Star Witness

5

JESSE

I wake up with a Joan Baez song stuck in my head and a familiar turning in my stomach.

The bed I'm in smells sweet. I turn my head, and the room's dim, but I can tell that Tomás is beside me, albeit facing away. He's fast asleep on his belly, sharp shoulder blades making peaks through the fabric of his hoodie.

I sit up, pressing my knuckles to my mouth like blunt force will be able to keep the inevitable vomit back. Really, what song is this? Something about a highway. One of my favorites to sing for the way your voice soars over the notes, always lands on its feet. I scramble past Tomás out of bed.

The bathroom is easy to find, since this is the same layout as Daniel's house. I slide down in front of the toilet practically like a baseball player, just in time to aim into it.

Some shadow falls across me. Fernando. "Dude, are you good? Whoa, it's purple!"

Tomás's brother is promptly dragged away, and a different person kneels down beside me. I glance over, retching, and see, humiliatingly, a woman who looks enough like Tomás to reasonably be his mother. One of them? Lesbians. God, what is this song?

"Are you okay?" she says, much more soothing than Fernando, but still all business.

I'm still too busy dry heaving to give much of an answer, and I hear another woman's voice. Cough syrup, it says, and you think we need to call someone?

In pieces, like they do, the night comes back to me. The party and the lights, the styrofoam cups, the lean. I feel like a shooting star, and all night my spit tastes sweet. Nico, Nico's car, Nico's anger, the ground. And then Tomás.

I lean back, gasping for air, but clear-headed now, at least.

His moms help me up; I shake off the touch as soon as I can. Tomás's siblings peek at us, and after a moment, he himself comes stumbling into the hallway, coughing, rubbing his face with the heel of his hand. "What's going on?" he says.

"I should go," I say.

"Do you think you feel like eating?" says the mom who doesn't look like Tomás, gently.

I do, actually. I haven't eaten since probably yesterday morning. "Well, I mean, I can eat at home."

"What will you eat at home?"

I stare at her.

"Stay." She heads for the kitchen, and Tomás's sister offers me a smile, which gives me the courage to follow them. In the distance, I hear him coughing. Rake and Rambling Boy. That's the song. My throat itches to sing it; sometimes I feel twitchy until I can sing, especially until I can repeat something stuck in my head.

Tomás appears, flushed from hacking and stupidly pretty for somebody who just woke up. He sits at the table with me and sets a couple little desert marigolds onto the table. "Dropped your flowers in the bathroom," he says, voice rough, and then coughs a few more times. It is frightful coughing, wet and thick and so hard his body jolts.

"Oh. Sorry."

He smiles at me, nose scrunching, then sobers. "You sure you're okay?"

Before I can answer, his mom announces that we can serve ourselves. Tomás's sister and brother already have plates on the table--clearly they were in the middle of eating.

The mom that looks like Tomás (it's actually kind of freaky how much she looks like him) appears in the kitchen. "Nebs," she says to him. "Don't forget just because we have a prisoner."