Tig looked at me with kind eyes. “Bad week?”

I nodded, and he leaned his shoulder against mine. I tried to be still and cool. I could feel my fat, and it was both me and a living wall around me. I sat inside my body, yearning. If he put his arm around me, he would feel the lumps and folds of my waist. Some nights I pretended my hands into his hands. I would grab squashy handfuls of my own ass, suck in my gut, and touch the ripe flap of it still hanging down in a dandle. My own hands were repulsed, so I knew I couldn’t let him touch me. Even so, I’d send one of my Tig-hands snaking between my legs, to touch the place where I was just like any other girl, to rock against the pretend of him.

I was not one of those loose-hipped, saucy girls from way down in his neighborhood, but when he leaned his shoulder against mine, my body didn’t seem that bad a place to be. We sat quietly together, and then I said a true thing.

“Mom’s sending me back to camp.”

“Ugh,” Tig said. “Camp Celery?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Camp Sweat.”

She’d announced it Monday night, watching me eat my allotted roll as if she begrudged me every dry, unbuttered bite.

I’d burst into tears. At fat camp mini Reesey cups were valid currency, same as Camel Lights in prison. Last summer I’d huffed and puffed through daily aerobics with floppy, uncommitted arm movements, half a beat behind. I’d doodled cats and ballerinas all through the nutrition classes, learning nothing except that I was an exceptional candy smuggler. I came home only six pounds lighter, and I’d quickly gained those back and then some.

“Please, no! It didn’t even work,” I’d begged my mother, crying.

“You didn’t mind it so much last year,” Mom said, but last year I hadn’t had a Tig to leave behind.

“Camp Fuck That Noise. You’ll be gone all summer?” he said, like he might miss me. Like I mattered.

I nodded, and then I said a thing that made me feel more naked than I had ever been with another person. The words came quiet and ashamed. “Camp Get Less Disgusting.”

“Hey. Don’t say that,” Tig said, turning his head. We looked at each other, faces close, still leaning on each other’s shoulder. “You don’t call you disgusting.”

“I know what I am,” I whispered. I could smell the wine sour on his breath. I liked it.

“You’re my best friend,” Tig said. “Don’t talk that way about my friend.”

I warmed. All of me warmed.

“I know what I am,” I told Tig again, and he shook his head, and then he kissed me. He slipped his shoulder sideways and ducked his face in. A real kiss. No sad cheek smacked with pity-lips, but the real thing, like I’d seen in movies. Like I’d seen pretty girls get kissed in the hallways, pressed up against their lockers by their boyfriends. My mouth opened under his, all of me alight and atremble.

He pulled back, and I pulled back. I was conscious of the night around us. The mattress behind us. The moon making him crazy.

He grinned. Ducked his head. Finally he spoke. “Shit, Smiffy, we are real bad drunk. We can’t ruin this. We can’t do this wrong.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. Ruin this thing that he started? Ruin our friendship by starting this thing? I just waited, panting, my mouth going dry again.

He leaned away to get the jug, and I hated the loss of that small pressure, his shoulder on mine. He poured the wax cup full, handed it over. I gulped at the wine, which felt so cool and good now on my sandpaper tongue. Tig relit the half joint, and we traded it and the cup back and forth, not talking. I wasn’t sure if we were comfortable or crazy. I wasn’t sure what time it was.

“I gotta eat somefin’,” I finally said.

The big green jug was close to empty, but I didn’t realize how bad it truly was until I stood up. The world lurched and tilted around me. I spread my arms out, braced my feet against the whole huge earth. I could feel it rotating under me.

“We’re so stoned,” Tig said, jerking his thumb to point behind us. “Let’s havver nap?”

When he said it, my chest filled up with a host of tiny, popping bubbles. He meant that mattress. He was asking me to lie down on it with him, and what would happen? He might fall asleep, snoring as I yearned—pathetic. He might roll to me and touch me. Kiss me. I thrilled to this, but what if he meant sex, all-the-way real sex? Would I be naked, my folds and creases open to him in the moonlight? I wanted. I wanted so much, and yet I shook my head, near panicking.

“I gotta eat,” I insisted, though I wasn’t actually thinking about food. I reached down and grabbed his hand, hauled him up. He let me tug him along the path, but it was my choice. My fear and my self-loathing.

I set us in motion, and we went.

The growly engine roared like a living thing, and Tig started singing that Pixies song again. I heard my own voice from a distance, winding in and out around his. The tires slurred against the dirt, and this was a song, too. We hit the railroad tracks, so fast, so fast. Up and over into a weightless moment, where my body disappeared around me and I was only motion, suspended in the darkness, and Tig Simms had kissed me.

The trees and the dirt road ended together, and ahead was a watery wall of moonlight glowing off the asphalt where the road became real. We went sailing out of the woods, into that white wall of light, and in that moment the road dropped out from under us and the music turned to clanging glass and the shriek of tires. Inside those sounds time itself changed. The stars spun, and they are spinning. The sky turned, and it is turning. I am inside a slide show of noise and flashing color. The lap belt cuts into my stomach as I jerk and flail to the grinding rhythm of metal ripping.

A small black beat of lost time. Am I asleep? Tig said that we should take a nap. Am I still asleep? Did he kiss me at all? My mouth floods with salt.

“Marmee?” Lolly Shipley calls, and her marmee must be sleeping, too. I must be babysitting. I have to go get Lolly. I swallow, gulping brine, and my mouth instantly refills. “Marmee, Marmee?” Lolly calls. She has blond pigtails, a soft belly, fat cheeks like my hamster. Little tiny things, hamsters and babies, they are so cute when they are fat. I touch my mouth, and my fingers come away sticky, my blood shining black in the moonlight.

Now I am standing in the moon-drenched road, Tig’s car behind me, and I am lurching forward, trying to follow Tig across the street. I am swayed by currents into a winding stagger toward the other car. I know this car, little and light and sporty, but the front side is now bent and twisted to an unfamiliar shape. It is so far away, shoved half onto a grassy, sloping lawn. Tig reaches it, and he is moaning, falling to his knees.

I see Lolly, and Lolly’s face is red. Her blue eyes are bruised pansies, wide and wet. Baby Paul, who never sleeps, wails in his car seat. Driving him to sleep worked, I remember Mrs. Shipley saying. Paul is beside Lolly in the back half, which is whole and like a car. But the front is strange and curved and lacy white and black with jagged metal. The nose is crumpled in profile, and the driver’s door is smashed. Pretty Mrs. Shipley stares silent at me through the missing window, and below her collarbones her body is smashed, too.

I go nearer, and Lolly sees me, and she says, “Amy, Paul is cry?”

I say, “Mrs. Shipley?” but I can see now that all the black wetness that is in the folds and crumples of the car is Mrs. Shipley. From the shoulders down, most of her insides are on the outside. Her face is still so pretty, even with the red-black wet splashed across it, even with the glassy open eyes that are so dead.

I feel myself toppling, the asphalt biting my bare, broad knees. I throw up salt and black and purple in the road.

Lolly cries, “Marmee? Marmee?” and it sounds softer now. Lolly is tired, and I must be tired, too. Paul wails from far, far away. Please let us be sleeping, napping on that filthy mattress, like Tig said. Tig lows like cattle, moaning on all fours.

Mrs. Shipley’s pretty body is folded and opened, and this is a thing I chose. I dragged us down the trail to the car. I understand this. This is a choice I can’t take back.

My face is stuck in an expression. My face is so surprised. I did not know I could lead us to a thing so big, so mean, something we can never undo or remove, that will echo in my life, in all our lives, forever.

I lie down in the road near my sick, and Lolly calls, “Marmee,” and of all the things I sank so deep down inside me, Mrs. Shipley’s dead, dead, pretty face, blood in strings like spiderwebs across her white skin, her eyes wide open, their blue washed down to pale gray in the moonlight, was the last. The hardest thing to never, never see.

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