Page 75 of Such Sharp Teeth

“Good for you, girl,” she says, raising her bottle. “Always seemed like things were going well, but you never know off social. And you rarely post.”

“I’m not an Instagram star like you.”

She revels in the compliment.

“What about you? How you’ve been?” I ask her. “I’d say I’m sorry to hear about your dad, but I know that was . . . complicated.”

“Thanks,” she says, flicking something off her jeans with a neon acrylic. She shakes her head, takes a swig of beer. “I was so ready to get out of here, the second I turned eighteen. Thought I’d never come back. Never see him again. But turns out, he’s everywhere. He’s every guy I ever dated. Can’t seem to get away from him. He’s gone now. He’s dead. But everything he did, everything he was, I still have to carry that. I tried to outrun it. Trust me. Not that I have to explain it to you. You know. You know how it is.”

She pulls out a cigarette and carries it to my lips. Slips it between. Lights it for me.

“Thanks,” I say.

She lights her own, takes a drag. “I’ve missed you, Rory.”

She’s not often serious. Even now, though I know she’s being sincere, the corners of her lips flirt with a grin.

“I’ve missed you, too.”

Whatever whispers of daylight remained suddenly go dead. It’s dark. Foggy.

“We understand each other. With our pasts. Everything we’ve been through. Everyone else, they want to judge girls like us. Hate us. Keep us. Either call us sluts or call us brave. Blame daddy issues for the choices we make. Blame us for the choices made for us.” She pauses to laugh, to ash her cigarette. “They don’t know anything, do they? They’ll never know.”

Girls like us. I take another drag, another sip of my beer. I wonder if she’s buzzed. With her it’s hard to tell.

“You’re the only person I ever told,” she says, letting her head back so her long hair scrapes the ground.

“Really?”

“I did tell one of my exes,” she says, whipping her hair in front of her face. “But he basically took it as permission to treat me like shit, too. That was the end of that. Once you tell them, once they know, they never look at you the same.”

The night goes cold around me. Cold and bitter. I shiver.

She shrugs. “Funny how being back here brings it all to the surface.”

“Hilarious.”

She shakes her head, then raises her bottle to me. “All right. You ready to do this?”

“I’m ready.”

We chug our beers, then step to the edge of the platform. We count down. Five, four, three, two, one. We hurl our bottles onto the tracks. We listen to the sound of shattering glass, to the music of something breaking outside ourselves.

Then we yell. We whoop and holler and laugh and stomp and spin.

I wait to welcome the freedom I felt doing this at seventeen, but it isn’t coming. Because it’s not enough. This petty destruction. It’s just not enough. I look at Mia, searching for some hint that maybe she’s come to the same understanding, but her back is to me.

“Pretty sky tonight,” she says. “Pretty moon. Don’t you think?”

“Sure. Another round?”

We each have another beer, share another cigarette. Reminisce. But it’s hard for me to be present, to focus on the conversation instead of how eager I am to smash something else. It’s got me on edge. I lie and tell Mia I’m tired, even though it’s only eight thirty. She doesn’t tease me about it; she puts her arm around me and offers to take me home.

When she drops me off, she says, “Let’s do this again soon.”

“Yeah. I’ll call you.”

“Pinkie swear?”