Star Witness

22

JESSE

The world feels turned upside down when I wake up.

The last thing I remember is the stitches in my arm, Tom sitting above me, looking so soft and worried. The swish of his highlighter against his pages. After that, there's nothing. After that, there is only this: darkness, mattress under me, arms wrapped around my middle, and breaths on the back of my head.

I touch the arm thrown over me. Warm, bony. His weight is all pressed into me, chest up against my shoulders. It's a comforting pressure.

Carefully, I reach for my phone. Almost five in the morning. Great.

I try hard to fall back asleep, lulling myself with Tom's strawberry smell and his deep breaths, but it eventually becomes clear that, at least for now, I am awake. So, gingerly, I slip away from him. When I sit up and turn, his sleeping face is the knife to my heart that it usually is, cheek squished up against the pillow. I bundle up some blankets under the arm that was holding me, so he still has something to squeeze. Alice and Mia are sleeping back to back on the floor, pressed close out of necessity.

In the front room, Anaya's passed out on the couch, and when I climb the stairs, Elise's other roommate's bedroom door is closed. That leaves my sister, who I am praying has some kind of fix, because my pockets are entirely empty. Her door is cracked, so I push my way inside. Oddly, the room is vacant, glowing gently from a lamp. "Elise?" I ask the air.

After a moment, her face appears outside the window; she's out on the roof.

"Jesus, kid, what are you doing up?"

"Looking for drugs." I give her a smile. "I slept, like, all day. And, also, I could ask you the same thing."

"Oh, please, my sleep schedule is bonkers. At this point I go with the flow. I set alarms for my work shifts, and other than that, when I'm up, I'm up." She waves a hand. "Come out here and see the sunrise with me."

"Drugs?"

"Sometimes I imagine your brain, and it's those seagulls from Finding Nemo, but instead of saying 'mine' they're saying 'drugs' over and over." She grins, resting her head on the windowsill. "I should have some Kpins in the bedside drawer. The first one. Don't look in the second one, because--"

"Ick, ick, ick." I pull it open as she laughs behind me, and it isn't hard to find her stash, rattling beside her pot; kept separate from the other drawer contents by a shallow tupperware.

Out on the roof, she's smoking her cigarettes. I sit beside her, watching her flick her lighter on and off.

"So what the hell happened, anyway?" she says.

I down a few of the tiny pills. Thinking, of course, of Tom, because I always think of him--it reminds me of how he can swallow seven pills all at once, the cute way he shakes his head while he manages it. I scratch up and down my leg. "I took him to the house. Liam's house."

"Ugh. I hate that fucking place."

"Yeah. I sorta freaked. But he was really good to me."

"He seems good," Elise says around her cigarette. "Seems like he'd take care of you. I used to get this nasty feeling whenever I saw one of Mom's new boyfriends, you know? Like an instinct that he was a freak. But I don't feel that with Tom."

"He is. He is good." I pause. "He takes care of everybody, I think. Before himself."

Elise makes a quiet assenting noise, continuing to mess with her lighter.

"Do you forgive her?" I ask.

The lighter switches off and doesn't come back on.

"I don't care enough about her to forgive her or not forgive her. It doesn't matter."