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Victoria Javadi cries for 72 minutes. It's a new personal best. Her white noise machine only has a 30-minute timeout; not for the first time she wonders if it actually drowns out the sound or if everyone else in the house now associates the overloud shushing noise with her misery.
When she finally feels like she's emptied herself out, her ribs hurt from hyperventilating. At least she didn't barf this time.
Half the time she doesn't even have a good reason to cry. The other half of the time she feels like her reasons (school stress, work stress, her mom, her future) are just so monumentally boring.
The sound of something clattering against her window makes her jump. Her heart immediately starts rabbiting in her chest again. It didn't sound like a bird flying into her window, and there's no convenient way for someone to climb up to her room to break in.
She slides off her bed and draws back her curtains just enough to peek down. Trinity is on her front lawn, searching the grass (presumably for something else to throw). Her car is idling at the curb.
Victoria unlocks her window and slides it open, leaning her face against the screen.
"Um, what the fuck are you doing?" She calls down in a half-whisper that she hopes her mom won't hear. "Did you literally just throw rocks at my window?"
Trinity stops searching and looks up. She looks relieved.
"You weren't answering my texts."
Victoria glances back at her phone, facedown and charging on her nightstand. She always puts it in Do Not Disturb mode when she's panicking.
"That doesn't explain why you're throwing rocks at my window."
Trinity shrugs. "Well, you weren't answering my texts and I didn't want to ring the doorbell." She jams her hands into her jacket pockets. "Are you gonna come down here or what?"
"What?"
"That's what I was texting you about? To go for a drive?" Trinity shrugs again. "I mean, we can keep doing this balcony scene thing, but I'll be honest: it's kind of making my neck hurt."
Victoria takes a step back from the window. She's in sweatpants, and not the cute kind that you can leave the house in. Her face still feels hot and puffy from crying. Her brain feels like a heavy, wet sponge behind her eyeballs. She needs to splash water on her face. Brush her teeth. Hose herself down with a pressure washer. Something.
Another pebble pings off her window.
"Hey," she says, pressing her face against the screen again. "Could you not do that?"
"I didn't know if you were still there."
Victoria sighs. "Give me five minutes."
"Take all the time you need."
Victoria slides her window shut and draws the curtains before shimmying out of her sweats and picking out a clean pair of jeans and a hoodie that she doesn't mind being seen in.
Before she creeps out into the hallway she unplugs her phone and watches her screen light up with missed messages.
Trin: bored.
Trin: what are you up to? are you home?
Trin: want to go for a drive?
Trin: crash it's 8 pm are you asleep??
Trin: i'm coming over
Victoria clears the messages from her home screen. Keeps her phone in Do Not Disturb.
—
By the time Victoria makes it out her front door, Trinity is waiting for her, leaning against the passenger side door of her car like she's some mid-century heart throb. The car is still idling. It's making a noise that tells Victoria that something might be critically wrong with it.
"'Bout time," Trinity says, and she straightens, opens the passenger door. Victoria slides in and Trinity shuts the door for her before walking around the front of the car and getting in on the other side. The insides of the windows are foggy with condensation and Trinity fiddles with the heat setting and cracks open the windows until the windshield at least begins to clear. Impatient, she pulls her sleeve down over her hand and wipes the rest of the condensation away. The result is streaky: the streetlights look smeary and dreamlike through the windshield.
"Where are we going?" Victoria hugs herself. Despite the heat being on, the night air coming through the cracked-open window is cold.
Trinity keeps her eyes on the road. "Just around," she says. "Just needed to drive around tonight, you know?"
Victoria doesn't know. She mostly takes the bus or gets rides with other people. But she supposes she can appreciate the sentiment. The wanting-to-get-away of it all, even if it means going nowhere at all.
"Everything okay?"
Trinity huffs out a little laugh. "I was going to ask you the same thing."
"Me?" Something in Victoria's heart pinches, just a little, like a warning. "Why?"
"Yeah," Trinity flickers her gaze over to her, then she's looking out at the road again, or as much of the road as she can see with her windshield fogging back up. She leans forward and gives it another impatient wipe with her sleeve. Then glances back at Victoria again.
"You look like you've been crying."
"Oh, um, yeah," Victoria says. "I'm just tired."
"Okay."
"Really."
"I said okay."
Trinity pulls over on a street that looks a lot like the one that Victoria lives on. It isn't, she can tell that much, but it's uncanny enough how all of the houses in the suburbs look alike.
She turns off the ignition, opens her door.
"Come on."
Victoria fumbles with the buckle on her seat belt. "Where are we going."
"Just outside."
She finally gets her clasp undone and leans over the console towards Trinity, who is already halfway out of the car.
"Are we going to break into someone's house?" Victoria hisses.
Trinity crouches a little to look at Victoria through the open car door.
"What? No. We're just going to sit on the hood of my car. I can't see shit out the windshield." Then she seems to replay what Victoria just said in her head. "I'm not a fucking criminal, Crash."
"Oh," Victoria says. She opens her door and scrambles out. "Well, loitering is also a crime."
Trinity gets up onto the hood of her car like she's done it a million times. "Well," she says, "I'll take my chances. Do you need a hand?"
"I've got it." She steps up onto the tire to get herself up. She doesn't like how the hood feels under her weight. Like it's just a little too thin to hold them both. Trinity leans back until she's half-lying down against her windshield. Victoria stays sitting, hugging her knees to her chest.
"So," Trinity says, her voice quiet. "Spill. You've been weird lately."
"You think I've been weird?"
"You're always weird. But lately it's been different weird. Sad weird."
Victoria considers this. Considers the Trinity, the nighttime, all of it. She lets out a breath.
"Do you ever, um, just feel like you're crouched inside your own skull, like, looking out through your eye sockets? It's stupid." She rolls her eyes even though she's pretty sure Trinity isn't even looking at her. She glances over just to be sure: Trinity's staring straight up into the sky.
"It's not stupid," she says simply. She looks thoughtful. Like she's actually listening.
"Okay, well," Victoria looks away again. "It's just that. I feel like that, like, all the time. And you'd think that, you know, if I'm so disconnected from myself, I must not feel anything. But I feel just so bad. All the time. And there isn't even a good reason." As she says it out loud, it feels fake. It feels like she's making everything up. "I've always felt this way," she insists, more to herself than to Trinity. "It's just worse lately."
And just like that the feeling's back: her chest tight, throat pinching shut, eyes brimming.
If Trinity notices the shift, she doesn't let on. She's quiet.
"Don't take this the wrong way, but have you tried Lexapro?"
Victoria laughs a little bitterly and tears escape down her cheeks. She pretends to herself that she isn't crying. "This is me on Lexapro."
"Brutal," Trinity laughs, too, then adds. "You can cry, Crash. I won't tell anyone."
"I don't want to cry. I wish I were an automaton."
"No," Trinity says, "You don't."
"That's it?" Victoria wipes at her cheeks with the back of her hand, even as more tears are streaming."No mean little joke?" She sniffles back snot. "Why are you being so nice to me?"
Trinity snorts. "I'm not that much of a bitch."
"You are," Victoria laughs a little. "Kind of."
She turns towards Trinity again, waits for her to laugh, but she doesn't this time. She just sort of hitches one corner of her mouth up in a little half-smile. Victoria feels herself falter.
"What about you?" She says. "What's going on with you tonight?"
She's curious. She wants a peek behind Trinity's hard walls. Hear some confession, some emotional outpouring. Find out that, maybe, they're kind of the same. Sort of. Or whatever.
But instead Trinity sits up, hunches her shoulders. "I was just bored. Needed the drive. Wanted the company. I'm fine." Then she sighs. Slides off the hood of the car.
"Okay," she says. "Time to go."
Victoria is already regretting the moment, lost before she could quite figure out what it was supposed to be. She knows she'll be replaying every single word of their conversation on the way home and lying in bed in her room, picking apart every possible misstep. Every loser moment. Like maybe if she'd said something else, something cleverer or funnier or straight-up less sad, then maybe the night would have stretched out longer. Like maybe they'd end up kissing on the hood of Trinity's shitty beat-up car. Or something. Everything up until now has felt almost like a movie. And nights like this in movies end with kissing, right?
"Are you coming or what?"
"Yeah," Victoria replies. "Just give me a second." But a second passes. Then a couple of minutes. She can't bring herself to move.
Trinity turns the windshield wipers on, lets them swipe back and forth a few times, like she's a bug that can be chased away.
Trinity gets back out of the car, walks around to Victoria's side.
"Do you need help?"
It's a complicated question. Victoria isn't sure how to answer.
"Look," Trinity says, "The sun's going to come up eventually. Someone's going to check their door cameras or peek out their window and call us in for loitering for real. I'll carry you off the hood of my car to avoid that if I need to."
"Okay."
Trinity's brow furrows. "Okay, what?"
Victoria turns so that her legs are dangling off the side of her car, heels bumping against the tire. "Carry me," she challenges.
Trinity snorts. "You're serious."
"Don't offer what you're not willing to actually do."
Trinity's mouth hitches in that half-smile again. "Okay," she says. "Okay."
She steps closer to Victoria and loops her arms around her. Victoria automatically wraps her legs around Trinity's waist and lets herself get lifted up. She hopes that Trinity can't feel how much her heart is hammering. How it hasn't stopped hammering all night.
This is stupid, Victoria realizes. Incredibly stupid. Their faces are so close together like this.
"I'm just gonna—" She closes her eyes and presses her mouth against Trinity's before she can figure out a way to finish her sentence that doesn't make her sound like a total dork. Trinity kisses her back for a second. But just for a second.
"I'm going to put you down now," she says, and Victoria releases her grip, lets her feet touch down on the asphalt.
Trinity hesitates. "I just—It's not that I don't want to kiss you. I just…don't want to kiss you when you're, what you said, crouched inside your own head like a little gremlin watching yourself kiss me."
Victoria winces. "I had my eyes closed."
Trinity laughed then. A real laugh. Somewhere a few houses down, a dog started barking. She turns back to Victoria.
"Okay, then," she says. "Close your eyes again."
Victoria closes her eyes obediently and Trinity kisses her again. Softly, sweetly. The kind of kiss to end a night.