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What she'd wanted was to skip out on fifth period lunch, the Powerade-sticky table tugging hair from her napping head and paper bags passing hands all around her, ice cream machine humming too loud. She could ride her bike to the quarry and taste sunny granny smith bites and dirt gritting between her teeth at the same time. Throw some rocks and close her eyes and wait. Deep, distant splashing sounded almost the same as all her breath letting out of her body at once.
One leg was over the fence. She'd ripped a new gash below the knee of her jeans from a wire sticking out where it hadn't before. She was one leg over, leather sleeves hanging over her palms, when she noticed the girl standing hip and head cocked and watching from next to the basketball hoop. With her hair scraped back in a ballet bun and her sweatpants cuffed just beneath her knees, she looked like she was on her way home from yoga class, the kind of girl with a pouch full of sharp #2 pencils and handwriting elegant like skeletons or skyscrapers, but her eyes were drill-sergeant-hard. Jan shrugged at her, hoisted her leg over, and tossed herself neatly to the ground.
"Hey," the girl yelled, and Jan said, "Hey."
As the girl approached and the sun fell newly across her face, Jan realized she knew who she was. Everyone knew who she was. Christy Pike, captain of the Riverside Bulldogs cheerleading squad. Enigmatic, razor-focused, and a complete bitch. Jan didn't not identify, having her own reputation as enigmatic, razor-dangerous, and a complete slut despite having never once fucked a single Riverside boy.
"You ever use that strength for something other than delinquency?" Christy Pike asked when they were inches apart. Asked it in a voice like she didn't particularly care either way.
"Uh, lifting cars over my head and spinning them around. Great trick at the county fair."
Time was dwindling and the quarry was calling. She looked over her shoulder to where her bike was tied meticulously to a tree. Christy actually whistled to get her attention back.
"You're light," she said. "You're graceful. You've got quick reflexes."
"And my tongue--" Jan interjected, eyes rolling like tell me about it.
"Would be a lot more useful wrapping around cheers than buried in my best girls' cunts in the janitors' closet."
It took Jan a moment to process that, and then she made a breathy, "Ha," that fell short of genuine laughter.
"I'm not kidding. I'm looking for a new top of the pyramid, and with some training, you could be up there in no time. You could fucking fly, Kirk. Instead of just, what, sneaking off for a joyride in a rich kid's Benz?"
"You sure it's not a joyride in your best girls' cunts?" She--tell no one--felt dirty saying it. All she'd wanted was the apple in her pocket. The wind to kiss her free. Today her brain had been particularly hard to live inside of. Her birthday was drawing closer and she was whirring all over, worrying all over everything she ever did so no words that came from her mouth tasted anything but poison.
Christy Pike's tight smile. Christy Pike's hand curling in the chain-link between them. "You'll be there at 3:05 sharp or I won't ask again. But I think you'll be there at 3:05 sharp. I know you know how to find the gym, since it's the only class you'll let anyone know you're any good at." And then she about faced and walked back to the building, and when Jan checked her phone, there wasn't enough time to make it to the quarry and back without missing history. Well, fuck history. Like she wasn't already breaking the curve a hundred times over anyway.
Pike’s quip about the janitors’ closet hadn’t been 100% inaccurate. When Jan walked into the gym—at precisely thirty seconds past 3:05, her minor rebellion—more than half the girls warming up averted their eyes. Nyota, true to fuck-it-who-cares form, stared openly, halfway through tugging her hair into a freshly tight and swinging ponytail, her mouth pinched thin, but all the other girls who did were new. Freshmen, Jan figured, who’d heard only the most fictionalized parts of the Jan Kirk Story.
One girl, though, seemed to not give even kind of a shit that she had walked in. Hunkered over by the bleachers, tugging at a sweatshirt three sizes too big, she looked too mean to be a freshman but too unrecognizable to not be. Riverside was not a big school. Everyone knew who Jan was, and Jan made it a point to know who everyone knowing her was in turn.
“No spectators,” Nyota called out, vowels clipped.
Jan sidled up to her, smirking, and whispered, “I’m always an active participant in everything I do.”
“Very mature. I told you it was over. Now fuck off.”
Jan raised the volume on the conversation so everyone could hear, “Hey, I’m here for the same reason you all are.” She gave a little spin with her arms out like a ballerina. “Let’s cheer for these useless hunks of jock itch!”
That got the hunkered girl’s attention. Her head whipped up and she scowled like they were in church.
“Captain!” Nyota was done with gifting Jan with her eye contact and her time.
Emerging from the gym office, Pike looked ready for slaughter, but when she saw Jan, she smiled. “Glad to see you’re not a complete idiot,” she said, and Jan smiled back.
“Only three fourths. And one fourth of that is technically imbecile.”
So maybe she didn’t adapt well to acting as part of a hivemind. Stretches, fine, even if she did bat her eyelashes at Gaila the whole time, recalling the taste of her Dr. Pepper Lipsmacker, but when it came to drilling formations, she couldn’t get in sync. Pike whistled again and again. One “again” for every time Jan moved too much like she was the star of the show instead of Pike—who, if pressed, would surely argue that the team was the star, not her. The second “again” for every time the hunkered girl just stood there and glared.
“Jesus fucking Christ, McCoy, just get on Hikaru’s back.”
“Oh, yeah,” the girl—McCoy—said. “That’ll get me into med school.”
“It’ll get you into not being kicked off the team.” Which didn’t seem like much of a threat, seeing as McCoy would rather be trampled to death by a Shetland pony than seen in a flippy miniskirt—her own muttered words as they did lunges—but it got her onto the pyramid anyway.
And then there was Jan, the sundae cherry, the married couple on the cake. From next to McCoy, Nyota asked if it wasn’t dangerous to let her do this her very first day on the team, but Pike told her she’d seen Jan Kirk master structures larger and more precarious than a handful of girls on their hands and knees.
Jan nimbled her way up until she was crouched half on Nyota and half on McCoy, knees to chest, a hint of wobble in her ankles. From up here, Pike looked the same as she had at lunch that day, deceptively small but keratin-hard, and she looked at Jan and she nodded, and Jan forced her legs to straighten, her sneakers to plant certainly, and then she was a tower. She could almost touch the ceiling. She could almost fall to her death, if she wanted to, if she dreamed the right way.
“Hey, wait!”
McCoy had booked it out of there at the clap of Pike’s hands, shoes squeaking mousily on the waxed hallway floor, the door slamming shut behind her. Jan waited around just long enough for Pike to tell her she’d done all right that day—all right, she’d been fucking beyond—before dashing after this tea pot tempest in fair isle leggings.
Her call did nothing to interrupt the furious swishing of McCoy’s long limbs, so Jan lied. “Hey, you dropped your pencil!” That stopped her. She turned and looked at Jan, clearly waiting for the pencil and an absence of chit-chat.
Jan ran to her. “Haha, just kidding.” She held up her hand. “Nice pyramid in there. Go teamwork. High five.”
“I don’t high five. Give me my pencil.”
“No, I. I said I was just kidding about the pencil. I wanted to talk to you.”
McCoy started walking again. “I don’t want to make any friends, so if that’s what you’re after—”
“Wow, Miss Priss—”
“My name’s Lenore.”
“Miss Priss, you’re in luck, because in case you haven’t heard, Jan Kirk isn’t a girl who makes friends.”
“Who the hell is Jan Kirk?”
“A question I ask myself every day. Though right now I’m asking, who the hell is Lenore McCoy?” Whoever she was, she had a pretty frown, a fog-gentle fall of her lips. “And why is she in cheerleading when she clearly hates it with every molecule of her very soul?”
Keeping up with McCoy required Jan to walk so fast she was shocked her feet were touching the ground at all, like one of those little dogs getting half-dragged along the sidewalk, so thank God McCoy finally stopped, sighing loud and long and poking her tongue into her cheek before glaring at Jan.
“Who’s Lenore McCoy?” she echoed.
“That’s the question.”
“Lenore McCoy is a shattered, unlovable ghost of a girl whose rat ex-boyfriend ruined her reputation in all of Georgia and forced her family to move to godforsaken Riverside, Iowa where, to keep her mother sure that she’s not gonna become an outcast again, she’s being pressured into jumping around and yelling for everyone to celebrate a team of useless numbskulls who all look like clones of this same rat ex-boyfriend. So now she’s got no boyfriend, no friends, no familiar places, and not even any dignity to shake a stick at. All she’s got left are her bones and it’s only a matter of time before a faulty somersault sends those to breaking. Does that answer your question?”
It answered it perfectly. Jan held out her hand for shaking. “Pleased to meet you, Bones. Now let me tell you a little about Jan Kirk.”
Still panting a little from her diatribe, Bones said, “My name is Lenore,” but she did shake Jan’s hand, and did let Jan show her the best wheat field in the whole town, in the interest of helping her develop some new familiar places. The rest of what she was missing could come later.
The Jan Kirk Story was simple. Her mom was a Gold Medal Olympic gymnast, the pride of Riverside. She died in childbirth. Her dad ran off and left Jan and her sister Sam with their uncle Frank. Sam ran off after him when she was twelve. Jan became a criminal. Jan became a little monster. Jan became the dyke you fear your daughter knowing. Jan was the shame of all of Riverside, Iowa, a boozed up delinquent genius just short of five feet tall.
Bones listened to all of this with a hard set to her brow and jaw. From her spine sprouted a scarecrow, looming as a demigod, and a shock of wheat kept blowing into her mouth, but for some reason, Jan didn’t find her appearance as comical as it clearly was. And she didn’t find Jan’s story comical either, so weren’t they even on niceness, then.
“What kind of a criminal?” Bones refused the small glittery flask Jan offered her.
A scorching swig of Fireball, and “Car thief. Vandalizer. Shoplifter. Disrupter of the peace. You name a crime, I’ve got the time.”
“Even now that you’re cheering for the good ol’ Bulldogs?”
“Bones, my friend, is cheerleading not itself a crime against nature?”
“I guess.” She put a hand to her temple. “But stop calling me that. And stop drinking at six p.m. on a school night. And put some patches on those jeans.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And thanks for inviting me to hang out.”
Jan patted her twice on the shoulder and laid down, head by Bones’ knee, body flattening a plane of wheat. Just-starting-to-get-cold Riverside was always beautiful, the sky like a river frozen over, the air tasting always the way it does when you run too fast. A little like blood in the back of the throat.
This was the best wheat field because no one ever came here and the scarecrow was ineffectual so if you were lucky, you could spot a whole murder swirling through the field, and you could pretend you were a witch princess instead of a loner freak. But today she wasn’t a loner freak. This girl with the preternaturally smooth hair and rough voice was warm beside her. They could both be witch princesses in another world, in another dream where bad reputations didn’t exist, whether you chose them or they were foisted boyishly upon you. In a dream of touching the frozen sky, with her holey sneakers on Bones’ shoulders, holding her safely up above the earth.
When they saw each other in the cafeteria the next day, Jan’s tights had a rip up the length of her left thigh and Bones had a sewing kit ready to go in her backpack.
There was a cheerleading coach, was the thing. The gym teacher was supposed to have been an erstwhile Dallas Cowgirl, and should have been able to show them all more than a few tricks, but she spent every practice holed up in the gym office playing Space Invaders on the old Macintosh and crying into a handkerchief—no, Jan wasn’t spying, perish the thought—so all the responsibility fell on Christy Pike’s soldier-straight shoulders.
A captain, a coach, and a flyer. Under her eyes, they stretched their, “Gastrocnemius, soleus, adductor, hamstring,” Bones muttered as Jan held her ankle like a balloon string. Don’t float away don’t disappear.
They ran laps to limber up, and Jan ran close to Bones and asked in her ear, “Should I be calling you Muscles instead?” and Pike let out her piercing whistle from right behind them and yelled for them to both run faster.
Jan could run faster, could run the fastest, her legs tiny but powerful from running her whole life, always running away from something. She could run, and she could lift her leg to her head, and she could jump so high, and balance so precariously, and she could fly, Pike had told her. She could leave gravity behind.
Of course, she had to learn first. She was a baby bird trying to leave the tree. She knew that; she accepted it. She had to watch Pike fly before she could learn to flap her own wings.
As her secret joke with herself, Pike’s signature move was the pike basket toss. Mackenzie Scott and Gaila were her bases, Something Something Spock her back spot. Pike was always perfect, steady as the opposite of California, high-flying and pointy all over. They practiced it once, twice, and Pike stepped onto their crossed hands a third time, telling Jan, “Watch every. Single. Move I make,” her thumb resting on Gaila’s collarbone.
And they threw her. And she soared. And she piked. And she made a pained face and twitched her leg, and she came down wrong, and hard.
Rightfully, Nyota should have been the replacement captain. Rightfully, she was asked first. But, “I’ve got debate. I’ve got French Club. And oh, I’ve got an entire course load of AP classes that aren’t getting any less intense as the semester goes on.” She didn’t have the time. No one had ever had the time besides Christy Pike, whose entire life was the shape of a human pyramid.
No one, that is, until Christy Pike said, “I want Jan Kirk to replace me.”
Whistling wasn’t as easy as Pike had made it seem. Pursed lips, breath-full chest and stomach, Jan practiced in front of Bones’ vanity mirror. A sound short, sharp, and pitiful curled through the air every time. “It’s not a vanity,” Bones had said when Jan explained why she was climbing the trellis outside of Bones’ window at nine at night. “It’s a dressing table. Don’t make it sound so vain.” But she opened the window wide and stuck out both hands and pulled Jan into the room, if a little brusquely.
She’d thought it would be harder to find Bones’ house, had been ready to wander the nicer section of Riverside all night, but within ten minutes of scuffing her shoes along the dirt, she’d practically stumbled into a mint green house with “McCoy” neatly stenciled on the mailbox and the living room still full of unpacked boxes. Bones hadn’t even asked that much. She must have been aware more than anyone besides Jan how on display you are in a kitten-small town.
“Everyone dies famous in a small town,” Jan whisper-sung to her reflection.
“You know,” Bones said from the bed, where she was surrounded by a panoply of textbooks, notebooks, highlighters, and Post-It notes, “you are allowed to have your own coaching style. Maybe something a little more humanizing than treating everyone like actual bulldogs who rolled in mud.”
“Maybe I just wanna wolf whistle when everyone pulls off a stunt well.” She was aware of the whine in her voice.
“Wolf whistle anywhere near me and Pike won’t be the only one with a broken leg.”
“Meow.” Jan bit her lip and looked down at Bones’ vanity. Two combs, a hairbrush, concealer, powder, a row of tastefully colored tinted lip balms arranged from lightest to darkest (sunrise to mauve), and, there we go, tweezers. Jan set to work thinning out her eyebrows.
“Are you using my tweezers?” Bones asked without looking up.
Jan paused halfway through perfecting her right arch to look more captainly. “How could you tell?”
“You’re swearing under your breath. You know, that’s completely unsanitary.”
"Yeah, yeah, I'll sterilize them with my lighter when I'm done."
Bones hmmed and flipped to the next page of her textbook. This was only their third time hanging out, one-on-one, outside of practice--yesterday morning, they'd met up before school to get breakfast at the town's only diner--but already their silence felt companionable, safe, the way nothing in Jan's life had ever been. It left her off-balance and needing to burst it every chance she had.
"Want any help with your homework? I'm already done with mine for the month."
A scoff. "And by' 'done' I assume you mean that you think five assignments out of thirty will be enough to scrape a passing grade. Some of us care what the teachers think of us."
Well. That stung. Like Jan didn't obviously care what every person she ever met thought of her more than she cared about anything in the entire world. But she persevered.
"I mean already did every assignment twice as long as it needs to be plus," she turned and wagged her unfinished eyebrows, "a mountain of extra credit kind of done."
"Sure, that's why you're the kind of girl who cares about being cheerleading captain. 'Cause you're smarter than a cat that can tie its own shoelaces."
"Yeah." She went back to plucking. "That's why I'm the kind of girl who's gonna be the best cheerleading captain Riverside High ever did see. Come on. Spit some math problems at me, Bones. Just watch me."
"Lenore."
"Lenny."
And Bones grunted in disgust and read aloud from her trig homework, and Jan solved the problems in her head smooth as Bones' ironed khakis while Bones double-checked her answers in the back of the book, and they went like this until Bones said, "Look, I think this counts as cheating."
Jan cackled. In the vanity mirror, with eyes cast downward, Bones' reflection had just the hint of a smile.
"We should be triple-stacking these mats if you want to pull stunts like that, Jan. Regulation mats are thinner than a fawn's ankles. This is how Pike got hurt." Bones was in swishy track pants and a too-short shirt from Girl Scout camp, her arms hugging her stomach where the shirt kept riding up. She still managed to stalk after Jan with the determination of a forest fire, the way she did everything that involved pointing out some new danger.
Around them, girls practiced their cartwheels, critiquing each other's form, laughing and snapping green apple gum. Jan patrolled through the assembled pairs with her hands behind her back, occasionally stopping to adjust the width of someone's upraised arms or the strength of her kick.
"Pike got hurt because she didn't stretch properly--"
"--or eat enough potassium--"
"--and got charleyhorse in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was bad luck. Triple-stacking our mats will make us look weak."
"We wear crop tops and microskirts and devote our precious studying time to stroking the egos of pimple-ridden basketball players. We already look weak."
"I look fucking fierce in a crop top, Bones. Nyota, great swinginess."
"Well we're look weaker if we're all hobbling around on sprained ankles. Triple stack the mats or next time you want to tell me about World War II generals, I'm singing bluegrass until your ears bleed."
"'I'm singing bluegrasss until your ears bleed...Captain.'"
Bones rolled her eyes, hugged herself tighter. "Jan."
The way she said Jan's name was enough that Jan would have stacked the mats eight-thick if Bones wanted her to. If the school had the money for that many mats. She didn't say this. What she said, was, "Yeah yeah yeah. I'll triple-stack the mats when we do the Pretty Girl. Don't think I don't notice you avoiding cartwheel practice."
"That stunt name is misogynist," Bones said, and walked away to practice with Hikaru.
Jan's whole body felt like a loose tooth. Bruisey and tender, wobbly and weak. Groaning, she rolled over to smush her face into the assortment of pillows arranged neatly on Bones' bed. Early Saturday morning after a grueling week of practice, sun cutting hard through the uncurtained window, and probably the hangover wasn't doing much to help.
"I'm dying, Bones."
"Please." She sat by Jan's calf and uncapped the little pot of Icy Hot. The medicinal smell hammered at Jan's aching head.
"It's true. And I leave you all my worldly possessions. My leather jacket. My Wonder Woman action figure."
Bones muttered, "Maybe this'll teach you a bottle of whiskey isn't a juicebox," and began massaging the Icy Hot into the back of Jan's knee. Like being kissed by a snowman. Like diving into the quarry in the middle of January. But she didn't jerk away. Not until it began to heat up, and she hissed and kicked out, but Bones just continued rubbing it down her leg.
"Jesus fucking Christ this is some kind of hell magic"
"Or it'll teach you you don't need to push yourself so hard. You're not a heavy door at the bank."
"That analogy is nonsense."
"Well, you're not." Jan's whole leg was warm and tingling. "Now where else does it hurt."
Stretching out the syllables, as far as they could go Jan moaned, "All over." The Icy Hot was promptly thrust into her hand.
"I'm not one of your cheerleader groupies. Get Gaila to do it or do it yourself."
"You're the only groupie I need," Jan said all singsong, and sat up to rub the balm into her ribs. When she pulled up her shirt, Bones turned her back. "Such a gentlewoman." Snowman-kissing her own skin, hoping her smirk could be heard.
It wasn't, like, just an illicit sex thing. Hiding in the janitor's closet. She might love openness and freedom more than cramped spaces, but she loved the darkness most of all. It soothed her to sit in the black, to imagine fantastical monsters surrounding her, days like today when all she could think about were her dead mom and her no future and the objects Uncle Frank had thrown at her recently.
Days two days before her birthday.
She felt bad skipping out on lunch with Bones, but Bones was better off not seeing her captain cry. They had their first game tonight. Morale had to be high if their kicks were gonna be even higher.
Snuffling, Jan burrowed into the back of the closet, amongst the mops--alien tentacles--and the bleach smell--pollution in the air of a newly discovered planet.
"One two three four," she whispered, "hear the Bulldogs' stomachs roar. Five six seven eight, when's the last time that they ate? Ten eleven twelve thirteen, well now they'll eat your fucking team."
It was a cheer Bones and probably the PTA alike disapproved of. The only thing Jan could see wrong with it was that she'd had to skip the number nine.
She was pulling out her phone to take some in-the-dark selfies when the door banged open, briefly, then closed, and two voices invaded her quiet alone time.
"Nyota, I--" one said, and Nyota murmured a name Jan couldn't catch. Or maybe gibberish, or a sneeze.
Jan skittered back further, to behind the mops, flush against the cinderblock wall, knocking her ankle straight into a bucket, which fell and drenched her in soapy water. "Bless you," she said belatedly.
Someone fumbled for the light and then everything was blinding.
There was Nyota, lacking her usual feline sleekness, gripping her hip where her red dress was rucked up. She tried to blow a wisp of hair out of her face but it fell back across her lips. Tangled together in her limbs, still grasping the pull chain for the light, Whatshername Spock was expressionless. The kind of expressionless that meant no human expression was appropriate. Jan couldn't relate at all.
As she clutched a hand to the imaginary arrow lodged, wounding, in her breast, her gasp was only half feigned. "In our closet?"
"What are you doing lurking!" Pitched up at the end.
"I was strategizing for the game tonight. Plotting all the details. Arranging the mops like they're, well, you. And you." Jan pointed to Spock.
"Mops can't do acrobatics," was all Spock had to say.
Nyota leaned into Jan's space, showing the vast majority of her teeth. "Well, go. Strategize. Somewhere. Else." Jan went to push her hair out of her face for her and was nudged away. "And don't act like you haven't moved on too."
She'd been about to stand, but paused at that. "What? Babe, I'm single as a loosie."
"Right, Kirk," Nyota said, and took her elbow gently and pulled her up and toward the door.
She painted her lips gold. Her own lips, Gaila's lips, the architectural lips of Lenore "Bones" McCoy. Who pouted through it, and over the blue electricity brushed springing from her eyes.
Each of them was a lightning storm, a cloud swirling atop Olympus, charged and summer-sky and ready to fly, and fall.
Beneath her glimmering gold crop top, Bones wore a camisole, periwinkle, clashing just a little with the cobalt of the skirt.
"Part of being a warrior is baring your skin to the screaming masses, Bones," Jan said with her own revealed torso stretching languorously across Bones' lap. The locker room was walled in mirrors, and Jan looked at herself, smirking, considering drawing gold claws curling down her danger-sharp cheekbones.
Bones held herself close. “I've been bared enough, Jan.” And Jan nodded, because, yeah. Bones was so relatable.
She jumped up to stand on the bench, to be a commanding tower. Radio control, broadcasting on all frequencies. “A-ten-hut!” she called, and then giggled at herself, before straightening out, rolling back her shoulders. Staring up at her from all around: a glittering mirage of girls with flexing muscles and faces painted with bloodlust. “Who’s got the best damn team in the world!” she crowed, and they all knew she didn’t mean the basketball team, and Bones led the room in calling back, “We do!”
That night, she flew. A Pretty Girl soaring. The faces in the crowd all blurred together into one roaring mass, one massive lion, one lion-ish messenger sent from God to tell her, “Jan Kirk, you’re a shining star.” And for one moment, hands at hip and head, she believed it, and believed it still as she felt gravity and Bones’ arms wrapping safely around her sternum, setting her down.
Her plan hadn’t been to go to school. Hadn’t been to be seen outside at all. She had two forties of Jack and a pile of black clothing and her saddest Spotify playlist all ready to go. She was seventeen. She was seventeen. She was the same age as her mother when her mother took home the gold.
If she was gonna let herself be seen anywhere, she better leave with two black eyes and a fist full of scraped-up knuckles.
Plans changed. Early that morning, she was awoken by a sharp sound like a woodpecker. Pebbles being thrown at her window. When she crawled out of bed and pushed it open, ready to scream herself to the moon, she saw Bones, standing in the weedy remains of the back garden, another handful of pebbles ready to go, her bike kickstanded neatly behind her.
She still had the ribbon in her hair from the game, bless her. Jan knew she found it infantilizing and tacky, but now she looked like a wrapped-up present. She yelled, “Happy birthday, Janice! My mom baked you a chocolate cake!” And that was how Bones McCoy found herself being persuaded to skip school for the first time since her ex-boyfriend ruined her whole life.
Jan still dressed all in black, ripped-up jeans and a tight turtleneck and her leather jacket pulled decadently around her like a bathrobe. She still poured some of the Jack into her biggest flask and tucked it in her inner jacket pocket. The Smiths were still playing in her head and in her throat as she sung in low tones, “Oh there’s more to life than books you know but not much more,” biking ahead of Bones and into the Nowhere outside town.
This didn’t count as being seen, because Bones didn’t count as another person. She was just Bones, just fussy floral button-ups and sensible shoes and a mean mouth and sandwich bags full of extra snacks and a little zippered pouch full of Band-Aids and Neosporin and fear of heights and flight and birds and callouses from whittling and a camisole under her cheerleading crop top and the softest, most patient slice of just being that Jan had ever known. That was all. Hardly a person at all.
They weren’t going to her favorite wheat field, favorite corn field, or favorite piece of the precipice dropping into the quarry. Today wasn’t a day for favorite anythings (except for the chocolate cake in Bones’ bike basket, her favorite kind of cake, but that was unforeseen and could be overlooked for the sake of thematic cohesion).
Actually, Jan didn’t have any particular destination in mind. She just knew she wanted to get far away, blown by the gusty air still chilly with the ghosts of winter. Somewhere she and Bones could be alone with the monstrous elephant of her pain.
When she eventually careened to a halt, it was by the banks of the English River, past where it touched the town, out somewhere in empty oblivion. Behind her, Bones’ bike tires screeched their stop.
“I should go to her grave,” was the first thing Jan said when they were facing each other. “But,” she laughed, “she doesn’t have a grave. She donated her body to science.”
“That’s a noble thing to do.”
Jan took the cake box from Bones’ basket, then regretted it, and stood there, lost, holding the box out toward Bones, waiting for permission. “For nobility, I’m surprisingly dirt-poor.”
Four was the number of birthday cakes seventeen-year-old Jan Kirk had gotten in her life, one for each of the times her dad came crawling back to sob on her shoulder and give her a postcard from wherever he’d been last with “Happy Birthday” written plainly on the back. Last time, her fourteenth birthday, Jan had asked him if she was at all like her mother, and he’d said, “She was perfect,” and that had been answer enough.
Now, Bones moved toward Jan’s outstretched arms and opened the box, turning it so it faced Jan. It was obvious Bones had been in charge of the icing rather than her mother, because instead of something jauntier, the words on the top were, “It’s your birthday, you freak.”
The nervous wobble of the letters alone would have been enough to make Jan cry.
Bones brought forks and knives wrapped in a toile napkin, but Jan said, “It’s my birthday,” and ate the cake with her hands, tearing “freak” from the rest and relishing the thick chocolate frosting all over her hands and the crumbs littering her turtleneck.
They sat on the riverbank and watched the water flowing east. Birds whistled in call and return. “What’s it like to live on a coast?” Jan asked, leaning back so the sun got in her eyes.
“It’s terrifying to be near so much water. Like a whole herd of stallions just waiting to carry you away. It’s powerful.” Bones sounded very far away.
“Well, maybe I’ll live on a coast one day.” Jan skipped a rock into the river and reached out to intertwine her hand with Bones’. Bones didn’t even complain that Jan was getting chocolate all over her.
Seventeen. She was seventeen and strong and full of screaming and in one more year she could fly wherever she wanted.
Out in the gym, the crowd was getting gladiatorial, or whatever the word was for the audiences of the people who were themselves tasked with gladiatoring. Jan made a note to ask Bones later, to unspool long strings of words from Bones’ beribboned head. This was the last game of the season and the Bulldogs were winning, but Jan’s team was winning more, had just moved slickly robotic as a freshly greased bike chain. Soared so high, “There are UFO sightings being called in all over the Midwest,” she growled in Gaila’s ear, her arm around Gaila’s neck and then releasing, with giddy energy: a carbonation she’d been missing.
To commemorate the occasion, each girl had constellations painted in blue and gold all over her face and akimbo limbs. Andromeda sliced across Bones’ cheek, glimmered hotly under the locker room’s fluorescent lights. Jan waded through the team to where she stood in front of a mirror, touching it like an ugly scar. “The chained woman,” she said glumly.
Jan, who herself had Perseus mapped across her face, with the Demon Head of Medusa outlined three times in increasingly shimmery shades of blue, said, “It’s just a joke,” and slung her arms over Bones’ shoulders from behind. “You’re the one who saves me.”
This was met with a scoff, and maybe, maybe, wetness there in the right eye, shiny as the stars. Bones disentangled herself from Jan’s arms and whirled around. “Don’t be dumb, Captain,” she said, and wiped, with her thumb, a stray bit of mascara from under Jan’s lower lashes. “Like Jan Kirk has ever needed anyone to save her.”
Jan laughed and let Bones have this, this moment of denial. But outside the crowd was screaming for more, and all around the locker room, girls were stretching their tired muscles, freshening their makeup. This was only a brief reprieve, a moment to breathe before returning to the onslaught that was forcing the body to be at its owner’s beck and call, and when Jan went back out there and took to the skies, she knew who would be ready beneath her to catch her when she fell.