. (mote) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-11-27 04:20:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | poison ivy, supergirl |
Who: Aran and Charlie
What: Reuniting
Where: Aran's trailer
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Nope
It was cooler, but it was not home. The air was too dry, and no salt clung to it. Some people might not believe that air could be different in different places, but it was. Here, there was no moisture, and the sea did not sing in the salt and damp that was swallowed down with each breath. For Aran, it was like something was missing. It had been missing in New York, but there had still been dampness there. The ground had been too steady, with no tilt and tip, but there had been water in the air and dampness in her lungs, and she could still imagine the taste of the sea on her tongue. Here she could imagine nothing but endless dryness, and even her dreams felt parched.
Aran had missed the cruise that everyone was speaking about on the parchment. Work had kept her out of town, and now she returned smelling of bleach and with knees bruised from scrubbing blood from cheap linoleum. It was always easier to clean death from expensive places, and the muscles in her arms burned like things used for too long. The trailer was messy, but it was home, and there was no bleach there and no children's blood dug deep into the cheap flooring and beneath the counters. She showered in the miniature bathroom, the lukewarm water turning her skin into wrinkles, and she dressed in pajama pants and a t-shirt before Charlie came.
Charlie, and Aran repeated the name over and over in her mind. Charlie, who set the world on its axis and made the sun brighten the sky. It was exaggeration, but Aran did not care. It felt like Charlie made the world turn, and it had since New York. The rave she'd met the other girl at had been like every other rave in the boisterous city. There was nothing of nets or fishing, and there was no conversation amid stamps and a crowd that bounced like waves on a day when Mother Sea was angry. And there Charlie had been, glowstick and lights, and Aran remembered every moment like it was a tattoo on her mind.
Charlie was nothing like her, and Aran loved that. She had followed the other girl like a puppy, saying little, just basking in Charlie's everything. She hadn't told the girl about her secret, because she had learned long ago that her secret came with bloody lips and broken noses and awkward shuffling feet. And none of it mattered now, because Charlie was in Las Vegas, and suddenly it was almost as if she could smell the ocean again. The world, too long steady, tilted and tipped again, and Aran sat on the steps of the trailer and waited, a hoodie over her thin frame and the hood pulled up over her thick, dark hair.
Some people didn't have homes, didn't want them. Charlie thought those kinds of people were free, the people that chose to let it all float away in smoke or sea. She thought Aran was like that. Because even though Aran wasn't like New York, she'd met Aran there, where she'd met so many people that gave their old lives away in exchange for the dream. Sometimes the dream was living in an abandoned building where nobody could expect anything of you. Charlie thought that was pure magic, complete with all of the idolizing of a child who didn't completely understand the so-called necessities of careers, mortgages, and a 401K yet. Some people gave up their lives in another sense, with drugs or decaying jobs, and Charlie thought that was sadder.
She wasn't an artist like her sister, and she didn't know about all of the music that her sister had known about. She didn't know old bands like Zeppelin because she'd been too young to be curious, then suddenly too jaded to give a fuck. She didn't know new bands because that cost money, but New York had given her some experience with basement joints and scum gigs and thumping raves. She knew club music, but not by name. She knew what she liked to play, some old songs she'd learned a real long time ago, and a bunch of stuff that she made up herself. That felt more important, or maybe just more present, than worrying about radio dials.
Charlie didn't have a car, and she'd made the taxi driver stop on the station playing something she recognized but didn't know the name of. A woman was saying that the landslide brought her down, and Charlie hummed along while putting some new strings through an old guitar. When the taxi pulled up the gas station that Charlie'd designated, one that was half a mile down the road from the address Aran had given her, she vanished inside briefly, promising to buy a six pack and be right back. Then it was into the bathroom, and out through the cramped window that she could just barely force her way through with that instrument hanging from her back.
That's how she showed up in Aran's trailer yard, winded from the run, dark hair sweat-clung to her face, painted guitar under one arm, a grin of victory cast across her pink stung mouth. "Hey," she said with a pant for air as she glanced over her shoulder to ensure that there was no investigate taxi prowling the street behind her. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from the back of a pair of faded old jeans that had belonged to the boyfriend, boyfling, boything in New York. Charlie didn't have a hoodie on, she had a thin red tee shirt and day old makeup around the eyes. She had a smile like loving a stranger, like she'd had the most perfect dream last night and was reliving it, it was so warm. "We should go inside, in case he comes looking."
Aran had the advantage. She had a few minutes where she watched Charlie cross the yard clothed in victory and sweat, and it was like the skies had parted after a maelstrom at sea. But Charlie was the maelstrom, and the storm had only ceased because it couldn't compete, and Aran smiled brighter than she had since leaving the dark smog-kissed sidewalks of New York behind. Her father, solid and practical, would have told her that one little girl couldn't make the world spin upon its axis, but Aran knew better. She knew the moon controlled the tides, and Charlie was the moon, bouncing wild in a rave with an abandon that Aran had never owned. Aran was shame and secrets, and Charlie was that old guitar and a daring that Aran envied, even if she recognized that wildness was self-destructive. It was still beautiful then, and Aran stood, hoodie still clinging stubbornly to her hair, and pushed open the door to the messy trailer.
She followed Charlie in, crowded behind her and then slipped, thin and nothing, past her toward the back room. "Come," Aran urged, voice a little too husky, and she climbed onto the huge mattress that took up every bit of space in the back. She flopped onto her spine, and it was New York again, stories and confidences in the dark, the smell of rave smoke still on their skin and their hair tangled up and becoming the best of friends on a shared pillow. She patted the mattress, and she played with the zipper on her hoodie - up and down and up again. "Tell me everything," she urged. Aran had no everythings worth telling, but Charlie always did. Aran read old books, and she knew blood spatter and the wave and bounce of bodies like the ocean. Charlie knew other things, like running from cabbies and boys and girls; feeling things, and Aran sucked those up and swallowed those down like red words in Bibles.
Out of sand and into steel, Charlie lit her cigarette with a pack of matches that were an anomaly, the paper fold had the printed name of a local bar that she was too young to get into. It was an atavistic throwback to the many decades marked by young women sneaking into the places that society said they didn't quite belong yet. Charlie liked those kinds of places best of all. She liked places with boarded up windows and rusty KEEP OUT signs, they were the most fun to sneak into after the moon went high and the music began to pulse like a gypsy invitation rather than a warning(like it always did in the scary movies).
The place was discreet and cramped in on itself, a pair of shoulders brought down and in with uncertainty, but Charlie liked it. Streamlined and shiny, the magic of having a house with wheels wasn't lost on Charlie at all. Aran could go anywhere, run everywhere, be anyone. Pride and jealousy bloomed simultaneously in the pit of Charlie's empty stomach, in the way of so many young girls that didn't quite know if they wanted what somebody else had, or just wanted to be them. "Cool place," was what she settled on. Smoke whipping past the corners of her mouth as she snatched a dirty cup from the sink in passing, using it as an ashtray in the same fluid movement that tucked the cool, wet glass into the crook of one arm.
The bed was soft, so much better than the bunk cot that Charlie slept on at the shelter. She'd stayed at the Holiday Inn for the first couple of days in the city before she realized just how fast it sucked the money out of her back pocket. Yeah, maybe the Holiday Inn had television, but it seemed like a small convenience to be paying one-fifty a night for. So she moved into the shelter, and she kept her bag of tricks in a locker with the key strung loose around her neck. The guitar wouldn't fit, so she took it everywhere and kept it strapped across her skinny back for fear of setting it down and losing it forever. But Charlie set it down now, she rested it in the cramped part of the trailer that almost functioned as the kitchen, and then she followed Aran further. There was no hallway to speak of, just step past a curtain and into the comfort. The colorful quilt on the bed made Charlie beam, an unguarded rarity.
"Well," she began once her head found the pillow. The ceiling seemed almost close enough to touch, and Charlie extended an arm way above herself in curiosity, but she found that it was only an illusion made by the metallic ceiling, she couldn't reach it at all. "I broke up with Franz, that guy I was seeing in New York.. and I guess maybe broke up is the wrong term, I kind of just took all of his cash and left." She said it with a smiling flash of bared teeth, like she knew that she should have been nervous or guilty saying such a thing, but she wasn't at all. "I took the greyhound, and we stopped in Austin.. have you ever been to Austin, Aran?" Twisting, Charlie stretched out against her friend's side. "There's so much music there.." Smile. "And everybody wears hats."
Aran watched Charlie's progress from the mattress. Through the small space that pretended to be a door, she watched the girl slide the guitar down and set it on the counter that pretended to belong to a kitchen. It was like being a theater, curtains drawn and something wonderful on the screen. Elbows against the mattress, and Aran felt like a erudite. She didn't know if the word could be used like that - erudite - but she was something knowledgeable, something that studied. She studied the long slip of girlish arm as Charlie set her beloved guitar aside, and she watched the effortless movement of hips as the girl on the screen approached her. The non-hallway was narrow, and it gave the illusion of shadowboxes on the walls of the hut that belonged to the grandmother down the way back home. Captured like a butterfly, and Charlie wouldn't like that. Aran didn't need words to know that Charlie would fight the pin and glass and little frame of wood.
And then the girl in the screen stepped out, no longer celluloid, and she climbed the chairs in the theater and laid herself down on the bed. Aran thought of mermaids, of sirens. She thought of beautiful things climbing out of the water and luring fisherman by merely existing and merely being. She would write that in a letter to her father, she thought. Dear daddy, today a mermaid came. And cool place made Aran beam with pride, as if she'd done something to deserve the plastic that had bought this home on wheels. But she paid the bill every month, and there was triumph in wiping up brains to pay for a bed. "Should stay," she said, touching long and boyish fingers to Charlie's hair, delicate, like strands on the nets that had been bunched and tangled and needed to be drawn back like thread through a needle's eye. There wasn't much room, but what did that matter?
Aran watched Charlie's reach with dark eyes that worshipped. As if, in that movement, was something miraculous. It was the way of friends, of girls that huddled and whispered in corners, but Aran had never owned any of those; she didn't know. She thought, though she knew better, that Charlie might reach the roof. If anyone could, it would be Charlie. "Didn't like Franz," she said, though it was unnecessary. Aran was an open book, and Franz had been a chapter she hadn't liked at all. "Not good enough for you," she said, but the severe statement was followed up by a peal of girlish laughter as she tried to imagine the look on Franz' face when he woke up to find his money gone. She slid her arm beneath Charlie's head when the girl turned, fingers dragging through the seaweed of Charlie's hair . She shook her head; she had never been to Austin, and she imagined another landlocked place devoid of salt and breath.
"Did you play?" Aran asked, imagining Charlie on some small wooden stage, men and women in hats from cowboy movies watching her in adoration. The image flickered in her mind, and she imagined Charlie nervous and bright, spotlights dancing upon her shoulders. "Don't think I like hats," she concluded a second later, her own little troublesome smile accompanying a few seconds of careful deliberation. "Work here is good," she added, though work was never a specified thing. She didn't think Charlie would mind it, but Aran never explained the blood beneath her fingernails, the forgotten chips of other people that sometimes stubbornly lodged themselves there. "Missed you. No one to go dancing with."
"Really?" Charlie asked it with the soft wonder of somebody who wasn't used to asking for anything. Even when she had been young enough to halfway believe it was okay to ask, it seemed like the answer had always been no. Unanswered prayers didn't mean God wasn't listening, they meant he explicitly said no. They meant go stand in the corner and think about what you've done. Charlie liked the idea of staying for reasons that didn't involve liking the trailer or liking Aran. Staying meant belonging, and she hadn't belonged somewhere in what felt like a very long time. Probably not since her sister was alive, but Charlie didn't address the psychology that rested bare behind the feeling of being a ghost that didn't quite belong. One that could slip through walls and lives and be forgotten by Las Vegas tomorrow if she wanted to. Staying with Aran would change that, but it sounded pretty for the time being.
"I'll think about it," Charlie promised, and the words cruised their way into an absentminded smile when Aran vocalized her dislike for Franz. Malnourished body twisted, and she was faced away from her friend long enough to focus on the arm that pillowed beneath her cheek, the long fingers that sprouted from the hand on the other side, nailbeds marked by something dark, skin always smelling faintly of chemicals, the kind that nobody got high with. Charlie curled her fingers into the crepe sewn sleeve of Aran's hoodie, where the fabric went all tight at the wrist. Charlie stretched it experimentally before she pressed the cool of her cheek against the warm back of Aran's hand. A moment to savor the quiet of their friendship, Charlie closed her eyes and laid there like that for a few breaths. Then she twisted back to face Aran.
"No, I didn't play in Austin," she confided, and she even seemed a little sad about it. At the time, she'd been coming down hard and couldn't have remembered a song if somebody had offered her a hundred dollars. She didn't really know how to sing that well anyway, and Austin had seemed like the kind of town that wanted words to go along with aimless strumming. Charlie planned on making up for her lack of playing in Vegas anyway, not that she imagined this kind of city could appreciate anything less than a million dollar production with ostrich feathers and sequined tits. "Have you found any good places to dance here?" Dancing had always felt like a more wholesome way to get the demons out. More satisfying come morning too, when her body was pleasantly achey. When the sunlight would creep in and she could quietly pick pieces of confetti off of the pillow of whomever's couch she'd crashed on.
Aran had grown up asking. Wordless requests made of an adoring father who was lonely for the world. She sat on the edges of cliffs in saddle shoes he'd driven clear into town to find, and she waded into the ocean with a pleated skirt, one made of something yellow and soft that was too amazing to be fabric, her boy's knobby knees peeking out in defiance of tulle and taffeta. When she'd wanted music, he'd bought her a violin, but her long and skinny fingers didn't take to a bow. Her fingers hadn't taken to flutes or clarinets or keyboards either, but he'd driven the distance in his rickety truck of corroded blue, and he'd brought them all there and back again. "Really," she said, hearing the shadows in Charlie's absentminded smile. Those shadows made Aran think of fishermen who had only caught stripers that they couldn't sell. Men two months behind on their boat payments, and the women gone skinny-gaunt and mean on the cliffs, waiting. The shadows reminded Aran of that infinitesimal moment when the realization sets in that you'd rather your man not come, than come home with a net full of hunger.
A resounding yes had been hoped for, but Aran took that promise as something that wasn't rejection. Aran asked, but she'd never spent a life repeating requests. Once, and she found whatever she had asked for on the cot that was her bed in the hut. Once, and she left Charlie to marinate in the offer. She considered saying they could move anywhere, if Charlie had a particular somewhere she preferred to be. She considered, but she kept her silence, like so many ocean graves when the bodies were weighted correctly by professionals. Instead, she watched Charlie's back, the slope of her shoulder, and she craned her head to see the fingers that smoothed the sins from the ditch of her elbow. Charlie's hands, so unlike hers. Feminine, for all that Charlie was not the blonde ideal for beauty. But Charlie's hands were soft, extra layers of fat there visible to Aran's discerning eye. She'd never been able to wish a woman's extra layer of plumpness on her own bones. In a world obsessed with anorexia, no one noticed, but Aran did. She knew she could grow old and fat on bones and cake, and her knuckles would still be there, greeting the world in defiance of that thing she wanted to be, that thing that Charlie naturally was.
There was a smile waiting when Charlie twisted back. "You will play here," Aran promised. She would bring down the moon for Charlie if she needed too, and she would find Charlie some place to play. For all of Aran's quiet, she was not demuring. It showed in the smile she gave the girl on the bed with her, and it showed in the certainty that dug dimples into her cheeks. "Found places," she said of dancing. "Hotels are best place for big dance clubs. Small places downton better for after," she explained. "Will take you to Vega," she offered, bright and certain. She had no idea how she would get them in, but she'd find a way.
"Will you come see me if I play?" Charlie knew that Aran would. She knew that Aran would camp out for days in the rain if she asked her to, and there was a wonderful comfort that came with knowing that kind of thing. Aran would help her bury a body, she'd help her commit any variety of crimes, and she had once or twice in New York. Charlie'd never had a best friend, and it felt like she might be too old to have one now, but maybe that's what this was. She'd had friends as a child, of course, before everything went to shit. After her sister died and her dad got drunk, nobody wanted to come over for sleepovers anymore. She'd been young still, high school fresh, and Charlie knew that was the time when friendships were supposed to be made. That was when she was supposed to share secrets about crushes and sex, and that's when they were supposed to smoke cigarettes out the screened window in the dead of night with the fan on high so that parents wouldn't know. Maybe they would have snorted speed and laughed in the dark, Charlie wasn't entirely sure of the specifics. She'd been too old, or maybe just too jaded by the time this first real friend came along. She didn't know what the rules were, what she was supposed to do, or how she was supposed to act. Charlie had never been the kind of girl to worry about that stuff for very long though, it was just a blip on the radar of her would-be greatness.
"Vega?" Charlie's questions always rode smiles. Wide smiles or shy smiles with teeth creating new seams in pale lips. A smile always paid the toll for the yes she was looking for. Right now she didn't want anything though, she just wanted to know about Vega. The smile was still ingrained, but it wasn't a trick to get what she wanted, it was true. Charlie tilted her cheek into the crook of Aran's arm, the hoodie was warm. "Get me drunk and tell me about it.."
"I will come," Aran assured Charlie. She knew that Charlie knew, but she said the words anyway, the reassurance salt-encrusted and rough. Aran had never had the kind of friends that slept over. There wasn't room for it in the huts that lined the oceanside cliffs. Hard life made for early, exhausted sleep and beds found when the sun kissed the day goodbye. It was a hard life, the one that had hewn the girl in the bed beside Charlie. She didn't know about the rules. Boys didn't play the same games girls did, not high on the cliffs, and while she had spent most of her life in skirts, the locals had known better. Even without the exhaustion of muscles that trembled from nets and anchors, there would have been no sleepovers for Aran. Charlie was new. Charlie was a novelty. Charlie was the moon that controlled the tide, in and out, like breath in young lungs that didn't rattle with age or knowledge yet. Everything was possible, and everything was possible with the girl on the bed by her side. Death was an undertow that took old fisherman, and Aran would go anywhere Charlie desired, and she would go fearlessly, with the immortality of the young.
"It is a club. It is hard to get in, and they say there are secrets inside," Aran said of the club with the neon sign. Some of her employers went there, the men with thick wallets and secret names written down in books that were locked in safes. Aran didn't speak at work, and dumb men thought silence meant she didn't listen. But Aran had been raised on thick books written by dead men and women, and she had studied in the tiny schoolhouse that was the one promise of freedom for the children born of the sea. She listened, and she remembered, and she stayed quiet while it suited her. She looked down at her friend, that press of cheek to the sleeve of her hoodie like hitched breath and fantasies. "Wine or harder?" she asked, sliding her arm out from beneath Charlie's cheek and scooting to the edge of the bed. She had both. She had acquired both when Charlie said she would come. She knew Charlie liked other things, but she didn't like needles, and she didn't like the thought of them piercing the pale lines of Charlie's skin.
At the foot of the bed, Aran stood. For the first time since she'd come to the desert, she felt like her feet were on the tilt-tilt-tilt deck of a downeaster. The girl on the bed brought the ocean in her veins, and she didn't even know it.
"It's hard to get in?" Charlie's inquiry was more of a laugh, like there was absolutely nothing the two of them couldn't get into if they put their minds to it. Not any club, not any bank vault, nothing. Charlie might have always been the girl with the plan, but it seemed like Aran always made it happen. Aran was the magic, and Charlie tucked her chin down into the hollow that began her friend's arm pit, cheek tilted into the fabric where tendons were more prominent beneath the surface than flesh. Aran hd always been more bone than skin, though.
When Aran got up from the bed, Charlie stretched out. Flat on her back with arms spread wide and bluejeans with dirty shoes divorcing like she could make a snow angel in the patchwork comforter. "Harder," and it sounded more like a vow than a request. Because anything they did from here on out was going to be more difficult than New York. Neither of them were all that close to home anymore, but if Aran wasn't worried, Charlie wasn't worried. Besides, after everything that had happened in her life, it seemed like a waste to start getting nervous over things now.
"Then come back here and tell me what you've been doing and who you've been paintin' your nails for, girl." Because that ruddy color that clung to the cuticles had looked like paint. It looked like old red that somebody scratched away out of guilt, or tried to wipe away with acetone the morning after.
"It is hard," Aran said of getting into the club but, like Charlie, she didn't think that would stop them. Like any child raised on the whims of the sea, Aran was resilient and industrious. Weak things died during frozen nights on water that was black as gravedirt and just as lethal. She'd toddled those warped boards in her bare feet, and she'd peered over the side and chanced death with chubby little hands and childish giggles. A club didn't scare her, and maybe she was too grown and too young, all at once, but when Charlie tucked her chin down against that hollow of fabric, she was sure she could do anything. Once, when all this had begun, she'd feared these intimacies, thinking Charlie would notice. But Charlie hadn't, and Aran had stopped worrying. She'd never become a boy - that was what she liked to think at night, when there wasn't even the moonlight behind her eyes. Charlie would never notice, and sometimes she believed. Her fingers twined in Charlie's hair, tugging through like the strands were the delicate nets that caught tuna, expensive and silken and requiring careful fingers.
Aran didn't flinch when Charlie asked about her nails. She looked down at them, as she grabbed the spiced rum from the cabinet, the two tiny shot glasses looking even smaller in her capable hands. She'd picked the rum because there was a boat on the label, pirates and shiver me timbers, and she walked back to the bed and sat, one bent knee tucked beneath her pajama pants. She poured two shot glasses, and she set the bottle against her knee and held a glass out to Charlie. She swallowed hard, adam's apple nowhere to be found and the spice burning a trail along her esophagus. "Haven't done much. Talked to a boy," she said, because she needed to say something, and it wasn't a lie; she had talked to a boy on the journals. "Talked to two boys," she corrected, though she wasn't sure talking to Michael counted, but she'd take anything, and she'd need to be more careful now. Or maybe she could just tell, but not tonight, and she poured herself another shot and downed it with a grimace at the burn.
Charlie liked it when Aran stroked her hair. She couldn't explain the comfort that it brought her, the soothing peace of mind, and because it couldn't be explained, it wasn't something that she thought over very much. It simply was. There was safety and untold strength in Aran's long fingers, and she was always gentle when working through the gorgon tangles that nested in Charlie's hair. That simple touch had coaxed Charlie into the miracle of sleep a few times, even when the speed hadn't quite worn off yet but forty-eight hour exhaustion lurked in her head, waiting for any sliver of a moment to sneak out and pull Charlie under. That'd been all of the way back in New York, though. There wasn't speed here, not for Charlie anyway. Which was okay, she didn't think she missed it.
Charlie sat up when the whiskey arrived, tucking her legs under herself when the shot was handed over. She took it swiftly, wincing at a taste that she found unpleasant, but necessary. Still young enough to find no merit in the flavor of alcohol, it was just a means to a very critical end. She didn't know how people drank beer or wine, and she didn't see the point in mixers as it must have only made it take longer to get to the bleary finish line. "Two boys?" That statement nearly made her choke, and blue eyes gashed wide with awe and surprise. "You slut," she whispered. Charlie could make the word slut sound like something impressive, grown up, and very cool.
She handed the empty shot glass back to Aran in expectation of a refill. "What are these boys like? I haven't met any boys yet," Charlie admitted with a playfully despondent pout. She thought briefly about telling Aran about Jack, but Jack didn't really count as a boy, and it seemed like a sad story to get into. Maybe one day.
Aran smiled, too wide, when Charlie whispered slut like it was as impressive as a PhD. "Talked," Aran corrected, the grin never faltering. "On the stone thing. Boring boys," she admitted, because she wasn't very impressed. In truth, she wasn't very impressed by most things. She'd wondered at times, while lying on her cot in the small hut she'd shared with her father, if she wasn't silly and flighty because she hadn't been born a girl. And she wondered if she would have been this way, even with a slit between her legs. "One complained about the boy in his head beating him up," she said dismissively, as if that made the boy weak. If there was one thing Aran had never been, it was weak. Like the fat that didn't line her bones, she was hardened by a life without cushioning. Charlie was as close to soft as she had ever come in a lifetime of knobby knees and salt water skin.
Two empty glasses in hand, Aran refilled them to overflowing, and she downed her fresh shot without any wincing at the burn. Liquor reminded her of days too long on the water, with the sting of the sun and the waves offering no reprieve or comfort. The other shot was held out to Charlie between those long and capable fingers, and she regarded her friend with a softening, a softness, waves gone quiet beneath moonlight. "Will meet someone nice," she assured Charlie. Charlie always met boys, but Aran didn't actually think they were nice. Most of Charlie's boyfriends that she'd known had been heavily into drugs and not good. She hadn't intervened in the past, but months brought change, and change was unpredictable; she felt older here, away from the ocean and the boats and the tether that anchored her to father and childhood.
Aran flopped back, belly warmed through with the fuzz of whiskey, and she looked up at the girl beside her on the bed with envy and longing. "This weekend, we dance," she promised, a selfish agreement because she wanted to see Charlie's skin beneath the red-pink-purple lights of a club, bounce and wave, and the way Charlie's expression changed to euphoria.