BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

she wouldn’t dare allow these impolite thoughts, but his reasoning appeared very shallow. Did he really believe that the world had been cruel to him? What reason did he have to rebel? How could the support of a rich family and a place at the most privileged school in the country be a negative? In the dark she caught brief flashes of his profile in the passing streetlights. Out of stress his hair had been tucked behind his ears and in her panicked prolonged observing Cathy for the first time noticed the sharp, angular line of his jaw and how it followed upward to his sharp nose, that freckles dusted his cheek bones. The whites of his eyes had pinked slightly, his lashes were almost spiked in the brief light.

“Are you looking at me or chewing a brick?” he said feebly, without his usual confident whimsy.

“I-was-I-wondered-uh…” She wanted to ask if he’d been crying. Did he cry? Well of course, but.

“Either way you’ll lose your teeth.”

He passed a roll-up. She took it. He hadn’t made that up. She put it to her lips but couldn’t muster the strength to breathe the smoke into the back of her raw throat, touching the dried blood on her chin. He wasn’t crying she was sure of it. Her lips had left a bloody bruise on the white of the roll-up. The silence continued. Nothing moved except the car. The road sounded like baby monitor feedback.

Panic crawled the walls of her throat, so she cleared and spoke suddenly, feverishly. “This song. Y’know, it’s really pretty, but I can never take the lyrics seriously-aha-because he says ‘Spider man’, meaning some kind of pervy spider thing, but, like, it just sounds like Spiderman, like y’know Spiderman, and I just keep thinking of Spiderman crawling around eating children with his, like, ‘tongue in people’s eyes’ ... Weird … Spider-Man, right?”

Lyall closed his eyes like he was in pain.

“And then he just starts making slurpy noises like …”

“What is wrong with you?”

Cathy blinked rapidly in recovery from the verbal blow. His words cut in her deficient mind and split skin upon impact.

“U-uh sorry. I don’t even know what I’m talking about, I just …”

“Thank you?” He bit, quoting her. Silence. “Cathy, I knowingly took you into a building with people who knowingly planned to drug you. Then, you knowingly realised that my car door handle was removed and after you knew you were fading from consciousness you said,” he breathed in, eyes closed, “thank you.”

Cathy looked down as he parked in the services. What could she say? Did he want an answer? A fight? She felt years younger somehow. Passing out in thought behind her eyes again from fear to muse on the lights of the service station.

“They do slushies.”

“Yes! You coughed blood out my fucking car window,” he smiled, nodding, grey eyes wide.

“I’m sorry, I…” She couldn’t. The words shuffled and reshuffled. His eyes seemed to glister, as though from her seconds of avolition he understood everything. She took a breath and turned her spine. Looked him in the eyes.

“I just really want a slushie.” It was the same wispy stammer of the same girl but it had been transposed to an assertive, fresh key. He nodded thoughtfully, his usual suave wit had returned, like hitting a static tv.

“C’mon, let’s get slushies, you and me. Pretend we aren’t fearing for our lives.”

She smiled, a sad crack in her porcelain face. “OK.”

So the protagonist stepped from the car onto her fragile gangly legs. Lyall, her arguablyreluctant companion’s dark form looked stark, black tangles of his hair bathing in the cherry soda of the motorway signs, taking on the rufescent cherry glow. It thawed the cool in his gaze when it horrifyingly drank the red. It was a haunting sight, so she drew nearer, like a beautiful car crash her eyes glued to him for some odd reason.

One could guess that it was at that moment that Cathy felt the weight of an unmistakably damned connection. A whisper of fate perhaps. It appeared to her as a sort of astral poetic form of the moment their souls were forever entwined by that kid passing her a roofied Red Bull can. Inseverable, this was what a relationship meant. She suddenly grabbed his hand, cold circulation-cut-off fingers clasping his like a dead fish and yes, she thought, this moment was uncalled for and weird, and that’s because it was. There was no other way of putting it. It was strange. Just strange.

“What the ever-loving Christ …”

Cathy looked him in the face and for the first time ever initiated a dialogue that wasn’t filled with awkward stammer or the notion of a self-destructive aftermath.

“Lyall, I trust you.”

“Why?”

Truthfully, a question mark never seemed needed when Lyall asked a question because they didn’t feel like questions. Cathy just nodded and smiled, the curtain of her hair shifted like