Fourteen A Pontoon Boat

I text Stella from a booth in the far corner of El Wok-A-Molé.

meet @ EWok?

She shoots back:brt

I need to talk to my best friend right now. I’m just not sure how to tell her about my fight with Joanna without telling her about Beckett, and I can’t tell her about Beckett, period. When someone like her kisses someone like me, it’s a secret that can never be shared, not even with a best friend. Things could get really bad for her if literally anyone found out.

Stella cruises through the door not long after I text her.

“What’s wrong with your face?” she says.

I know it’s meant to be a joke, but if I try to say something, I’ll just start crying again.

She recoils in mock horror. “Girl, you know I love you, but damn, you do not cry cute.”

I’m not ready to go there yet. I’m not ready to let Stella fix things by being funny.

I look out the window.

“Gotcha. Okay,” she says. “Did you order anything?”

I shake my head, and she slides out of the booth. I reach into my pocket for my debit card, but she goes, “Don’t sweat it,” and a minute later she comes back with a table number and two Cokes. She doesn’t comment on the half dozen balled-up, snot-filled napkins on the table.

“I got some egg rolls,” she says.

“I’ll pay you back,” I sniff.

“Seriously, don’t worry about it. Mr. Zapata handed me a twenty as I was leaving. He was like, Have a good time with your friends, Stells, but I think he just gave me money because he’s excited to have my mom to himself for a change.” She lifts the straw to her lips and goes, “Perv,” before taking a sip.

I make face. “Has he moved in already? Cuz that would be a land-speed record.”

“No, but he will. It’s inevitable. I mean, it’s disgusting how much they genuinely like each other. I’ve never seen her this way before. I don’t know how to process it.”

The plate of egg rolls lands unceremoniously on our table.

“Can we get more hot mustard, Ashlyn?” Stella asks, reading the woman’s name off her badge. Ashlyn swipes our number off the table and heads back to the kitchen without answering.

We each take an egg roll. I dip mine in the cup of sweet chili sauce and blow on it. Stella drags hers through the minuscule dot of spicy mustard huddled against the side of the cup and bites right in.

“Wanna talk about it?” she asks, bouncing the egg roll around on her tongue to keep from scorching the inside of her mouth.

“Not really,” I say.

“Do you think maybe you should?”

I open-mouth chew the bite I just took, because apparently I learned nothing by watching Stella incinerate her mouth literally five seconds ago.

“It won’t matter,” I tell her.

Ashlyn comes back, plunks Stella’s hot mustard on the table, and walks away.

“Is it about Joanna?” Stella says. “I mean, most things are.”

“Yeah, mostly.” I drip sweet chili sauce onto my egg roll from the spoon and take another bite. This time I fully chew and swallow before adding, “Can I stay over? I don’t want to be home tonight.”

“Sorry, dude, I don’t want to be home tonight either. You know how small our place is. The last thing I want to know about Mr. Zapata is whether he shouts out calculus functions when he comes.”

“Ew!” I shriek. “Why would you say that? Now I have this image I can never unsee!”

Stella goes, “You think I want to be alone with that image?”

I can’t help it—I start laughing, and Stella laughs with me, and her laugh is so pure and unfiltered, it makes things feel a little easier in my body.

“So, what are we gonna do until your mom and Mr. Zapata are done—ew. I can’t even finish.”

“That’s what he said.” She laughs at her own joke, and I can’t help laughing, too.

I go, “Jeez, how old are you?”

She uses her egg roll to scoop up a huge blob of hot mustard.

“That’s gonna hurt,” I tell her.

But Stella shoves it in her mouth anyway because she’s Stella, and I shake my head as her face turns red and her eyes water.

“So good!” she says through a cough, ignoring the tears streaming down her face.

I lick the grease off my fingers, then wipe them on a napkin. For a few seconds, I stare into the bowl of spicy mustard, thinking how it reminds me of something, and when I realize what that something is, I tell Stella: “I have an idea about tonight.”

I pull out my phone, fire off a quick text, and wait for the reply.

It isn’t long before B’Rad’s rusty yellow VW wagon pulls up in front of where we’re standing outside El Wok-A-Molé.

“You gotta be shitting me,” Stella mumbles.

“Thanks for picking up the bat signal tonight,” I tell him as we climb in.

He goes, “I know a distress call when I hear one.”

“You’re not as all-knowing as you think, Be Weird,” Stella tells him.

“Is that right?” he says, pulling out of the parking lot toward route 9. “Do tell.”

I tune them out as we cruise toward the outskirts of the Flats where the electric fields are. There’s an edge to their banter that I don’t want any part of. No more edge tonight. I want ease. I want to sneak back into the bubble that existed for a sliver of a moment this afternoon, when Beckett kissed me like kissing me was as natural for her as breathing. The muscle memory of that kiss is still flexing in every part of my body.

The car ride goes silent just before we get to B’Rad’s, and no one speaks even as we climb up onto his boat. He scrambles around for the sleeping bags from the other night, and I help him spread them out while Stella stares across the heap of junk in his granddad’s yard.

After a few minutes, she pushes away from the railing.

“Damn, it’s creepy out here. Seriously, Be Weird, how do you keep from losing your fucking mind?”

“I have my ways.”

“I believe you,” I say. “You’re like freaking MacGyver.”

“Well, spill your survival secrets, MacGyver. It’s starting to feel like the pontoon boat version of The Cabin in the Woods.”

A message pings from the phone in B’Rad’s back pocket. He checks it, tells us, “I’ll be right back,” and jumps off the platform. Within seconds, a pair of yellow running lights squints down the dirt driveway toward us as B’Rad shuffles over to his car. He unlocks the passenger-side door, clicking the glove box open as a small sedan rolls up next to him on the driver’s side. He locks everything back up while this dude in a snapback gets out and meets B’Rad in the dusty golden beams of the other car’s running lights. Their exchange is so muffled and backlit, it’s hard to see what’s actually going on. Less than a minute later, the dude in the little black car slips back down the driveway, just as stealth as he drove in.

“Was that Tanner Scott?” Stella asks, but I’m like, “Man, are you shitting me right now?”

B’Rad ignores us both. He comes back around to the passenger side, unlocks the door, pulls something out of the glove box, then locks it all up tight again before coming back to the boat just as quietly and carefully as he hopped off. This time, he’s carrying a rolled-up T-shirt, which he gently unfurls and hands to me. In the moonlight, I see the red, white, and blue letters spelling out Pray for America across the front of the shirt, and the beam of light bouncing off the metal bowl inside the pipe.

I go, “Dude... you’re dealing drugs out here?”

But Stella’s voice cuts right between that shirt and me.

“Now we’re talking!” she says with a huge smile.

B’Rad kicks a quick look in my direction as he sets out the pipe and a couple of nugs he apparently keeps hidden in his car.

“Not really,” he tells me. “I just help a few select friends stay stocked up on some basic needs.”

“Fire that shit up, Be Weird,” Stella says. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”

Great. Nothing says bonding like Stella and B’Rad burning one together on a pontoon boat in the middle of the electrical fields.

“Daya doesn’t smoke,” she tells him as we cluster together on the sleeping bags like some kind of weed-worshipping coven. “So. I’ll have hers.”

“You’re fired from being my spokesperson,” I say. If ever there was a time when I’d want to try a little, this would be the night.

B’Rad tips his head, adorable-puppy-style, while he packs the bowl, then manifests a box of about three thousand matches and strikes one.

“What do you do to get loose, then?” he asks me, puffing on the mouthpiece to get it sparked. “I mean, when the world gets too heavy.”

He takes a hit, hands it to Stella.

I intercept it, push the end against my lips, inhale. When the smoke hits my lungs, I can actually feel the membranes shrivel up and die. I visualize them morphing brown-to-black like a marshmallow over a campfire.

For some reason, these two think my coughing fit is hilarious.

“Don’t give up,” B’Rad giggles. “It gets better.”

“Where have I heard that before,” Stella says dryly, snagging the pipe from me so she can take her hit.

They snicker together. Stella passes the pipe to B’Rad when she’s done, and he takes another long inhale, an equally long pause, then exhales slow and smooth.

He holds it back out to me. “Go again?”

“That’s my limit,” I say.

B’Rad nods and takes the hit that would have been mine. On the exhale, he goes, “That shit’ll cure whatever’s ailing you tonight, even if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, my mom’s at home fucking my math teacher right now,” Stella says. “So, light it up again, Be Weird. I got issues I’m not afraid to discuss.”

I shiver at the thought of Stella Avila buzz-sharing her issues with B’Rad Anderson in the middle of what has already been the most intense day in recent memory.

The three of us sprawl out on the sleeping bags, B’Rad in the middle, the box of matches on his stomach. The moon is on the rise, and now and then a coyote howls off in the distance, but at least for now, it’s quiet out here. I close my eyes, hear the soft drag-and-pull of their lips against the pipe, and the now-and-then scratch of B’Rad flicking two match heads together to see if one of them will light. Only the crickets are talking at this point, their chirps echoing toward us from a distance. When I open my eyes again, the moon is so electric, you can almost hear a hum coming off it, like those old-style TVs that throb blue light into a room. I feel lit up inside in kind of the same way. Blue, mysterious, throbbing light, running currents of electricity into places it has no business going.

And I can’t even tell anyone about it.

I look up. The moon is hanging right there above us now, so close you could almost reach up and run your fingertips along the veins of gray cracking through its white-marble dome. For a moment, I do reach up. Hold out one finger. Follow the cracked lines of the moon’s surface. Only the lines keep shifting. I move my finger, try to follow a single, steady vein, but I can’t. Everything’s changing and it’s disorienting as hell. This whole day has been disorienting as hell.

B’Rad flicks the match heads again.

“Why matches?” Stella says. “Why not a lighter?”

“I have a lighter,” he says. “I just like matches better. Makes lighting something more of a decision.”

B’Rad’s granddad starts his nightly rant inside the house, but this time we all pretend not to hear it.

“If you can light one that way,” Stella says, “I’ll tell you a secret.”

B’Rad drops his head to the side so he can see if she’s bullshitting him.

“For real?” he says.

“Sure, why not. I’m an open book.”

Oh man...

“What about this,” he says. “What if we pass the box, and every time you flick two matches together and one of them lights, you have to reveal something about yourself?”

“Matchbox truth or dare?” she says.

“Only without the dare,” I cut in, suddenly glad I stopped at one hit. “And you can only reveal something about yourself, not anyone else.”

Stella goes, “Okay. Sure.”

B’Rad flicks his matches together, but nothing happens.

He passes the box to Stella, who also strikes out.

Mine lights on the first try. I don’t even want to play this stupid game, but now I’m supposed to tell these two a secret about myself, and the fucked-up part is, I actually have one, and it’s burning a hole inside me.

I shudder, knowing that B’Rad has a sense of it. He guessed it the other night at the Hound’s Tooth. I just hope that bowl he’s smoking doesn’t loosen his grip on my story.

The two of them are watching me like a couple of strung-out turkey vultures.

“Um... I threw up in the middle of Pinkie’s on my twelfth birthday,” I say.

“Pinkie’s near the highway?” Stella asks. “Or Pinkie’s across from Dickie’s?”

“Pinkie’s across from Dickie’s.”

B’Rad snort-laughs. “Was it crowded?”

“It was a Wednesday night,” I say, and they both groan because Wednesday night is Bible study night in Escondido. Families, sometimes entire congregations from smaller churches, meet up for dinner afterward. As was the case that night at Pinkie’s Mexican Cantina near Dickie’s BBQ, not the one by the highway but the other one. With Joanna. And my grandparents.

“How come you never told me that?” Stella asks as I flick my burned-out match between two fingers and aim for the moon.

“Would you?” I ask back, adding, “Skip it. Of course, you would. No such thing as a humiliation filter in the Stella-verse.”

B’Rad snorts as he takes out two new matches and strikes them. One of them lights this time.

“In seventh grade,” he says, “I definitely played the entire first half of a basketball game with my shorts on inside out and backward. The tag looked like a sad little white flag of surrender.”

“Wait—in gym class?” I ask through a snicker.

“Nope. Actual game.”

Stella giggle-asks, “Who was it against?”

“Santos.”

This time, Stella and I are the ones who groan in empathy. Santos Junior Academy is our crosstown rival for middle school.

“Sports never really was my thing,” B’Rad says after relighting the pipe. He gives the match a sharp flick to snuff it and tosses it at the moon.

“Did you hit it?” I ask.

“Shot short. Did a lot of that in basketball too.”

The three of us giggle at that, then Stella gives her matches another go, and this time one of them flares.

“If I had a porn name,” she says, “it would be Harry Caucus.”

B’Rad explodes with stoned laughter, but I just say, “That’s not a secret. Everyone knows that about you.”

“I didn’t,” B’Rad says.

I shake my head. “Still calling an audible.”

“Fine,” she says.

B’Rad takes another hit while she goes again.

“I hate exercise—”

“Also not a secret,” I say.

“Shut up, I’m not finished.” Stella sits up. “Sometimes when I’m home alone, I find old jazz stations on TunaMelt Radio and pretend I’m tap dancing.”

I shift my whole body to face her, and B’Rad pulls his glasses down to stare at her over the top of them, and for a few weirdly long seconds no one says anything.

Stella finally breaks the silence.

She goes, “What?”

“Wow,” I say. “You think you know a person, and then in the span of five seconds—”

“—they not only confess to fake tap dancing for cardio,” B’Rad joins in, “but also that they listen to—”

“TunaMelt Radio!” we both shout at the same time.

“Not Your Grandparents’ Music Station,”I say, quoting from the music platform’s current ad. “Except that it totally is.”

“Also?” Stella turns to B’Rad and sticks her finger right in his face. “Duke was the best thing that ever happened to either one of us, Be Weird. Just so you know.”

Uh-oh.

“Who’s Duke?” he asks.

“Daisy?” she says. “Webster?”

B’Rad scratches that patch of hair on top of his head. “I... yeah. That was in, like, eighth grade. And we didn’t really date, I just—”

“Well, we did,” Stella cuts in. “Really date. And then we really didn’t. And then there was you.”

I hold my breath. Maybe the one pipe hit I took was enough to make me nervous and paranoid, or maybe Stella just turned into a loose cannon, but I’ve spent the last few days hoping this wouldn’t come out between them, and now it has.

This night is going from sideways to downhill fast.

“I don’t actually know anything about that,” he says. “I just know she was really sad, and I tried to make her laugh and feel better, and then one day she declared we were dating, and a few weeks later, I heard we broke up.”

Stella goes, “It wasn’t that simple for some of us.”

It really wasn’t, I think to myself. Duke was Stella’s first relationship, and she was pretty busted up about how it ended. It kind of set the tone for all her future relationships, where she just wanted to keep things light and move on before it stopped being fun.

“Look, man,” he says to her. “I’m not blind. I see you around school. You’re always with someone different, so... I’m pretty sure you would have dumped her eventually.”

“Yeah, well, maybe if you hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t have had to.” Her gaze drifts up into the cosmos. “Don’t you ever think about how different everything would be if just one single thing in our lives had happened another way?”

“All the time,” he mumbles.

“Preach,” she says. “Anyway. Daya’s our only hope for a happy love story now.”

“Leave me out of this,” I tell her as B’Rad passes the pipe to her.

“I mean it.” She looks down like he’s handing her his own turd, but takes it anyway, and waits for him to drop a lit match into the bowl until it sparks. She leans in, takes a drag, holds the smoke deep in her lungs. Lets it out long and slow, then flops back down.

“Daya’s not out there just hooking up with random people,” she says. “She can’t even get with someone unless she’s all in her feelings about it.”

“Flag on the play,” I say. “You’re not supposed to talk for someone else in this stupid game.”

“Nothing wrong with being demi,” B’Rad says.

Stella busts a laugh. “What do you know about that, Be Weird?”

“Demisexuality isn’t just for queer people,” he tells her. “Straight people can be demi too.”

“Why are you labeling me?” I ask, but they both jump on me at the same time, defending their shared perceptions of my demisexuality. “Maybe I just have trust issues. Ever consider that?”

Stella snorts and goes, “No,” but B’Rad turns toward me a degree or two.

“What kinds of trust issues?”

I take the box of matches, pull two of them out, strike them. This time, they both light.

“Y’know, the usual. My dad jumped ship to follow his heart.” I add air quotes to this. “And it just about killed my mom. And it sucks watching your parent get thrown an emotional curveball like that, because she’s still not over it.”

I rub my two burned-out matchsticks together like I’m trying to start another fire.

“But I guess my aunt talked her into going back to church, so... she’s fine now.”

“Yeah, right,” Stella says. “I think you mispronounced fanatic.”

The burnt match heads break off and fall into my lap. I brush them away.

“Joanna’s got this... anchor around her,” I say. “Like this emotional anchor that just weighs everything down.”

B’Rad clears his throat. He squints up at the sky, adjusts his glasses.

“An anchor has two functions,” he says. “One weighs things down. The other holds things steady.”

I roll my gaze across the platform and back over to him. He’s right. Even though Joanna had some kind of breakdown when my dad left, we never went hungry. We never lost our house. Maybe she was stuck in place, but we never went under either.

“I’m saying this as someone who lives on a boat,” he adds.

Stella goes, “Yeah, but Joanna just traded in one anchor for another. Now church is her anchor.”

“Which is funny,” I say. “Because she honestly thinks Grace Redeemer has cut the chains that held her captive all this time, and now she’s free.”

“Right,” Stella says. “Free to shame. Free to judge. Etcetera...”

“So you think the reason you don’t just hook up with people is because of what happened with your parents?” B’Rad asks.

I feel momentarily tased by the question.

Stella tries to answer for me by saying, “Well, duh,” but I go, “Um, no. The reason I don’t just hook up with people is because I’m queer and I live here.”

I lean against the railing that’s stuck at a slight tilt toward the house, where B’Rad’s granddad is barking back at the TV.

Stella goes, “That’s true. You can’t even scratch your tits in this town without someone calling it perversion and wanting to make a city ordinance about it.”

“The thing is,” I say to B’Rad, “everyone’s childhood got messed up in some way. I mean, if that’s the bar, we should all have trust issues. And if we all have trust issues, what’s the point of putting labels on ourselves?”

“Thank you for coming to my TED Talk,” Stella mumbles into the fizzling silence. And because Stella hates silence, she adds, “You know what? This is bullshit. I’m starving. Is anyone else starving?”

I know this move. This is Stella Avila doing what she does best. Deflection is high on her list of coping skills, but for once I don’t mind. I hate this truth or dare game.

“I brought home some mistake dogs,” B’Rad says. “If you promise not to narc, I’ll share.”

His eyes cut to me for a split second.

“I’m always down for a secret,” I tell him, hoping he takes my hint. His minuscule wink tells me he does.

Stella perks up. “A fucking pontoon picnic—cool! Bust out the munchies before I kill someone.”

We lay the hot dogs out on the foil blanket, and B’Rad manages to find a few plastic-wrapped forks and napkins that he may or may not have also brought home from work, not that I’d ever tell. I pull those condiment packets I stashed at the kiosk last night out of my pocket and lay them down by the hot dogs, in case anyone wants it.

“Those better not be from the Hound’s Tooth,” he says.

“Only the relish,” I tell him. “The ketchup was from Sonic.”

For some reason, they both find this hilariously funny. They giggle so hard they can barely keep from spitting out their food.

“Daya likes to take things,” Stella says.

I drop my foot sideways and kick her in the ankle.

“Ow!” she yelps.

“Quit telling my business.”

“This is just like in that movie OutBound,” B’Rad says around a bite of hot dog.

“Which one is that?” Stella asks.

“Dude volunteers to spend the rest of his life doing scientific research on some remote planet, and all they can send up to him is junk food because it’s the only thing that can survive the trip. You know that shit’s preserved forever.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s based on a true story,” Stella says.

We both look at her like she’s the one on the remote planet.

“Are you kidding me?” B’Rad snorts.

She goes, “What?”

“Totally not real,” I say.

She seems so stun-gunned, it’s almost funny.

She says, “But didn’t we—”

“No,” he tells her.

“—send people to—?”

“No.” He shakes his head with absolute conviction. “The moon. We sent people to the moon and then we gave up. We’ve never sent humans to live on another planet.”

“That we know of,” I add.

Stella’s lips twist into a skeptical pout. “Okay, you know what? Ya pa’que. The aliens would probably just kill us when we got there anyway.”

“Nah,” B’Rad says. “That’s what we would do. Humans are the real assholes in this scenario. We’d probably bring space Glocks with us and cap the aliens as soon as we landed. Manifest destiny motherfuckers.”

Space Glocks. Now that shit’s funny and I’m barely even stoned.

“Or nukes,” Stella adds.

She’s baked. They’re both baked. Maybe we dodged Stella’s angst bullet tonight after all.

But not B’Rad’s. He makes a gun with his fingers, points it toward the house where his granddad is diatribing about who-knows-what inside. Closes one eye like he’s aiming and mumbles, “Hey. If you can’t shoot a thing, blow it up, right? If you can’t blow it up, light it on fire.”

Stella and I go silent as B’Rad stares down his imaginary barrel at the house. The crickets are chirping on speed. Even the stars seem to be rolling through the sky at a sudden, frantic clip.

“B’Rad...?” I say.

Stella goes, “Dude, should we be worried about you?”

“What’s it look like?” he asks back.

Stella says, “It looks like you smoked a bowl and now you’re all morbid and shit.”

His gun arm falls to his side and, after a moment or two, he flops onto his back again, takes a single match out, and strikes it against the side of the box. It flares yellow-orange light against the metal siding of the pontoon boat.

“He didn’t want me,” B’Rad says.

Neither of us breathes a word as we watch that match burn down the wooden stick toward his fingertips. He doesn’t even flinch as the flame snuffs itself out against his bare skin.

The smoke that rises from the match head seems to snap Stella out of her daze. She goes, “Who didn’t want you?”

“The old bastard in there,” B’Rad says, launching the match carcass at his granddad’s house. “Missed again,” he whispers.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Didn’t want you, how?”

He lights another one.

“After my parents died,” he says, letting this one burn toward his fingertips too.

Wait a minute...

“How’d they die?” Stella asks.

I watch how his glasses fog up, how his eyebrows creep toward each other. He shakes the flame out and throws this match even harder than the last one.

“Murder-suicide.”

I sit all the way up.

I thought that was just a bullshit story.

Stella says, “Holy shit.” An unfinished bite of hot dog puffs her cheek out from the inside.

He pulls out another match. Lights it. Lets it burn down some before blowing it out. Throws it at the moon. Lights another. Then another. The next match is still lit as it sails—luckily that one whiffs out in midair. The surface of the moon is shifting by the second. The ground feels like it’s shifting too. Nothing feels stable. Nothing feels anchored. Maybe it’s because we’re on a boat, but it feels like any minute we could all just drift up into the stratosphere and float away like that guy in OutBound, not to give away the ending.

B’Rad looks like he’s getting ready to throw another match. I put my hand on his arm, and he hugs the box of matches to his chest. No one says anything else for a long time, until B’Rad goes, “I was nine. They took me into protective custody and made me a ward of the state.... There’s some vocabulary not every kid has to learn. Anyway. When they figured out I had a living relative, they asked him to take me. He refused.”

Stella points toward the house. “But now you’re—”

“They made him.”

“Damn,”she says, blowing the word into the air like she’s exhaling a bong hit.

“I can’t believe it,” I whisper. “I thought that was just a story you made up to get my mom to buy your... you know.”

The way he looks over his shoulder at me... it’s pure haunt.

“I’m pretty good at telling a real story like it’s part of someone’s fictional life,” he says.

In the swirl of cricket chirp and breeze and moonlight, I start to shiver. I toss our empty food wrappers off the foil blanket and fold myself up inside it, but the shiver won’t stop. The words murder and suicide won’t stop either—they just crash together inside my head. I can’t process those words in relation to B’Rad Anderson, much less nine-year-old Brad, as he would have been known back then. I mean... shit.

Stella eases back down on the sleeping bag. “So how did he do it?”

“Stella.”

“It’s fine,” B’Rad says, staring off into space. “Everything’s fine.”

He pushes the box of matches open, then changes his mind and closes it. When he starts talking again, I slip it away from him.

“You don’t need to tell us,” I say.

“They’re just details. Puzzle pieces.”

He lifts his hands toward the sky, pantomimes moving a puzzle piece as he says, “I found out my dad left a note.”

He slides another piece into imaginary place. “Love makes you crazy, Jeanette. That’s all it said. Ain’t that some shit?”

His hands stop moving. They just hang there, suspended in zero gravity with the moon cradled between his empty palms.

“Love must make you crazy,” he says. “Where else would that kind of insanity come from?”

He wipes the invisible puzzle pieces onto the imaginary floor.

“I’ve seen some crazy shit happen in the name of love,” Stella says. “That’s for fucking sure.”

“Same,” I say.

God will forgive you, Jon—just come back!Only he didn’t. My dad drove away, and the next morning she emptied every single thing out of our house. Furniture, clothes, food, it all went on the curb for someone else to deal with.

For a fraction of a second, the moonlight and starlight blink out, leaving us in complete darkness.

“I can’t believe your dad killed your mom,” Stella whispers, cracking into the drifting moonlight. “All my dads have been shitty to my mom, but... nothing like that. That’s messed up.”

“Yup. My life’s a fucking true-crime show.”

It gets quiet again for a while, except for the muted sound of B’Rad’s granddad soapboxing from somewhere inside.

After a while, I hear Stella murmur, “We caught you cheating, by the way. You lit those last few matches against the box. Right, Daya?”

“Daya’s not playing anymore,” I say.

But Stella doesn’t hear me. She’s already asleep—I can tell by the rhythm of her slow, steady breathing.

I roll to the side to face B’Rad. He’s wiping his eyes on the Pray for America shirt. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him with his glasses off.

“Your granddad,” I say. “Does he do that every night?”

“Every night. Every day. Like he’s stuck in a loop somewhere.”

“It must suck, having to listen to that all the time,” I whisper.

“Yeah, but... sometimes listening to the noise inside my own head is actually worse.”

He pushes in close and stares at me for the longest moment ever. I can tell his eyes are red even though everything around us is washed in a silvery blue.

“I’m really sorry,” I tell him.

B’Rad nods, closes his eyes, and rests his forehead against mine until his breathing becomes deep and regular.

I just lie there, letting B’Rad sleep while listening to his asshole granddad curse the moon and the stars and everything else in the universe.