She wouldn’t have to come up with a plausible excuse to head off on her own in a strange city so she could meet Ash.
She wouldn’t have to endure paranoid thoughts about her own Epheme chats popping up on the window in 800-point font. If Otto could snag Daniel’s supposedly untraceable words from the ether, then hers were obviously fair game as well. She wondered what he was waiting for.
In the back of the car, Christina whispered something in William’s ear, and he poked her playfully in the ribs. Daniel turned the page.
Melissa put her phone down on the seat and watched the motorcycle shrink to a black dot, and tried not to literally scream.
“Never have I ever seen Daniel Benson’s self-proclaimed weird nipples.” Christina scanned the group with the shifty-eyed stare of a private eye. Her beer remained in her lap, undrunk. William hoisted his bottle and swigged. Daniel lifted his own beer halfway, then paused, lost in thought.
“I shouldn’t have to drink for this, since I own the nipples in question. But I do want to drink. So…” He took a long swallow.
Melissa felt Christina’s eyes on her. “What? I said I didn’t want to play.”
“Just play with water,” William said. “You don’t have to drink.”
An ice-cold water bottle tumbled into her cup holder.
US-285 had taken them north through the high plains. The shrub seemed to burn away slowly, scorched into shriveled blotches that hunched over the land like carrion birds. Even the hills had been hammered flat. Melissa hadn’t ever conceived of places this empty existing in modern America. It looked like Otto had taken a detour through the Australian Outback or some thawed Mongolian steppe. By sunset, red rock formations began to rise from the cracked earth.
Welcome to New Mexico.
She opened Epheme.SewWhat:It’ll be really late by the time I get to you.Ash:No problem. I’m a night owl.
She closed the app. Soon she’d have to find a way to go alone into the streets of Albuquerque. Playing a drinking game was the last thing on her mind. But the atmosphere in the car had swung back to “reasonably harmonious,” and she wanted to keep it that way. If everybody was partying, it would be easier for her slip away once they got to the city.
She twisted the cap off the bottle. “Fine.”
“Okay,” William said. “My turn. Never have I ever talked to the Fremont Hills Jesus.”
Daniel frowned. “Like, said hi to?”
“No. Like, had an in-depth conversation with.” William looked around, shrugged, and drank by himself.
“What did you guys talk about?” Christina asked.
“He did most of the talking. Turns out he used to work on Wall Street. He used to have a wife and an apartment with tomato plants on the balcony and everything.”
“Tomato plants?” Melissa pictured the Fremont Hills Jesus taking the elevator to his glass-walled corner office in Morgan Stanley wearing his ratty old army jacket, unzipped to display his sunken chest, dry leaves crumbled in his hair, an overworked assistant handing him a coffee.
We’ve got the Swiss contingent here at nine, Mr. Jesus.
Hold my calls, Xavier.
“Yeah,” William continued, “tomatoes and some other stuff. He was really into this little garden he used to have, which makes sense, ’cause now he grows weed.”
“You guys are besties,” Christina said.
“He comes by the skate park sometimes to sell shit.”
“So the Fremont Hills Jesus is a stockbroker who got sick of the rat race and decided to become a small-town crazy guy?” Melissa asked.
“He’s not crazy,” William said. “Except for the thing about the chip in his head so he can translate owl noises. And a few other birds.”
“That’s not not crazy,” Christina said.
“I don’t mean to undermine your whole impressive preamble here,” Daniel said, “but I know where this is going. Lemme guess: the Fremont Hills Jesus did too much cocaine and lost all his money and got addicted and ruined his high-powered life in the big city and had to come crawling back home to the trailer park.”
Melissa studied her ex-boyfriend closely. Ex, she thought. Ex. Letting the prefix linger inside her head. It felt like a new bra that didn’t quite fit, the underwires of the word digging into her skin. But she was confident that she could get used to it. Daniel was looking at William with mild curiosity. He wasn’t flinging words rapid-fire or bouncing off the walls. Except for the fact that he was two beers deep, he seemed completely sober.
His shirt said HABITAT FOR HUMANITY. The left side of his face was puffy and mottled.
The real Daniel Benson existed somewhere on the spectrum between Guy Who Builds Houses for Charity and Guy Who Starts Fights with Strangers.
“Never have I ever been secretly on drugs for days at a time without anybody knowing,” William said.
“It’s not your turn,” Daniel pointed out.
“Never have I ever smoked crack.”
“Jesus Christ, is Reagan in office?”
“Never have I ever been high right now at this very moment.”
Daniel rested the bottle on his knee and looked solemnly at William, as if to add weight to his denial. “I swear on the feline souls of Taylor and Swift that I’m not high at this very moment.” His eyes went to the bottles William and Christina were holding. “This is the weirdest intervention of all time.”
Melissa heard herself speak, but couldn’t quite believe she was saying it. “Never have I ever been high during sex with my girlfriend.”
Daniel’s composure seemed to fall away. His eyes flashed with desperate indecision. It was a look she’d seen many times, regret and anxiety knotted together. Then he clicked back into himself.
“You mean ex-girlfriend.”
He chugged the rest of his beer.
The moon above Albuquerque was the color of desert rocks. At first Melissa took it for Mars—some trick of the Southwest, land of Roswell and Area 51. It was hard to imagine this moon was the same
