Emery ate Phish food ice cream off her fingers and watched the blood dripple down my knee.
My eyes were pinned to her. She sucked the chocolate paste off her nail beds, the marshmallow fluff gluing her skin together. Her tongue traced careful lines down each finger before she plunged them into the carton all over again. Careless. I hated her for it, the way she was dirty and unapologetic and watched me with a narrowed stare.
“You should be more careful,” she criticized. “I mean, it’s not like you didn’t know about the hill.”
I wanted to tell her I’d done it on purpose. I wanted her to know I wasn’t an idiot, that I had skated my board down that road more times than she’d ever walked it. Instead, I swallowed hard, bearing it. “You’re right.”
I had known Emery for seven unwilling years. Her father was a member of our parish, and when he had custody of her for the weekends, she would kneel between him and my family in the pews. She always sang the hymns too loud, smacking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, so the click of each word reverberated through our practiced harmonies. She tried to drink from the chalice without a proper Confirmation ceremony; she’d nudge me hard and joke about only coming for the wine.
Emery licked the carton’s rim, wetting the paper. “Do you need anything?”
I couldn’t place her concern and shook my head in answer. The crash has been minor compared to other scraps I’d been in. A single trickle of red ran its course down my shin, rimmed with faint purple bruising on my kneecap. I let my finger run up the stream, smearing it along the skin before lifting it to the retreating light. We had about fifteen minutes before it was completely dark, and our parents would start to care where we’d gone.
Like slick paint, my fingertip glistened under the sun. Emery shoveled more cold dough down her gullet, teeth gaping and saliva dripping off her maw.
“It’s getting dark, Kara,” she said, the words trapped in the tackiness of her throat. Why was I supposed to be the one with all the solutions?
I stared into the round pits of her eyes and lifted my own fingers to my mouth, tongue darting out to sample the red. I wanted to make her watch me taste it.
Her mouth contorted to a half-smile. “I love you.”
The feeling was not mutual. I sucked on my fingers now, plunging the flesh into the back of my throat and mocking the way she suckled, an infant in swelling heat, face pressed into the milky fat of their mother.
We walked back in the full dark, faces wet under the crescent moon.
“Why do you bother following me around?” I asked her. Her arms swayed unnaturally, and I took note of her stained finger beds.
“Because I have no one besides you,” she answered smoothly, plainly, as if there was no other answer to my question.
The notion of having me made my skin crawl. I belonged to my parents. I belonged to God. Not to grubby fingers and denial. “You don’t have me.”
“Not like that.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I couldn’t understand a lot when it came to Emery.
Four years later, I watched her drink plainly off my blue Gatorade, and I didn’t mind the thought of her backwash. I didn’t care about her round, billowing voice when we sang, because it wasn’t at the church anymore. It hadn’t been in a while, since they’d found out.
“Before we start the drive,” Emery started, face basked in the headlights that passed us from the freeway, “can we stop for a bite?”
The only open place I could find was a run-down Dairy Queen, where I joked that children were surely abducted in white rusted vans from their parking lot. Emery had grown into her teeth; I noticed every time she stretched me a smile.
She ordered for the both of us: an Orange Julius for me, an Oreo blizzard for her.
The elderly man at the window tried hitting on her as she paid. I felt a twinge of jealousy stretch tight in my ribcage. Emery was oblivious, marching back to the booth I occupied with our full tray, coat pulled tight around her shoulders like a closed set of wings.
My knees were drawn into my chest, and I held the cup between my thighs while I drank. I couldn’t pull my eyes off her mouth. She worked a bite of cookie apart with her tongue, dissecting the cream filling from the rest before swallowing. The small of her mouth grew red from the bursts of cold.
Her eyes fell to my bare legs, trailing up them before stopping on my knee. She reached across the table. I didn’t flinch when she touched me, soft-padded hand running down my horizontal, now-faded scar.
Emery stood abruptly, abandoning her food and crossing the space between us until we were seated together. Her body was thin and delicate, a fawn moving through blades of grass. The cream coating her lips didn’t come to mind when she pressed a soft kiss into my kneecap and sighed.
I couldn’t disguise the smile on my face. I craved chocolate as I said, “I love you.”