My dad has stopped talking, and my mom’s sniffling again; the tension in the room is making me sick. They still haven’t spoken to me, but I don’t care.

I don’t.

I don’t.

I look at my phone and see that Lucy’s texted; she’s outside. My escape. My liberator. I try to force myself to stand, but the weight of everything presses down on my shoulders. I’m frozen.

My dad clears his throat like he’s going to speak, and all my energy slams back into my body at once. I bolt out of my seat, surprising us all, and start to babble. Gotta run, Lucy’s here, blahblahbblah—I don’t even know if I’m forming words or just making sounds. I can’t hear my voice over the heartbeat thumping in my ears. I grab my bag off the counter beside my mom, give her a smile that might actually be a grimace, and hightail it over to the kitchen door. As I pull it shut behind me, all I hear is a deafening, sickening silence.

—

Lucy’s taste in music is…eclectic, to say the least. More than half the time when I’m in her car, I have no idea what band is playing, what era they’re from, and whether anyone other than Lucy and the lead singer’s mom thinks they’re decent. I don’t care, though; I’d literally listen to a human scream for the next hour if it meant I didn’t have to be in that house with my parents.

The first time I saw Lucy, in third grade, she had just moved to the States from Haiti with her dad and grandmother. She was sitting on a swing on the playground wearing these awesome Mickey Mouse headphones. When I got up the nerve to ask her what she was listening to, she silently handed them to me. Later, I learned that it was a band named the Velvet Underground, which didn’t sound anything like Katy Perry or Taylor Swift or any of the other music I loved back then, and that they had a badass female drummer. Lucy’s always listened to music outside of the crap on the radio, and all the stuff she gravitates to tends to have women behind the drums. Jordan and I always loved when she’d introduce us to bands—we shared a Spotify account, and it was always a fight over who would get to use it on nights after she would turn us on to someone new, because we knew without a doubt that the rest of the school would be talking about them a few months later.

Right now is no exception. Whatever she’s playing in her car is simultaneously making me nauseous and causing my leg to bounce in time with the beat. I want to hate it, but for some reason I don’t.