Page 40 of Angels Fall

“I got two hands of my own, and they’re doing just fine, thanks.” She throws her shit in the car, kind of ripping the leather seats with her pitchfork as she does. “Fuck! Me!” she shouts.

“What about your parents?” I offer up.

She spins on me, hard. “What about my parents? What do you mean, ‘what about my parents?’ Fuck are you trying to say, ‘what about my parents’?”

I choose not to point out that she just asked the same question three different ways. “Like, OK, fine, don’t take my fuckin’ help, but do they know what’s going on? I mean, shit, surely they can help bail you out of whatever the hell—”

“No one is bailing me out of a goddamn thing, you get that?” She’s poking me now, right in the places I’m bleeding. “I don’t need a fucking bailout. I can only trust one person, and that’s me, and so that’s who I trust, and I’m fucking fine. Get it?”

I take a breath, trying to understand and to be patient, when suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t. Understand. And I’m out. Of fucking patience.

“Yeah. Yeah, I fuckin’ get it.” There’s a little more heat in that than I actually intended, but fuck it.

Sure, I did something wrong once, but I’m trying to make up for it now.

And she fucks me and then tells me to take a hike like I’m… I don’t even know what. And then she fucks me again, and… So, no. No. Fuck that. I’m done. I’m done sitting in the penalty box on this shit. I’ll do whatever in the world I can for this chick, but if she won’t let me, then fuck her. And you know what? If Scotty was here, that’s exactly what he’d tell me to do too.

I know he would.

Seriously.

He would.

I know it.

She stares at me like she’s surprised that I got a little terse with her.

So I do it again.

“What?” I say. “I said I get it. So… I fuckin’ get it. You’re fine. You’re dynamite. Super. You’ve got a handle on fuckin’ everything, so… Great. Good for you. Run with it. Do you, boo. I won’t ask another time. Good luck. See ya. Bye.”

She blinks a couple of times with heat behind her eyes. I keep going.

“Seriously. I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want. Shit, I mean it must really be, because Evan told me that he tried to reach out to you back in the day, back when Scotty…” I stop short because I’m trying to make a fucking point, not be a goddamn asshole. “And he says you just ghosted on him. Wouldn’t return his calls. He’d invite you out and you’d never show. Or swing by and your mom would tell him you weren’t there, when you almost certainly were. And so it hit the point that when your parents moved away, he just assumed you moved with them. That’s how much you fucking disappeared. I mean… ain’t it?”

She looks like she wants to rip my goddamn head off. And so again, I keep going.

“So, yeah, you really must wanna be all the fuck alone. Because Evan’s like the best dude on the planet, and if you were doing that shit with him to… I don’t even know what. Like, make some kinda fucking statement to me? Well, that didn’t work, but you sure as shit did wall yourself away. So brava, girlie. Bra-fucking-va.”

I give her a slow, sarcastic hand clap, and ready myself for the kick to the nuts that I anticipate happening any second.

But it doesn’t.

Instead, her face goes blank. Not sad. Not angry. Not…anything. Blank.

And then—“Fuck,” she sighs out. “Man, you’ve done so much in the world, seen, I’m assuming, so much, and still… the sheer volume of what you don’t know could fill an encyclopedia.”

“Oh, yeah? Really? Who the fuck still reads an encyclopedia?”

I dunno why I said it. Just where my brain went.

“You’re fucking impossible,” she says, and gets in the car. I can hear the squeak of leather as her bare ass makes contact with the seat and I have a hard time…

No. That’s it. A hard time.

She turns on the ignition and presses a button. The convertible top lowers. She puts on her sunglasses, looks over her shoulder at me standing there, bleeding through my clothes, and says, “Fuckin’ dumbass. Next time just come inside me.”

And then she peels off down the alley, around the corner, and out of sight.