tonight I’ll probably fantasize about pushing her up against the wall of that doughnut shop and reaching my hand inside her fishnet stockings. I loved the way she held the back of my neck when I fucked her, forcing my lips against hers. She gave the dirtiest kisses.
Amy licks her fingers. “Let’s go to Backspace,” she offers. It’s one of the few late-night coffee shops downtown, which means it’s always full of high school kids. I don’t really want to go but, until we turn twenty-one we don’t have many other options.
Amy buys a second latte and grabs a deck of cards from another table. There’s a group of boys with laptops at a big table in the back and they’re all playing some computer game together. One of them leans back in his chair and sighs, “This is so fucking gay, dudes.”
Amy deals gin, which means she wants to talk. We’ve been playing gin since we were in the Girl Scouts. We used to play a quarter per point against other troops and clean them out. She spent all her money on makeup and I bought books. “How old is Liz, anyway?” she asks.
“Twenty-five,” I say.
“So does that mean it was, like, statutory rape when you were dating?”
“Nope. Just sodomy.”
“Oh.” Amy looks a little disappointed, like she was hoping for a felony, but her face brightens as she lays out her hand. “Gin.”
“You’re a cunt,” I tell her and slap my cards on the table.
She shrugs. “Homo.”
“Prude.”
“Dyke.”
“Breeder.”
Amy deals another hand and then leans across the table to whisper, “Don’t be mad that you can never have me.”
“Mad?” I point at her bug-bite titties. “There’s nothing there to motorboat. Forget it.”
Amy shakes her shoulders in an effort to make her nonexistent tits jiggle, which makes me snort. “Is that why you loved Liz?” Amy asks. “Because of her motorboat-ability?”
“And her apartment,” I answer. “It was nice to have a place where I could escape.”
Amy nods as she picks a discard. “I didn’t see you much then.”
“Yeah,” I say. I feel my cheeks tinge pink. It’s true. I dated Liz for nine months, right at the end of our senior year. I would live at her place on the weekends and never answer my cell phone. Amy sent me so many texts:
But I didn’t want to deal with anyone else. I just wanted to be in Liz’s apartment and see her looking disheveled in the morning. I loved the way she would roll over and smile at me with crusty raccoon eyes. “Morning, Glory,” she would say. Then she’d kiss me and I’d run my hands over her bare breasts, over her back, into her panties.
“Well, too bad she was a nut job,” Amy laments.
I nod and half-smile. “And now she’s straight too.”
Liz had moods sharp like knives. She said she was stressed with grad school and would apologize, but then she’d go into rages, break dishes, and yell at me to get out. One time she bit me so hard on my arm it left a scar. My mom asked if a dog did it.
“Some of it was good,” I say. Amy looks up from her cards. “I loved going to brunch with her on Sundays. And she wrote me letters, even when we saw each other every day. Sometimes we just sat together on her porch, reading books and smoking cigarettes.”
Amy nods thoughtfully. Then she gives me a big smile and I groan. “Gin,” she says.
By the time we head back across the river, the train is almost empty. We sit side by side, Amy texting a mini- novella while I stare out the window.
A guy about our age in an Old Navy T-shirt is sitting across the aisle. He’s rocking his head back and forth singing “Brown Eyed Girl” to himself.
He catches me looking at him and lopes over to our seats. He goes, “Hey.” He’s got pale skin and he smells wet and sour, like a gutter that’s been pissed in too many times. I breathe through my mouth. I look at Amy and we don’t say anything.
The guy smiles like one half of his mouth is all shot up with Novocain. “Hey,” he says again, and leans closer to Amy. “You’re really pretty.” She tenses up but doesn’t move. He runs a finger along the edge of her hair, from the base of her neck down to her shoulder blade.
I swat his hand away. “Hey, man. Don’t fucking touch her!”
Amy is red and frozen, not looking at either of us.
The guy straightens up and laughs. “Whatever. I’m just giving her a compliment.” His Adam’s apple bobs in his neck and suddenly I want to wrap my hands around his throat. Make him shut up. Make him sorry. His eyes roll around, like he’s not sure where to look. He stares into Amy’s lap, at her purse. “Hey,” he says again, and points. “What’s what?”
The Hummingbird is sticking out of her bag. He can see the cupped tip and the edge of the package, where it says, Re
“Nah,” he says. “That’s a dildo.” He stretches it out into two heavy syllables: Dill. Dough. He laughs again and I want to crush his windpipe. My fingernails are digging into my palms.
He touches Amy’s neck. “You need some help, honey? Need a man to help you, baby doll?”
Amy cringes and I leap over her, shoving him with force. There are three other people on the train and they are all working very hard to seem like they are not looking at us.
I warn him, “Keep your fucking hands and your compliments to yourself.”
“Don’t touch me, you fat fucking dyke,” he growls. His glassy eyes darken and he pushes me back, so I stumble into Amy, who, miraculously, is still texting.
I take a deep breath and feel my body hum. There’s a rush of blood that starts in my feet and burns straight up my legs to my pussy. It feels like an hour passes before the train stops and the doors slowly pull apart, and in one moment I do two things-I stomp on his foot, which distracts him enough to look down for a fraction of a second, then I jam the palm of my hand upward into his face and I hear his nose pop into my fingers. Suddenly there’s blood streaming down my forearm and I yell, “Run!” to Amy, who’s already jumped out and is racing to the parking lot.
I run as hard as I can, pausing only once to glance over my shoulder, and I see that he’s stepped off the train but he’s not going to catch us. He’s stumbling around with blood all over his shirt. The last thing I hear from him is a muffled cry like a broken animal.
Amy shouts for the keys and I toss them to her. She sprints ahead to the car and has the engine started before I even reach the passenger door.
We burn through signals regardless of their color and pull onto the freeway. The blood on my hand slowly dries and turns brown. Amy stares straight ahead, a death grip on the wheel, her chest heaving. Her right foot is planted to the floor. The album is still blasting from the stereo and we don’t turn it down.
A moment turns into half an hour. I make Amy turn around at Multnomah Falls, the scenic area thirty miles east of where we started.
“I don’t want to go to Idaho,” I say. I try to make it funny but she doesn’t respond.
Amy quietly, slowly pulls the car around. She looks left and right three times. Stops. She finally speaks: “Do
