Free Tats by Layce Gardner

in the car.
    “Good line, huh? I saw that in a movie once,” Vivian says lightly, pulling back out onto the highway and pushing the little Pinto harder than it’s meant to be pushed. “Fasten your seat belt, you’re in for a bumpy ride,” she adds.

Chapter Four

    Crickets, bullfrogs, and the hum of locusts and june bugs make my ears vibrate. Anybody who ever said the country was quiet is just plain wrong.
    All five feet eleven inches of me is stretched out across the hood of the tiny Pinto, the warmth from the engine seeping into my very bones. This is pure heaven. I feel as if I’m levitating and there’s nothing more important at this moment than studying the blanket of dark sky and making dot to dot connections with the stars. If there’s anything that feels better than this, I honestly don’t know what it is.
    I look over at Vivian lying on the hood next to me. If anything she looks better than she did in high school. Life can surely take some strange turns. She wouldn’t have been caught dead with me fifteen years ago. Now we’re more on equal footing. We’re both stoned out of our gourds and neither one of us has anything except the clothes on our back (and in the trunk of the Pinto).
    Vivian sucks hard on the joint before passing it back to me.
    I take a toke and hold it in until I can’t stand the burn any longer. “This is perhaps...” I completely forget what I was going to say, then I grab the thought again and run with it, “...the best high I’ve ever had. I mean, it is really, really, really...” Why do I keep forgetting what I want to say? “... good.”
    “Enjoy. ’Cause that’s the last of it.”
    I crash back down to earth. “Well, you just pissed on a perfectly good high,” I say.
    Vivian takes another toke—“I smuggled it over here in my girlie hole.”—and passes it back.
    It takes every ounce of my self-control not to sniff it.
    She exhales and continues, “The guy I got it from is young. Good-looking. Fantabulous sex. This one time—”
    “Good for you,” I interrupt, not wanting to hear about her sexcapades with men. I change the subject. “You know, I’ve never even seen this alleged spooklight. Every time I’ve ever come out here, I wait and wait, but it’s a no-show.”
    “I’ve seen it,” she says. “I’ve definitely seen it. It’s just this little ball of light bouncing down the road. Like those old sing-along cartoons, follow the bouncing ball. This one time I was parked out here with the cute guy who worked at Reasor’s, you know the one with the sideburns, and this little ball of light bounces down the road, right into the car and right out again. Scared the bejeezus outta the guy.” She takes another slow drag and holds it in. “Saved my virginity.” She exhales slowly. “If it weren’t for that spooklight I’d probably be married to Lloyd with sixteen kids and raising them on a bag boy’s salary.”
    “Nah,” I say, taking the joint from her. “He’s probably been promoted to checker by now.”
    “Nice scar,” she says, running her finger lightly over the thin white scar on my forearm. “That hadda hurt.”
    “I don’t remember,” I reply a little too quickly, pulling back.
    “On cop shows they’d call that a defensive wound, right there on the arm like that.”
    “I don’t remember,” I say again, “I was just a kid when it happened.”
    “Oh,” she says and adds pointedly, “I thought maybe it happened in prison.”
    I look at her. “Nothing happened in prison. It was like the same day over and over again, every day.”
    Vivian pulls a lipstick out of her cleavage and adds another coat.
    “How much stuff you got tucked away in your cleavage? You’re always pulling different shit out all the time. It’s like a magician’s hat or something.”
    “What were you in for?” she asks, putting the lipstick back down her top.
    “Guess.”
    “Shoplifting makeup from Walmart.”
    “No,” I answer quickly, “and quit