Dave V. Riser
Triage
The words twist and turn in Veronica’s head, playing over and over. An earworm, she thinks it might be called, or maybe that’s just for music. Sounds turning over and over until they’re devoid of meaning, until it’s just sound.
It’s Sasha’s party, but he’s nowhere to be seen, the half-darkened living room populated by half-familiar bodies. The house, belonging to Veronica’s best friend and his eight roommates, has been transformed into something glittering and alien. Veronica can’t remember if it’s someone’s birthday, or anniversary, or if there’s no reason at all for the party. Briar and Hazel had been there, but then—
I can’t believe he would do that to me, to anyone, her friend, Briar, had said. I think about it all the time, just, what kind of person thinks that’s okay? The words had seemed to pour off her tongue, fully formed, a river of language describing the wrongs assigned to her. Briar was always talking like that. Like it was easy, even when everything else wasn’t.
Something rattles the window, fireworks or gunshots. It’s audible for only a moment over the pulsing synth playing over someone’s borrowed speakers. Veronica scrapes at the label of her now-flat beer with one ragged fingernail and surveys her options.
I can’t be here anymore, Briar had continued, near tears, just before Hazel had taken her by the arm and guided her from the over-loud party. Probably to walk to the 7-Eleven, or to go back to Hazel’s apartment, somewhere quiet so they could talk. Hazel had given Veronica an over the shoulder look as they left. Mouthed sorry or see you, some kind of goodbye that Veronica didn’t have the voice or the energy to return.
There’s another loud sound from outside. Veronica picks herself up, thighs briefly sticking to the vinyl of the couch, and makes her way to the front porch to watch the show. Someone’s dog barrels inside just as she pushes the door open, nearly knocking her off her feet.
Sasha’s in the middle of everything, of course. Laughing, his grin too big for his face, as he lights another Roman candle. The light reflects red off his teeth.
“Careful, man—” says one of his roommates, as Sasha brandishes the firework through the air. “Careful—”
“He looks like the devil.”
The words are too close. Veronica flinches, even though it’s stupid. The devil.
Willie—uhm, it’s William, actually—is leaning against the porch railing, draped over it like it’s the only thing supporting his weight. He’s in all black, although the shade of his sweatshirt and the shade of his torn jeans don’t quite match.
“Vee.” Willie names her like he’s trying to stick a pin in her.
It’s probably too late to go back inside. Veronica feels her shoulders creeping upward.
“Willie.” Veronica returns the favor. Willie glares at her, and then at Sasha, who has taken no notice of his small audience.
She’s liked Sasha’s boyfriends before. Sometimes she wonders if she liked them more than he did; they never lasted long, hanging around for a month or three at most. Willie is not Sasha’s boyfriend. Not that Willie seems to get that.
“He’s gay, you know,” Willie says. “Like, actually.”
Veronica is well aware.
Sash is her best friend. Has been, since they were seventeen and angry and stupid, both at a party they shouldn’t have been allowed into. He’d said he liked her earring, a little silver bat she’d stolen from Hot Topic, back when Hot Topic actually sold good accessories. She didn’t get many compliments back then, hanging somewhere uncomfortable between boy-and-girl.
“Okay,” she says to Willie.
“So like, he’s not going to fuck you,” Willie continues, and Veronica knows he must be really fucking drunk, knows it has nothing to do with her and everything to do with the way Willie’s been looking at Sasha all night.
Sasha has told Veronica more than once about the silly, stupid things Willie likes to say when he’s drunk. His too-big-for-his-mouth revelations that all come out sounding like LiveJournal entries. Poor little Willie, with his water-damaged poet’s notebook and his big sad eyes.
Still.
“Okay,” she says again, because it would be needlessly cruel to tell Willie they’ve already fucked, long before Willie had ever fallen, accidental and awkward, into their scene.
One of Sasha’s roommates has found another Roman candle and is trying to light it off of Sasha’s. They’re laughing, stumbling over the uneven yard. Someone’s going to put an eye out if they’re not more careful.
“It’s pathetic, the way you stare at him.” He’s still looking at her, his face half-shadowed in the dim light. It makes his jaw look stronger, his eyes darker. The fine hair at the back of Veronica’s neck stands up.
Willie’s standing too close to her. He looks like someone else.
He’s standing too fucking close.
Nerves spark. Veronica moves, and for a brief, glorious moment, is only the movement, only muscle and bone, action-reaction without higher thought. Knuckles meets skin, jarring Veronica’s arm up to her shoulder. The sound of it is lost in the pounding drumbeat of her pulse.
She didn’t mean to hit him that hard. It’s not a feminine thing to do, a punch, her thumb folded neatly over knuckle, elbows steady and level. So she’s been told.
“Fuck.” Willie hits the ground hard, his legs splaying wide. He sounds more surprised than hurt. He probably is.
Veronica feels herself move like someone else is in control of her body. Stepping around Willie. Wiping her hand on her jeans.
“Vika?”
The sky lights up, smoke and sulfur floating thick in the air, uncountable red lights like stars illuminating Sasha’s face for one brief moment. He looks concerned, unsure, watching her and not the lightshow. Everyone is silent and staring.
“I’m going home,” Veronica says, and leaves Willie sprawled on the steps. She doesn’t know if he watches her leave, doesn’t know if Sasha helps him stand, doesn’t know if the cops get called. Sasha will tell her, later. If she asks.
Veronica walks home haunted by car headlights, her shoulders hunched against the possibility of slurs or bottles hurled from passenger windows.
* * *
Sleep doesn’t come easily to her, but when it does, her dreams are thick, oozing things. She can see Sasha, except it’s not Sasha, and no matter how loud Veronica screams, he won’t look at her. She tries to move and can’t. She tries to breathe and can’t. She tries—it doesn’t matter. There’s water all over the floor. The bathroom is cold.
* * *
Veronica wakes late in the afternoon to seven texts: two from Hazel and five from Sasha. Nothing from Briar, but that’s to be expected. She has Hazel. Veronica ignores all of them, forcing herself to choke down a few fistfuls of dry cereal before work, Mischief twining between her legs. If anything had happened, Hazel would have called, not texted.
Still, the silence sits uneasily in her gut as Veronica changes her sweat-soaked jeans for grimy slacks and non-slip black kitchen shoes. Fuck, did she really punch sad Willie?
The dream sticks to her like molasses, crowding in at the edge of her senses. Normally, Veronica likes the kitchen, likes the feeling of the knife in her hands as she does prep work, likes the solitude and ease of the dish pit, the simple pleasure of taking something dirty and making it clean. She blasts Against Me! and Norma Jean and whatever else she wants, and no one says shit to her about it.
It’s just not enough, today. The kitchen is somehow extra loud, even over the thrashing drums played from the overhead speaker. Someone drops a full tub of wine glasses, and Veronica can’t stop herself from flinching.
Her head pounds as she sprays ketchup off of dinner plates, stacking them in rows to go through the sanitizer. It’s mechanical work, easy to do while thinking about something else. Willie’s face in the light. Someone else’s face. The tenor of Briar’s voice when she’s on the verge of tears. An empty bathroom, half-lit, half-remembered.
“Want to hear a riddle?” one of the servers asks.
“Not really,” Veronica says. She sprays down another plate. Loads the plates into the machine.
The server rolls her eyes. “Come on. If a tree falls in a forest—”
Veronica slams the sanitizer’s door down, and the rest of the server’s sentence is drowned out.
“Smoke break,” Veronica says, wiping her damp hands on her equally damp slacks.
“Jeez,” says the server, but then Veronica is stepping into the backroom to grab her cigarettes.
It’s quiet in the back alley, despite the relatively early hour. Veronica pulls smoke into her lungs. Holds it. Breathes out. Checks her phone.
8:06 PM Sasha: (((((((((
8:06 PM Sasha: i got something 4 u, u workin 2nite?
Veronica looks up at the slowly darkening sky. It was probably hot today. Sasha probably woke up on his front porch and took one or five of his roommates down to the river, to keep the party going.
8:15 PM Vee: yeah.
The reply is almost instant. He must have been preparing to text her again.
8:15 PM Sasha: let me bring u a present
8:15 PM Vee: no.
8:15 PM Sasha: (((((((((((
8:15 PM Sasha: was it willie? ill nvr fuck him again vika
8:16 PM Sasha: for u
She should check Hazel’s texts. She should figure out something to say. She’s just tired. Instead, she opens her text thread with Briar and sends a quick thinking of you <3. There, guilt assuaged.
It’s not enough, but it’s what she can do.
She doesn’t think about it. She doesn’t need to think about it, or about the waver in Briar’s voice, the perfect break in her speech. Like she thought someone would listen. Would care. Despite the fact that it happens every fucking party—someone is always hurting Briar, sending her spiteful messages over Instagram or Tinder, leering at her on the bus, or making fucked up comments to her at work. Briar recites every incident, holding it up to the light, like anyone else cares to look.
They do, though. People look. Briar had been right because Hazel had been there, to take her away, to hold Briar and stroke her hair or get her drunk or do whatever it was Briar had needed or wanted in that moment.
Veronica looks back at her phone. Her cigarette smolders, untouched, between two fingers, the cherry burning closer to her skin. It’s going to burn.
8:17 PM Sasha: he says sorry btw. no hard feelings. then he asked why i wouldnt suck his dick
8:18 PM Vee: slut lmao
8:18 PM Sasha: ;)))))
There are no sirens in the distance, the alleyway strangely shielded from the noise of the street. Veronica wishes it was louder.
The bar’s backdoor creaks when it opens. Veronica nods at one of the cooks—Mateo, Matty to the other cooks—when he steps out, his own pack already in his hands.
“Hey, man,” Mateo greets her. “Rough night?”
She’s worked at the restaurant for almost eight months now, but she’s known the staff longer, half of them poached from Black Dog just before it had gone under. Her gender isn’t a secret, but she doesn’t talk about it, either. Her name on the schedule is just Vee. Sometimes the managers call her by her last name if they have to talk to her: Skovron, where’s the truck? Skovron, we need more cutlery. She doesn’t mind. It doesn’t matter, not here.
“Yeah.” Veronica shrugs. Somewhere distant, a car alarm starts. Veronica works her shoulders, trying to stretch some of the tension out.
Mateo spits, then lights his own cigarette. Familiar movements, and a familiar, comfortable silence, until Veronica’s cigarette has burned down to the filter.
Later, close to close, Mateo brings her a Styrofoam box that smells like grease and cheese and everything that makes life worth living.
“For you and your boyfriend,” he says, with a smirk and a nod toward front of house.
“Not my boyfriend,” Veronica says, because he isn’t, and she doesn’t want him to be, but she twists to look out past the bar where Sasha grins at her, raising his cider in acknowledgement.
“Okay. It’s not a big deal, you know. I’m cool.” Mateo gives her an affectionate slap on the shoulder and, before she can think of how to respond, is back in the kitchen and yelling at one of the new hires about watching the fryers.
It’s not like there’s anything she can say. Nothing she knows how to explain; she knows how she looks, to the others, knows how it looks for her and Sasha to be together all the goddamn time. Even if she was still a boy—even when she still thought she was a boy—it had been like that. They were too close; boys aren’t supposed to be that close to each other. Girls aren’t either, but that’s a whole other fucking issue, a gordian knot. There are a hundred thousand words for complicated but none that describe what Veronica needs them to.
* * *
“Asshole,” Veronica says, shoving the Styrofoam container into Sasha’s chest. Her shift is over, according to Mateo, who took over wiping down the dish pit and sent her on her way.
“Vikusha,” Sasha responds, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. The container creaks, threatening to burst. “You don’t text, you don’t write.”
She just looks at him, refusing to smile. It doesn’t matter; he’s grinning wide enough for them both.
“Come home, come on.” He gives her a last squeeze and then beckons toward the door. Veronica can feel her coworkers watching, a burn on the back of her neck, but she goes.
Given what she’d seen of him last night, Sasha should be hungover and miserable, but even at the heights of their poor teenage decisions, he’d managed to rally within a few hours.
He’s more than rallied now, buoyed by some unknown force, sneaking glances at her face and smiling. Veronica might have some idea of what’s in his pocket.
He’s parked in the street. Veronica sinks into the passenger seat of his beat-up black Mazda and breathes out.
“You walked away so fast last night,” Sasha says, getting into the driver’s seat. “I would have given you a ride.” He hands her a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.
“Nah.” Veronica lights two of his cigarettes, holding them in her mouth. Sasha puts the Mazda into drive. She hands him one of the cigarettes.
“I didn’t fuck Willie, you know. Too drunk, too sad. Sadder, when I made him sleep on the couch.”
Veronica rolls her eyes, staring at the darkened storefronts and drunken strangers they pass, Sasha driving too fast down Division Street.
“Alright,” she says. “I get it. I didn’t mean to hit him, he was just—” She shrugs. He was just Willie. He wasn’t doing anything.
She still can’t make herself be sorry. Willie didn’t deserve it, but she can’t make herself care, can’t make herself regret the action, the way her chest had eased when he was on the ground and she was still standing.
“—He was standing too close.”
“Ah, Vika,” Sasha says, and she hates the way his voice softens.
“Watch the road.” She forces herself not to look over when she says it. She doesn’t want to see him looking at her, doesn’t want to see what he thinks he sees reflecting back at her.
“I am watching,” he says, like he always does. “It’s not going anywhere.”
Veronica takes a long drag, the cloud of smoke a soundless retort.
“Okay, okay,” he says, and the subject is dropped, easy. Always easy, with Sasha. “Do you want your surprise now, or at home?”
Veronica doesn’t want to want whatever it is he’s brought, but she does.
“Now.”
“Glove compartment.”
It’s always a fight to get it open, something sticky in the corner adhering it to the dashboard. After jostling it, though, Veronica gets it open, and a plastic packet falls into her lap.
“I thought you might want a pick-me-up,” he says, and winks.
Veronica rolls her eyes again. Her chest feels tight, warm.
“You shouldn’t have,” she says, voice dry, but she still smiles when she picks up the bag. The evening is looking up.
“Enough for us both,” Sasha says, and there is, although just barely. Dried, white-brown mushrooms, innocuous in their plastic wrapper.
When they get to the apartment, Sasha whisks Mischief into his arms with a wordless shout of joy. Mischief, used to this, meows loudly in complaint but doesn’t try to wriggle away until after Sasha has peppered her head with kisses. Veronica sets the Styrofoam container of bar leftovers on the kitchen counter and goes to hunt down a can of cat food.
By the time she locates it and the can opener, Sasha has divvied up the shrooms into two neat piles, sitting cross-legged on Veronica’s bed.
They start with .7, chased with the chicken strips and fries Mateo had given them. The woody taste of the mushrooms mixes strangely with the tang of hot sauce. After an hour passes with no come up, they take the remaining .2.
Sasha logs into Veronica’s laptop and pulls up some old documentary about deep sea caves; he’s always been interested in the past, ancient cave art, shit like that. Veronica’s almost sure she’s seen this documentary before, but it doesn’t matter.
She’d been in her skirt phase when she met him, interested in loudly proclaiming her gender deviance by stealing nail polish and push up bras from the Target downtown. Every slur screamed out the window, every rude look at the 7-Eleven just made her stronger. She’d been expecting much of the same from Sasha. He’d been a scarecrow boy then, tall and rakish, charming all the older girls with his hint of a Russian accent.
These days, she wears jeans and sweaters. Whatever doesn’t have holes.
Sasha sighs with his whole body, like a dog, going taut and then relaxing against her side. Veronica leans her cheek against the top of his head. He smells like sweat and smoke.
On the screen, a man speaking French points at the black outline of a bull. Shadows move across the cave wall, giving the illusion that the bull is running.
“Can you imagine, nuclear warfare, everything wiped out except Briar’s fucking statues?” Sasha muses, lighting another cigarette. “Aliens find them, think we were all twisted hunks of metal, like that?”
Veronica checks her phone: a message from one of her coworkers, asking about shift swapping next week. Nothing new from Hazel, nothing from Briar. One email notification.
“Or they think we worshiped the metal, which isn’t that far off,” she says. She’s not feeling anything yet, but the night is early.
There’s an anthropologist speaking on the screen now, talking about the painted handprints on the cave wall. Probably women, he says, based on the size of the handprints.
Veronica’s hands are larger than average, larger than Sasha’s, even, but fine-boned. Elegant, Sasha had said once, early on in their friendship.
Mischief, finished with her dinner and bored of slinking around the apartment, comes to join them on the bed. Veronica pets her with one hand and lights a cigarette with the other.
There’s a bruise on the first knuckle of her right hand, where she must have made contact with Willie’s face, and a scar on her palm. She doesn’t remember what the scar is from. Memory is slippery like that, disappearing without notice and then showing back up when she least expects it.
She looks over at Sasha, the artificial light catching on his crooked nose and the angular line of his jaw. She remembers when his nose was straight, unbroken, one of his better features.
“What?” Sasha has caught her looking. “Getting visuals?”
“Nah. Just looking at your stupid face.” Veronica thinks she likes his nose better, this way. It’s almost proof that they’ve grown up, put a good handful of years behind them.
“My Vika, always knows what to say.”
Veronica looks at her hands. She remembers how they looked under the artificial lights of the bathroom, strange and both too close and too far away. Too unfamiliar to be hers, even as she watched them brace against the wall, watching herself push herself off the ground, onto her knees. It must have been cold. She doesn’t remember it being cold.
“You’d never kill yourself, right?” she says, voice even and remote. The anthropologist on screen continues to talk about possible Paleolithic gender roles.
Sasha takes a long drag off his cigarette. Exhales just as slowly. He’s gone tense, next to her.
“What are you thinking about?”
Veronica shrugs. There’s something blocking her throat, burning at the base of it. She wants the shrooms to kick in. She fucking wishes she smoked weed.
“Vika?” He used to call her Vitya, when they first met.
Veronica just—she doesn’t know how Briar does this. How she just says things.
“Just stuff,” she says, but he won’t stop looking at her. “Like, you know, Briar. From last night. I don’t know.”
It would just be so much fucking easier if Veronica wanted Sasha to be her boyfriend. If she still wanted to fuck him, instead of wanting to cut him open and crawl inside, to wear his skin like it was hers. Then they could fuck instead of talk, instead of waiting to get high. Then maybe she wouldn’t mind the stares on the street, the knowing looks from her coworkers, from people at parties.
“She okay?”
“Probably.” Veronica shrugs again.
Sasha looks back at the laptop screen, worrying the end of his cigarette. He smiles most of the time, but Veronica knows that doesn’t mean shit. She’s seen him go from laughing to weeping in the span of a few seconds, has seen him pissed and tripping balls and so tired he can barely walk, fingers stiff and cold from wandering the city streets all night. He doesn’t talk about it, except when he’s drunk or joking. She’s seen the stupid face he makes when he orgasms, too, and that image, out of fucking everything, is what makes her feel like she’s able to breathe.
She knows him. She knows him like no one else, and if she got hit by a bus tomorrow, she’d take that knowledge with her. What doesn’t she know about him?
“Okay,” he says.
Veronica tilts her head back, resting it against the cold wall.
“I don’t feel anything,” she says, staring up at the blank, cracked ceiling. “Like, nothing.”
“Duds,” Sasha agrees. “Fuck, what a fucking bummer.”
It’s stupid to be upset about it, she wants to tell him. It’s fine. They’ve tripped together before, and they can again, later. They have time.
It doesn’t explain the lump in her throat, or the way the evening stretches out before her. She just—she can’t say it. She doesn’t know the words, doesn’t know the right delivery.
“Vika?” Unsaid, another question: What are you thinking about? What’s wrong?
She’s shaking. She doesn’t know how to make herself stop.
“I can get more shrooms, hey, Vika—”
“It’s not that,” she says, and it isn’t, but it’s also not about the shrooms. She just can’t fucking say it. Any of it.
Veronica must have known how to say the words at one point. After it happened. The logical progression of events: There was her, there was a bathroom, and afterwards, she was someone else, only no one around her seemed to notice.
Veronica remembers a party when she was fifteen or sixteen, a drunk girl nodding in response to whatever Veronica was saying, until someone had jostled them or laughed too loud or the drunk girl had to leave to go throw up. She remembers the shape of the words in the air in front of her, hanging there, ugly and empty. Deficient.
Hazel had said, once, in response to Briar: I’m sorry that happened to you. Veronica had wanted to hit her. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t.
Sasha squeezes her. Somehow it’s grounding, instead of suffocating.
“Sorry,” she says, and it sounds the same to her own ears. Not enough.
“Shut up,” says Sasha. He pulls her closer, pushing her face into his shoulder. “You don’t have to, okay, Vika? So shut up.”
Veronica shakes her head, but she lets him stroke her back, his hands warm and heavy over her sweater. Calm, weighted, sure of their movements. No hesitation, no weird shit.
She shuts up. Sasha squeezes her again—a reminder. A promise.
His body knows her body, and if Veronica keeps her eyes closed, it could be any moment. It could be her, seventeen again, high and laughing and tucked under Sasha’s arm in the back of his car. It could be her, a different her, at fifteen, lifting herself off the bathroom floor. It could be any impossible, distant future.
Dave Riser is a gender ghoul acquiring his MA in English Literature at West Virginia University. His fiction has appeared in journals such as Orca and The Furrow. Find his retweets of salamanders on Twitter @davevriser.