What Two Girls Can Do, by Elizabeth Endicott
The first time my girl and I kissed, it was so sudden—my arm shot out, knocking the milkshake we were sharing from its perch on the dash. For a moment, I imagined my mother’s anger, her beloved 1999 Honda Accord puddled with pink, but then the truth shuffled forward, breathing hot from its mouth. The car was mine now. My sole inheritance. The milkshake splashed across our laps but I was still trembling from our collision of lip and spit and tit, and barely noticed the thick cream oozing cold between our legs, down the crevices of the console, penetrating the seatbelt. It never buckled the same after that, only latching when it was wiggled just right.
We were never the same either, my girl and me. The thing about kissing is it slams the door behind you, and then there are twenty new knobs to jiggle. But I cared less about all that; what I wanted most was to stop hiding with her in my mother’s shitty old car and instead share a milkshake at the diner where she worked. I’d kept this from my mother, this urge to kiss the prettiest girls in town, but I didn’t have to anymore. My dream was this: I’d roll up after my girl’s shift, put my arm around her in a booth, and help her forget her troubles, just two bitches in heat. But she said it could never happen. Her ex managed the diner and he was the sort of guy who held onto grudges like his dick depended on it. And isn’t that how life goes? Just when you’re old enough to leave home, your mother gets sick and needs you; right when you find the girl of your dreams, you meet the awful ex-boyfriend who lords over her life.
Before that first kiss, we’d used our mouths the other way, talking and talking and talking. She told me about the ex and the meanness broiling inside him, like he had one of those heat lamps that kept fries hot inside his head. He never hit her, but he yelled, and I understood that a shouting man could shrink you down until he stuffed you in his back pocket. I’d never be her prince, but I could still be her hero, so by the time the stink of spilled milkshake had given way to just the occasional whiff of strawberries, and we had done everything two girls can do in the front seat of a sedan, I had a plan. And then, a miracle, we had a plan. Together.
One evening not long after, as darkness began to swallow the sky, right after she let me push fingers inside her, curling them as if to say come closer, come, we drove to the diner as it closed and asked her ex if he wanted to go for a drive. He said shit, he didn’t have anything better to do, so she slid into the back, he sat in her spot, seatbelts clicked, and we were off.
Hurtling along that tongue of road, disappearing down the night’s throat, the car whined before downshifting. The ex kicked a foot up on the dash—my mother’s dash—and slapped at his inner thighs like cheeks, asking questions. Where were we going? And why? For the first time I felt uncertain, and almost a little afraid. The plan was that we’d take him for a ride and we’d scare him a little, just enough that he’d leave her alone. A car passed, the only one we saw, its headlights illuminating my girl’s eyes in the backseat. They flashed wild from the dark.
My fingers were stiff and cold from gripping the steering wheel, and I splayed them as we crested a hill. In the distance, a pond shimmered into view, ghostlike. Cows had gathered, their ruddy legs disappearing into mud. Loneliness pierced my chest. The emotion had haunted me as a child, and then again at my mother’s funeral, where the minister had held my limp hand while talking at the wall behind me. It was like nobody could see me and nobody even cared to try. But then I glanced in the rearview and saw her, my girl, and let the emptiness mutate into love—no, anger.
My mother had taught me how to avoid men like him, how to discern if a door held open was a courtesy or a trap. She also taught me how to make morning beers, Budweiser mixed with Clamato, and that the darker the alcohol, the worse the hangover.
Right when my anger was seeping outside the lines, a large boulder materialized up ahead, dark in front of the pond. It was a beacon and it told me what to do. My foot pressed the gas without my command, like it already knew. The ex wanted to know what the fuck I was doing, his arm groping for the grab handle on the ceiling. The car groaned as it veered off the road, straining and shuddering, but I knew just what it needed, and just how long. I’d been driving my mother to and from the bars since I was twelve; I’d spent the last two years driving her to and from the hospital. I knew that Honda Accord the way someone knows family, and I still had time before I needed to edge off the accelerator. That was our plan. I’d stop well before the boulder, and it would be enough to see my girl’s ex-boyfriend squirm. Before he caught his breath, I would point out how terrible fear felt, that this was how he made her feel. Then he’d leave her alone. We would finally enjoy our milkshakes in peace.
Yet as we careened toward the boulder, the ex started to scream. It was a terrible sound, high and jagged, clawing at something in my chest. He lunged toward me, grabbed the wheel, and the car shot right, tumbling away from the shoulder, barreling straight toward the pond, skidding before slamming into the embankment.
My mother had been diligent about being the good kind of drunk, the kind that feeds their monsters quietly—functional. But once in a while she’d get carried away, losing herself, and she’d lock herself in her bedroom, screaming with that same tinny ferocity. When that happened, I’d scrunch my eyes closed, and I did the same thing as the ex veered us off-course, keeping them sealed until the shattering and splashing had stopped. I opened them to a new world, where the windshield was half gone, caving in with a sheet of wet-eyed crystals, and the headlights had gone out too, or no, they were flickering, revealing the pond before us in slow strobes, like God was blinking.
I don’t know what I did next, but I remember my girl’s hands on my face, plucking glass from my forehead, smoothing down my hair, cooing like I imagine a different sort of mother might. She patted my shoulders, scanning for injury before brushing off the passenger seat and climbing back to where she belonged, strawberry sweetness wafting as she settled. And then the realization finally struck that her ex was gone. I leaned toward her to peer out the missing half of windshield, wondering where he’d wandered off to so fast, and saw the cows, fearful and flashing, clumped a ways off in the grass. Bubbles churned at the center of the pond’s roiling black surface, and then total darkness, and then again, the bubbles. In a flash of light, my eyes traced from the pond back to the hole in the windshield, snagging for a moment at a shiny black stain on the nearby telephone pole, dread pooling in my gut as I pieced it all together.
My voice was small and choked when I broke the silence, admitting that I’d forgotten to warn him about the busted seatbelt, that this was all my fault. But her face gave her away, a calm moon in the night, telling me without words that she had remembered.
Her fingers interlocked with mine as we watched the ripples melt flat in syncopated glimpses, dark then light, dark then light again, erasing the topographic map of where her ex had sunk. Minutes passed, bubbles stopped rising, and soon the pond was still once more. Cows waddled back to its edge, seeming to take large leaps as they sauntered through the breaks of illumination. When the cows decided it was time to get on with things, we did, too.
And only then, with a crumpled hood and winking headlights, limping into reverse with a flat tire, the night licking us right in the face, did that car finally feel like mine. It was just the two of us at last, me and my girl.
Elizabeth Endicott is an award-winning writer and multi-disciplinary artist based in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, LA Times, Scientific American, ELLE, Orion Magazine, and many more.