“I never thought of us as a triangle,” Daniel said.
“Neither did I,” Melissa said. “I never thought about it at all. We were just us.”
“If we could be just us, together, the four of us…” Christina said. “If you don’t hate me. Which I would understand if you did.” She laughed. “I hate me.”
“See, that’s so weird,” Daniel said. “I hate myself way more than I hate you. I mean, I don’t hate you at all.”
“Am I the only person on this road trip who doesn’t hate herself?” Melissa said. “William’s got a suicidal death wish for fuck’s sake. I never knew you people were so messed up.”
“Well, I was scared to die back in Albuquerque,” William said. “Thanks for the breakthrough, skinhead meth dealer.”
“So, um.” Christina brushed against his arm. “Is Tommy…”
William tried to send a silent apology to his brother, but it felt ridiculous. For the first time ever, he could hear Tommy’s reaction to the lie he’d used to trap his brother like a top secret burden only he could bear.
That is some genuine emo bullshit, William.
“Tommy’s not back in Michigan with my dad. He’s dead.” William stopped walking and turned to face his friends. “I’m sorry I never talked about it, I just, I don’t know. It was mine.”
As the story of Tommy’s life tumbled out, the waking nightmare of his death wormed into William’s cells as if to mimic the disease itself: his brother’s live-wire energy sapped by radiation, all that bright hilarious Tommyness hemmed in by a hospital room, bedside machinery coldly presiding, the inescapable tang of urine and disinfectant that followed William through his brother’s final days and numb dream of a funeral, the parade of grief-slackened faces, where did all these people come from?
His friends held him while he wept next to a short stump inscribed with rings the color of sunset.
“Adderall,” William said, “Roxies, weed, mushrooms, cocaine. Am I leaving anything off the menu here?”
They were walking in the shadow of an imposing Gemini, a steel skeleton twisted into mirrored angles. Daniel took a sip of water (eight dollars at the Hydration Station).
“Here’s the thing,” Daniel said. “There’s a lot of complicated steps I have to go through to make myself capable of just existing. Christina, you know in Principle Dark when the Ancient Ones open up their stomachs and there’s just rusty clockwork gears in there?”
“Yeah,” Christina said. “They have to oil themselves with blood from those flytrap things. I hate that part.”
“It’s kind of like that.” Crop-topped girls and shirtless guys staggered past. An old man in a Speedo came weaving through the tent city crowd on a unicycle. A gaggle of Spider-Men slung silly-string webs across a huge Mayan calendar. Moonshadow’s early-morning chaos was accompanied by melancholy trip-hop, snare drums cracking all around them, dry as the desert air. “What should I do? I’m honestly asking. Nothing feels right.”
“Detox,” Melissa said.
“Maybe some kind of rehab situation,” William said.
“And then you should go to Princeton and play basketball,” Melissa continued. They passed beneath the ridged brightness of Cancer’s claws. “And you should go to therapy and get some help, and for the rest of your life you should tell me whatever’s going on with you, because I’ll always be there to talk, and I’ll do the same with whatever’s going on with me.”
“We should go to group sessions,” William said. “All four of us, every week in the same room. I actually know a great therapist.”
Christina’s water bottle hit him in the shoulder.
“Oh. My. God.” Melissa ran to the entrance of a tent as big as a gymnasium. An inflatable sign in the shape of a 1950s drive-in marquee said SUNRISE DJ SET: JESSA PARK.
The tent seemed quiet. And dark. “I think we missed it,” William said. “Sunrise was a while ago.”
“But maybe she’s still in there!” Melissa said. “Maybe we can meet her.”
“Or maybe it’s just an empty tent,” Daniel said.
Melissa took his hand and pulled him inside.
William turned to Christina. Tributaries of RenderLux sludge ran down her sunburned face.
“You were never the lesser friend,” William said. “Never.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too. I can’t believe I stabbed my car to death.”
“That was…something. So what are we now?” she asked. “Me and you.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have any pictures of you and your brother together?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I see them?”
“I’ll print a few out.”
“We could just look at them on your phone.”
“I know. But I want to print them out anyway. So I can put them in frames and bring them with me to Buffalo.”
She took his hand. “Just one thing.”
“What?”
“How are you gonna get there?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to ride with you.”
Melissa reappeared in the tent flap with Daniel at her back. She was squeezing one of his fingers in her fist.
“You guys aren’t gonna believe this,” she said.
William thought for a moment. “Jesspiration?”
“No,” Daniel said. “You just gotta see it.”
Christina reached out her free hand, and Melissa took it. Daniel turned and led them all inside, William bringing up the rear. The bright day vanished, and together they moved through silent gloom. Something was going to happen. Something always came next. William was ready for it.
The darkness lifted.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my editors, Kieran Viola and Ricardo Mejías, whose creativity and intelligence helped this story come together.
