Dark Places

62 | i know

—I KNOW I KNOW YALL ARE WORRIED ABOUT JONAH 🤐🤐

❝hunk in the trunk, there's an amber alert:
pull behind the mausoleum
in the back of the church.
i'm immortal, motherfucker,
and i hang in a cave.
i'm the girl you're fucking over,
etching your name and your days.❞

☽

BOTTOMS UP.

I take a shot behind Big Apple. It had been on my mental to-do list since I saw Larina in Monument Square. I take another shot for being manhandled by Tyler Oullette, another shot for... for Jonah.

Desperation has sunk in. Despite trusting Drake (as a bodyguard) with Jonah, I'm dangerously close to resorting to old fashioned tactics: tattling to Mamá.

How do I call Mamá and tell her... that Jonah may or may not have joined a Satanic cult? I don't know anything about it, I'd have to say, but I don't think Jonah is safe.

Everything I swallow burns, and I hate it. I toss a handful of empty nips into a dumpster, careening off a curb woozily. It's too much, too fast, Jess used to say. It's all about dosage and pacing. Don't drink yourself to death, Luz.

Why not?

Homebound, I sip at a brown-paper-bagged 40 oz, a grimy, metallic taste beneath my tongue. Convince Jonah to stay in, play Halo, instead of going out. Rendezvous at 9:30 p.m. off Monument Square. Hope I can finish it tonight, or soon enough to not snitch on my big brother.

"I'm doing it my way, Medina," I told him. "I want you to stay away, let me talk to her for a minute, ¿entiendes?"

Drake winced. "But I'm your bodyguard, Melo."

Medina could be my bodyguard from afar. It would only take a minute, if I pregame hard enough.

I shiver into his jacket as I coast toward Congress; I'd plucked it from his backseat, remembering that I'd left it last Saturday, that Drake insisted I keep it. I'll burn it when I leave him again.

You took your problems somewhere else, he'd said, my first night in Portland. You left, Melo.

Jonah had been mildly surprised by our joint insistence on staying at Bull Moose, on giving him a lift back to Portland. It was disconcerting and disorienting, stirring suspicion to his obliviousness. Did Jonah know nothing, or was Jonah playing us?

Why would...

By early Saturday afternoon, I'd been barely sleepwalking. Hanover and Cumberland. Jonah plopping onto a couch lazily. Connor and Eli, playing Halo on a flatscreen I don't remember, as I trudged past them, hardwired to head for his bedroom. Drake. I reversed, whipping around to fumble into him, jackknifing for my own bedroom.

I'd emptied my pockets immediately: a knife and a crumpled sketch from my missing Moleskine. Jess forgets where she is, why she is, it says, says, says, in fading ink, and I know I wrote it. Coney Island. 5/28/2019. 5:18 p.m.

I'd already shed his clothes off when I heard his soft knock. It was a silent exchange, only I didn't give him anything. He slipped my iPhone into my palm, case-less, but lingered, half a heartbeat of hesitation, and I thought Medina was going to lean down and kiss me.

"I'll see you tonight, Melo."

Vaguely, I wonder if Drake slept.

I'd rinsed myself of a salty assault, untangled knots, assessed damage, before shrugging into my sheets with another Moleskine, forced into a foreign feeling in my framework, unable to draw anything. It didn't feel like my sketchbook: too stiff, too empty, too quiet, reflecting back blankness, rather than a private gallery show of Jessica Montero. I kept flicking back to its only tainted page, a haunting half-moon, carved into its flesh in Micron. They'd carved it into Corey. Immortality. Permanence. His corpse, wherever it may be, symbolizing a sacrifice.