But then, Raj! Great! But now. No Raj. So.”

Hungover anxiety hums.

“What happened?” she asks.

He had to ask everything you already know.  

“Nothing,” I say.

“Fine. Don’t talk about it.”

“Deal.”

She squishes her lips together. I can hear her counting down in her head. I should see if she’s trying to blink the argument away. But now, I don’t want to. Finally, she says:

“It’s all just so easy for you.”

She’s going to tell me what she means, even if I don’t want to know.

“You get bored of who you’re dating? You leave. Don’t want to finish school? There’s a job at the preschool for you anyway. Decide to try fucking drugs? You can just stop.”

I want to bat her words away. Magnanimously understand that they have less to do with me than their grieving speaker. But they pierce every part of my body.

A huge flock of starlings emerges to the right of the highway. They’re called a murmuration, an Anna memory reminds me. Because of the sound their wings make when they beat together. The birds spread across the sky, unfolding like a wave, then pulsing out into two swirling columns, only to swarm back together again. Beautiful, overwhelming.

“Raj was good,” she continues. “I thought you finally wanted something good. But maybe you were with him because he was convenient. And if the next convenient person is an Ed, you’ll choose them. Maybe that’s why you’re friends with me—because I’m the only one who’s still here.”

“Anna.”

“What?”

I almost blurt the truth. Deep down, I always thought she knew. But if that all seemed easy, my acting was too good. Her eyes are wild, lids swollen and purpled from exhaustion. Hair hangs around her face in greasy pieces. Neck is bright red. She doesn’t have room for anything beyond how she already sees me. I take the slowest breath of my life.

“You get to be mean to me right now. If that’s what you need, I can take it. But to say I’m only friends with you because you’re still here. That is—so wrong. I’m only still here because we’re friends. Okay? Say okay.”

But Anna doesn’t say anything. Instead, she slows the car, pulls onto the shoulder. Outside, the vacant highway stretches on until it blends into the horizon. Anna gets out, slams the door behind her, walks away. I get out too, sit on the hood of the car.  She walks so far that I can hold my hand up and block her completely.

Anna screams up at the sky. It’s too empty for noise out here, so the scream just hangs in the air, grasping around for something to hide behind. But there’s nothing.

As the hood groans beneath me, I think about how Kai, only twelve, stole the keys and picked us up from Aaron Kasock’s party, giggling while we told dick jokes in the backseat. Didn’t even get mad when we had to pull over so I could puke again on the side of the highway.

When Anna walks back to the car, she gets in on the passenger side. I climb into the driver’s seat and adjust it for my shorter legs, like I’ve done hundreds of times before. As I move the rearview mirror, I catch another glimpse of Kai in the backseat. A freshman now, refusing to get a haircut and thinking about trying out for the basketball team. Hoping to be invited to our weekend plans, wanting to help plot our big escape from high school and the little world we built around it, happy to be here, just glad to be included. Even if he isn’t coming with us.

It’s okay, I want to tell him. You aren’t missing much. You leave most folks behind and stick with people who don’t love you how you want. Alright, sure, there are these birds that murmur across the extra blue Kentucky sky like a blanket blowing away from a picnic, there is fried chicken and spicy chips and supermarket cookies with half an inch of frosting, there’s that gray river that laps against both its northern and southern banks in some impossible way, there are rooftop patios where the sunshine feels like a forehead kiss when you’re almost awake but not just yet, there are people you’d ruin your hands for, who will sleep in the car with you even when they could have had a bed. There is all that.

As we pull up on Cincinnati, Anna starts sobbing. Her tears could fill the car. I try to keep us steady as they carry us over the iron bridge, through the city’s glass and brick, down the familiar potholed roads, back into the palm.

STORY:
Leah Francesca Christianson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, TriQuarterly, River
Teeth, Watershed Review, Los Angeles Review, Split Lip Magazine, and other publications. She teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center, reads fiction for Split Lip Magazine, and is seeking representation for her first novel. Find her online @lfchristianson. 

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ART:
Nina Semczuk’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Sinking City Literary Journal, Coal Hill Review, and elsewhere. Her art, pottery, and comics can be found online and around the Hudson Valley. 

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Leah about this story!

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