Chapter 8: The Punk and the Girl Who Did Ballet

Eliana woke up because her neck hurt.

For a second she didn’t know where she was. The floor was cold and hard under her, and something heavy was leaning against her shoulder, and the room smelled like dust and burnt wiring. Then she saw the coffee cans on the shelf above her, and the cracked window, and it all came back at once.

The line of daylight across the floor was gone. The crack in the window had gone a dull orange, and the rest of the room had gone gray.

The heavy thing on her shoulder was Lexie’s head.

Eliana didn’t move. Lexie was asleep with her mouth a little open and her burned hand cradled in her lap, the gauze gone dark at the edges. Her hair smelled like smoke. Eliana sat very still and looked at the far wall, and for some reason she didn’t want to be the one who moved first.

Then she remembered her mother, and the eleven missed calls from yesterday, and she sat up so fast that Lexie’s head slid off her shoulder and knocked against the bench.

“Ow,” Lexie said, or tried to. It came out as a scrape of air.

“Sorry. Sorry. What time is it?”

Lexie squinted at the window. “Late.”

“How late?”

“I don’t know. My phone’s dead. Yours is dead.” Lexie rubbed the back of her head. “Sun’s going down.”

“No!” Eliana whimpered. “No, no, no, no, no! My mom is going to kill me!”

Eliana got to her feet, and the room tilted. Her legs felt like she had run a mile. Her arms felt worse. When she looked at her left hand, the fingertips were red and shiny, and there was a groove across the pads of three of them where the strings had pressed in. She hadn’t felt it at the time.

Lexie was looking at them too. She reached over without asking, turned Eliana’s hand palm up, and pressed her thumb next to one of the grooves. Eliana hissed through her teeth.

“Yeah,” Lexie rasped. “That’s gonna callus.”

“Is that bad?”

“Means you actually played it.” Lexie let go. “First time, probably. Ask Meghan, she’d know.”

Eliana pulled her hand back into her sleeve. She wanted to be annoyed about that, and she couldn’t quite get there.

Lexie tugged her own sleeve down over the gauze before Eliana could say anything about it.

They gathered their things in the dark. The bulbs were dead, and when Eliana tried the light switch, nothing happened. Lexie found her notebook on the floor by the couch and shoved it into her hoodie. Eliana picked the guitar case up off the concrete, checked that the photo was still tucked inside it, and set it back against the dead amp.

Up on the shelf, the only light left in the room was the salamander. One crack along its back was glowing, faint and steady, like a nightlight someone had left on.

Eliana stood under it for a second.

“It’s not going to get lonely,” Lexie said behind her, quieter than last time. Eliana didn’t answer. Lexie shifted her weight, like the quiet had gone on a second too long.

“Also, it tried to eat your face. Come on.”

“I know,” Eliana said, smiling.

She went out first. The street was blue with evening, and the warehouses had gone dark except for a single light over a loading dock down the block. Eliana pulled the gray door shut and locked it, and then she crouched by the sixth pipe and hung the key back on its hook, down low by the sidewalk.

Lexie watched her do it. “You’re just gonna leave it there?”

“It’s a spare,” Eliana said. “It’s supposed to be here.”

Lexie didn’t argue. She held out her good hand again, and Eliana took it and got up, slower than she had that afternoon.

They walked to the bus stop without talking. Eliana’s legs kept wanting to stop, so she let Lexie set the pace. At the bench with no back, Lexie dug out the crumpled bills and counted them twice under the streetlight.

“Enough for two,” she said. “Barely.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“Chill. My aunt was Celeste. I’ll be an heiress any day now.”

Eliana looked at her. Lexie was still smoothing the bills flat against her knee, and her face hadn’t changed at all. Eliana couldn’t tell if she was supposed to laugh, so she didn’t, and Lexie didn’t seem to expect her to.

The bus came around the corner with its windows lit up yellow, and it was the warmest-looking thing Eliana had ever seen. Lexie paid for both of them without being asked. They took the back seats because they were the only ones free, and Eliana sat down, and her whole body went heavy all over again.

The bus smelled like rubber floor mats and somebody’s fries. It pulled away from the river, and the warehouses slid past the window and turned into gas stations, then strip malls, then streetlights coming on one at a time.

Eliana leaned her head against the glass. It was cold, and it felt good.

Lexie sat beside her on the aisle side, with her knees up against the seat in front and her burned hand tucked into her lap. She had her eyes closed. Every time the bus hit a pothole, her head dipped forward, and she jerked it back up without opening her eyes.

“My uncle taught me guitar at a graduation party,” Eliana said.

She didn’t know why she said it. It came out of the fog in her head like it had been waiting there.

Lexie opened one eye. “What?”

“I was nine. Some cousin’s graduation. Everyone was inside, and he found me sitting on the back steps and borrowed somebody’s guitar.” Eliana watched a car dealership go by, all its flags hanging limp. “He taught me three chords. G was the one that hurt.”

“G hurts to sing, too.”

Eliana lifted her head off the glass. “What?”

“Okay, I don’t actually know anything about guitars,” Lexie said. “Just what Meghan complains about.”

Eliana almost laughed. It caught somewhere in her chest and stayed there.

“Nobody came out to look for us,” she said. “The whole party.”

Lexie was quiet for a while. The bus stopped, and a man with a grocery bag got off, and the doors folded shut again.

“Cece taught me to cheat at Uno,” Lexie said. Her voice was still mostly air. “Forty minutes. She had a whole system. You hide a draw four under your leg and wait.”

Eliana turned her head on the glass to look at her.

“My mom caught us,” Lexie said. “She was so mad. Cece just laughed.” She closed her eyes again. “Haven’t played since.”

Eliana thought about a draw four hidden under somebody’s leg. Her ha, and this time she didn’t stop it.

The bus turned onto a wider road. The heater came on with a rattle under the seats, and the warm air rose around their ankles, and Eliana’s eyes kept closing. Each time she pulled them open, the streetlights had moved a little further. Somewhere in there her head slid off the window. It landed on Lexie’s shoulder, and she was too tired to fix it.

Lexie didn’t move it.

A few stops later, Lexie spoke again without opening her eyes.

“We’ve got a show next Saturday.”

“Mm.”

“Basement thing. It’s not a big deal.” A pause, long enough that Eliana thought she’d fallen asleep. “You could…”

The bus braked hard at a light. Eliana’s head knocked against Lexie’s collarbone, and they both jerked upright, and whatever Lexie had been about to say was gone.

“Sorry,” Eliana said.

“It’s fine.”

The driver called out the next stop, the transfer at the plaza. Eliana blinked at the window. The parking lot was bright with signs, a frozen yogurt place and a phone store and the big pharmacy on the corner, and she realized she knew exactly where she was. Her bus home left from here. So did Lexie’s, probably.

She looked out as they slowed, and there, at the patio tables outside the frozen yogurt place, right by the stop, was Hannah, laughing at something on Vivian’s phone.

The doors folded open, and the cold came in.

Eliana stood up too fast and had to grab the pole. By the time she got down the steps, Hannah had already seen her. She was half out of her chair at the patio table with her mouth open, and then Vivian turned, and Tessa, and Emily with a cup of frozen yogurt halfway to her face.

“Eliana?”

It was too late to do anything about her face. She did it anyway. She pushed her hair behind her ear and felt grit in it, and she smiled.

“Hannah. Hi.” It came out sounding more relieved than she meant it to.

“Where have you been?” Tessa said. “You weren’t answering anybody. Vivian said you were missing.”

“I said she was quiet,” Vivian said.

“I haven’t gotten a new phone yet,” Eliana said. “Since the pool.”

Hannah looked at her hair, and the dust on her sleeves, and then at her hands. Eliana pulled her sleeves down over her fingers.

“Can I borrow yours?” she asked. “I need to text my mom before she calls the police.”

Hannah handed it over without a word. Eliana typed with her thumb, slowly, because it hurt.

She looked at the last part for a second, and sent it anyway.

Then Tessa looked past her, and her eyebrows went up.

Lexie had gotten off the bus behind her. She was standing a few feet back on the sidewalk with her hood up, her good hand in her pocket and the other one tucked into her sleeve, like she was waiting for a different bus. She probably was.

“Oh,” Tessa said. “Hi.”

Lexie nodded at her.

“We were doing a civics thing,” Eliana said. It came out bright and even, in the voice she used on the front steps. “Mr. Anderson’s essay. We got stuck together on it.”

“On a Friday night?” Vivian said.

“It was due today.”

That was true, technically. Neither of them had turned one in.

Lexie looked at Eliana, and something in her face was still loose from the bus, still half asleep, still the girl who had let Eliana’s head stay on her shoulder for six stops. She took a breath, and when she spoke, her voice came out in that ruined rasp.

“So are you coming Saturday or not?”

The table went quiet.

“Coming to what?” Vivian said.

“Our show.” Lexie didn’t look away from Eliana. “Some guy’s basement. It’s nothing.”

Vivian looked at Eliana. Then at Lexie. Then back at Eliana, and her face lit up like she had been handed a gift.

“Eliana at a punk basement?” Vivian threw up devil horns. “Okay, I need to see that. Are you gonna headbang? Rock on, Eliana!”

Tessa laughed first. It was loud and delighted. Emily laughed too, kindly, the way Emily laughed at everything. Even Melanie, at the end of the table, snorted into her drink.

Hannah didn’t laugh. She was watching Eliana.

Eliana felt the whole table turn toward her and wait. She knew what they were waiting for. She had known it for years, the way she knew which chairs by the English classroom were Hannah’s.

“I don’t really do basements,” she said.

She said it to Vivian, not to Lexie. And then she laughed, the right amount, at the right time. She heard it come out of her like it belonged to somebody else.

“She was just being nice,” she added. “Right?”

Lexie looked at her for one second longer.

Then her face closed like a door.

“Right,” Lexie said. “Whatever.”

She turned around and walked toward the bus shelter at the far end of the sidewalk, her hood up, her hand in her pocket. She didn’t look back.

“She’s so weird,” Tessa said happily.

“Come on, don’t be mean,” Emily said, though she was still smiling.

Hannah stood up and picked up her keys. “I’m parked around back. I’ll drive you.” She said it to Eliana, quietly, and her eyes went to Eliana’s sleeves again.

“Give me a sec,” Eliana heard herself say. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

The bus shelter was at the far end of the sidewalk, past the pharmacy, where the light from the frozen yogurt place didn’t reach. Lexie was sitting on the bench inside it with her hood up and her knees pulled in. She didn’t look up when Eliana stopped in front of her.

Eliana didn’t know what she had come over to say. She had walked the whole length of the sidewalk trying to figure it out, and nothing had come.

“You can’t just ask me something like that,” she said finally. “In front of them.”

Lexie looked up.

“Something like what?” Her voice was barely there, a scrape of air, and somehow that was worse than if she’d yelled. “A show?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. Tell me.” Lexie stood up. She was shorter than Eliana, and it didn’t seem to matter. “You said I was being nice. Like I felt sorry for you. Like inviting you was some kind of charity thing.”

“That’s not what I…”

“Then what was it?”

Eliana opened her mouth, and nothing useful came out. She could feel the whole patio behind her, even though nobody back there could hear. Hannah’s keys. Vivian’s phone. The way the table had gone quiet and waited.

“You don’t get it,” she said.

“Get what? That you’d die if they saw you talk to me?” Lexie laughed, and it came out broken as her throat tightened. “You slept on my shoulder for six stops.”

“I was tired.”

“Yeah. I noticed.”

Something hot came up in Eliana’s chest. It was the same feeling she’d had in the studio with the pick in her hand, except there was nowhere for it to go this time, nothing to hit, and it came out of her mouth instead.

“Look, we might fight monsters together,” she said, and her voice was loud, louder than she ever let it get, “but I barely know you, and don’t think that makes us friends!”

It rang off the plexiglass walls of the shelter. Somewhere down the sidewalk, a car door shut.

Lexie stood very still. For a second, her face did something Eliana couldn’t read. Then it was gone, and there was nothing behind it at all.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Lexie said.

Headlights swung around the corner. Her bus pulled up to the curb, and the doors folded open, and Lexie stepped past Eliana without acknowledging her and climbed on. She didn’t sit by the window. Eliana watched the bus pull away and couldn’t see her through the glass at all.

She stood in the empty shelter until her hands stopped shaking. Then she pushed her hair behind her ear, and put her face back on, eyes still wet, and walked toward the back of the plaza where Hannah was waiting with the engine running.

Lexie took the seat on the aisle because the window would have meant looking out at the plaza, and she wasn’t going to do that.

The bus was nearly empty. A woman in scrubs was asleep near the front, and a kid with headphones was mouthing along to something, and nobody looked at her. Lexie pulled her hood down further and put her hands in her lap.

Her good hand was empty. She had been holding the bills for so long she’d stopped noticing them, and now there was nothing there. She’d spent the last of it on two fares.

She didn’t know why that was the thing that did it.

It came up from somewhere under her ribs, and she put her burned hand over her mouth to keep it in, and that hurt, so she pressed harder. Her throat was too raw to make the sound properly. It came out as nothing, a hitch of breath and then another one, and the charms on her bracelet shook against each other with every breath. She hated that. She held her wrist still with her other hand until they stopped.

The kid with the headphones got off at the next stop. The woman in scrubs didn’t wake up.

Lexie cried until the bus turned onto her street, and then she wiped her face on her sleeve, pulled the cord, and got off like nothing had happened.

Hannah’s car smelled like vanilla, from the little cardboard tree on the mirror.

She didn’t turn the music on. She pulled out of the plaza and drove with one hand on the wheel, and every time they stopped at a light she glanced over, and every time Eliana kept her eyes on the dashboard.

Eliana’s sleeves were pulled down over her hands. Her face was still damp, and she could feel it, and she couldn’t do anything about it without Hannah seeing her do it.

At the last light before Eliana’s street, Hannah said, “You okay?”

“Fine.”

Hannah waited a second.

“Okay,” she said.

It was only one word. Eliana thought about it the whole rest of the way home.

Her mother was in the hall before the front door had finished closing. Her work badge was still clipped to her blouse.

“Yesterday I hear from the school,” she said. “Today I hear from Hannah’s phone.”

“Mine’s broken.”

“And whose fault is that?” Her mother’s eyes went to the dust on her sleeves, the grit in her hair. “Where were you? And don’t say Hannah’s, because you look like you crawled out of a chimney.”

Any other night, Eliana would have had the answer ready. Something polite, something that cost her nothing.

“Out,” she said.

Her mother stared at her. “Out.”

“I was out. Now I’m home. I’m fine.” Her voice was rising, and she let it. “Can you just stop?”

The hall went quiet. Her father was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder, and he was looking at her like she was somebody else’s kid.

“Eliana,” he said. Just that.

It had always been enough. This time she went upstairs anyway. She shut her bedroom door hard enough to rattle the frame, and locked it, and sat down on the floor with her back against it, the way she had the night before.

She cried quietly, with her face against her knees. She had done this so many times she knew exactly how to make no noise.

When it was over, she looked at her hand. The grooves were still there across her fingertips, red and shiny, where the strings had cut in. She pressed her thumb into one, the way Lexie had, and held it there until it stung.