Sometimes they did cocaine and went driving, the windows down, cigarette smoke flying past them like Isadora Duncan’s scarf. They’d drive with no purpose, in the little red Alfa Romeo, and Odilie would show Peri Wyneck’s back roads and she’d zoom down them going a hundred miles per hour, their hearts in their throats, their screams intermingling with the dusty sand, the stars.

On occasion, they almost seemed like one person. Odilie would lift her hand and expect to see Peri’s long magenta nails. And sometimes she did, because she’d taken to painting hers the same color. Peri’s mouth would twitch and Odilie would raise a finger to her lips and see if hers moved, too. Their limbs would become octopus tentacles entwined in the sheets, their musky sweat commingling into one odor, one stench, that the bedroom was steeped in.

“Doesn’t your boyfriend miss you?” Odilie asked Peri one evening as they lay together in bed, Peri’s fourth night in a row sleeping over, her body cuddling against Odilie’s even when she was in the deepest sleep. Peri shrugged. “We’re not out here for leisure. He has shit going on every day, in meetings, on calls. I’ll see him when we get back to the city.”

The city. Odilie didn’t want to think about that, Peri’s inevitable return to New York, to her real life. This is just a dream to Peri. That thought wormed its way into Odilie’s head more than once and she would have to go to great lengths to suppress it, to disable it, to knock it out of her skull.

And was Odilie real without Peri? That was another thought. Sometimes she felt like she was part of Peri’s fever dream, a figment of Peri’s imagination, magicked up by Peri’s sheer willpower.

“This isn’t my real life,” Peri had murmured more than once, on the third night of a bender, puffing anxiously on a cigarette. “What do you want to do, Odie? When you’re out of this town? Who do you want to be?”

Peri had asked this question before, of course, but still Odilie had no solid answer. “I want to be more important than I am now,” she’d squeak out and this was when their differences shone through because Peri, in moments like this, she liked to remind Odilie how far she’d come.

“I grew up poor, was living on people’s couches. Now I’m summering in Wyneck.” And in one rare, sharp-tongued moment Odilie almost barked back, “Well, you’re still basically living on people’s couches,” but she didn’t. She didn’t because she loved Peri, loved how being friends with her made her feel.