Avery drummed his fingers against the table while humming a complicated tune. The girl he tried to impress—Lane—stared distantly at his fingers, chewed and raw with dots of blood. “Good,” she shrugged. “That’s really good.”
“Lane. I feel like you weren’t even listening.” Avery knocked his fists against the table, meaning to be funny, but he knocked too hard, and Lane’s glass of water spilled onto the rug beneath their feet. Lane didn’t see the use in chastising him, she knew he’d clean it up. They were close in the sense that they saw each other every day, knew how to tease each other, always rode to school in Avery’s car.
Lane just sighed. “I was listening. I told you it was good. And I think we should head to your recital now, I don’t know if I can handle another suggestive look from your mom.”
“She doesn’t think we’re together, c’mon.”
“I know she doesn’t. She shouldn’t. But I think she’s hoping, and it’s pretty annoying for her to keep shoving you in my direction. ‘Lane, why don’t you go with Avery to his piano recital?’ ‘Lane, I’m going to be out of town this weekend, could you check on Avery for me?’ She acts like you’re five years old, like she thinks I can save you or something, I don’t know. And for what? You’ve even been doing quite well with the ladies!” She nudged him and raised her eyebrows.
Avery didn’t like any of what Lane was saying. His mother was pushing him against her? Mrs. Redmond was a very polite lady, and what bad was it if she was trying to set her son up with someone like Lane? And what did it matter? He was with another girl anyway; they had been going on dates for a few weeks now. I don’t think she’s very nice, Avery. She didn’t even thank me for giving you guys a ride! Why don’t you ask out Lane, she’s such a nice girl…
“Shut up. Let’s go, or I’ll forget the melody you didn’t listen to.”
* * *
Though she acted like he was a bother to her, Lane always looked forward to seeing Avery. She thought he was kind of clunky in spirit—he was always tripping over his words and accidentally admitting to embarrassing truths—but she appreciated how kind he was, appreciated his relentless sincerity. Every morning, he picked her up and took her to school, and when she didn’t feel like being at home (which was often), she went home with him until her father called her, drunk and slurring, demanding her presence. It was weird. She wasn’t sure why he let her go to Avery’s house so often, but maybe her father couldn’t remember how much he loved Lane until he was vomiting on his feet, until his cheeks were burning and his hands were shaking, until he felt the bite of whatever drink he could get, which tended to be vodka.
* * *
Avery was a quiet person, and this made his father very angry. He thought Avery would be better off if he acted more like a man. And when he would ask what that meant, his father would ask him not to give him that liberal mess, that he knew what it meant. They both didn’t like their fathers too much, Lane and Avery. It made them feel connected to each other, though they didn’t like to talk about it. This meant that when their friends would mention their own fathers, Lane would look hard at Avery, and he would nod.
Lane sat in Avery’s dented SUV, her eyes focused on his hands, which were gripping the steering wheel with such force that his knuckles were turning white. “Wait, Avery. Are you nervous? I thought you did these recitals like every week?”
“What makes you think I’m nervous?” He tried to look cool while saying this, turned to Lane as he spoke, shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh my god, Avery, look, the road!”
It was mid-December in North Dakota, their breaths had been visible in the air for two over months now and so the sun was quite desperate to go away for the night, every night. The road was wet and cold, and Avery knew he had to drive slowly, knew how easy it was to swerve, to lose control of the brakes, to lose control of himself.
Avery was swerving in a direction he couldn’t place. Their seat belts tightened, and the back of her head banged against her seat. She screamed and she thought the car’s headlights had begun spinning, as the belt strap squeezed her chest, as Avery’s forehead collided with the steering wheel. Avery thought of nothing important as the car was airborne, thinking only that he’d like to be floating forever. He closed his eyes, had let go of the wheel, felt Lane’s screaming making his ears vibrate. Once the car hit the ground, Avery thought about how angry his father would be with him, and the last thing he remembered was seeing blood on his hands and wondering who it belonged to.
* * *
When Lane yelled about the road, she just meant for Avery to stop looking at her, there was nothing actually dangerous that she could see. She got tight about things like that, reprimanded her friends for taking calls when they drove, for checking their phones at a stoplight. “Don’t do that around me,” she’d say, smiling, and would snatch the distractions from their fingers. Her friends knew how much she meant it, knew that she’d likened the distractions in their hands to the bitter huffing of her father, who hadn’t his license anymore.
But nothing bad had happened before, and though the people around her never said it, they felt that she worried too much, got a little offended at the possibility that she thought them as careless as her father. And Lane knew that she talked about her father too much, knew he permeated her life in a way that wasn’t normal, debilitated her and forced her into a permanence of anxiety. But what else could she do but spend her time in the preventative, hoping that her words would have some life-changing impact, wishing to mean a little bit more to the world than she knew she did?
Lane was conscious in the ditch, knew the blood spreading across the car’s twenty-year-old fabric was hers, rushing from a gash in her stomach. Lane turned to her left and thought Avery was conked out in his seat, his glasses had broken, and his face was puffed and tender. Though she figured he wouldn’t answer, she called his name, felt a pulsing ache in her head. She couldn’t feel her legs, save for the common sensation of pins and needles. Avery groaned in response, startling Lane, and sending her into a fit of tears.
“Avery, I can’t feel anything. Nothing even hurts, I’m so scared.”
She fumbled for the seat belt and unbuckled it, letting her body fall forward onto the dash. Her hair stuck to her sweat and tears, and she wondered for a moment if she still looked alive. She thought about what Avery might think of her when he woke up, if he would blame her, if he would be angry, if he would be repulsed by the sight of her. She tried to breathe, sucking cold air through her teeth, making herself shiver and gasp. But the weight of it all hit her, held her down, and she wondered how she’d ever breathed before. Never like this, with her exhales hitting her face in blasts of hot fog, baptizing her, making her feel reborn under a god she hadn’t realized she was wishing for.
“I am the air. I am the air, I am the air.” She tried to assure herself that it all wasn’t happening, that her body, which seemed to be useless, whose adrenaline was taking her away from herself, was not real. She hoped that she truly was the air, that Avery wasn’t wet with drool and his hands weren’t rogue with her blood, that the world wasn’t spinning, spinning, spinning.
