“I don’t know if she should,” he says. “Feels weird, doing that against your own parent.”
“You can’t stand my mother.”
“Yeah, but there’s no need for war, is there? No need to actually hurt someone.”
“Thinking like that might be why your dad loses all the time.”
Jared laughs. “I don’t think he’d know what to do if he ever won.”
“Won’t be for months anyway,” I say. “Not ’til we’re both gone. Maybe this time we can just leave them to it.”
Jared and I are going to different colleges – both of us with scholarships and huge loans that will probably follow us until death – but those colleges are in the same city, two states away. The plan is, we’ll stay friends. The plan is, we’ll maybe get an apartment together later to save money. The plan is, maybe we never come back to this town.
The colleges are forty-five minutes apart, though. Is it going to be as easy as I hope? To keep our plans? Even here, we don’t get into the town that’s an hour away very often.
But I don’t want to think about that right now.
I stretch in the passenger seat, feeling the aches lessen by quite a lot. I can even reach down to my feet, which are freezing now in the stopped car. Movement catches my eye, and I watch a mountain lion emerge from the fog and circle over to Jared’s side.
“Hey there, Missus,” he says, opening his car door. He puts his hand on the mountain lion’s head and does one long stroke all the way down to the end of her tail. Ever heard a mountain lion purr?
Like a broken drain. She leaves huge cat footprints on the damp of the field as she sits like a statue a little bit away from the car, just a dark spot in the shadows. I know from experience that she’ll wait there patiently until we leave, guarding us from danger, if she can.
“Now that,” Jared says, closing his door. “That shit’s crazy.”
“I told Henna I loved her,” I say. “Right before we hit the deer.”
He looks at me, surprised. “She have time to say anything back?”
I breathe in slowly through my nose. Then I realize I can breathe through my nose. I touch it lightly.
“Good job,” I say.
“Thanks.”
“She said she didn’t think I did.”
Jared looks thoughtful. “That’s a weird response.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“…but I held her hand until the paramedics got there. And the last thing she said before they
knocked her out was my name.”
I don’t tell him what she said about Nathan and the prom. I’m kind of hoping the accident will have made her forget. Is that bad?
“Dude,” Jared says, rubbing his eyes, “healing kind of takes it out of me. I think I need to get to bed.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks again.”
“No problem, my friend.” He takes a deep breath and opens his door again. “Let me go hand out benedictions first.”
A hundred cats and one mountain lion watch him eagerly as he steps out towards them, hands up.
“How you feeling?” Mel asks, waiting for me as I come back inside.
“I think I’m lying about how okay I am with this scar.”
“I thought that was a possibility.”
We sit down on the couch, turning on the muted television for light. A topless woman with a gun in each hand is shooting Asian people down a long hallway. Then her cut-off jean shorts are obviously bothering her, so she takes those off and – now wearing only a G-string – keeps on shooting. I don’t understand the world sometimes. Mel turns it over to a show about dogs.