That was what Dan never understood: Liss needed Johnny, and Dan didn’t.
Thinking about Johnny, before they were together and he was just the object of Dan’s crush, made Liss feel empty and starved. She’d barely known him then, but she knew he had something that would satisfy that feeling. She tasted it when she first caught him in the hall at school looking at her instead of Dan, when she read the captions of the pictures he posted, when he held the door for her once as she dashed across the parking lot and out of the rain. Out of all these little pieces of Johnny’s attention, she was convinced that she could assemble something like happiness. And it would be better than it had been with boys in the past, who’d failed to stop that same hunger, because Dan had seen something in Johnny too. She liked him too, and Dan rarely had crushes.
When you felt that kind of hunger, you couldn’t just sit there and do nothing about it.
Liss hadn’t.
Had it been worth it?
Johnny did make Liss some kind of happy, with the moony look he got when he told her how pretty she was and how he always asked permission before he kissed her and the way he’d smile that lazy, lucky smile at her when they were pressed skin to skin in the back seat of his car. She knew he loved her; he had to.
Liss clenched her teeth remembering how she always wanted more from him. The hunger never really stopped, sometimes even got worse, as if he was teasing her with satisfaction just out of reach.
When she tried to talk to him about how her parents were fighting or how she worried that she’d never get her SAT scores where they needed to be, Johnny would mumble “Don’t be stupid,” then pull her in for a kiss or start packing a bowl. Every time he responded to one of her texts with haha nice, she felt desperate and miserable. One night she’d had to check that every light in her house was off, that the stove was off, and that her curling iron was unplugged so many times that she was an hour late to meet him and they’d had to catch the next showing of the movie. She could barely focus on the screen, her every muscle tense and the acid of anxiety moving through her guts, and he’d never asked her what was wrong, never noticed that she felt like she’d been twisted into a pathetic knot, tied so tight she could barely breathe. But then they’d parked the car in the empty high school parking lot and taken off their clothes. The way he looked at her, shamelessly wanting her, made Liss feel very far away from herself, from the Liss who was anxious and real. She could let herself be the Liss that Johnny was looking at, and it made her feel good enough that she unraveled around him. It never lasted as long as she wanted.
She had told Dan that she loved him, and magic had proved it wasn’t a lie. Right before Johnny was taken, things had been changing between them for the better. He had been so sweet to her on Valentine’s Day, she’d nearly cried for real. He drove her all the way to Santa Rosa, where they had dinner in an Italian restaurant with candles on the tables and walked around the downtown eating ice cream and made out frantically in the middle of a park, high on the idea that they didn’t know anyone there, not like in North Coast where anyone passing by could be a friend of your parents or your elementary school teacher. On the way home, she fell asleep in the passenger seat holding his hand.
Then two weeks later he was stolen from her by something that wasn’t even human, and Liss was left wondering what they might have been—if their love could have fixed her, or if she would have given him permission to kiss her, then let him go.
FOUR
Dan
One thing about running at night in North Coast was that the road unspooled obsidian and silky before you, more and more of it around each turn, and you could smell the salt the wind carried off the black ocean—you could lick that salt off your upper lip, where it mixed with your sweat.
This was the second thing about running at night in North Coast: it wasn’t safe. The roads weren’t made for it, all blind turns and soft shoulders that fell off into the sea or cut into the cliffs so there were only a few spare inches where Dan’s feet found the tarmac. The streetlights were few and far between, and Dan didn’t have a headlamp as some other runners did, so if she ran on the coast side, there were places where she knew she risked slipping in the roadside gravel and over the edge into the nothingness below. She’d leave no trace—no one knew where she was, where she was going, and this struck her as dangerous.
After Liss stormed out, Dan felt wild and small, so after dinner she’d pulled on her running shoes. As usual, her mom didn’t ask where she was going and Dan never offered up the information. If her dad had been home, he might have called out “Be safe” from his spot on the couch, and Graciela would have swatted at him with her pottery magazine. Graciela believed that safety was the enemy of experience, that girls were told too often to be safe and boys were told too rarely. “I’d rather you be strong than safe,” she always told Dan. But Dan’s father wasn’t in front of the TV because he was driving back from a job somewhere inland, so Dan left her mother engrossed in a complicated crochet project in the incense-smogged living room.
Dan pushed herself further into the darkness: the wicked beat of IronWeaks blaring in her ears, the wind stinging her eyes, her chest tightening around each breath as it fought to get away.
She’d begun running only a few months earlier. When school started, without Liss, Dan barely spoke to anyone. It wasn’t exactly difficult—she’d been spending all her time with Liss for so long that the kids she’d grown up with hardly seemed to remember her. She didn’t want them to. She had changed, and explaining how felt impossible and terrible, an effort that could only end in them seeing her for the worthless, destructive thing she’d become. She joined the cross-country team because she’d heard long-distance running was a solitary sport, but then quit when the coach emphasized the team dynamic and suggested running with music wasn’t allowed in competition.
So now she ran alone, the cold mist of the fog chilling her skin while her muscles blazed with pain.
That was the point of running: that if you pushed yourself hard enough, it hurt, and if it hurt enough, you could give all your thoughts over to that pain. The same way, alone in her room at night, she dug long scratches into her thigh where no one would see them and listened to IronWeaks loud enough to damage her hearing. If it hurt enough, it satisfied that empty thing inside you enough so you could have a little peace.
The relief was only temporary. The punishment never truly erased the crime. The guilt was always there. It filled her, sluggish and thick, as if were she cut, she’d bleed something black and putrid—although repeated experience demonstrated this wasn’t true. The guilt always came back just as savage.
But tonight, although she was running harder than usual and her quads already felt filled with liquid fire, her mind wouldn’t quiet. She felt Johnny’s name in the rhythm of her stride; she heard the whisper of Liss’s name with each of her breaths.