The Dark Magazine

10.

When I woke up yesterday morning, I saw how Mom had spelled out HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE in magnetic poetry on the fridge before she left for work.

It was a stupid thing to write. I knew from hunting with Jill what real hell looked like.

But I also knew what Mom really meant: HELL IS LIVING WITH MY WORTHLESS LARD ASS SON WHO STAYS OUT ALL NIGHT, EATS ME OUT OF HOUSE AND HOME, AND NEVER MINDS A SINGLE WORD I SAY. She just didn’t have the words and letters to spell all that.

There are never enough words and letters to fill the gaps between us.

Still, it got her point across just fine, and since I wasn’t in any hurry to get to first period study hall, I took my sweet time rearranging the pieces to say LOVE MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOUR SORRY. I knew it would piss her off because it’s something Jill likes to say. I’m not even sure what it’s supposed to mean.

Jill just says it.

9.

It was Jill who got her mother to give me my job down at Pancake Chalet.

It was during those six months when she and Mom were best A.A. buddies or whatever, and Mom kept bugging her to find me something to do to get me off my fat ass and out of her refrigerator. I’m not the kind to do whatever Mom tells me to do though. The only reason I showed up to interview with Mrs. Hachette was because I wanted the job for myself. To earn some cash to get my own wheels before graduation, and so I wouldn’t have to beg for a ten spot every time I felt like going to a movie.

I could tell right away Mrs. Hachette didn’t like me. But I didn’t care because she still gave me the job. So what if it was only because Jill made her? She does whatever Jill wants, on account of Jill being adopted and troubled, with an “addictive personality disorder,” or whatever that expensive shrink she goes to tells her.

Mrs. Hachette will do anything to keep Jill on the wagon.

I say, if she made sure the wagon was a bloodmobile, she’d have a shot at that.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter that the old lady doesn’t like me. Jill warned her to back off, and she did. She doesn’t glare over my shoulder while I run the dish machine anymore. She’s stopped clocking my breaks. She lets me work weeknights and closings now, instead of just Saturday and Sunday rush. She pays me under the table and didn’t even make me go through the hassle of getting a work permit. So what if she treats me like a maggot she found squirming in a pile of dog shit? It’s $250 a week in my pocket, and it gets me out from under Mom’s thumb, so I’m fine with her dirty looks and fine with Mrs. Hachette.

Of course, she doesn’t know a thing about me and Jill. It would be hell to pay if she found out. She doesn’t know how, after closing sometimes, when the cooks and waitstaff have all gone home, Jill and me eat the best steaks straight out of the cooler, raw. Then we get smashed on B.V. and Coke, and make out in the squeaky vinyl booths where hours before little kids dribbled their canned cherry compote, their slender throats pulsing, pulsing. Mrs. Hachette doesn’t know how we undress each other in the stock room so we can open up little red slits in our skin with that sweet, spring-loaded knife-ring Jill got off of eBay. Then we drink from each other’s bodies to seal our bond. I like to sip from Jill’s breasts and her soft belly. She likes hers to come fresh from my love handles or the fleshy insides of my thighs.

Afterwards, we do whippets in the cooler until the walls vibrate and my eyes feel like they’re going to pop like firecrackers. Mrs. Hachette must wonder why Pancake Chalet goes through so many cases of Ready Whip.

But then again, I bet she probably doesn’t want to know.

8.

Janice is in the backseat bitching about the price of the cigarettes she just bought at the Nice ’N Easy. To shut her up, Jill makes a big show out of sliding her hand up the inside of my thigh to squeeze my junk, which is like, duh, perfectly okay by me.

Actually, everything Jill does is okay by me.

But Janice ignores her and begins howling instead that she wants her kick, and by that she means a toot, and by that I mean a snort, and, well, everybody knows what that means, right? But Jill is all like, “Later,” which means when she’s good and ready and not a minute sooner, and I’m perfectly okay with that because I’m not in the mood for them to get all coked up tonight.

Not now. Not ever, actually.

The streetlights flash past the windshield like lightning bolts, while the engine rumbles like a thundercloud. I’m feeling electric. No work tonight, no school in the morning, and after midnight we hunt. Plus, I love riding shotgun with Jill. Her car is this sweet piece of Detroit’s finest: a shiny, Guido-black Chrysler 300, with 20-inch aluminum wheels, power everything, a black leather interior that smells like hot summer sex, and an enormous trunk that even I can fit inside. Jill lets me drive it sometimes, late at night when there’s no traffic around or she’s too fucked-up to care. Mrs. Hachette bought it for her as a reward for graduating from that fancy rehab downstate. It’s got all-wheel drive and the Hemi V8, so the thing can haul ass. Though it’s no Corvette, it’s still way better than Mom’s POS Elantra.

The best part is that Jill won’t let Janice drive it anymore, on account of it was Janice who totaled her old Caddy that night on their way home from scoring beans at some gay club in Syracuse when the Thruway was a sheet of ice.

I love how Janice’s face squeezes up like a fist whenever Jill tosses me the keys.

The night air rushes in like a river through the open window. Jill is easily doing eighty-five down the Arterial. She loves going fast and knows the 300 can handle it. She weaves around the other cars like they’re not even moving, like they’re elephants, and we’re riding the back of a black and chrome cheetah. She won’t get a ticket either. Not in this county. The cops don’t even bother pulling her over anymore for all the grief it causes. One call to her brother and it’s done: Sorry for the trouble Ms. Hachette . . . Have a good evening, Ms. Hachette . . . Give my best to your brother, Ms. Hachette.

Jill knows she owns this town. I guess we all do.

But that doesn’t even matter now. All that matters is how electric I feel. Like, I have this sense that something’s going to happen tonight, something wild and unexpected. I always feel this way before a hunt, like life is a fiery jolt of possibility, and everything is real and alive and good. I mean, we’re good, me and Jill. Jill and me. I think this is what happiness is supposed to feel like. This real, alive feeling, our blood pulsing hot through each others veins. Knowing that what’s there between us is an actual, honest-to-God thing. Not some daydream. Not some high school jerk-off fantasy. But the real deal, here and now.

Me and Jill. Jill and me.

7.

I told Mom at breakfast last Saturday that this girl I know from work said she thought I was handsome. Mom just snorted, said “Whatever,” and took another drag off her Pall Mall. I didn’t tell her that it was Jill, but it irritated her nonetheless. She leaned over the table and pinched my nipple hard and said she didn’t care what some blind tramp told me, she expected me to wear a shirt when I sat at her kitchen table, because she didn’t want to stare at my hairy moobs while she ate her fried eggs.

She didn’t even ask about all the scars.

Anyway, I ignored her. I figured I was entitled to enjoy my secrets, and so I leaned back in my chair and scratched my bare chest like I didn’t have a care in the world.

Since Jill and me started hooking up, I don’t wear shirts as much as I used to. Even mowing the grass outside where everyone can see. It’s not because I suddenly think I’m good looking. I know I’m just as fat and pasty as ever. My hair is still gnarly, I still have shitty posture, and my, um, junk could be bigger. I mean, I guess every dude thinks that, right? But I’m pretty sure I’m not batting with the major leaguers down there. I’ve looked in the locker room before, which is totally normal and doesn’t mean anything gay. It’s like when you’re driving a hot car and some dude pulls up next to you in another hot car and you check each other out. It’s natural, like in the jungle, survival of the fittest, Darwin and shit.

Still, I guess it’s okay that I’m not King Dong, because Jill she says she likes it that way. It makes me her eager little beaver. She says hung dudes think they don’t have to try. They make the woman do all the work. But not me. I do whatever she tells me to do for as long as she tells me to do it. Fingers. Lips. Tongue. She says I don’t need a big dick to make her feel good, and then she whispers in my ear that it’s all good, that everything I do feels good to her.

And then we open our veins and drink from each other, and it’s good.

I mean, all good.

Everything is good with Jill.

6.

Janice is being such a whiny bitch tonight.

I feel her eyes burning holes into on the back of my head while she complains about me riding shotgun. It’s always something with her: too hot or too cold, they raised the price of Merit’s, she’s PMS-ing hard, or she’s just sick of looking at my face. It’s like she thinks we’re holding out on her, like Jill’s got a secret stash of coke in the glove compartment or she’s shoved a bag of it up my ass.

But Janice can go fuck herself.

She’s pushing fifty for Christ’s sake. Practically old enough to be my grandmother, yet she acts like a spoiled brat whenever I’m around. I guess it’s because she thinks I’m standing between her and Jill. Maybe I am, though I’m pretty sure Jill was done with her dyke phase after she and Mom broke things off.

I don’t even understand why Jill still hangs out with Janice. She blows her off at work, keeping to the hostess station whenever Janice is behind the grill. They never talk, except when Jill starts jonesing to hunt or needs somebody to go with her to her shrink appointments. Back when they were A.A. buddies, Mom said she thought Jill kept losers like Janice around because they made her feel better about herself. I wanted to ask, if that was true, why she thought Jill kept her around? But I wasn’t suicidal. Besides, she was right. I figure it’s not such a bad thing if you’re Jill to hang around a loser like Janice, who does whatever you say and acts as if the sun rises and sets when you tell it to.

Still, I feel bad for Janice sometimes. It’s obvious she’s nursing a major ache for Jill. Sometimes it hurts to look at her, like when Jill kisses me or touches me, and I can see through all that rage to the sadness buried in Janice’s eyes.

Other times though, like when she’s being a bitch to me, I’m happy to see her suffer.

Like, this one night, she got all wasted on blood and coke and vodka after the hunt, and she started joking around about how stupid Dad was to get busted holding onto the murder weapon after he fled the bar that night. I don’t let anybody talk shit about Dad—except Mom—so I grabbed her by the throat and nearly choked her out.

She never mentioned him again after that.

So, whatever. Let her bitch and moan. She can just sit there and wait for her damn buzz until after the hunt. It’s not even 11:00 yet, and I’m so not ready to watch the two of them get all coked up even before we grab the kid. When the two of them get high it turns into this scene out of Scarface, except without Pacino and the guns. Janice starts pacing around her trailer like a rat in a cage, all hyper and crazy, while Jill just stares through the window blinds like she thinks she’s being staked-out or something. If a phone rings, forget about it: it’s like the FBI is about to break down the door.

It’s so stupid and pointless.

I mean, Jill doesn’t have a thing to worry about from the law. Her brother’s the goddamned D.A. and will probably be the next mayor: She could slash a guy’s throat on the courthouse steps, and the cops would just go shoot some poor Black dude for jaywalking.

5.

On my seventeenth birthday, I woke up to find that Mom had spelled out YOUR FIRST WORD WAS COOKIE on the fridge as my happy birthday poem. Beside it she’d duct-taped a small mirror to the door handle.

Looking in that mirror was the first time I realized my tits were bigger than hers.

I Googled it that afternoon. Gy·ne·co·mas·ti·a: American Heritage defined it as “Abnormal enlargement of the breasts in a male.”

Mom just calls it being a lard ass.

When I told Jill about it later that night, she said that when Mrs. Hachette dies and she comes into her big inheritance, she’ll give me the cash I need for plastic surgery to chop off my moobs, so long as we can find a doctor who’ll let us keep the meat afterwards.

Then she laughed.

Jill says my body doesn’t matter to her. She says she likes how warm and juicy I am,  how she can bleed me for hours without me passing out. She says it all feels the same in the dark anyway, and besides, being fat doesn’t make me less of a man.

She says a lot of things like that. Things I don’t believe, but I pretend like I do. I guess it’s sweet of her to say them, to try to spare my feelings. It’s just her way of showing she cares, so the least I could do is act like I believe her.

Besides, Jill likes to say that it’s perfectly okay with God and the universe when you lie, so long as you do it out of love or self-preservation. Who can fault her when you look at it like that? Self-preservation is just part of the natural law, like survival of the fittest or whatever. And as for the love part, doesn’t that mean you’re never supposed to say you’re sorry, even for lying or worse? Especially for worse.

Later on that same night, after she gave me my special birthday blow job, I asked her if she thought we were maybe in love, and she sat up in the driver’s seat with this dead look in her eyes and said, “Why don’t you tell me?”

Christ! What the hell was I supposed to say to that? It wasn’t like there was some easy, obvious answer to give her. Sure, I kind of thought maybe I did love her, at least a little. I certainly liked her a lot, and besides, it wasn’t as if I’d gone around drinking blood and hunting with all these other women. We were spending all this time together, and it was good, and I was having fun. It was nice and different and unexpected to have somebody cool who wanted to be around me as much as I wanted to be around them, which was such a change from the way things usually worked for me. Plus, what a sweet little bonus that she had a nice car, tons of cash, and was old enough to buy liquor.

But even more than that, it seemed like we’d connected in this deep, mysterious way, you know? Or at least, I thought we had. I’d told her everything about Dad, and she told me all about what it was like being the screw-up in the otherwise sitcom-perfect, all-American family. She even hinted at some of the sick shit Mom said had gone down between her and her old man before he died. The stuff nobody was supposed to know about except Jill’s shrink and Mrs. Hachette, who apparently had to keep bribing her daughter with cars and money and rehab just so she could live with herself for letting it happen in the first place.

So yeah, maybe I did kind of love Jill, even if she lied to my face about paying for my moob surgery, or about not caring that I was a lard ass, or that she and Mom had only been A.A. buddies before their big blowup. But I wasn’t about to tell her any of that. Hell no. Or at least, I wasn’t going to be the first to commit to that fucking loser’s word out loud.

Love? I’m not that stupid.

So, instead of answering her, I just did what I always do when I don’t know what else to say to her: I shrugged and offered up a vein in my arm.

4.

The first time is the one I remember best.

It began on this random Thursday night, after we were done closing a few weeks into my evening shifts at Pancake Chalet. Jill called me into the office after everyone had left. She wore this shit-eating grin on her face and told me I looked tired and burned out. Wouldn’t I like a little kick? A little pick-me-up to get the rest of the night going?

I just figured she had some blow to offer, and so I was like, “Sure, whatever.”

She laughed in her lifeless way, and then made me swear not to narc, that this was our little secret, blah, blah, blah. But once I’d sworn, instead of pulling out a bullet of coke from her purse, she flicked the hidden button on her ring, dragged the little blade across the back of her arm, and offered it up for me to drink.

For a minute I just stood there and gawped at her. I guess I was freaked out or something. But she held me in that cool, steady gaze of hers, and then it wasn’t so bad anymore, and I stopped being afraid.

Instead, I leaned forward and drank.

To be honest, it was gross at first. The blood tasted all hot and metallic, and right away I wanted to gag. But she held the back of my head in place with her other hand and kept moaning for me to drink more, more, more, until, all at once, the whole experience shifted. I got this crazy-intense rush of energy, and suddenly I was ready to kick ass and take names or some redneck shit like that. My body felt tingly and alive in this hyper-aware sort of way, like everything was super sharp and crystal clear and under my control.

That was the main thing, really: control. All of a sudden it felt like the kind of dude who actually had some say over his own life. It’s amazing what a few sips of fresh blood can trick your brain into believing. It was like waking up to the sunrise after a whole lifetime spent locked in a casket. I no longer felt like the fat, lonely loser from The Flats who’d gotten his ass kicked practically every day since he was ten, because everybody knew his Mom was a drunk and his old man got sent down to Elmira for first-degree manslaughter.

Instead, the me I saw was some badass dude I barely recognized. I was drinking the blood of rich, older women now. I had secrets, real ones. Not kid’s stuff. Not high-school-drama-club bullshit. No, these were bona fide, grown-up secrets—the kind they made sexy vampire flicks about—and it was as if Jill had taken me behind a velvet rope, where the only price of admission was letting her slurp a pint of her own from me.

Anyway, after we’d finished drinking, we locked up the restaurant and went for a drive. We weren’t even looking to hook up right away. We were still feeling each other out, getting to know one another, and anyway sometimes the blood just really makes you want to drive and talk.

So, we drove and talked.

I don’t remember now much of what we said. But what I do remember was realizing how, despite her being Mom’s age and all, Jill was actually hot. Or, not hot exactly, but beautiful, you know? In the headlights of the passing cars, her green eyes glinted like broken glass. Her hair was soft and feathery, shimmering like a field of wheat in the wind. I wanted to reach over and touch it, though I didn’t dare, so I just stared at it—at her, I mean—and talked and talked, and gazed into her face because it seemed to glow in the passing headlights, with the stars above us in the sky, and maybe the moon, too, and the soft yellow shimmer of the streetlights, and the city all around us, holding its breath to listen as we laughed and talked and talked.

It was nice. Really nice.

Or, maybe . . . I dunno.

It was probably just the blood.

Anyway, whatever it was, it felt really good while it lasted. But then she said it was time for us to go hunting with Janice, and the night turned like bad weather.

By the time we got to Janice’s trailer way out in the boonies, we were late, and Janice had already put to bed a six pack of Utica Club. As soon as she opened the door, she let me know how unhappy she was to see me. But what could she do about it? Jill wanted me there. It was Jill’s car, Jill’s plan, Jill’s hunt. Janice and I were just along for the ride.

So anyway, we all climbed into the 300 and went to pick up the kid. It was all so new to me at that point, I mostly kept my mouth shut and did what I was told. Jill had already made plans to meet him at this vacant lot near the train tracks. It’s a different location each time. She knows the city like the back of her hand, so it’s a simple enough thing for her to tell them to meet us where there’s no cops or security cameras around. And okay, so I guess that means it’s technically not a “hunt,” since it’s always prearranged like this.

Maybe it’s more like a takeout run to pick up a late-night order?

Anyway, Jill usually finds the kids on Tenchat, or one of the other encrypted apps that are impossible to trace. She has a real nose for sniffing out the needy ones. She chats them up, gets to know them, gets them to reveal their secrets and desires, frustrations, routines. Sometimes it takes her weeks to groom them before she finally lowers the boom.

They’re always the same, too: lonely, bored, broke, and horny.

The boys are easier. All she has to do is flash a tit and some coke and they hop right into the car as soon as we show up. The girls sometimes change their minds when they see me and Janice. If they try to put up a fight, I’m there to make sure they cooperate, or else they end up in the trunk.

The rest is straightforward. When we get back to Janice’s trailer, Jill takes them into the bedroom, fucks around with them awhile, and then pump’s them so full of shit their hearts stop beating in minutes.

Next, the three of us get to work.

Janice has the tools already laid out in the bathroom, so we just have to dump the body into the tub, get undressed, and then we drink and drink and eat and fuck.

After that, it usually takes a couple of hours to chop up what’s left and clean up the mess. Jill gets rid of their phones on her way home. I don’t know what Janice does with the clothes, but Jill gave her some cash to buy this huge chest freezer to store the extra meat, so there’s always leftovers to defrost whenever we get a craving. There are at least two or three of them stuffed in that freezer right now. If you ask me, that’s why Jill prefers kids. They’re smaller, so we can fit more inside. Plus, she claims the flesh is tender.

Janice says Jill just likes them young.

Anyway, this particular kid said his name was Kyle. He claimed to be seventeen, but I could tell he was more like thirteen or fourteen. Although he was short, he was built like a wrestler with washboard abs or whatever, plus this wavy black hair and the piecing blue eyes of a boy-band singer. I saw later on that he had a big dick, too, so I was glad when we ate him.

But then Jill had to break out the coke and that ruined everything.

I just wanted to spend some quality time alone with her, you know? Cuddling or whatever. But she and Janice had to go get all fucked up without me. Janice turned on the TV, and they started to pace around the living room, rehashing the kill while a Family Guy rerun blared in the background. Jill offered me some blow, but I didn’t want any, even though I’d started to feel weirdly depressed. More so than usual. Maybe it was all that blood, or coming down off the high of the hunt. Or maybe it was just because I’d experienced this totally amazing connection with Jill earlier in the night that’d suddenly switched off for no good reason.

Actually, it was more like she’d switched off. Right there in front of me. One minute she was totally into me, and the next she’d slipped back inside herself. It was like I wasn’t even in the room anymore. I guess that hurt me or whatever, because then the usual dark shit swirling inside my head turned really dark. Like, scary dark. I started crawling out of my skin and imagining doing something bad to myself. My heart couldn’t stop racing, and my brain wouldn’t stop running through all these random, ugly thoughts, like remembering that time I was asleep and Mom woke me up in nothing but her panties, slobbering drunk and sobbing that she’d ruined our lives by shacking up with a killer like Dad. Or the time Mike Sweeney stole my clothes in gym class and stuffed them into the toilet with his turd, and I had to wear my smelly gym clothes the rest of the day because Mom couldn’t get out of work. Or the time my bike got stolen from the backyard, but Mom wouldn’t call the cops, even though we knew who’d swiped it, because she was wasted and terrified the pigs would take me away from her, too.

So, there I was, wigging out over all these pointless, fucked-up memories, only I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I started to sweat, right through my clothes. I couldn’t stop cracking my knuckles or sit still, and I hadn’t even snorted any coke.

I think I maybe even started to cry.

By then, they’d finished off the last bullet, so Jill passed me a bottle of vodka to even me out. But it only made me sick to my stomach, what with all that blood and Kyle-meat down there, and so I had to go puke in the kitchen sink, because Janice had freaked out over something Jill said about me spending the night and had locked herself in the bathroom.

After that, all I wanted to do was go home and sleep it off. But Jill wouldn’t leave, so I ended up walking the whole six miles in the dark, and when I finally got home before dawn, I couldn’t even fall asleep, which totally sucked because I had to get up for school in a few hours to take this test on Of Mice and Men that for once I didn’t want to blow off because I’d actually read the damn book.

3.

This morning’s poem said DO NOT TAKE WHAT DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU.

At first, I didn’t know what the hell Mom was talking about, because I make it a point never to touch her shit. It’s nothing but grief when I do.

But then I remembered how Jill had lifted a pack of her cigarettes from the carton in the fridge when she picked me up for work yesterday.

She had a smirk as wide as a dinner plate on her face when she did it.

Jill gets off on taking what doesn’t belong to her. Like, she’s always laughing about how she lifts all this crap from the storeroom at Pancake Chalet. Crazy, useless shit. Cases of non-dairy creamers, industrial cans of Hollandaise sauce, plastic bags filled with steel wool pads. Stuff she knows she’ll never use in a million years. I think she hurls it all into the dumpster behind her apartment building as soon as she gets home at night. It’s kind of stupid and wasteful, but it’s totally hysterical, too. Like, what ridiculous thing will she steal next, you know? I guess it’s not really stealing though, since Mrs. Hachette owns the place, so all that stuff really sort of belongs to Jill in a way.

It’s all in the family or whatever.

Anyway, it really pissed me off that Mom thought I stole her cigarettes, but I didn’t want her to know that it was actually Jill. She’d kill me if she found out I let Jill back into our place. So instead, I spelled out MY HEART BELONGS TO DADDY, because it was a line in a song from some old movie I saw on TV, and because she hates it whenever I bring him up. Almost as much as she hates it when I mention Jill.

The thing is, I still don’t know what went down between the two of them.

I know there’s more of a story there, but I don’t want to hear it.

I don’t like to think of Mom and Jill drinking each other’s blood.

I want that to be just for Jill and me.

It’s not like I could ask Mom anyway, and when I’m alone with Jill, the last thing on my mind is home, even though once in a while she’ll bring Mom up. Her face will go all tight, and she’ll ask me stupid shit, like how’s Mom doing at work or if she’s seeing anybody new. It’s almost like she’s jealous or maybe missing her a little. It makes me super uncomfortable, and though I only toss her off one-word answers, she never presses me for details and lets it drop, which is fine by me.

The way I figure it, her secrets with Mom are none of my business. They don’t belong to me, any more than Mom’s cigarettes do, and I don’t take what doesn’t belong to me, no matter what Mom thinks.

Jill has lots of other secrets, too. But they’re all ones I don’t ask about and don’t need to know. She tells me what she feels like telling me. I don’t pry after the rest. I think it’s why we have this deep connection. It’s like respect, you know? Her secrets are cool with me. I’ve lived practically my whole life without any of my own, so I know how lucky she is to still have hers. Since Dad got sent down, my entire life has felt like this trashy novel that everybody in town has read, laughed at, and tossed into the garbage. I think the world would be a better place if more people just minded their own fucking business. I really don’t need to know Jill’s private business, like what she talks about with her shrink, or the gory details about her and her father, or why she won’t ever let me touch her or kiss her or even hold her hand until after we’ve opened each other’s veins and taken our first slurp.

I mean, it doesn’t really bother me. Not really. Not too much.

Anyway, it’s cool and all, because the way I see it, secrets are like lies: When you keep them, it’s almost always out of love or self-preservation.

2.

It’s not like Jill hasn’t done eighty-five down this stretch of the Arterial a thousand times before, so I have no idea why we got pulled over tonight, except that the cop’s a rookie and maybe didn’t recognize her car or know who the brother of the woman driving it was.

When she saw the flashing red lights in her rearview mirror, Jill cursed about us being late to pick up this girl named Wendy she’d arranged to meet for tonight’s fun. Then she refused to pull over until I’d deleted all the chat apps from her phone.

“Just in case,” she said.

As soon as she’d stopped the car, she jumped out and started giving the rookie a hard time. If she’d been a Black dude, he probably would have shot her on the spot. But he clearly didn’t know what do about a belligerent, thirty-something White lady yelling her brother’s name over and over and saying, “Don’t you know who I am?”

Finally, he called for backup.

While all this was happening, Janice sat behind me rocking back and forth, muttering, “Don’t narc, don’t narc, don’t narc,” under her breath. I could see in the rearview mirror that her face had gone as white as death.

As white as Mom’s did on the day they sentenced Dad.

That was the only time I ever saw Jill’s brother in person. He was just Assistant D.A. then, and I remember how he nodded at me and Mom as he left the courtroom, like it was nothing personal, you know? Like it was just business or whatever. Though that was years before Jill and Mom and me, it was a good thing he never came around to Pancake Chalet, because even though I knew he wouldn’t recognize me, I still didn’t want him to see me.

But as we sat there waiting for the backup cop to show, I started to freak out thinking that this time he might actually have to come down to bail out his little sister from her scrape with the law, and then he would see me, and remember who I was, and lock me up just for the hell of it, because Mom says that’s what they do to trash like us.

When the backup cop finally showed, I could tell right away that Jill was happy to see him. She smiled this big, shit-eating grin and waved to him the minute he stepped out of his cruiser. He was a lot older than the rookie, and after a private chit-chat with the kid, he strode over to Jill like Mr. Big Swinging Dick and threw his arm around her all fatherly. Then they started chatting and laughing, and I was so relieved that this shit was finally over.

But then his phone rang, and after a moment of speaking to whoever it was on the line, he handed it to Jill, and that’s when everything turned dark.

I can’t really say that I’ve never seen Jill look more scared than she did taking that phone from him, because, well, I’d never actually seen Jill scared at all. Sure, she’d been crazy, twitchy paranoid from being strung-out before. But never stone-sober, white-as-death petrified. This was the first time, and seeing her expression change so swiftly like that made me feel as if the bottom had fallen out of the world.

She didn’t say much to whoever was on the other end of the call, just nodded a few times and whispered, and then handed the phone back to the cop. Maybe it was her brother. Maybe he’d gotten sick of bailing her ass out. Truth is, I don’t know who it was, but as soon as the cop hung up, he grabbed Jill by the elbow, and still all fatherly-like, walked her to the far side of his cruiser, where they whispered to each other for a long while.

He reached into his pocket for his cigarettes and lit one for her.

I could tell she was trying really hard not to look at me or Janice.

Janice was still rocking back and forth behind me whispering, “Don’t narc, don’t narc, don’t narc,” but I knew it was already too late for that.

Then Jill said something to the cop, who gestured to the rookie, who came over to the passenger side with his hand on his weapon and ordered us to get out of the car slowly, with our hands up.

1.

But I can barely move because I’m shaking so hard.

My hands are quaking, my knees, too, and the rookie notices this and gives me a big, fat grin, like he just won fifty bucks on a scratch-off.

Still, I manage to scramble out of the car without falling on my ass or getting shot.

Janice follows me out.

He makes us both lean face-down and arms spread against the hood, and frisks us slowly and carefully, asking before he turns out our pockets whether we’ve got anything sharp inside.

All he finds on me are my phone and wallet, which he sets on the hood beside me. I don’t see what he pulls from Janice’s pockets, because he sets it on the far side of her.

By now, the older cop has come over to watch the show. He mumbles something to the rookie about an eyewitness, a license plate, and a missing persons report. Then he picks up my wallet and flips it open, though I can tell he doesn’t even look inside.

“So, you’re Phil Rizzo’s kid, huh?” he says, and I wonder how in the hell he knows that, until I glance over at Jill. She’s still leaning against the cop car, smoking her cigarette and staring really hard at some distant fixed point down the road, like she’s waiting on a cab to come take her to her shrink or the liquor store.

I want to call out to her, but I know it’s too late for that. I could burst into flames right here and now, and she wouldn’t even turn her head to look.

“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it Mitch?” the older cop says to the rookie, who just shakes his head all smug, like, No, it sure doesn’t. But when he’s done frisking us, he turns to the older cop and tells him we’re both clean, and for a moment I allow myself to think that we might be okay, that this might be the end of it after all, and shit, won’t we have one hell of a story to laugh about later on, while we’re snacking on Wendy’s ribcage.

But no, because the older cop shakes his head, swaggers over to Jill, and whispers something else into her ear.

She doesn’t say anything at first, just nods at him quickly, ever so slightly, and then mouths something I can’t make out from so far away. Whatever it is though, it’s all he needs, because he grins like the devil himself and flashes her a wink. A fucking wink! Like they’re old buddies. Like they’re sharing some secret, dirty joke at our expense.

Then he struts back over to me with his hand on his weapon and says, “The lady tells me you two’ve been borrowing her car late at night without her,” and I swear to God, like, the first thought that pops into my head, the very first one, is that thing Jill always says, you know, about how love means never having to say you’re sorry.

Well, I’m not sorry . . . I’m not sorry.

Originally published in The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times (a collection).