Chapter Text
“...fode et erue in lapis…”
Scratchy looked up at the knock on the door, and Agatha dragged her nails through the fur of his neck. He craned his neck to look to the entryway, and she paced back towards the kitchen, chanting.
“...forma quam volo informari…”
Knock knock knock.
Christ, just leave the package at the door.
“...volo videre te crescere…”
Knock knock knock.
Scratchy kicked in her arms, twisting, and the tremulous weave of magic between them flickered. She threw a dirty look over her shoulder at the door.
“...volo videre te introspicere…”
She stormed to the door. Scratchy wriggled, and she scritched under his chin, squeezing him tighter to her chest.
Knock knock–
She put her back to the door, donkey-kicking it right back as hard as she could. There was a pause, and she hoped that, whoever it was, they got the fucking message.
Agatha stalked to the front window. She jerked back a curtain just enough for her and the rabbit to peek through into the night, her incantation dropping to a low growl. Her neighbor’s windows glowed orange as they made their way through dinner and whatever mundane nightly routine.
In front of her house, right under the street lamp, sat a familiar, empty Subaru.
She growled, snapping the curtains back closed before storming to the door. She threw the lock, and the door slammed against the wall when she threw it open.
Hunched on her porch in a sweatshirt and a beanie, Billy blinked against the sudden light.
“...surge, lapis…”
He frowned, taken aback.
“I…what–”
“...scandere, columnae…”
He looked between her and Scratchy.
“I…I don’t–”
“...ascendit, usque ad petram…”
Agatha sat into a hip, scrutinizing him.
Billy shifted uncomfortably, his shoulders pulled tight and his hands buried in the pocket of his hoodie. His eyeliner was suspiciously faded, leaving his face plain, and the dark beanie was pulled low, his curls pushed down into his eyes.
His red eyes.
“...et inanis mea est ad corruptor…”
Billy looked back at his car, shuffling his feet.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his shoulders closing in even tighter. “I’m…I didn’t mean to…I should have…”
She held up a hand like a phone, and Billy nodded at his feet.
“I couldn’t…I know, I should have called, I’m sorry…”
His face twisted, his cheeks and nose gone red with cold or embarrassment or worse, that flush of color that is only followed by tears.
“I’m sorry, I’ll go–”
He turned, and she groaned, fisting the shoulder of his sweatshirt.
“Get inside, you little–”
He stumbled through her door jamb, and she grit her teeth as the intricate, convoluted weave of magic slowly unravelled. It drained away like sand through a sieve.
“Thirty one hours!” she croaked.
Billy jumped as she slammed the door shut.
“Thirty…?”
“I have been incanting…for thirty one hours. You couldn’t have waited four more? I’ve been listening to the sound of my own voice since breakfast yesterday– when was the last time you tried to piss while casting? Do you know how delicate…”
She squished Scratchy to her chest, chomping her lip. Billy’s eyes had closed, his head falling back slightly as the rest of him went almost slack. He breathed like he had just resurfaced from a great depth, his brows drawn tight.
She slumped into the door jamb, eyeing him as his jaw worked.
“Who pissed in your Cheerios?”
Billy’s face tightened, his bottom lip twitching. She watched the pulse race in his throat.
“Billy.”
“It’s so quiet.”
Her heart lurched at the familiar words. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard them, not by far, but it never failed to turn over something in her chest.
It usually felt like glass.
His head tipped forward, and this time his sharp breath sounded dangerously wet.
Oh, god. It was gonna be one of those nights.
“Billy?”
His voice was small.
“Can I stay here tonight, please…?”
His mouth twisted, his eyes still squeezed tight, and she sighed. She poured Scratchy onto the floor, shaking out her stiff arms before tugging him around by the elbow to face her.
Billy blinked down at her through red, long-swollen eyes, and the only word she could conjure for him was pitiful.
“Did something happen?”
His mouth trembled, tears welling, as he shook his head. He blinked and a fat tear rolled down his cheek, and then he was nodding, more tears falling.
Agatha shook her head.
She reeled him in, and suddenly she was drowning in teenager.
“Okay,” she huffed into his sweatshirt, “That’s…yep, okay.”
She held him as he dissolved. His fingers dug into her back, and his voice was muffled in her shoulder.
“I had a bad night...”
She rubbed a hand over his back and he melted over her shoulder. The knobs of his spine and shoulder blades were distinct under her hand, and he leaned heavily into her as she tightened her arms.
They were new at this. The first time he’d hugged her, she’d just crawled back to the land of the living in a shiny new body, and since then he’d kept his distance for the most part. After everything, it’d been jarring– she’d found that, in general, life or death situations strip away decorum and boundaries quickly, and something about being stone-cold dead had left an odd vulnerability between them. Maybe it was her really only existing in his mind, but he’d been frighteningly open with her as if she’d been a part of his own subconscious, his walls as translucent as she’d been.
With her return to corporality, it seemed convention had caught up with him again. She found it equal parts amusing and irritating as he once again tried to talk himself in circles as if she couldn’t see through his careful mask like it was made of polished glass.
Recently, though, Agatha’d found him letting himself fall into her, and it felt less like pressing on a bruise than jackhammering a gaping wound. Last month, after a particularly involved and demanding conjuration, the whole coven had stayed late into the night at Jen’s townhouse, sprawled across her fancy couches and spilling wine on the upholstery. By midnight, Billy had slumped low against her arm and she’d gone stiff, giving herself a migraine trying to hold still so as not to wake him. He’d moved at some point to drool into the fluffy carpet and Agatha had spent the rest of the night quietly seething at the gentle hand Lilia skimmed easily up and down the boy’s spine as he slept.
She used to be good at this.
His shoulders were hitching now, though, and he was too big for her to sweep up like she did when he was little and his brother had smashed his shitty Lego castle or whatever. She figured he wouldn’t appreciate that anymore anyway. This was a different life, one where problems couldn’t be solved with a well-placed dinosaur bandaid or a tropical punch juice pouch.
It’s not that kind of show.
Agatha shook that memory off. Billy was crying in earnest now, really, he had to be one of the most hydrated boys in the state, and she was exhausted, her throat parched and arms aching, but she couldn’t bring herself to be snide or to push him off– he’d come to her house. Not Jen’s, not Lilia’s, not to his little school friends or his own mother.
She was old enough to know that covetousness as a mortal sin was just propaganda. It was how you kept what was yours.
She felt more than heard him mumble into her shoulder.
“I don’t speak weepies.”
She let her hands fall when he pulled back, watching him drag his sweatshirt sleeve quickly over his nose and eyes before looking back down to her. His lip shook dangerously as she reached to trace her thumb down the tight line between his brows.
“Can I have an Advil?” he asked quietly.
She huffed, a jibe about drug deals on the tip of her tongue, but his voice was so soft and his face so wretched, the words died on her lips.
She ran a hand down the side of his head, displacing his beanie a bit. She let her thumb graze his temple and that was enough. Even without reaching she could feel his magic, withered and weary and pulsing with exhausted, frustrated tension. Not drained, but parched. It writhed in a numb horror, and her own throat suddenly tasted of a foul mixture of fear and mortification.
Strange.
She ran a hand over his cheek again, shaking loose of his magic before he noticed.
“Yeah.” She gave him a little push. “Come on.”
Drawers and cupboards banged around in the kitchen, and Billy curled his legs up tighter on the couch as humiliation burned in his throat. He wrapped his arms around himself, tucking his hands into his sleeves.
He curled forward, burying his face in his knees as bile bit at his throat.
I couldn’t leave if I tried…
He fisted his hands in his bangs, dragging at his hair and sending his beanie tumbling back.
I couldn’t leave if I tried…
Knuckles rapped gently against the side of his head. He looked up slowly, and Agatha raised an eyebrow down at him, holding a glass of water. She knocked her fist against his temple again until he raised his hands to catch the three little red pills she let trickle into his palm. He downed them with the water glass she passed him.
Agatha’s rabbit picked his way across the floor, curious of their guest, and Agatha rolled her wrists, stretching them as Billy finished off the water with a gasp.
His head pounded, even in the welcome euphoric silence of her living room. The sun had just begun its descent behind the hills when he’d crossed into Westview, and by the time he’d pulled up in front of her house, the entire neighborhood had returned home, and their voices had beaten like drums in his mind.
Crossing Agatha’s threshold had felt like salvation, the world snapping shut behind him with the door.
I couldn’t leave if I–
Billy’s stomach turned, the water souring in his belly. He gagged.
Agatha, bent halfway down to collect her rabbit, looked up at him.
“Do it in the sink,” she said sharply, and he waved her off.
She eyed him warily as she straightened, but he kept his gaze low as she deposited an only slightly wriggling Scratchy into his lap without comment. Billy ran his fingers through soft fur, timing his breath with the strokes.
Agatha disappeared again, this time up the stairs.
It was so stupid for him to come here. He couldn’t even conjure up the words to explain it to her– and why would she care, anyway? She’d laugh him out the door. She’d flick him off like a pesky tagalong that overstayed his welcome.
Or worse. She’d take him seriously.
Scratchy nibbled at his fingertip. Billy offered him the finger, the odd sensation of his little tongue and tweezer teeth mouthing at his skin felt altogether silly and trivial and familiar, even through the anxiety that ate through his chest. Scratchy nibbled up his nail before turning his head to pull at a hangnail. Billy hissed, jerking his hand away, but the sharp pain cleared his vision for a moment.
Agatha snorted from the stairs.
He glared up at her as she descended, a bundle of clothes under one arm and a messily folded pile of blankets in the other.
“If I hadn’t eaten in a day and a half, I’d have bitten you too,” she said, dumping her armful in the armchair. Her voice was hoarse, craggley like his sounded after a full day at an amusement park. “Don’t give me that look– familiars gotta work too.”
Billy pulled his hands out of the rabbit’s reach.
“He used to be nice,” he said.
Agatha huffed, dropping onto the other side of the couch heavily.
“Living with you made him soft,” she said, “It was that vegetarian life, you ruined him.”
“He’s a rabbit.”
“Ha.”
Billy gave him a wary look. Scratchy blinked innocently back.
The clock on her mantle chimed the eight o’clock hour, and Billy listened to the little knell with a growing knot in his belly. He couldn’t decide what would be worse– Agatha prodding him, wheedling him until he had no choice but to blurt out an answer, or to have to sit there pretending there wasn’t eyeliner stained on the shoulder of her turtleneck.
He swiped under his eye again. His fingers came back dark.
He shouldn’t have come.
He had nowhere else to go.
Agatha shifted, and then she was up again, banging around the kitchen.
It made sense. He was pretty sure the only time he’d ever seen her hold still was the night he’d almost died on the Road. He’d stirred from sleep by the fireside in a dull haze under Agatha’s coat, Jen’s magic still working its way through his system and everything in him in a confused panic. He couldn’t remember much from that night. The others had slept, someone snoring, but in the quiet of the woods, the most promising reassurance of safety was the sight of Agatha curled on her side. She’d breathed shallowly, but if she’d deemed it safe enough to close her eyes, then safe it must be.
Beyond Agatha, Rio’s eyes had seemed to glow where she watched him from the tree root she’d curled into, and Billy had shut his eyes quickly, burrowing further into Agatha’s heavy coat.
Billy looked up as she reappeared with a cup of tea and what looked like a slightly smushed peanut butter sandwich. The mug burned his hands when she passed it over, and its steam curled around him, pungent and bitter. She threw herself back into her seat, propping an elbow on the back of the couch as she shoved almost half the sandwich in her mouth, watching him expectantly.
“Sorry about your spell,” he managed, “What were you working on?”
She said something utterly unintelligible, and he watched her choke through peanut butter, waving a hand at the door that led downstairs. After a truly heroic amount of time, she managed to get out the words, “Fix my basement.”
He frowned.
“What’s wrong with it?”
She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, pulling a face.
“Pocket dimensions don’t happen on accident.”
For a sick moment, he thought she was talking about the Road, the dimension he’d opened up quite literally by accident.
She went on, though.
“I’ll show it to you when it’s up and running again. You’d like it, it’s your vibe.” She sneered at her sandwich. “Your…well. The last witch in there tore it all down when she stripped my magic. Rookie mistake on my part. I should have rooted it. Didn’t think I’d be sticking around long enough to get nuked.”
“Rooted it?”
“Are you here for an architecture lesson?”
He looked up at her, and she kicked a leg up onto the couch. He had the odd feeling she’d keep talking if he said yes.
Because she wants to? A voice whispered at the back of his mind, or because you want her to?
He took a sharp breath, looking up at the ceiling to recenter himself. Stay cool.
Her eyes narrowed, and he watched them flick to the side of his neck and back.
She cocked a sharp brow.
His hand flew to touch his pulse point. It was still slightly sore, and she raised a brow. He could feel heat flooding his face.
“Ruh-roh,” she said, “Somebody have a run-in with a vampire?”
“No! It’s nothing. Is there something?”
“Oh, you just got yourself with your curling wand, then?”
Billy clapped his palm over his very first hickey, twisting his other fingers through the frayed hole in his sweatshirt cuff. Agatha hummed. To her credit, he’d have thought she’d laugh at him more.
“We haven’t…I’ve never…I didn’t do anything…”
“Look, I may have grown up with Puritans, but if you think I’m gonna push the wait till marriage agenda–”
“No, I…I didn’t…”
“As long as you wanted to be there.”
He looked up sharply. The look she regarded him with was deadly serious.
“What?” he asked quietly.
“You wanted to be there.”
“I…of course!”
“Because a boy shows up crying at my door with–”
“No! He wouldn’t, it was–”
Oh, Billy. I couldn’t leave if I tried…
He dug the heels of his palms into his eyes.
“Billy.”
He looked up to meet her hard eyes, and the lights flickered. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t from him.
“It wasn’t like that,” he said, “I promise.”
She licked her lips, rolling her shoulders.
“For me, at least,” he breathed.
He was going to be sick.
“And yet you’re banging on my door instead of cozying up with your boytoy.”
“He’s…” Billy swallowed. “He’s not my boyfriend. Not anymore.”
He drove his hands under his thighs, digging in as he pressed his knees together.
The reality of that sank in. The nitty gritty of it. He’d lost his Starbucks study partner. He’d have to get rid of the novelty penny in his wallet he’d given him on their second date. He wouldn’t have to get that bowtie for Homecoming. He wouldn’t have to go to Homecoming at all.
No more midnight texts. No more warm hand under the lab table in Chemistry 102. No more soft hands in his hair or a shoulder to lean on in assemblies or a nervous, brave thumb rubbing circles on his thigh in the dark of a movie theater, daring enough to make his heart leap but never creeping higher.
No more Eddie.
Something bumped his shoulder.
He looked up.
Agatha nudged his shoulder again with the sloppily torn-in-half peanut butter sandwich.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask.”
He took it with numb fingers for want of something else to do. He couldn’t think. Nothing was making sense. The whitebread tasted like chalk in his mouth, and the peanut butter choked him.
“Billy.”
He shook his head.
“Look at me.”
Her face was hard and sure as she read him for filth.
“You didn’t force that boy into anything.”
He lurched to his feet and he could hear Agatha sigh before he was stumbling down her hallway, slamming into the bathroom. He crashed to the tile, and he barely registered her in the doorway behind him as he emptied his stomach into the toilet.
She waited him out. That’s all she ever did, wait him out as he made a disgusting mess of himself. His skin crawled, his spine felt like it would tear itself out of him, burst through his skin as he sobbed into the bowl. It burned his nose, his throat, his everything.
One hand gripped the rim as the other tore at his hair, dragging, and it was only then she moved. A hand touched his, easing it from his curls and guiding it back to the bowl. She didn’t touch him again, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted her to.
“I did,” he choked. His voice echoed. He could smell his own stomach. “I did, I did.”
It was like that first night he’d put together the Road, that cold horror and electric terror.
“You did nothing wrong.”
He squeezed his eyes shut to make her a disembodied voice. He’d told her more when she was like that, just a voice in his dark room at night when sleep wouldn’t come.
“Agatha–”
He didn’t have an end to the sentence. He gagged again. He couldn’t stop shaking. He couldn’t say it, he’d done it and he couldn’t even say it.
His hand flew back to his hair, nails digging like claws into his scalp, the back of his neck. He wanted the burn of his nails deeper. Harder. His fingers tightened.
Agatha pulled it away again, her other hand coming to touch the back of his neck.
He shoved her away blindly, feeling his nails scrape on her skin even as he leaned in to heave again.
“Go away,” he wailed.
“You’re in my house, you little shit.”
She didn’t want him here. He’d shown up at her house, invited himself to her couch to sleep, she’d delivered him tea, she’d followed him into her bathroom.
He couldn’t stop the noises falling from his mouth, distorted in the toilet bowl full of his sick, his nose was clogged with his own vomit, the bathroom stinking of bile–
“Get out,” he begged, “Please.”
The noises were getting louder. He couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t breathe, his breath wasn’t coming, just enough to make sound, he’d interrupted her spell, she’d been working for almost two days and he’d wanted her to open the door so badly he’d thought he’d die if she didn’t, and so she did.
He tore at his hair.
“It’s all the Road,” he gasped, “Everything, it’s–”
She pulled him away once more, her hand small over the back of his own where she laced her fingers between his, and this time when she smoothed over his neck her hand was firm, a hard pressure, and he couldn’t stop himself. He fell into her.
She drew him in, falling backwards gracelessly to let him collapse between her knees. The side of his hip hurt where it dug into the tile, and it was humiliating, but the world disappeared. Her arms were hard where they wrapped all the way around him, her chin digging into the crown of his head. She drew up her legs, her bent knees pressing like metal bands around him, her fingers digging into his ribs and the back of his head. He gripped her arms like a lifeline.
He let her cage him.
I couldn’t leave if I tried.
“She should have taken me,” he cried, “You should have let her!”
Her whole body tightened around him.
“No.”
“Get her,” he begged, “Please, bring her back. Agatha–”
Her palm left his hair, pressing flat against his chest. He pressed forward into it, and his head hurt where her chin dug harder into it.
“You’re not going anywhere.” He could feel her voice in her chest.
“I’m not here– there’s no here.”
“Oh? Where are we?”
“There’s no we!” He wasn’t making sense, he knew he wasn’t, but the words wouldn’t stop coming. She had to understand.
He felt her hum, a sound of comprehension deep in her chest. She shook her head slowly.
“You can’t control me, Billy.”
Some ugly, humiliating noise fell from his mouth.
Her hand slid up to hold the side of his head hard, muffling his ear. He wanted the whole world to go mute. Her nails dragged in his hair. He could hear her heartbeat.
He grasped higher on her shoulder, wrapping an arm around her knee. He thought of a fly in a web, and he wasn’t sure which one he was.
“I don’t know what’s real,” he whispered.
She ran a thumb over his temple, resting it there.
“I was here a hot minute before you, kiddo,” she said, “And my mind ain’t up for grabs.”
He wanted to believe her. God, he wanted to believe her.
“How would you know?” he whispered.
He listened to her breathe for a moment.
She shifted, squeezing him with her legs and forearms and releasing him with her hands. He turned his head, shifting in her arms to watch her spider-like hands come together, one on top of the other.
Her chest rumbled as she spoke quietly, and he couldn’t pick apart the language, but her fingers twitched and turned in that twisted grace he could never look away from.
Violet, fluid and churning, swirled around her fingers, lighting up her palms and casting them both in a purple hue. This close, he could feel the hum of it, the raw power thrumming just inches from his face.
It was beautiful.
She turned her palm towards him.
It wasn’t just light– inside the glow running up the length of her fingers were miniscule runes, flowing upwards and disappearing as new ones appeared at the bottom.
He tilted his head away, and her spindly fingers followed to hover just over his temple. He could feel her just brushing the tips of his hair.
No. Not his hair.
His mind. Brushing his mind.
He should have started. He should have shoved her away and fled, but that touch had the warmth of a campfire, or the first whiff of peppermint tea, or the deep rumble of thunder at night heard from a warm bed. It wasn’t a threat. It was familiar.
It was her.
The magic pulsed in time with her heartbeat.
“You’re not that special,” she said quietly, “A little more complicated, but still learnable, give or take a couple decades.”
“Are you– can you read my mind right now?”
“If I tried. I wouldn’t, though, because that, my witchlet, is rude. I can feel you from the outside, though. My magic to yours.”
That warmth against his mind pressed a fraction more, almost a nudge. He could feel his body relaxing.
“You feel that?”
He nodded.
“Great. So do I, every time you think you’re so sneaky and try snooping through my head.”
He flushed, and the flex of the warmth– her magic– felt like a laugh.
Her finger lifted from his temple, and with it went the warmth. The sudden absence left him with an oddly bereft feeling in his chest.
She let her hands fall, and he found himself suddenly deeply self-conscious. He struggled to sit up and Agatha’s limbs loosened to let him. He propped himself up against the bathtub, and she leaned back into the wall, her bare foot extending to fidget with a vanity drawer.
A discomfort hung in the air. No, wait, that was just the smell of his sick, still just sitting there.
He leaned forward to flush the toilet before sliding back down, and in the fluorescent light the mundanity of the sound was absurd.
He wondered if she had lied. The ease with which she’d tapped at the edge of his consciousness– his essence, she’d called it– should have been disturbing. Intellectually, he knew that. It hadn’t been frightening, though. It hadn’t been invasive.
It’d felt like companionship.
“I could hear him,” he said to a spot on the tile.
“Your boyfriend?”
“Eddie.”
She hummed.
“So goes sex with a telepath.”
He cringed.
“We weren’t…we didn’t… get that far. I…left.”
She propped her cheek on her fist, leaning against her knee.
It should have been desperately uncomfortable– he never would have been able to look his mother in the eye– and it was weird, but not in an impossible way. She blinked at him expectantly like this was a normal thing that normal people talked about.
Three hundred and fifty years old, she probably had heard worse.
“And I take it this is new?”
Billy twisted the ring on his pinky.
“We’ve been together…we were together almost seven months.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He flushed.
“I…yeah. We’d never. I’ve never…been with…”
“Well, good to know we’ve still got a virgin to sacrifice if the need arises.”
“Stop.” He didn’t put any heat into it, and she blinked back innocently.
He pulled at his hangnail.
“I could hear him sometimes, though. When he was feeling a lot.”
She rubbed an eye with her finger.
“Lord save us from pubescent telepaths,” she muttered, but her face was mild. “Like what?”
“You want specifics?”
“I didn’t stutter, did I?”
His finger burned where he tugged at the hangnail.
“Just that…he liked me.” He swallowed. “It took a while for it to start, so like, not at first, but once I got to know him…I could hear him the first time he kissed me. Not before but…during.”
He huffed a laugh.
“It was really distracting.”
She opened and closed a drawer with her toes.
“What, did he give you notes?”
He felt his mouth twitch up and hers followed.
“Rude,” she said, and it drew a laugh from him.
Agatha kicked both feet up against the vanity, crossing her arms before she fixed him with a very dry look.
“And tell me: In any of the time you were peeping–”
“I wasn’t peeping! I can’t control it!”
“-did you ever hear anything beyond PG-13?”
His face was so hot she could probably feel it from where she sat.
“When your–” She made a frustrated noise at the ceiling. “When Wanda took over the town–”
“And made everybody her mind-slave.”
“They remembered. They had to obey, but their minds were their own.”
He remembered. Boehnerific69 had been very specific. Hauntingly so.
“Eddie thought…” Blood welled in his cuticle and he dragged a nail through it. “We were, you know, starting, and I tried not to listen, but could hear him.”
“Did he want you to stop?”
He shook his head.
“Then wh–”
“He thought I was…” He wasn’t ever going to come back here after this. He was just going to dissolve into humiliated glue. “He thought I was beautiful.”
“Oh, he sounds awful.”
“He was thinking…I-” He made a vague disrobing gesture. “And he thought, I couldn’t leave if I tried.”
He couldn’t look at her.
“He wouldn’t recognize it like you,” he said, “I could have…I wanted him to want me. I want it so bad, what if I made him…?”
“You don’t play with people’s minds, Billy,” she said, “Who knows, maybe you will. It could be somewhere at the bottom of your bag of tricks, and if you want to do it the old fashioned way, then I can teach you.”
“I don’t.”
“You play with what’s around you. If Teddy–”
“Eddie.”
“-wanted out, you’d hear about it.”
He swallowed.
“Do you really think so?”
She nodded, her face smooshed where it rested on her palm, and she got a wicked twinkle in her eye.
“I don’t know if anyone’s told you this,” she whispered, “But sometimes, teenage boys just want to fuck.”
He groaned, burying his face in his palms as she snickered.
“I’m never telling you anything ever again.”
“Aw, how will I survive?”
Her knees popped as she rose, and he looked up when she kicked his shin.
“Come on.” He took the hand she offered. “Take a shot of mouthwash, your breath smells like shit.”