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Oct 24, 2015

Loop de Froot

for: Christina || @studdedbraids @cuddlingdirection by: ali || @cowlek summary: Harry is a little bit homesick and thinking of someone else and on the road. word count: 5697 warnings: drinking, language, sexual references main pairing: Harry/OFC

To start with on that morning, I had a dinosaur face, some stroppy boots, an empty bowl and:

“Why…? Why did you do it?”

My hands trembled. I was overreacting, you know. Except she was, too, as she was already grinning and shaking her head and condolences… condolences. Her bowl was full. Mine was empty.

“You’re ridiculous,” she said. She giggled when she did it, and that is what really did it.

“Gimme yours.”

“No.”

“I don’t—just… why this?”

As if there had never been anything more terrible. She was overreacting; so was I. That’s all I thought.

She’d flooded the dining hall of the Best Western with breakfast. My hand shook, my bowl shook, my mouth shook; it crossed my mind that I might really be about to cry. A massive frenzy of kiddish hotel staff surrounded me, all of them wanting to sweep away breakfast before actual color buried forever in close-cropped cream carpet.

“It just broke,” she insisted. “I was using it, and it broke; why d’you have to look like that for?”

“…Why’d you have to break it for?”

“Quit pouting.” She pointed with her thumb over her shoulder. “Just get another kind.”

Her “another kind” are Kashi Seven Grains of Hell and Cran Bran Grapeseed extract grandparent’s deepest recesses of cupboard right next to expired Nesquik.

“We’re shooting for seven,” Liam crunched up, right next to the catastrophe. Honeycomb.

“Y’all right?” Louis asked, pouring out the last travel-sized Applejacks box (he took the two remaining ones.)

She was off with Tabby, and Tabby had the bit of Honeycomb that Liam left. The real dusty, broken powdery refuse.

My breakfast, my Froot Loops, they were beneath our feet. And she didn’t even act like it was an accident.

Because it wasn’t.

So I wouldn’t leave her alone.

“Why didn’t you get any of the Raisin Bran?”

“Because it tastes gross,” she said.

“Then why d’you think I want it?”

“‘Cause you’re gross.”

She took a humongous bite out of my Froot Loops. She ate it with her mouth wide open, spewing radioactive rainbow all my way.

+++

Not only was it so dry out there that you had to slather chapstick over your entire face, about a tube a day, but I don’t know who decided to let Tabby drive, and we were probably all going to die because of it.

The AC broke, or else it just never worked, and the last banana at the continental breakfast had already been opened at the top and left sitting for hours or days.

“Y’think we could stop at the next place?” I asked. “Someplace with a drive-through.”

“We just had breakfast,” Tabby replied, swerving an imaginary pothole, throwing everyone against my side. And all of her hair.

Oh, gosh… Her hair was all over. All over my legs, all over the floor. It was in my mouth. It dripped onto the roof. It was in Liam’s hands because he likes giving her braids. Louis painted her toenails. She was all over me because “she can’t lay down sitting up” or something else that doesn’t make any sense. Her lips were flaky as she was, probably. Probably flakier.

Gross. I reapplied some chapstick.

“I didn’t have anything to eat,” I said.

Tabby laughed at me.

“Why didn’t you eat anything?” Liam asked. He took some more hair off my lap and started another braid.

“‘Cause I broke the Froot Loops,” she said, and she smacked Louis in the face with her blue foot when she did. It was some color you might call turquoise, I guess, but there was something too off about it to have a real name, really.

Liam laughed at me and Louis wiped nail polish off his face.

We did go through this one place that cracked me up, good thing. There was a total of about four signs in the entire town, and one of them was this Dairy Queen that stuck off about a mile high. It was at least twice as tall as all the rest of the signs in that place. I laughed four miles straight, decided the Dairy Queen was actually four miles high. No one else got it, as always. I’d like to think you probably would have.

By noontime, Tabby pulled over so Louis could have a wee. Liam went ahead and had a wee right next to him; Louis warned him not to cross the streams.

Tabby wasted more car battery by not turning off her music, she went off to smoke or something else unhealthy, and, inspired by her unhealthy habits, I had a bit of a jog. I tried to do that more, and anyway, it was really nice out by that side of the road: we parked right in the middle of a wheatfield that must’ve gone on for a hundred acres (we were stuck driving through it for half the year. Actually, an entire year because the seasons did cycle though four complete changes.)

It was windy like it always is out there. It had to be Idaho because it’s the flattest most vegetable-ridden place in the world. But the dirt was all red, so it could’ve been Arizona. The wind blew all the time, and with the windows down and it hitting your face, your skin goes all rough and almost flaky as your lips.

I stopped the jog for more chapstick.

It was windy like that in Texas. Then we get to some mountains in the distance, things go all green and flowing and smells like alfalfa and it rains, so it has to be Utah (not the salt flats parts; the green parts.)

Or it could just be a desert; that’s the pointy end of Nevada. Pointy places are often hot, we all know.

Tabby liked listening to gospel and Johnny Cash singing gospel, making the summer even hotter. She had a beer when she was driving, sometimes, and she’d always look at all the rest of us and say, “Now, this that I’m doing right now is something you probably shouldn’t do.”

Letting her drive was a better idea than Liam.

Liam drove us once. Right into the parking lot of a hospital.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

“What?” she asked.

“I thought those big blue ‘H’ signs meant ‘Highways.’”

“Hospitals,” Tabby said.

“Hospitals, yeah.”

He spun the wheel and backed us out of the parking lot. There was a lot of graveyard right across the street, and she pointed that out:

“Nice,” she said. “Imagine being able to look right out your window and say ‘won’t be long now.’”

“Let’s get out,” Tabby suggested. “Have a walk.”

Liam always did what Tabby wanted, so he got us around to the graveyard so we could have a walk.

I didn’t mind a nice graveyard; I don’t think you’d think that was morbid. I don’t find them poetic, or anything, just that they have this quiet that you can’t find anywhere else.

This graveyard had quiet, but it was a quiet desolation, the type you have to be very careful with because it’s very depressing. I knew it before we even had that stupid walk, before we got out of the car. It had one of those chain link fences around the whole thing, and the new side was still all green with new flowers, the edge where the ground’s too soft for tombstones so they have wooden crosses.

The older side had all the dead grass, and the oldest side had nothing but dirt. Not red dirt; pale orange. It was windy, always chapstick weather, very hot, but it felt like fall in the afternoon. I hated it and I wanted to leave.

We heard some kids in nice black clothes playing on all the headstones when we walked through, commenting on who died too young. There was a kid’s grave who was twenty-one, except he’d been in the ground for close to two years. His headstone had some broken pinwheels, some of those Mardi Gras beads, some of those fabric flowers with most of the petals gone and mostly just plastic stems leftover.

She had some change, and his headstone was the type that lay flat in the ground. She put down two dimes with a penny. Tabby was drinking another beer.

There was a funeral there, over on the new side; that’s where all the nicely-dressed kids came from, at a respectful distance. The kid had been in his late teens. You could tell because there were about a million people all around, and all their cars were over on the other side parked in a line down the chain link fence. He was a football player, and he’d been away at college on a full-ride scholarship. When he died, they brought him back to this place to put him in the ground.

I kept wondering if everyone standing around and mourning kept looking at the old ratty side and thinking about when this kid’s gravesite would look like that. The other boy had no more than two years, probably less.

Tabby left her empty bottle on someone else dead. She went to the football kid’s funeral.

I believed the entire town to be there. Most of them were finished crying from the slideshow that’d been too short. I didn’t want to go, but I ended up standing next to this blonde, blue-eyed kid off by himself. Because I was trying to keep off by myself, not belonging to this funeral, and this kid was trying to keep off by himself, too.

He was scrawny in hand-me-downs, too old to bawl his eyes out, too young to cry without feeling weak. You could tell how bad he wanted to cry, but he wouldn’t do it.

I ended up standing next to her by the end.

So we never let Liam drive.

+++

There were a lot of broken playgrounds you could see from every part of highway. I guess the people never had kids of their own.

Liam drank his Coke through an apple sour straw from the millionth gas station we’d been through. I bought some chapstick and some scrunchies; the windows down always made me want to shave my head, so I just started pulling it back instead.

Liam didn’t get carsick, so he read a lot of gas station novels when we drove. That he could read surprised me. That he could read in the backseat was weird.

Tabby drove, and she was back in the front seat with her feet up on the dash. Her not-so-turquoise nail polish chipped real fast because she never wore shoes anywhere. I wished Louis would paint over it again, just because it was that annoying, but he was sleeping.

All over me, so even if I wanted to do some cartime activity, I couldn’t.

It was hard to look out the window when I kept looking at her chipped nail polish.

The car growled. Tabby looked at the dash, and she removed her feet from the passenger side.

I put my hand on the side of Louis’s head, Liam stopped slurping, and we all waited. Tabby kept driving while she waited, even when the power steering cut off.

She’s the one who posed the question, “Should you stop?”

“We might not start,” Tabby said.

“Might not—”

The car lurched before I could finish what I didn’t even know I was about to say, and you could already tell it’d died, but we still wheeled on for a bit before coming to an absolute, silent halt in the middle of another heatwave. We were the silent part; the heatwave was riddled with droning bees.

We all just sat, because as you know, that takes a little while to sink in. There were locusts, a scanty breeze, a lot of stillness from us. Tabby couldn’t believe it, and she peeled sticky hands off the steering wheel.

“Fuck me sideways,” she declared.

Liam looked too thoughtful about that. He had a lollipop that he unwrapped and stuck in his mouth. All the better to stare at the car roof, fabric pulling off and full of tears.

Louis woke up, blinked and got off my lap that had gone so far to sleep it’d probably be numb forever.

In the midst of everything, I found myself staring at her. She found herself staring back at me, and it was an accident on both accounts. We were in the middle of a calamity, is all, so we looked naturally to the nearest living calamity.

“Get out and push,” Louis told me.

“Get out and push,” Tabby told him.

Tabby steered us down a straight road; me and her and Liam and Louis all pushed the back.

It was hot and delirious.

“Ice Cream Mountain,” Liam panted. “Just ahead. Thirty-one different flavors, woo whee-e-e-e.”

He threw his head back with enough hair for a Diet Coke commercial. Wet enough, too.

Louis peered around towards the front of the car. “With the gummy bears, the Oreos and the Turtle Magical Shell that magically freezes in seconds?”

“Yes, Louis, yes!”

Louis started jogging; we all had to push harder to catch up.

“I smell a lemon hazelnut mint up there,” he called. “Covered in hot fudge and mm’s. Also, a maraschino cherry, or a dozen, dripping off the top, eh.”

I was about to tell them both to knock it off, how it was bad enough with all of us melting, but then I took a good look around the front of Tabby’s car and discovered they were both absolutely right about Ice Cream Mountain.

“Slow down, Louis!” she yelled over the wheedling axels. “The rest of us can’t keep up!”

Louis started to push the car without us. He left us in the dust, actually, and I stopped and stared at the Ice Cream Mountain, Mount Vesuvius herself, that he and Tabby went hurtling towards. The base was mostly lemon, because everyone knows the color yellow is always best for bases, with the vanillas and chocolates near the middle. Rocky Road lived on the top because, scientifically, marshmallows are mostly air.

It took us a fair while to catch up to Louis and Tabby down the road. When we finally did, they’d made it to the nearest home and talked to another boy in a white t-shirt, blue jeans and bare feet.

Louis had some blueberry, birthday cake and coffee shavings from the Ice Cream Mountain, all of it covered with some crackly bits. He wouldn’t share with anyone.

When the three of us finally made it, dusty and with blisters, Tabby said, “Zayn’s a mechanic and he can fix our car.”

“I’d say more ‘machinist’ than mechanic,” Zayn laughed. Zayn laughed everything he ever said. He had a permanent smile, one where his eyes were always squinty at the very corners. He thought everything was funny, our situation, especially.

“What’s wrong with it?” she asked.

I hate to say that me and her were probably the only two who weren’t so trusting of Zayn.

It turned out Zayn already had us beat.

“Serpentine belt,” he laughed. “S’gone all crooked. Gotta restring one.”

“That doesn’t sound like it’ll take long,” I said.

“It won’t! Supper’ll take longer, so y’all won’t be out of here ‘til morning.”

Zayn led us up the driveway. The house he lived at was very saggy because it had to hold up the red sky, or because Zayn had thirteen younger brothers and sisters that stomped on all the floors. I think all of them might’ve been there, but I can’t count that fast and they were always in and out and everywhere so I probably counted them up wrong.

Zayn had the car already in the barn. He fixed the serpentine belt in eight minutes. Tabby watched him with both breasts propped up on the side way, and that probably added on six minutes when Zayn could’ve been done in two. He looked over and laughed. He had a single pin-up in his barn, some redhead; me and Liam went over to check.

Liam went back to stare at Tabby and her breasts with Zayn.

She was off looking at one of Liam’s books. She was looking because she didn’t read anything; she never read anything. She thought everything was boring, me especially, and she looked me over just like she looked over Liam’s book he got for fifty cents in a gas station.

I don’t think there were many more things that’ll make you feel worse than that.

Zayn was busy laughing at Tabby’s antics when we all got called to eat supper. When we left, he said it was hard to live in a town this small because everyone might be his cousin.

Up on the hill, there were five tables all pushed together and a kids’ table by itself off to the side. We used plastic trays. Everyone fought over a single blue one the color of her nail polish, and we ate catfish. One catfish, I think; it was just whale-sized. Zayn’s dad used the bathtub to fry it.

When it started to rain, we had a waterfight right next to the creek where Zayn lived. Me and her were on the same team, and we worked to fill one thousand water grenades.

(She couldn’t tie balloons very well, so she did the filling and I did the tying.)

Our team huddled up. We came up with a terrific plan. She looked at me, I looked at her, and we knew we were both of the same mind: Liam had to pay, and Louis was going to lose.

I climbed a tree for the best vantage and she stayed nearby to cover the rear ground. No one and nothing would get past us. It was so perfect that the rain didn’t even get past us; it was all stuck on their side, and the creek kept rising.

A perfect water grenade arced out of my hand and burst over her head.

She looked up in my tree, glared, screamed, “We’re on the same team!”

I laughed too hard that I fell out of the tree, and probably should have died, as it was very tall. But it was so tall that the clouds cushioned on the way down on what would have been a fatal impact.

“Where’s Tabby?” Liam asked after the waterfight.

“Where’s Zayn?” she retorted.

Where were Tabby’s glasses?

I found them off on one of the tables; she never sees straight when she does that stuff. I handed them off to Liam for safekeeping.

It was still raining when we returned to the barn to sleep (no sign of Zayn or Tabby.) Louis and Liam climbed up into the hayloft and fell asleep.

I stayed on the ground with her, just in case Tabby thought it’d be all right to slink in like we wouldn’t see her, or something.

“Tabby could’ve asked me along,” she grumbled.

“S’long as I got to go, too,” I said.

“‘Stead I was getting beaned over the head with a water balloon.”

“It was better that what you missed out on.”

She snorted.

I scratched the back of my head.

She laughed.

I looked at her.

She raised an eyebrow and crawled over to me. On the way, she seduced me with her crawl, and then she shoved me back up against the wall. The seduction hazed me, I’m pretty sure, because she made me kiss her first. She grabbed handfuls of my very wet shirt and pulled it up right over the collar. She just left her hands there clinging on the entire while. That’s what I thought about the most.

Also that she overreacted again, but that wasn’t any of my business.

+++

We all waited outside the barn in the morning. Louis brushed all the hay off from his hair, and Zayn and Tabby giggled out from the woods near the hill near his house. Zayn had his hands behind his neck and stumbled, and Tabby went up to Liam, who handed off her glasses without saying anything.

It rained nearly forty days and forty nights, and we could only drive the highest hills. Everywhere you looked was an alligator-filled swamp, cattails to the horizon so you felt in the middle of an ocean, treading water until you drowned.

(At Zayn’s place, the creek flooded up, and all Zayn’s chickens (the eighteen of them) floated up to the house on the hill, bobbing like ducks. The dogs all made it on a raft made of barrels, and the shoats found safety on the roof, best place for rain. He wrote all that to Tabby in a postcard.)

A lot of it was fast, stuff you missed and couldn’t look out the window to catch. Sometimes it took a thousand years to get through a hundred-mile stretch where nothing grew, or a hundred-mile stretch where everything grew: farms, with all their sprinklers.

It got to be a really long time when Liam and Louis started bickering, just stupid stuff about who has their leg in Liam’s space, or that Louis sleeps too much and snores too loud and never even offers to drive, even though Tabby does all the driving. Zayn kept sending her postcards that smiled. They’d fly right in through the window, even if Liam tried to shove them back before she saw. There were twenty all along the dash of the car; she always had to show off like that.

Sometimes I ended up thinking about her, and that wasn’t good. I shouldn’t have thrown the grenade, is what I thought most of the time. Most of the rest of the time I thought, sadly, that it should be disgusting.

The rest of the time leftover that I thought, I think I liked it.

Then I got back to thinking about how you shouldn’t attack your own teammates.

Then I thought it wasn’t that disgusting. Sadly.

I thought if she hadn’t broken the Froot Loop dispenser, this wouldn’t have happened.

She kept smirking at me. She always sat in the front seat, just so she could turn around to do it, and it was more annoying that way. I glared back. She laughed at me. She always laughed at me.

Liam would get pissy and start complaining about Louis sleeping on his lap, and Louis would pretend to be asleep. And the thing kept repeating, and the rows of cotton kept repeating, and the only thing I wanted a repeat was barn night when she kissed me up against the wall.

+++

We drove for too long, when it feels like you might end up just falling asleep forever instead. It’s when it’s time to go back home, when the air tastes recycled and your eyes are burned. There was that part where you think you wanted to go back home, always right when you started. Then it would go away in a few days, and stay gone.

But when it came back and made you feel tired and your throat feel sore, then it really was time to go home.

And it was always when you were farthest from home that you realized you wanted to be back at it the most.

Louis was talking about his hammock when we went out to see the Ground Squirrel Paradise. Ground Squirrel Paradise is a bit of dirt surrounded by a brick wall, three feet high, and our shadows stretched out so far that it looked like Mars.

She paid the quarter for ten-minutes of binoculars.

“Come look,” she said, and everyone else could even tell it was directed towards me.

That was really something, because Louis tried to blow bubbles out of the pink bubblegum and Liam tore in half more of those postcards he found and Tabby cleaned her glasses.

I went to the binoculars.

“Put your hands on my shoulders,” she said.

I did. Standing up on the little metal steps, she was taller than me.

“Nice?” she asked.

“Yes.”

It was so nice that I put my hands on her waist instead, and she didn’t mind. She had a really nice waist. I liked the way my hands fit over it.

Her foot scratched off in the dust and we sailed; she was the lookout because she had the binoculars. I steered wherever she told us to go.

“Wanna see?” she asked. She angled the binoculars down so I could take a look.

I saw Liam get his foot stuck in a Ground Squirrel burrow, and Tabby had to help him remove it. There was a herd of antelope, or some aliens, in the very distance in front of the moon.

I swung the binoculars out left and found a crumbling amusement park with a rollercoaster made all of wood, and Louis went climbing up the side to slide down the biggest drop.

I gave her back the binoculars so she could see, too.

When the four of us rallied at the bottom of the roller coaster, Louis roller-skated down the big hill, flipped off the next hill, and landed far enough that he found a ragged sheet of cardboard near the bagatelle. We all climbed to the very top to slide down on the cardboard. It was so high up there that we sledded through some snow, and the ice over the tracks made us slide even faster.

Louis clung onto Tabby who clung onto Liam who clung onto her who clung onto me, and aside from being about to die, it was completely wonderful.

There was a snowdrift at the very bottom that saved all of our lives. I think some of the marshmallows from Liam’s Ice Cream Mountain fell all the way down with us, because the snow tasted very nice.

Or she crashed into me at the bottom, and that might’ve been it. Also, I might’ve kissed her. In the hair, on accident, unnoticed, because of the natural draw of calamity or because we didn’t die at the bottom.

+++

There was one other time you should’ve been there (we missed you the most, and you should’ve been there for all of it.)

It started just like any other of those middle-of-the-desert-floods you’ve heard so much about, with a purple sky, smell of hot asphalt and a dozen raindrops. It looked like Zayn’s rain finally caught up to us; I suspected the postcards left a trail easy to follow.

Tabby kept going. Liam sat in the front seat with his ankle wrapped; he had to keep it elevated. Louis kept me and her on our own sides in the backseat, and I looked out the window. It was another cornfield, eight feet high and pure gold. Also, I think we might’ve been lost, and when it started to rain, we all had to roll up the windows.

The first rain cleared all the locusts off the windshield. Tabby kept driving into it, and it kept getting worse until not just the locusts were going but the moths and butterflies and the rest of the car’s paint, too.

Tabby had to pull off to the side of the road because you couldn’t see anything anymore. Liam turned on the heater, and we all just sat and waited. Louis laid down and played tic-tac-toe by himself on my leg. It was cold, even with the heater on, but none of us had coats because it was summer.

“I think I forgot something,” she said, and opened her door.

She got out of the car, pulled all her hair out of her eyes, and walked away into the cornfield.

We all watched her go, waiting for the storm to pass. Except it got very itchy.

“Be back,” I said.

When I did step out, the water came up to my knees. I waded through everything, past the postcards, swirling broken pinwheels and cheap beads. I used an uprooted “H” sign as a raft, the plastic stem from a fabric flower as an oar. I saved any of the Ground Squirrels that I found and had forty-eight the last time I counted.

Last of all were the Froot Loops, and I had to sift through them to clear a path through the cornfield to find her.

I docked the sign where her place was that she waited. It was the calmest there because she was the eye of the storm, but it was something else, too.

I don’t know what else, just that everything about it was going backwards and she was the only thing going forwards; I think you’d know what I was talking about. The rain quit falling down and went back up into the sky. All the husks and silk and tassels all over the ground, I watched them swirl up, right back to the stalks. The corn wrapped itself away, pretty and neat, and the stalks all turned from gold to green, grew down and disappeared beneath the soil.

They were all throbbing, and I was, too. I was the most. And with everything floating away, I thought I would, too, and I grabbed onto her so at least we’d fly away to the same place.

But I was backwards as everything else, so when I went to grab her, I started to float away just like the rain, and she had to grab onto me. She grabbed onto me with both hands, and I grabbed onto her wrists just in case she decided to let me go, in case she was still mad about the water grenade because we were on the same team.

She still had the mark, and her hair was still wet, too.

Soon as the thought occurred to me, I put on some more chapstick.

“Take your hair down!” she said.

I did still have it up because the windows were always down, I remembered. When I took it down, it was almost as long as hers, but not too close. I showed her my tattoo; she had one that matched that I never knew about.

“Did you know?” I asked.

“I had an idea, yeah.”

The rain stopped.

“You shouldn’t have hit me,” she said. “We were on the same team.”

I held out my hand so she could take it, if she wanted. I was more nervous than I was when she kissed me in the barn.

“Everyone else is a few miles back,” I said. “I had to row a boat to get here.”

She made us some rainhats out of cornhusks. Cornhusks slough water very well.

And she made me wait a hundred years before she grabbed my hand. The rain washed away almost everything on the way back, but it made all the little green buds grow back, too, and by the time we made it back to the car, everything was so tall I had to hold all the whippy crawlers out of the way and she had to hack through the rest of it with a machete.

Consequently, we were forced to let go hands, and in her own typically selfish way, she kept little bits and pieces that I felt were missing like big, gaping caverns housing bats and echoes. She smirked at me every time, too and kept her hand in a fist that she waved like she kept telling me “hello.”

She was just bragging.

I held back the last creeper for her before we made it out to the road. We took off the cornhusk rainhats and she handed Tabby some corn whiskey. Tabby handed her beer off to Liam, who kept the bottle to use as a vase for flowers.

Louis had gone to sleep out in the middle of the road, basking in the evening orange sun.

When she grabbed my hand, I felt those all those little cavernous bits and pieces fitting back in, and I could breathe again. I never realized how easy it was to do everything one-handed until someone held my other one.

“Back?” Tabby sighed.

“Where are we?” Louis moaned.

“Good point.”

Tabby laid out next to him. Liam hobbled over, one-footed, and did the same.

“M’all sticky,” Louis said.

It was very hot.

Me and her sat down with the other three. Highways look a lot bigger when you’re sitting out on them. I couldn’t even see the edges, and the stripes were tall as me. It was very hot on the pavement. The mist steamed over us all like a batch of dumplings, and Liam did have some, thankfully, because we were all very hungry.

Like that movie you liked (that I really didn’t) we should’ve driven off into the sunset, and for you, I guess, that’s as good an ending as any.

It ended up with us not really going anywhere at all. We stayed on the highway all night. The rain had just moved the cornfield up into the sky over us, all out of stars. Me and her were glad it hadn’t been washed away, and we explained to Liam and Tabby and Louis that that’s where the cornfield had all gone. You could hear the keys ring even from the ground, like campanelli, like every star was a little to drink.

Tabby fell asleep; whiskey will do that. The rest of us were reluctant to let Liam take the wheel, so we stayed out for several years’ worth of nights until Tabby could sleep it off.

Louis slept with his head on my leg. Her hair flew out in the night breeze, and I put my head on her. She held our hands curled over her chest with the pinkies hooked.

I realized I felt very happy.

You take someone not going anywhere, and it was still a very disruptive thing to turn the one letter “m” upside-down. A “me” into “we.” But I liked it, and I didn’t miss anyone.

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