She sneezed, then, loud and wet spray, and Spyder wrapped the sleeping bag around them both. It smelled only slightly less than Spyder herself, but the hoarded body heat, the shelter from a thousand drafts, was almost irresistible. And the snow was coming down harder, if there’d been any change at all in the storm in the last hour. Clumpy white flakes pelting the window, reducing the view of the building next door, grainy brickwork and fire-escape zigzag.
Niki yawned, growing even groggier in the sudden warmth.
“Sleepy?” Spyder asked, and Niki thought maybe she heard disappointment, disappointment or guarded alarm.
Niki shook her head, no, not at all, but then she yawned again.
“Maybe just a little,” she said, and “You too?”
“No. I can’t sleep without my meds.”
Something else Niki wouldn’t ask about, not now, better to watch the snow, wait and see if perhaps things would explain themselves further along.
“I didn’t know I wouldn’t be going home tonight,” Spyder said.
Niki nodded, looked over at Keith and Daria, twined in each other’s arms and legs, Mort alone.
“Hell’s slumber party,” she said.
“Yeah,” and Spyder shut her eyes a moment, opened them very slowly, a drawn out, predatory blink.
And through her weariness, Niki was amazed that she felt this comfortable so close to Spyder, someone she’d never even seen just a few hours earlier. More than an absence of discomfort, the pit-of-her-stomach homesickness all but faded away, the dread gone with it, mostly. She felt something like safe, something like peace. And she thought again about whatever they’d exchanged in the parking lot, whatever she might have imagined they’d exchanged; frightened at the possibility of it having been real, cautioning herself that it might have been nothing at all. Contradiction all around.
“You must be pretty pissed,” she said, praying her voice wouldn’t break the spell, the calm inside. “Your friends running out on you that way.”
Spyder closed her eyes again, and Niki marveled at her eyelashes, so black after her white hair, long and delicate. Spyder frowned, eyes still closed.
“That was just Byron,” she said, and Niki remembered the terrified face behind the wheel of the Toyota, the boy in his velvet frock coat that she’d watched across Dr. Jekyll’s. “He does that kinda shit. It doesn’t mean anything,” so much stress on that last part before she opened her eyes again. “You don’t count on Byron in a fight, that’s all. I guess he just freaked out.”
“You’re not mad at him?”
And the frown softened, a little of the tension in her face melting away.
“When I catch up with him, I’m gonna kick his skinny faggot ass all the way into next week.”
“Oh,” Niki said, and it was still there, that sense of rightness, something she’d experienced so seldom that it felt like borrowed clothes.
“But what I really want to know is why Joe Cool over there stuck his neck out for me tonight.”
Niki glanced at the mattress again, at Keith Barry, one arm slung protectively or possessively around Daria.
“I think maybe he just likes to fight,” she said.
“Crazy fucking junky. I thought he hated my guts.”
And then Niki turned and looked at Spyder’s eyes, eyes like marble the faintest shade of blue, palest steel, that divine wound between them, and Spyder gave her another long animal blink. And then Niki kissed her. Clumsy kiss, too fast and their noses bumping, urgent and too much force, but Spyder did not pull away, opened her mouth and Niki’s tongue slipped between her teeth, explored cheekflesh and teeth and tongue. Spyder laid one hand against Niki’s face, stubby fingers cold from the chill, and Niki opened her eyes, pulled away. She was breathing too hard, too fast, her heart stumbling, missing beats in her chest.
She’d never kissed a girl before, had kissed no one for what seemed like a very long time. Not since that last morning with Danny; immediate guilt, and Niki pushed his memory away again. Spyder smiled at her, brushed the coarse tips of those fingers across her lips and chin.
“I’m sorry,” Niki said, feeling the warm rush of blood to her face.
“Don’t be sorry,” Spyder said. “It’s okay. But I do have a girlfriend already.”
“I shouldn’t have,” Niki said, and she felt dizzy, the madness and violence of the night and then this, and the snow outside the window playing Caligari tricks with her head. Her exhaustion swimming upstream against the adrenaline flash, gathering itself like the drift piling up on the windowsill. And Spyder still getting in through her nostrils, the leather muskiness and old sweat, stale smoke and something else, sweet and sharp, that might have been Old Spice cologne, her father’s smell.
She shut her eyes, discovering the retinal burn-in of the window and the storm where she’d expected nothing. And then Spyder was talking, words as soft as the worn tapestry of her smells.
“Niki, do you remember when they’d announce on the news that there was a twenty or thirty percent chance of snow, just flurries, you know? But you’d be too excited to sleep because maybe there wouldn’t be school the next day? It was nuts, ’cause it never fucking snows on school nights.
“But you’d stay up all night anyway, all goddamn night, and of course morning would come and there wouldn’t be any snow, and it didn’t matter that you hadn’t slept a wink. You still had to get your ass out from under the covers and go to school anyway. Remember how cheated you felt?”
“It doesn’t snow in New Orleans,” Niki said. “It just rains a lot.”
“Oh,” Spyder said. “That makes sense,” and Niki thought, Yeah, Old Spice, the white bottle in her father’s hand, a spot of white shaving cream behind one ear.
“I think I’m too sleepy to talk anymore, Spyder,” she said. “I’m sorry,” but Spyder didn’t answer, just hugged her closer inside Keith’s skanky sleeping bag. Niki listened to the wind and the pattering sound of the snowfall and later, when she opened her eyes, Spyder was asleep.
2.
Spyder doesn’t know she’s fallen asleep, never knows, so there’s never even that small distance from the rage and his voice and the things that move back there in the corners of the cellar, where the lamp can’t reach.
He raves, opens his rough hand and pours red earth, and she presses her face against moldy army-cot canvas; her mother’s footsteps overhead, heels on the kitchen floorboards, like hopscotch tap dancing, and there’s no comfort at all in the dust that sifts down and settles in her open eyes.
The angels are crawling on the walls, pus dripping from the tips of their blackbird feathers and raw things hung around their necks, things that used to have skin.
“Why do you think they haven’t taken me?” her father wants to know, always wants to know that (and she doesn’t know), and his baggy Top Dollar work pants keep falling down, funny, and that
“Answer me that, Lila! Why won’t they take me?” is really funny and horrible, and it whips back and forth, back and forth, like maybe it wants to tear itself loose from his crotch and come millipede slithering across the dirt floor after her.
Her mother laughs upstairs, and she can hear television voices, too.
She wants to scream, scream that she doesn’t know, she doesn’t fucking know, swear she’d tell him if she did, so he could go. But the dust from his hand fills her mouth, spills over the sides, past lips and chin, gets into her ears, her eyes.
“Goddamn you, Lila,” he says, lips trembling and sweat on his face, glistening slick in the orange light, glistening like the slug trails and shit the angels leave on the cellar walls.