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Taissa is against it.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no? You can’t stop me.”
She spits into the phone. “It’s forever, Van.”
“So?” Tai hears her click her tongue. A bell dings behind her. She must be calling from the gas station, the latest of her shitty jobs.
“So? So you can’t get rid of it.” Taissa throws the sneaker in her hand into a large cardboard box. “Since when do you want a tattoo?”
“Since now.”
Taissa raises her eyebrows as if Van can see her. “Exactly. You’re being impulsive.”
“Don’t talk to me about being impulsive,” Van snaps. It stings, no matter how many times they’ve had this fight that like all their fights never quite feels like a fight.
“Anyway,” her voice shifts. Taissa imagines her lips twisting into a smirk. "It's happening. Just paid the deposit. You’ll see it tonight.”
“Wait, what?” Taissa’s heart skips a beat. “What the fuck do you mean? Are you getting it now?”
“Well, yeah. That’s why I’m calling.” A buzz hisses over the line, horror movies sounds that she dreamed in the hospital after they pulled Van from her arms. Needles in her silk-smooth eye the shape of fish hooks, twine in a girl's hands, a twitching girl body. “I thought you’d…want to know.”
Her pause hangs in the air, a space for Taissa to fill—identical to the space she left for Van between the piles of boxes slowly accumulating in the back of her dad’s car. Two spaces, or really one, saying, you don’t control me but also you do, you can’t come but also there’s no world in which you aren’t already where I'm going. The gap they both pretend to ignore that means, there never won’t be a we when it comes to you and me.
Taissa sighs. “Where the hell are you?”
She’s sweating. There’s no air conditioning in this goddamn shithole of a tattoo parlor. The fan is pointed at Van. She's curled on the leather table like it’s snow and the woman behind her is Natalie or Lottie or one of those names Tai can’t think any more. Instead, it's some punk butch with a page boy’s cut named Beth.
“She’s giving me a deal,” Van explains after Tai stomps inside to find her shirtless and already stained with stencil ink. “One of the family and all.”
Two paper towels cover the pink nipples that Taissa has come to think of as hers. The last time a bit of Van's body was covered in gauze, the table was steel and Tai couldn’t be in the room until after. Beth waves at her with a latex glove and Taissa remembers for half a second what those taste like, and underneath them the flesh—
“What are your credentials?”
Beth frowns, raising an eyebrow. “Sorry?”
“How many times have you done this?” Taissa crosses her arms. “When’s the last time you sanitized that thing? Have you ever been a defendant in a lawsuit—”
“Tai!” Van groans, twisting her head so she can see Beth’s face. “I’m sorry, she’s kidding—”
“I am absolutely not kidding—”
Beth smirks and puts down the gloves. “Nah, nah, it’s alright. Can’t be in this line of work without running into a protective girlfriend or two.” She grabs a bottle of what Taissa thinks is hand sanitizer as if to show she’s serious. “I’ve been tattooing for eight years, so…thousands?” She wrings the alcohol between her palms. They're covered in ink, flowers and skulls and cool blue spirals. She looks just a bit like Natalie. “We sanitize the machines after every client—everything else is brand new for her, swear. And nope, no lawsuits, no jail time. Just a few parking tickets here and there.”
Taissa narrows her eyes at the materials. There must be something to halt this stupid procedure that her stupid girlfriend is doing just to piss her off. She asks for the waiver Van signed and looks at Beth’s license on the wall. Everything unfortunately appears to be in order.
She sighs at Van’s expectant face, mushy even when it’s hard. “You really want to do this?”
Van nods. Taissa can’t even get herself to look at the design etched over her ribs for fear it’s something she’ll hate. A cartoon, probably, or some dumb movie quote. No matter what it is, it’s about to be stabbed into her soft tissue. She’s about to be scarred, again, for no reason, and meanwhile she’s looking up at Tai with baby bird eyes. She's unlatching her fingers from the belt loop of her jeans and wiggling them in Tai’s direction, all playful and defiant.
Tai exhales again before sinking into the chair beside her.
At first, Taissa thinks that Van might be into it.
“Feels weird,” she says, a tight smile on her lips. She bites her lip and lets out a chuckle as Beth skims the needle beneath her breasts. Taissa tries not to flinch at the sound.
“Not too bad?” Beth asks.
“Naw,” Van says. She twinkles her eyes at Taissa, who melts, because she can't help it. “I’m tough.”
“Thought so. Usually I don’t let people start with the ribs, but—well.” Beth pauses like they all do—their parents and old teachers, former classmates and grocery store employees who stocked magazines with their faces on the covers. “You’re different.”
Taissa looks up from scanning Van’s face for twitches and fractures—and maybe, a bit, for hisses that remind her of other hisses, cool sounds made with hot breath muffled into her neck or legs or chest—and cocks her head to the side. “Wait. Why not the ribs?”
Beth meets her gaze for half a second. “Because the skin’s pretty thin there.” She shrugs as Taissa narrows her eyes. “Tends to be a painful position.”
“What?”
“Jeez, Tai,” Van squeezes her hand. “Like I said, it’s really not that bad.” She smirks. “I’ve had much worse.”
“I know,” Taissa glares at her. “I’m well aware. Thanks for reminding me.”
Van blinks as if she’s just now getting it, and maybe she is. Shame flickers over her features. When she lays like this, with half of her face smushed into a cushion, everyone but Taissa may be able to forget the angry red marks stitched into her left cheek. Taissa would never hate those marks—they're just Van, now, a part of her—but she does dislike the sight of Van’s guilt, almost as much as she does her shameless audacity. Neither, though, hurt Taissa as much as seeing Van in anything close to agony.
It doesn’t take long for her to approximate it now.
“Oooof,” Van winces. The needle dances over the arc of her ribs. She’s still so thin all these months later that the skin might be mistaken for pure bone.
Beth clicks her tongue. “Yeah, it might get a little spicy here." She adjusts her hand over Van's waist. "You good?”
“Mmmh.” Van inhales as Beth moves. “Mmmh, hmmm.”
Taissa presses her thumb into Van’s palm. Van doesn’t squeeze back.
“Try not to move too much here, okay, kid?” Beth barely looks up from her work. The machine sneers its angry hum of tiny teeth. “It’ll take longer if you can’t stay still.”
“Yeah.” Van shuts her eyes. “Okay. Yeah.”
“Maybe hold off on talking too?" Beth suggests. "I’ll go as fast as I can.”
Tai and Van squirm at the words, one spasm bigger than the other. It's just like the last time—just like Natalie’s hands holding down Van’s arms and Travis her legs, just like Taissa weeping in tune with every one of her screams, just like that small, sweet black girl trying to be quick with her nimble fingers—
“It’s okay,” Taissa forces out—different from before, if only a smidge. She strokes a wayward strand of hair back behind Van’s ear. “You’re doing great.”
“She’s right, you’re a badass, Palmer,” Beth says. The words drop from her mouth in such a snappy way that Taissa knows she’s said it thousands of times to plenty of customers who were anything but badass. “Kinda gotta be, if you’re working for Rick.” She steals a careful glance at Taissa. “You met her boss?”
Taissa knows the look Beth’s giving her—it’s Natalie when Shauna was in labor, Shauna while they changed Van’s bandages. They’re partners in crime, and the crime is keeping Van distracted. Tai thinks she’d like this woman if she wasn’t actively stabbing ink into her girlfriend’s flesh.
“Once or twice,” she replies. She runs her thumb over Van’s chin. “He’s…interesting.”
Beth laughs, exposing a shiny piercing in her tongue. “That’s one way to put it.” She quickly wipes the excess ink from Van’s skin. “Mean ol’ bastard. But his cigs are the cheapest around.” She smiles at Tai and moves the needle. “What about you, where’d you work?”
“I don’t,” Taissa says, far too quickly. “I mean.” She gulps. “I’m in school.”
“Oh, nice. Where at?”
She looks down quickly. Van’s squeezing her eyes shut—tighter than before. “I, uh, start at Howard next week.”
“That in DC?”
“Yeah,” Tai says as Van’s lashes flutter. Her jaw tightens her lips into the thin line she trademarked back in early June, back when Tai first told her. About their letter, and her response, and the tuition deposit, and the housing forms, all already signed and sent states away.
“DC’s cool. I was there back in, ah, ‘94, I think it was? Had a convention up there…”
Beth babbles on about monuments, and public transit, and dyke bars and gay clubs. Taissa listens halfheartedly, letting out little “mmmmhs” and “oh wows” and “where’s that ats” to be polite but also so Van can hear her voice. Occasionally she looks up to track Beth’s hand, and that’s a mistake—first, because she feels sicker every time she sees the needle prick, and then because she misses the moment Van goes pale.
“—those pink drinks will fuck you up, man. Learned that the hard way, Jules had to practically carry me home—”
“Van?” Taissa asks, alarmed. Her hand is limp. Though her eyes are open, they look glazed, lost in space. “Van?”
Beth pauses. The machine growls. “You doing okay there, Van?”
No response. Tai instantly scoots forward in her chair. The second she takes Van’s face in her hands, Van lets out a tiny mewl.
Tai nearly chokes. Instead, she snarls. “Turn that fucking thing off.”
She kneels on the dirty floor, Van’s chin vibrating between her fingers with shaky breaths. She’s shrinking, dissolving into the bed, and Taissa suddenly sees rags over her cheeks and blood seeping through them. She’s slipping out of orbit, again and again and again, right there and somehow too far away for Taissa to grab.
Beth is fretting behind her, but Tai can’t hear her, just like she couldn’t hear Lottie and Shauna and the rest coming to find them in a pile of dog meat, just like the only word in her brain the second she dropped from that plane was Van, Van, Van. Every time they played the game that wasn’t a game, the deck concaving in the dark, only one card ever mattered to her, only one set of eyes was ever there for hers to meet. They were always alert then, those teal circles, Tai's favorite color. Now they’re as thin as movie screens.
“Van,” Taissa murmurs. She presses their foreheads together. “Van, talk to me.”
She whimpers, first, and Tai’s throat sinks into her stomach. I knew this was a fucking bad idea, I knew it, I knew it. She tightens her grip on Van's face and breathes into her barely-open mouth. “Van, please.”
Van is still for a second. She blinks once, then again. Her lips move, mumbling nothing, looking for a word. Moments later, it comes out a slur.
“Tai?”
“Hey,” Taissa exhales. “Hey, baby.” She thumbs Van’s sweaty cheeks. “You know where you are?”
“Uh.” She hesitates. “Tattoo place?”
“That’s right,” Tai coos. She never talks like this when they’re around other people.
Van’s nose scrunches up like a leaf. “What happened?”
“Think we lost you there for a second, bud,” Taissa hears Beth say behind Van. Her voice is too cheerful, almost sickly sweet, and something in Tai gags, turns, clicks open its jaw. No, we’re safe, she reminds her. We’re safe, she rubs into Van’s tense shoulders as Beth clears her throat. “Maybe you got lightheaded?”
“Oh.” Van grimaces. She closes her eyes, blushing. “Uh. Yeah.”
Her fingers shake as she reaches up to pinch her nose. Taissa squeezes her shoulder. She’s hot to the touch.
“Now seems like a good time for a break,” Beth says. She doesn’t make any effort to look Van in the eyes, and Tai for once is grateful.
“Yeah,” Taissa takes Van’s hand. “Let’s go get some fresh air.”
They only make it as far as the bench near the window before Van fumbles, tripping over her feet.
“Okay, okay,” Tai murmurs. She helps her sit down and then drops to her side, pulling her close. Beth mutters something about grabbing her a drink. Van waits until she vanishes into the back room before she groans.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
Tai rubs her back. To anyone else, or even to Van under different circumstances, she might throw out an “I told you so." Instead, she nudges Van’s hands away from her face. “It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry.”
“It does not,” Van mutters to her knees. She looks wrecked. “It does not just happen.”
Beth brings Taissa a bottle of water and throws Van a worried look.
“Do you guys, uh, wanna stop?” she asks. “Because that’s like, totally okay—”
“No,” Van says. A punch to the gut, a child’s whine.
“Maybe we could have a few minutes?” Taissa suggests before Beth can argue. She squeezes Van’s shoulder. “Alone?”
“Of course,” Beth nods. “You call me when you’re ready.”
Why, Taissa wants to ask, even though she knows why.
Van droops in her seat, hangdog. Bare from the waist up, her hands twitching like flames. One of the paper towels over her breasts swings down, revealing half her areola. Tai reaches to put the tape back in place. When she looks back up, Van’s watching her with huge eyes.
She has the softest face in the world. Taissa has always thought so.
Gently—oh so gently—she takes Van’s cheeks in between her hands and coaxes her head into her lap.
Van settles with a sigh, blinking up at her. Her mouth softens. Taissa slowly ghosts a thumb over her forehead, then threads her fingers through her hair.
You idiot, she wants to yell but she doesn’t. I’m sorry, she wants to whisper and can’t.
“Silly girl,” she murmurs instead.
Van blushes sheepishly and closes her eyes.
“Goose.” She mumbles after a minute.
“Hmmm?” Taissa says, lost in the freckles lining her cheek, the red bush poking out from her armpit.
Van grins. “Silly goose.”
Taissa scoffs. Van huffs out a little laugh. Tai scratches the softest part of her skull. Van moans, hard, because she always does. Taissa doesn’t say any of the words floating in her head.
The rest of the session goes as well as it can. Beth gently offers to let Tai sit on the table so Van can lay with her head in her lap. Van stares up at Tai as Beth works, and Taissa tickles her chin. Beth keeps the shading to a minimum. Van winces only occasionally, and Taissa plays with her hair, tugging here and there to distract her.
Afterwards, Beth doesn’t let them pay. Van protests, blushing furiously.
“I, like, ethically, cannot charge you for that, dude,” Beth insists. Taissa isn’t quite sure what she means by ethically, but she has a few guesses. “Besides, you paid the deposit, that’s more than enough.”
“It was $40.”
“See?” She winks at Van. “More than enough.” She waves at Taissa, who’s digging for her wallet. “Put that away. It’s my pleasure.”
“Your friend is cool,” Taissa says once they're in the car.
Van is biting her fingernails. “Huh?”
“Your friend,” Tai repeats. She gestures out the window towards the tattoo parlor's door. “Beth?”
“She’s not my friend.”
Van stares into the distance. The strap of her tank top slides from her shoulder. She makes no move to fix it. A week later, over the phone and half-moved into her first college dorm, Taissa won’t be surprised to find out that Van has already quit her shitty job at Rick’s gas station.
She wakes up and someone’s crying.
No, Van. Van’s crying.
Fuck, Taissa thinks, slipping out of bed.
In the bathroom, Van stands in the darkness, shirtless, her face blotchy. Her fingers skim over the tender flesh beneath her arm. She’s weeping, more little girl than half-grown woman.
“Baby,” Tai sighs.
Van turns to her, and her face crumples impossibly more. Her mouth moves wordlessly, and she breathes in sobs rather than air. Taissa immediately moves to wrap her arms around her. Van bawls harder, burying her face in Taissa’s shoulder.
“I hate it,” she cries.
“Shhhh,” Taissa murmurs. “It’s okay.”
“It’s awful.”
Taissa hushes her again. Van opens her mouth against Tai’s shirt, dampening the fabric with her hot gasps. Each breath screams whatever it is she really wants to inscribe on Taissa’s skin, not that Tai can understand what she means to say.
What ink is it? Beth’s, or the college degree’s? Both. Neither. Neither of them know.
Taissa presses her cheek to Van’s hair and glances at the blue mirror, where their forms dance as if in water. The fuzz beneath Van’s arm looks lavender in the dark. Under it, swirls of ink spill across her pale skin, forming the familiar shape of roots, and moss, and the bark of a tall, thin tree.
A sacrifice, just like all the others except this one is all her own. One she chose. Taissa looks at this newest scar and almost smiles through her tears, surprised and almost disgusted to find that she, if not Van, likes it and all that it represents.
For the wilderness, Van would say if Tai wanted to know, half-lying.
For me? Taissa wants to ask.
The little girls in both of them answer.
Is there a difference?