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The Camaro is finally finished when Max is eighteen and three days old. She skates over to the auto shop to pick it up. It’s beautiful, gleaming with fresh paint and a new coat of wax. The engine purrs when she turns the key. The clutch pedal doesn’t need to be stomped on to shift gears unlike before.
Everything is new, and yet it looks so much the same.
So too is the story of Max’s life now.
When Billy woke up, Max had been all for dumping him into her mom’s sedan and driving west straight into the ocean. Billy laughs at the idea and her clear excitement, a rasp in his voice he never had when El let him speak through the radio.
“No, you should finish school. One of us should have a diploma, at least.”
Billy can no longer scream at her like he used to, his vocal cords damaged in some sort of way Max doesn’t understand. He can’t do a lot of things but that’s what physical therapy is for. His brain works just fine, still intelligent and since his father left him for dead at the government hospital, he can read as much as he wants so long as he can stay awake.
Those days in the hospital, when Max would sometimes fall asleep with her head on his chest as Billy held a book in his lap and read out loud. She misses those days, even though life is better now.
Billy lives in a ground floor apartment in a walk-up that they think was built in the 1950s. Max used to visit every day after school when he moved in but now, she lives there too.
It’s easier, safer than going home.
Billy didn’t say anything when her belongings expanded from being her school textbooks and the occasional sweatshirt to a suitcase of clothes and the box of things she has left from her dad. It sits on the closet shelf next to the box full of Billy’s mom’s jewelry and photographs.
He clears out a drawer in his flea market dresser and lets Max set up her own vanity in the corner of the bedroom. They share a bed, at least when Billy manages to sleep through the night.
Usually, she falls asleep by herself, wrapped in blankets that smell like his soap and lays her head on the pillow she brought from Cherry Lane. Billy sits in the kitchen with his correspondence course, or on the second-hand sofa that Ms. Henderson gave them with the television on low. The clock ticks past eleven, midnight, one am.
Whatever time he gets to bed, or even if he doesn’t, Max wakes up with his arm around her. He always holds her close, a heavy weight over her body and heat from behind. Billy likes touching her, she’s had to get used to that.
In the before, it would always mean pain: a headlock she couldn’t escape, a burn on her arm from a pencil eraser as he sat on her so she wouldn’t squirm away.
Now, Billy needs the reminder she’s not a mirage, a figment of his imagination. He tugs the ends of her hair almost gently, puts a heavy hand on her shoulder when she’s stirring the mac ‘n cheese together for their dinner.
It’s the other touches that makes the place between her legs throb and ache. How Billy holds her hand when she has to leave in the next three minutes or risk another tardy slip because he isn't sure she's real, or how he stares a little too long when Max’s hair is damp from the shower and she sits on the couch to comb it out.
The tension between them is growing and Max thinks she’s the only one who can feel it.
She’s proven wrong two days before her graduation. Classes ended last week for the seniors so Max has spent her last days with the Party and at the arcade, capturing the last moments of youth. She spends her nights with a map of the US highways, planning out their route.
The goal is to get home, wash off the stench of monsters and cornfields in the familiar salt air. They’ll just take a longer time to get there, not the breakneck pace it was when they moved away. They have time now, a whole summer before Max’s classes start at UC San Diego.
“I’m not stopping for the world’s largest ball of twine or whatever podunk kitsch attraction you think will be a sight.” Billy says as Max consults a guidebook on roadside attractions. He hooks his chin over her shoulder and their cheeks touch.
“The Grand Canyon is non-negotiable.”
Billy sighs and she feels his exhale against her skin. “If you need to see it that badly. It’s a hole in the ground.”
Max turns to face him and their lips touch. It’s an accident.
Billy’s hand comes up to the back of Max’s head, holding her there. He’s so gentle, she wonders if she’ll ever be used to it.
His lips are thin, warm against hers. As first kisses go, Max has the thought it’s not a bad one. Then it’s over.
Billy pulls away and drops his hand from her neck. He sits heavily in the chair on her right. His mouth opens and shuts again, blue eyes wide.
Max touches her lips with her fingers and reaches over to take his hand.
“I didn’t say stop,” she smiles, teasing him. The tension that was present, suffocating in this one-bedroom apartment has snapped.
“Yeah?” Billy checks with her even as he takes her hand in his. “No going back, Max.”
“I won’t,” Max promises. She doesn’t see that happening. Who else is going to understand why she suddenly can’t breathe when she walks past a mall’s food court, or why she hates pumpkin patches for reasons she can never explain to someone who wasn’t there.
She knows Billy. Not inside and out, because she’s still discovering new facets of him every week. Like how he thinks recipes that call for two cloves of garlic really mean six but can’t ever remember if he drinks two-percent or whole milk when he buys it at the grocery.
Billy has been a part of her life for years now. This doesn’t change anything, and changes everything.
Something old, growing into something new.