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Grace is two weeks from aging out of juvie when they tell her to pack her things. “Your grandmother’s come to claim you,” she’s told by her social worker, “I guess it really is never too late, huh?”
“Who?” Grace asks, but she dumps her three pairs of jeans and her threadbare t-shirts and her one jacket into a black trash bag and goes out into the reception area. There’s a woman there, with grey hair cut just below her ears and a shawl around her shoulders with turquoise patterning, a floral kerchief over her hair and a hooked cane leaned against her knee. Her smile sits wrong on her face, discordant and unfamiliar.
But if there’s one thing you learn in juvenile hall, it’s to keep your fucking trap shut. So Grace is quiet, and she watches, and she shifts in her chair to feel the reassuring pressure of the handmade shiv in her back pocket and never says both my grandmothers are dead; they’re buried next to my parents and my baby brother.
Sante Fe, she reads sideways off the paperwork. The old woman gets her birthday wrong when she fills out Grace’s information, and when she reaches across the sticky plastic table to pat Grace’s hands, there’s rough calluses across her palm.
In the parking lot, Grace grips her trash bag, holding it over her shoulder, and slips her other hand into her back pocket. “I’m not going to Santa Fe.”
The woman has already climbed into the driver’s seat of the jeep. “Of course we’re not fucking going to Sante Fe.” She tosses the headwrap aside with a grimace, and then the shawl. She’s wearing practical clothing underneath, and there’s blurred curls of old faded ink across her wrist and disappearing under one sleeve. The cane lies abandoned on the asphalt, forgotten and unneeded. “We’re going to Texas.”
Grace has never been to Texas.
“You’re dangerous,” she says, and her voice shakes but her fingers are steady, curled around the cloth-tape grip of her weapon. “I can tell it.”
The woman looks at her then, straight-on for the first time, her sharp eyes and the lines around them, worn deep and not from laughter, the way her voice has gone from saccharine sweet to rough and graveled. “I knew you’d be smart.” She thumps her hand on the passenger seat. “I’m driving to Texas by way of a Wendy’s drive-thru, and there’s a bed waiting for you at the end of it. You can even keep that pushpin you’ve got in your pocket.”
Grace pulls it, holding it against her thigh, pointed down. “I made it from a spork,” she says, “and I blinded somebody with it.”
“Yeah,” the woman says, “they told me about that. Are you comin’ or what? Because I need a Whopper.”
The sun is beating down against Grace’s neck, a heat wave in the middle of September. Her father used to keep a calendar pinned to the wall, next to the fridge with Grace’s report card and her brother’s pencil stick drawings. It was Word-of-the-Day, and he’d read it out loud, once and then again slower, the definition aloud over the top of his newspaper while her mother packed their lunches at the counter, the sweet crunch of the waffle between Grace’s teeth.
“Whoppers are Burger King,” Grace says, and climbs into the Jeep. “It’s copyright.”
“I knew you’d be annoying,” the woman mutters. “My name’s Sarah. Keep your fucking feet off my dash.”
++
“This is where you live?” Grace peers out the window at it, a quiet looking house with no neighbors for miles and miles. “This is Texas?”
“This is Texas,” Sarah agrees. “Get your shit out of the back.”
Grace’s palm is sweaty around the crinkled cinch of her trash bag, the porch creaking under her steps. A dog bursts out, dancing about their feet in unbridled joy, and Grace drops to her knees to rub her hands over its silky head, its brindled coat. A mutt, she thinks, one eye blue and the other green.
“Dog likes you,” Sarah grunts, holding the screen door open with the toe of her boot. “That’s good. Dogs know who’s people.”
Grace is smiling despite herself, pushing the dog’s snout away as he licks eagerly at her face. “About people, you mean.”
“Sure,” Sarah says vaguely, “that too. Come on inside already, I’m an old lady and I need a drink.”
There’s a couch just inside, in the small living room, a pillow and a folded fleece blanket atop it. Grace frowns at it. “I thought you said I’d have a bed.”
Sarah pops a beer open using the edge of the kitchen counter, the bottlecap clinking onto the linoleum. She pokes her head out into the living room. “Maybe you shouldn’t take rides from strange women. Didn’t your mama teach you anything?”
How to tie her shoes, how to brush her hair. To do the nines times table using her fingers, what it looks like when the life goes out of someone’s eyes. “Whatever,” Grace says, and sits on it. Her stomach is rolling a little from the grease of the burger and the fries, untold hours ago, and she’s too tired to ask where the bathroom is. Her foot is cold where there’s a hole worn in the bottom of her shoe, a half size too small.
“You drink?”
Grace blinks at her. “I’m seventeen.”
Sarah is standing in the doorway now, the beer dangling from her fingers, the sunglasses still on her face. “So?”
Grace glares. “So no, I don’t drink. Don’t you know anything about teenagers?”
Sarah’s face goes flat. She drinks, long, until the bottle’s dry. “I guess not,” she says, and disappears down the hallway. A door closes with a hard snap.
Grace stares at the blank television. She can’t hear any traffic outside, no sirens, no voices. There’s a bird singing outside the window, chirpchirpchirp, trilled and irritating. The dog hops up beside her and rests his head on her knee. She scritches his ears. “Better than nothing,” she tells him, and he snuffles at her fingers reassuringly.
++
She wakes up because her stomach rumbles. There’s early sunlight slanting through the window, more grey than yellow, and her side is cold where the dog was sleeping against it.
In the kitchen, potatoes are frying, the popsnap of the oil and the cloying smell.
Grace shuffles over, trying to flatten her hair with one hand, and her knee bumps against the dog, perched hopefully just inside the kitchen with his entire focus directed at the pan on the stove.
Sarah is poking at it with a wooden spoon in one hand, a beer in the other. “Morning.”
“Morning,” Grace answers. “A little early, isn’t it?”
“You can go back to sleep.”
“I meant for drinking.”
Sarah takes a long draw without looking up. “I know what you meant.”
Whatever, Grace thinks. “Bathroom?”
“Down the hall, blue towels are yours.”
“Okay,” Grace says, and pats the dog’s head once, his tail waving against the floor, before making her way to a toilet and a shower.
When she comes out, scrubbed clean twice over and teeth finger-brushed, it smells like burnt oil. “What happened to the potatoes?”
Sarah shrugs. “Never been one for cooking.” She tosses a bag of rolls onto the table, spilling open and sending a few tumbling across the tabletop. “You drink coffee?”
Grace has a flash of memory. “Petite dejeuner,” she says.
Sarah is bent into the fridge, looking for something. “What?”
“Petite dejeuner,” Grace repeats. “It’s when you eat bread and drink coffee in the morning. I think.”
Sarah emerges, holding a tub of butter. “Where the hell you learn something like that?”
Grace shrugs. “Word of the Day.”
“That’s two words.” Sarah makes an impatient jerk of her head. “Is that a yes on the coffee or not?”
“Whatever,” Grace says, and sits at the table with a grumbled sigh. She pulls a roll towards her.
A butter knife slams into it, sticking straight up, making Grace startle. It’s closely followed by a mug clattering down on the old tabletop, the coffee sloshing over the rip and spilling onto the placemat. “Help yourself,” Sarah says with a smile, all teeth, and thumps away into the living room, coffee in one hand and a whiskey bottle in the other. The dog trots after her, tail aloft and cheerful.
Grace scowls, then smears butter all over the roll and stuffs the entire thing into her mouth, before tucking two more away into a nearby kitchen towel and tiptoeing over to stow it in a nook behind the sofa. She sits back down at the table and starts buttering another roll, slower this time. The coffee is strong enough her eyes almost water, but it’s not cold and it’s not instant, and possibly it is some kind of test, so Grace forces it down between bites.
In the living room, she can hear the scrape of a bottle cap and the clink of glass on ceramic. “Don’t spill on my fucking bed,” she calls out, spewing crumbs. The dog returns to lick them off the faded linoleum.
“Fuck off,” Sarah says back, and the television clicks on; the jingle of the local news, the creak of Sarah’s chair, the thump-thump-thump of the dog’s tail when Grace splits a roll with him.
++
In the middle of the night, the dog sits up and woofs, low and quiet, ears pricked. Grace slides her hand under her pillow, around her shiv, wondering if she should call out for Sarah. The dog jumps off the couch just as Grace hears the screen door creak and the key scrape in the lock, and she immediately tucks herself into the blanket, closing her eyes, breathing quiet and slow and her white knuckle grip tightening even further.
“Ay,” someone--a woman--says. “Quiet, Carlito, you’ll wake Sarah.” Taptaptap go the dog’s nails on the wood floor, and that’s the sound of his happy dance. Sarah told her to trust the dog, so Grace doesn’t make a mad dash for the window or the back door, her ears straining: the floor creaking under booted feet, the tired sigh right after a bag drops down with a heavy clunk.
Grace’s breath catches; her eyes open. A woman is looking back, standing in shadow. Grace sits up, swallowing. “I’m Grace,” she says, bold despite the tremulous shake in her fingers.
The woman flinches, a full body jerk so intense it makes her rock back half a step. Then, almost hesitantly, she draws closer. “I’m Daniela,” she says, and the moonlight slants through the blinds, her dark hair and the steel in her spine. “Dani.” Her voice is very slightly accented. “I’m sorry I woke you.”
“It’s okay.” Grace shrugs. “I’m sorry I’m in your house.”
“It’s not my house,” she says, and her hand extends, hovering in the air between them before very carefully taking the edge of the blanket and tugging it back over Grace’s knees, all without ever actually touching her. “Go back to sleep. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
“Okay,” Grace says, and lies back down, listening to the woman move quietly into the kitchen, the creak of the pipes as she gets a drink of water, the thump-thump of one boot hitting the ground before the other. Grace’s thundering heart slows; her breathing eases. She falls asleep listening to socked feet whisper down the hallway to the bedrooms.
++
She wakes up because Sarah and Dani are arguing in the hallway, and Grace has only known Sarah for maybe three days, but the older woman doesn’t seem to have a low volume setting. It’s still dark out, and Grace keeps her breathing quiet and her body still.
“How could you,” Dani is hissing. “We had an agreement.”
“Did we?” The click-hiss of a beer bottle opening. “Well I’m old. I forget things.”
“Give me that, the sun’s not even up yet.”
Sarah makes a put out noise. “This is elder abuse.”
Dani takes a drink, the liquid sloshing, the seal of her mouth over the glass bottleneck. “Yeah, well, you transported a minor across state lines, I’m just trying to keep up.”
Sarah sighs. “Did you really want me to leave her there, Dani? We can send her away if you really want to.”
There’s a short, hard silence that Grace can’t read without getting a look at the scene. “I will never send her anywhere,” Dani says coldly. “Not ever again.” She drinks, the glug of the liquid and the tired exhale after she swallows.
“Then she stays.”
There’s a long silence, long enough that Grace almost falls asleep again despite her future being discussed less than five feet away.
“Yes,” Dani says finally. “She stays. In the spare room, not the fucking couch. You’re such a bitch sometimes.”
++
“So,” Sarah says, a few hours later at breakfast. “You gonna stick around?”
Grace frowns at her roll. “I thought you weren’t going to kick me out.”
“Sure,” Sarah agrees. “That doesn’t mean you can’t make a run for it.”
Grace takes a small bite, chewing slowly. The dog, hunched forward, licks his chops eagerly.
Sarah nudges him with her foot. “Leave the kid alone, Carl, I already fed your ass.”
“If I left,” Grace asks, “would you chase me?”
Sarah considers the question. “Probably.”
Grace feeds Carl a piece of her roll. “Okay. I’ll stay.”
Sarah stands, slow and with a sigh, and shuffles over to get herself another cup of coffee. She brings Grace one too, and a fistful of diner sugar packets. “Here,” she grunts, dropping them next to the mug. “So you can quit pullin’ that face.”
It’s probably a peace offering, Grace figures, assuming the sugar isn’t actually poison. She dumps six packets in and stirs with the tip of her index finger, watching Sarah spike her own coffee with something much stronger.
Dani comes into the kitchen, yawning, and Grace takes her first good look at her, in the sunlight coming through the window. “What’s for breakfast?” She picks up one of the rolls and looks at it disdainfully, tapping it against the counter. “These are stale. Tell me you haven’t been eating nothing but stale bread for two days.”
She’s short, is Grace’s first thought, surprised. Somehow she’d missed that the night before. She’s got one of those faces, the ones that are hard to pin down with an age. She’s pretty, Grace thinks abruptly, and forces her attention back down, picking her roll into little pieces and trying to will the heat in her cheeks away. “Sarah burned the potatoes.”
“Snitch,” Sarah mutters.
Dani sighs. She starts assembling ingredients, bent over in the fridge. “Grace, you want to help make dinner?”
Last night, before Dani came, Sarah told Grace if she was so tired of rolls she could make herself her own dinner. Grace told her to go fuck herself with a cactus. “Okay,” she says softly, and when she stands she smoothes her hands down her thighs, trying to press out the wrinkles with her palms.
“Jesus Christ,” Sarah says, and escapes to the living room with the good tequila.
“Chop these,” Grace is told, and she hesitates, clutching the thin plastic bag of vegetables to her chest.
“I--with a knife?”
Dani straightens to look straight at her over the edge of the refrigerator door, eyebrow arched. “You’d rather use a spoon?”
Grace flushes. I have a caution sticker in my file, she almost says, they used to take the staples out of my books before I was allowed to read them. “Okay,” is what she does say, turning away. The drawer drags when she opens it, wood scraping on wood and the glint off the metal.
Dani steps, close but not too close, carefully holding herself just outside of Grace’s personal space. “Here,” she says, and her arm brushes the sleeve of Grace’s shirt when she reaches past her.
“No one’s trusted me with a knife,” Grace says carefully, keeping her eyes averted and her posture hunched in, non-threatening. “For a long time.” Then she blinks, shoulders straightening. “Except Sarah. Kind of.”
“That’s good enough for me.” Dani sets a knife down on the chopping board, then steps away, turning her back to Grace and fiddling with the pilot light of the stove.
Grace’s fingers curl around the handle, worn with use and old age, and rests her finger on the flat of the blade. When Dani turns Grace is still standing there, the knife at her side, her white knuckle grip. I could take you, Grace thinks, until Dani’s back straightens and her eyes go dark and cool, her weight subtly shifting. Grace knows what a fighter looks like, and she knows what danger looks like, and she’s taken a half-step backwards before she stops herself.
Then she juts her chin out and curls her empty hand into a fist. She doesn’t mind going down fighting, not if it comes right down to it.
Inexplicably, Dani flinches. Her expression softens, her body language easing. “Like this,” she says, and takes another knife from the drawer. They cut tomatoes, side by side, and when Dani tells her to go get Sarah for dinner, the pan sizzling on the stove, Grace slips the other knife up her sleeve.
++
Grace comes out of the bathroom after dinner and Sarah is standing in the hallway, eyebrow arched. Grace’s shoulders slump. She pulls the knife out of her pocket and offers it back, palm extended and eyes averted.
She’s surprised when it’s replaced by something heavier, looking up to find the grip of a different knife resting there instead. It’s large, so large Grace almost finds it comical, a knife she’s only seen in the movies.
“It’s called a k-bar,” she’s told, Sarah’s expression closed off and inscrutable. “I’ll trade you for it.”
Grace’s hand goes to her back pocket, unbidden and instinctively protective. “It’s mine,” she says, even though the handle’s bent and it’s too old and too dull to cut through anything stronger than packing tape. It’s never let her down. “I made it.” With her own two hands, dragging the handle on the concrete floor over and over, the ragged scraping lulling her to sleep.
Sarah frowns. Then she turns around and walks away.
Later, Grace lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, tense and uneasy. Maybe it was a test, she thinks, maybe she was supposed to give it up without the trade, maybe they’ve decided everyone’s better off if she doesn’t stick around. Her fingers clench in the sheets, twisting; when she sleeps she dreams of her brother, the way he shouted when he saw the car coming and realized it wasn’t going to stop, the way his eyes went wide with shock and then stayed that way until they didn’t anymore.
She wakes up with a start, her skin prickling uncomfortably with chills and a cold sweat dampening her hairline. She wipes her face on the pillowcase, scrubs her fingers through her hair, and levers off the mattress with a quiet sort of groan, shivering at the cold floor against the soles of her feet.
Sarah is sitting in the chair against the wall, hidden in shadow and smelling like cheap cigarettes.
Grace almost screams, sucking it back in and trapping it against her teeth. If she has to fight her way out of this house, she’d rather try to get past Sarah instead of two of them and a dog.
“I have a better trade for you.”
Grace rubs at one eye with her knuckles. “What the hell is wrong with you, anyway?”
“I’m crazy,” Sarah says nonchalantly. “Do you want a gun?”
Grace hesitates. “Really?”
“You have to learn how to use it before you can put it under your pillow.”
“I guess that’s fair.” Doesn’t stop Grace from feeling resentful about it.
“Good talk.” Sarah leaves, lighting up as she goes.
“You’re not supposed to smoke in the house,” Grace calls after her, and ignores the middle fingered response.
++
Later in the week, Dani finds them practicing on a home made range of bottles balanced atop a few rotting fence posts and completely flips her shit. She drags Sarah off into the trees, cursing and lecturing all the while, sometimes in Spanish. Neither one takes the gun from her, so Grace just shrugs it off and continues being the worst shot in the history of the world, she’s pretty sure.
The intact bottles sit on the tree stumps, the colored glass glinting in the sunlight. Mocking her.
“You’re a terrible shot,” Dani says, and Grace jumps; she hadn’t noticed she’d come back.
“I know,” she mutters, a dull flush of embarrassment rising in her cheeks. “I just started learning.” No one in the movies is ever this terrible at shooting.
“Learn faster.”
Dani’s head jerks up, surprised. Dani’s been nothing but polite to her in the time she’s spent living in her house. Grace helps chop things for dinner, or stir whatever Dani orders her to stir, and Sarah turns up the television so they can hear the news. They’re always listening to the news. And it’s the boring news channels too, the ones even her own parents had said were dull. “I’m trying!”
“Try harder.”
Grace gapes at her.
Dani just inclines her head at the bottles. “Try again. Try harder.”
Grace doesn’t say the snarky comment about Yoda that she’s thinking, but Dani smirks at her like she knows it all the same. Grace takes a deep breath, in and out all the way through her belly. Her palm is slippery on the roughened grip, and the harsh bark of the recoil has built a dull soreness in her wrist. “How did you?” she asks. “How did you learn?”
Dani turns back to look at the bottles, but her smile softens. “Sarah.”
“Oh. Did she tell you to try harder?”
“Something like that.”
“You can try as hard as you want at some things,” Grace says, sweat stinging her eyes. “It doesn’t mean you won’t fail.” She’d tried to get to her brother, to hold his hand before…
“Try again,” Dani says, and Grace takes another breath.
“Okay,” she says, and lifts the gun.
++
Sarah takes clippers to Grace’s head after a week of Grace’s disgruntled mumblings about her thin wisps curling into her face, sticking to the back of her neck; it’s two days after Grace starts accusing her of hiding hair ties on purpose. Grace leans forward, an old towel around her neck, the toilet seat cover creaking under her when she shifts her weight.
Grace has mostly kept her hair short thus far by hacking at it every few weeks with a dull pair of craft scissors from the nonprofit that comes in every other week to help them make macaroni sculptures and encourage them to go to college or whatever. There’s no scissors in this house, as far as Grace can tell. Just… knives. And guns.
The clippers buzz over her scalp, the metal guard pleasantly cool and the sensation faintly soothing. Sarah hadn’t offered to attempt to replicate any particular style, and Grace hadn’t asked. In almost no time at all, she’s peering at herself in the bathroom mirror, her neck and shoulders prickling uncomfortably.
She looks younger, she thinks, and is annoyed by it.
“You look older,” Sarah says, shoving up the window so she can smoke out of it. “More dangerous.”
Grace hides her pleased flush by turning to the door. “Like a teenaged boy,” she grumbles, and feels bad when Sarah’s face does something funny. “That’s gonna stink,” she adds, opening the door with a squeak of old hinges. “Dani’ll be mad.”
“She’s not here.”
“Oh,” Grace says, and her smile fades. “Another trip?”
Sarah is looking at her, unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, eyes narrowed.
Grace makes a hasty exit.
++
Dani comes back in the middle of the night, like she always does. She smells like a fire. “You smell like a fire,” Grace says drowsily, when the kitchen light flips on and wakes her.
“You have a room.”
Grace sits up on the couch, the blanket crumpled at her waist, squinting the sleep out of her eyes. “Did you set something on fire?”
Dani half-disappears into the fridge, scrounging for leftovers that won’t be there. “Of course not.”
It sounds like a lie. “You smell like you did.” Not like a barbeque, not like a wildfire. Like lighter fluid, and struck matches. Grace is not one hundred percent a stranger to arson herself.
Dani hums evasively, emerging empty-handed and crossing to sit in the armchair and take her boots off. “No leftovers?”
“There’s ham,” Grace offers, making her way to the fridge and lifting the plastic tray in the door. “From the deli.”
“That’s where the butter goes,” Dani tells her, and Grace shrugs. It’s not like they have any butter; there’s barely anything in the fridge at all except old condiments and leftovers from canned goods. “I don’t like that Miracle Whip shit.”
“No one likes it,” Grace tells her, taking it out anyway and fishing the bread out of a cabinet. “It just helps make you feel full.”
Dani doesn’t respond to that, and Grace doesn’t look at her, letting her brain blank out while she goes through familiar motions. She doesn’t realize she’s not moving until a hand closes gently around the wrist holding the butter knife. “Go sit,” Dani tells her, and she goes.
There’s Miracle Whip on the knuckle of her ring finger, and she stares at the small white smear, the rug under the dining table rough and thick under her bare feet. She can hear Dani in the kitchen, the clink of silverware on ceramic and the splash of tap water into a coffee mug.
A plate clunks down on the table in front of her, and Dani settles in across from her with another place. Grace blinks. There’s two ham sandwiches on her plate, and just the one on Dani’s. It makes Grace frown.
“No mayo on yours,” Dani tells her. “You can have another one if you’re still hungry after.”
Grace stares at her place, her eyes burning. She can’t think of what to say.
“It’s okay. Just eat.”
Grace wipes her fingers on her pants, and eats.
“Your hair looks terrible,” Dani tells her later, as they walk down the hallway to their respective bedrooms. She’s smiling.
“Like a teenaged boy,” Grace says ruefully, clambering into her bed, and Dani’s smile brightens before fading.
“Don’t mention that to Sarah,” she says, and lifts a hand before leaving, like she was going to touch Grace’s buzzed scalp before thinking better of it.
++
“Where does Dani go?”
“Nowhere with you, if you can’t even figure out second gear.”
Grace rolls her eyes, one foot stomped down awkwardly on the clutch. “It’s only my first lesson.”
Sarah pushes the passenger seat all the way back so she can stick her bare feet out the open window. It’s summer: sticky-hot, humid, stifling. Grace can smell her own deodorant, and Sarah has a wet towel around her neck. “Some pilot you’ll be.”
Grace winces as they stop and start their way across the grass towards the dirt road. “Let’s figure out the car before a hypothetical plane.”
Sarah scoffs at her. “Don’t ask her,” she says, after another two minutes of terrible driving. “She’ll get upset.”
The car makes a terrible grinding noise, and Dani fumbles at the gearshift. “I want to help.”
“Yeah kid,” Sarah says quietly. “I know.”
++
There’s an old four door sedan in the sideyard, an automatic, and Grace gets to drive the two-nearly-three hour drive into the closest town for supplies, usually under Sarah’s watchful eye (or, most usually, under the sounds of Sarah’s snores).
When Dani is around, they all go together. There’s no reception on the radio until after the first half-hour of driving, and then there’s not much except an old banda station, bible readings, and bubblegum pop.
“Happy birthday, kid,” Sarah says over staticky brass instruments, and tosses an airplane sized bottle of tequila onto the dash in front of her. She exits the car before Grace can respond, headed for the dive bar on the corner.
Dani makes a frustrated noise from the backseat. “Don’t drink that.”
“Because I’m underage?” Grace puffs up, insulted despite the truth of it.
“Because you’re driving.”
Grace deflates. “Oh.” She flickers a sad look up from under her lashes. “But it’s my birthday.”
“You can drink it,” Dani concedes, and Grace’s head jerks up in surprise-- “But you can’t drive back.”
The cap slips in her fingers, small and flimsy, and she spills a little of it over her fingers, the smell of it acrid in her nose. It tastes terrible, and she chokes into a coughing fit while Dani laughs.
“I’ll get you the chaser, next time,” she says, her eyes crinkled. “Happy birthday, Grace.”
++
Grace comes awake slowly, quietly, her cheek smashed into her arm smashed into the door. The car rocks around her, and Dani’s humming along softly to the radio.
Dani’s stopped humming. “You could have let her have shotgun.”
Sarah stirs in the passenger seat, and Grace keeps her eyes shut, her breathing even, her face hidden in her elbow. “That’s not how shotgun works.”
“It’s her birthday.”
“Had to do it,” Sarah says shortly, almost defensively. “I gave her a drink first. And another in the store, when you weren’t looking.”
“She doesn’t have to prove she’s over what happened to her family.”
Grace’s heart thunders--she’s never really pushed, not really. Not even asked plainly. Why did Sarah come for her? How did Sarah know what happened, how do they both know what happened. What they talked about, before they agreed to keep her.
“--And neither do you,” Dani is saying.
“Fuck you, General,” Sarah says, and then something in Spanish, none of the playground words Grace knows. It sounds mean.
“Your accent fucking sucks,” Dani says, but she doesn’t sound that upset.
Sarah does, though. “She’s legal now, you know.”
“Fuck you, Sarah,” Dani says coldly, and she sounds more than just upset.
Grace keeps her eyes screwed shut until the music fades out of the radio and the trees climb up around them to blot out the stars and the moon; until she falls asleep in the silence.
++
Grace is twenty one and three months. She keeps her hair short but not buzzed, and she can shoot the flies off the bottles in the practice range. She squabbles with Sarah like they've been married for ten years, and avoids Dani’s increasingly heavy-handed hints to go back to school.
She’s asleep on the couch when Dani slips in the backdoor like she always does, in between two and four in the morning and smelling like a crime scene. She stirs when she hears Dani in the kitchen, listening quietly to the click-hiss of the stove lighting and the splash of water into a pot. “Mac n’ cheese?” she asks without sitting up, her voice sleep-rough.
“Just the cheap stuff.” Grace can hear drawers opening and closing, the metallic rattle of cutlery. “You don’t have to wait up for me.”
Grace ignores her; it’s not a new argument. “Where did you go?”
Dani ignores her; it’s not a new question. “Come help.”
Grace grumbles, but it’s more for show than anything else. It’s not so much a ritual as it is both of them trying to out-stubborn the other, this routine. In no time at all Dani is taking her boots off at the dining table while Grace stands at the stovetop, stirring lazily.
“I missed your birthday.”
Grace looks up, meeting Dani’s tired smile. “It’s okay. It’s not like we really celebrate.”
Dani’s smile melts into a frown. “We should.”
Grace just shrugs. It’s not like she wants to, not really. Her mom and her had shared a birthday, she doesn’t think she’ll ever untangle the grief enough to enjoy it. “Sarah gave me another gun.”
“Of course she did.” Dani bends, digging through her backpack. “Here.”
Grace abandons the stove, curious, and sits at the table for her present. It’s a bottle of tequila, and it startles a smile out of her. “Were you in Mexico?”
Dani shoots her a look. “Don’t start. And don’t let Sarah have any of that, it’s too expensive for her.”
Grace frowns.
“And I got her whiskey.”
Grace’s frown thaws, but doesn’t disappear. “I can go with you, next time.”
Dani stands and goes to the cabinets, busying herself with bowls and spoons and dishing up the food. “That’s not necessary.”
“I’m old enough--”
“We’ve discussed this already.”
“No we haven’t.” Grace crosses her arms mulishly as Dani returns, setting a bowl and spoon down before her. “It’s not a discussion if you just refuse to talk about it.”
“It is in Mexico.”
Grace straightens triumphantly. “So you were in Mexico!”
“No, I’m just Mexican.” Dani nudges the spoon. “Eat.”
Grace squishes the goopy mess in her bowl, moving it around more than eating it. “Sarah called you General.”
Dani goes still, eyes down and shadowed in the dim light, the crickets screaming in the dark outside. “When.”
“My eighteenth. You thought I was asleep.”
“Very sneaky,” Dani sighs, and starts eating. “She shouldn’t have said that.”
“Are you? A General, I mean.” Grace stares at her, more bold than she’s ever managed before, eyes fixed on Dani’s face.
“No,” Dani says, meeting Grace’s gaze easily. “I’m not and never have been. No army here.”
“But you are fighting.”
Dani says nothing, her mouth a thin displeased slash across her face.
“And you could use my help.”
“We’ve been doing just fine.”
Grace sits back in her chair, satisfied. “So there are people helping you. And you are in charge.”
Dani breaks their stare with an annoyed exhale. “Eat or go to bed.”
Grace shovels a few bites down before trying her luck again. “Sarah says I’m good enough.”
“Sarah fucking sucks. Did you two eat a single vegetable while I was gone?”
“We had oranges. I could--”
“Oranges aren’t vegetables.”
Grace scowls, her previous victory forgotten. “Sarah says it’s enough to keep scurvy away.”
“Sarah is a terrible influence on--” Dani tries to stop herself from saying it, but by her wince she knows it’s too late.
“So let me go with you!”
“Grace--”
“I’m good, I’m really good, and Sarah even says there’s nothing she can teach me--”
“Sarah is elderly--”
“If you’re a general without an army, then let me--”
“No!” Dani slams her bowl down on the table so hard it cracks, cheese sauce splashing across the tablecloth. Carl, snout peppered with grey, levers himself out of the dog bed in the corner to sniff hopefully at the air. “No, Grace.”
Grace is breathing hard, furious at herself for the tears in her eyes and the trembling in her fingers. “I’m not a child.”
“I know.” Dani takes a deep breath. “I know.” She stands, dumping as much of the mess as she can scoop up into the trash and retrieving a fresh bowl. She sits again, ignoring the ceramic shards and elbow pasta left on the table.
Grace takes the bowl and splits her own portion in half before sliding it back across the table. “I can do this. I want to. I know it’s important.”
“How?”
“I can,” Grace stammers, “I can shoot, and drive, and hotwire, and--”
“No, how do you know it’s important? How do you know it’s worth it.”
“Because you do.”
Dani shakes her head. “I’ll… I’ll think about it.” She pulls the newspaper towards her from where Sarah had left it with a disgusted scoff at breakfast. They eat in silence, Grace quietly triumphant and Dani’s eyes fixed on the news.
Grace finishes and leaves her bowl in the sink, wiping her mouth on her arm. She hesitates at the entrance to the hallway. “You won’t regret this.”
Dani doesn’t look up. “This isn’t what your family wanted for you.”
“They died.”
Dani flinches. “This isn’t what I wanted for you.”
Grace shrugs, brutally practical. “Then you should have left me an orphan.”
Dani looks younger suddenly, tired. “Yes,” she says. “Okay.”
Grace grins, opening her mouth, but Dani shakes her head and she swallows it back down.
“Don’t. Tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay,” Grace says softly, off-footed. She looks back only once before going to bed--
Dani alone at the table, just barely lit by the moon through the window, her knuckles white around the newspaper. Grace would die for her, and Dani looks like she knew it already, knew it before Grace told her so.
She drops her head into her hands, and Grace looks away.