“You’re too late,” I say.
Raine is pointing a gun at my face. Her hands are shaking.
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here on the edge of the pool. I am looking in the water. There is nothing there but my phone lying dead on the bottom.
“It’s not me you’re looking for,” I tell Raine.
She is so close. How did I not notice her coming? She is so close, I can hear the rattle in her lungs as she breathes.
“You really shouldn’t be out here,” I say. “What about your asthma?”
Raine is real and I am real. I was Ivy but I was never Raine.
“You killed him,” she manages to say through her wheezing. “Everyone saw the car. Your car. You ran over him like he was nothing. We’re not nothing.”
We are all nothing.
We are everything.
“How many of those pills did you take?” I say.
Freedom. What a stupid name for this nonsense.
“Swim with me,” I say.
Daddy says our true selves live in the silence between our breaths.
But what if you can’t breathe?
“Ash was the one driving,” I say. “He kept driving even though I told him to stop.”
That’s what they do. They keep going when you tell them to stop.
I can tell Raine wants to believe me. She knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“I knew he was cheating on me,” she says. “But he went there to see you? Why him? Don’t you have enough?”
“Me? Oh, no. You have the wrong girl. That was Tami.”
TamiandAsh. AshandTami.
“Don’t you know that if you shoot me, they win?” I say. Again and again and again, they win. “Don’t you know you’ll just be another fucked person in prison?”
Don’t you know it’s the women who always pay? The sick women. The poor women. The dark women. The women, scorned. The women, forgotten. The women, beaten and used.
But look at us now. We are the ones who can make or break a life. We are the ones who start and end everything.
Maybe Raine drops the gun on purpose. Maybe it is a choice. Or maybe she just gets tired and her body makes the decision for her. Either way, the gun lands in the water with a splash and joins my phone at the bottom of the pool.
“Sit with me,” I say. What else is there to do?
So Raine sits. We stare into the water. Who knows what will happen to us now.
“I thought the pills were supposed to make it stop hurting,” she says.
“No pill can do that,” I say.
I take her hand. We lean into each other. We hold each other up, just a little. Sometimes that’s all we can do.
Maybe we are just dust and specks floating in space. But no matter how infinite and vast it is out here, somehow we find each other. Gravity pulls us in. We crash into each other, over and over and over again, we connect and fuse and change matter, we touch and make explosions. We touch and it changes everything.
We dissolve and we come back together, re-formed into something new. Something better.
“I don’t understand,” Raine says. “The pills. Something is wrong with the pills.”
But they only affect shame. Not loss, not grief, not this.
Sometimes we need to dissolve. Sometimes we need to go back to fragments, to dust and specks. Sometimes that’s what it takes to build a new path.
Tami and Ash in their private first-class cabin, clear sky ahead. They think they can coast. They think they can trust their path forward will be easy because it has always been easy.
But paths intersect with other paths. New paths are born where we’ve dissolved and collected and built something new.
“He was mine and they took him,” Raine says.
“Yes,” I say.
“They’re not going to get away with this,” Raine says.
“No,” I say.
And then her hand becomes a vise, and mine breaks inside its grip, all the bones of my fingers crushed into fragments, needle-sharp, tearing from the inside.
Sometimes new stars smash into old stars. Sometimes whole galaxies collide. Sometimes everything changes and it lights up the universe.
And I tell her, “Keep squeezing. Squeeze as hard as you can.”