Free White Lines by Jennifer Banash

hot cup between my thighs to warm them.
    The wind is rocking through the trees above us like it means business, and I almost can’t wait for the first snowfall of the year, the whole city suddenly clean, blanketed under drifts of white dust, how silent it will feel. I didn’t tell Sara everything that happened in the bathroom—just that Alexa Forte had asked for my number and hinted that she’d like to hang out downtown. Somehow, what went on in that stall, the food that was violently ejected from her perfect body, doesn’t seem mine to recount, so I’m staying quiet about it.
    “God,” Sara muses, taking a bite of tuna, “do you really think she’ll call?”
    “Who knows?” I shrug, pulling my black leather jacket closer to my body. “I’m not exactly holding my breath.”
    Sara’s laughter is a snort, her cheeks stuffed with lettuce. With her white hair and nose pink from the cold, she reminds me of a bunny rabbit, the furry hood on her vanilla-colored down coat adding to the illusion. “Are you working tonight?” She swallows hard, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Or can I come over?”
    Sara hates clubs and can’t understand why I choose to spend every night in them. The one time I persuaded her to give the club a second chance and took her to work with me, she was yawning five minutes after we got there, and I ended up putting her in a cab an hour later. She maintains to this day that nightclubs give her narcolepsy, and that everyone who frequents them is pretentious and totally full of themselves. That’s the point, I tell her, rolling my eyes.
    “Working. But you can come over this afternoon if you want.”
    Sara takes one last bite and closes the plastic top to the salad bowl, placing it on the bench next to her black tote bag, a row of metal safety pins running up the shoulder strap. “Can’t,” she says, still chewing. “Yearbook.”
    “Why don’t you just move a bed into the pub lab and be done with it? That way you can arrange senior pages in your
sleep.
”
    “Good idea,” Sara says, swallowing hard. “Imagine all I could accomplish. I could really get things
done.
”
    One of the reasons I love Sara is that we totally get each other—same completely sarcastic sense of humor. Sara is so deadpan that most people can’t even tell when she’s kidding. Especially her teachers, who mostly think she’s some kind of mad genius when she’s not totally annoying them with her smart-ass remarks.
    “You look thin,” she says out of nowhere, scrutinizing my legs covered in black leggings, her eyes moving up to search the bones in my face. “And tired. You’re working too much.”
    “Not really,” I say, brushing her comments aside. “But why beat around the bush? Why don’t you just tell me I look like shit?”
    Sara rolls her eyes and nudges me in the side with her pointy-ass elbow. “Relax! I’m just worried about you, moron.” She smiles and her tone is playful, but I can tell that beneath the veneer of lightness, she’s dead serious.
    “I just . . . think maybe you’re partying too much. I mean, after the whole fiasco at Nightingale, I think I have the right to be a little worried, you know? Doing lines in the bathroom? That’s not like you, Cat.”
    Her eyes mist over with tears, and she looks away from me and out into the street, the grin slowly evaporating from her face, fading into nothingness.
    “Look,” I begin, trying to keep my tone reasonable so that I don’t burst into tears or fly off the handle. Her concern infuriates me. I don’t want to be questioned or cross-examined. She’s supposed to be the one person who understands me completely, the one person I don’t have to defend myself to. “I
told
you what happened. I got home really late the night before, and I was practically falling asleep in class. I was just doing one little line to get me through the day, and if that idiot freshman hadn’t walked in, no one would be any the wiser. We wouldn’t