Page 42 of Property of Thrasher
A car door slammed on the other side of the building. The shift change was happening. Evening would bring a different crowd, louder laughter, rougher shadows. I knew I’d have to go back in soon, change into my jeans and tank, tie my hair up again. But for a few more minutes, I let myself lean into the shade and into my cousin and into the fragile net of rules we’d woven.
“Do you ever think about going back?” I asked, surprising myself. I never asked that. I never wanted to give the thought a chance to come to life.
“To Montana?” Lyric snorted. “To the people who decided who we were before we had a chance to find out? To the man who called me wife like it meant owner? Hard pass.”
“What about the parts we miss?” I pressed. “The mountains. The cold mornings. Our family around Grandma’s old table for every holiday.”
“We can make new tables,” she stated. “We can hang a picture of a mountain and call it a window until we get a real one.”
I smiled. “Maybe I don’t need a mountain. Then again, maybe I do.”
“We’ll get there.” She said it like a promise she believed in, and because she believed it, I found a little slice of belief for myself.
We headed toward the back door, the metal push bar warm from the day. The hallway inside smelled like whatever the kitchen had been cooking—fried something—and lemon cleaner. Voices bounced off tile and metal. The world was still the world.
Before we split—she toward the kitchen, me toward the laundry—Lyric caught my arm. “Hey,” she said. “Last thing.”
“What?”
“Enjoy it,” she said, and her grin went wicked and soft at the same time. “If you want it, enjoy it. That’s allowed.”
It took me half a second to realize my face had heated again. I rolled my eyes at her, but the smile tugging at my mouth gave me away. “Bossy.”
“Generous,” she corrected. “Don’t confuse the two.”
I hugged her again, quick and hard, then let go before either of us could make a joke to hide how much it mattered.
Back in the laundry room, the machines spun like planets, steady and sure. I loaded a basket and tugged it onto the folding table. A white sheet slid across the steel, the cotton cool under my palms. I smoothed a corner to make it neat, then another, then another. My hands remembered. My body remembered other things now too. That didn’t make me new or ruined. It just made me here.
The door cracked open and somebody I didn’t know stuck their head in to ask where the mop was. I pointed—third closet, left side—and they thanked me and left. I stood for a second with my hands on the folded sheet and let a thought drop into the space of me like a coin into a deep well.
I could want things. That could be true. I could say yes. I could say no. I could say not yet. I could say ask me again in a different voice.
I could tell Thrasher I wasn’t a patch. I was a person. If he wanted to claim me, he could learn what it meant to be claimed back by a girl who didn’t belong to anybody but herself.
The sheet made a soft thud when I set it on the stack. I pulled another one over, the edge of it whispering against the metal. The room hummed. The late sun painted a stripe of light across the floor where the door didn’t quite meet the threshold. Dust danced in it. I watched it, and everything inside me felt a little less like a hooked fish and a little more like a girl with lungs that worked.
Later, when I finished the shift and the sky blended from black to deep purple, I would walk out back again. I didn’t know if Thrasher would be there. I didn’t know if I wanted him to be. Both answers were allowed.
What I did know was this: if he was there and he said that word again—claimed—I would tell him mine. I would say the words Lyric gave me and the ones I’d discovered tucked under my tongue. I would see what he did with them.
Maybe he’d ruin it. Maybe he’d surprise me. Maybe I’d surprise myself.
The dryer dinged. I moved through the motion of opening it, heat rolling into my face, the smell of clean cotton like a promise that even if nothing was ever new, it could still be fresh. I pulled a towel out and it was warm against my cheek, and I realized sometimes small things were enough to get you from one day to the next.
Sometimes advice that sounded simple—enjoy it—was the hardest task and also the right one.
I folded the towel. I kept going. I thought about Lyric’s grin, about Tiny remembering creamer cups, about how love and sex might sometimes share a collar and sometimes run in opposite directions, and how maybe I didn’t have to leash either to live.
When my break came, I texted Lyric a heart and a mountain emoji. She sent back a coffee cup and a tiny cow for no reason. I laughed at my phone like an idiot. The sound bounced off the metal and didn’t sound lonely at all.
I went back to the table. I smoothed another sheet. The white of it glowed in the last of the light. I wasn’t a patch. I wasn’t a secret. I wasn’t a thing to be handed over to any man under any name.
I was Melody Holton. And whatever I decided next—yes, no, not yet—I was going to make sure the voice saying it belonged to me.
12
THRASHER
