We have been drinking cough-syrupy wine that clings to the tongue. Beth calls it hobo wine, and it feels like we are hobos now. Wanderers. Midnight ramblers. I forget everything and think that, hidden up here behind the sparkly granite of a thousand gorges and knobs, I am safe from all hazard. But there is Beth beside me, breathing wildly and talking in ragged lopes that seem to streak around my head, across the sky above us. At some point I stop listening and instead focus on the loveliness of my own white hands, bending and canting them above me, against the black sky. “Do you hear what I’m saying, Addy?” she asks. “You were speaking of dark forces,” I tell her, guessing, because this is usually what Beth is speaking of. “You know who I thought I saw yesterday,” she says, “driving her whorey Kia over by St. Reggie’s?” “Who?” “Casey Jaye. All last summer, cheer buddies in your camp bunk, giggling together in your matching sports bras, and that love knot she gave you.”
