She was twisted up, weaselly and golden in her seat. Pretty and small and the same live animal whom I’d gotten in a car with just because she said, Come with me.

“You’re kind of a cunt.”

“What the fuck?” Harry started laughing, and then stopped in the middle of it, which left her mouth open, bottom lip curled so I could see the flat white tips of her teeth, the slick of her spit on her tongue.

There was something dry in my throat that I had to swallow around, something like a ball of chalk. I was so tired. “You heard what I said.” I hadn’t raised my voice yet, but I would rather yell at her than cry.

“Where did that even come from?”

I shrugged. “From you kind of being a cunt.”

Rest stops are such beautiful liminal spaces. A long way below us the lake was so bright you couldn’t look right at it. There was a quiet wind, as there always seems to be at rest stops. Maybe cars make it. The parking lot was empty, except for one beaten sedan parked in a far corner, glittering indifferently where streaks of paint had been scraped from it. There was no way to tell if it was abandoned or not.

“What crawled up your ass?” Harry demanded. “What do you care what I say?”

“Never mind,” I said. I had the sensation of something bubbling in my chest, like those mouths that open in the earth and spit sulfur and steam, venting themselves into the sky. If I had shouted at her then, I probably would have shouted a lot of things. At this point, though, it didn’t feel worth anything to argue with her. Five days and a long empty road from Michigan, it felt both early and too late to air our grievances. “Forget it.”

“No.” Harry was petulant, outraged, and she twisted over the center console. “You don’t get to just sudden—” She cut herself off halfway through the word, sucking in a breath so abrupt and high it sounded like a scream, and clutched her arm back to her chest.

I startled. “What?”

“Fuck!” Harry inhaled again, sharply. “Holy fucking fuck! Jesus!”

“What?” I looked around the car, frantic, but also wondering, a little, if this was a joke at my expense.

“I put my hand on the fucking cactus!” Harry shouted at me.

This did not register with me right away as a thing that could happen. I looked at her, at her arm, which was indeed lit from the base of her palm up her wrist with tiny golden spines, and then at the cactus, innocent in its cup holder. My breath made a hitching sound, which was not quite, but almost, a giggle.

“What the fuck?” Harry snapped at me, clutching her arm in her other hand. “Shit! It isn’t funny. Christ. Do something, whore!”