“I don’t get it,” Dallas says, his voice edging on a whine. He curls his feet up underneath him, arranging the blankets over his lap, pouting. He looks like a little kid who’s just pissed the bed at a sleepover party. Pathetic. Nicki picks up an empty water bottle from the floor and throws it at his head.

“Just help me find my purse.”

The room feels like chaos. Nicki doesn’t know how they could have done so much damage in such a short period of time. Dallas eventually finds her purse shoved behind the bedside table, and she digs out her lipstick, her wallet, and her sunglasses, but can’t find her keys. “Did you leave them at the bar?” Dallas keeps asking her, until she’s ready to punch him. Like, why the hell would she pull out her keys at the bar? They must have fallen out of her purse somewhere in the room. Her car is still outside the bar and she’ll need it for work the next day. No, she doesn’t know where her spare is, who knows where their fucking spare is? They scour the room from top to bottom but her keys are not under the bed and they’re not in the bathroom and they’re not behind the television and they’re not in the drawer with the Holy Bible. They’re not even in Dallas’s beat-up old Accord, which Nicki is shocked to discover they had driven to the motel, disgust rising up in her throat like bile, until finally the adrenaline or whatever the fuck it is that Nicki has been running on wears off and she runs to the bathroom to throw up again. When she comes back out, Dallas is sitting on the bed again, holding up his own keys and jingling them in his hand.

“I guess you need a lift,” he says.

Nicki sighs and nods. “Fine,” she says. “But you’re not coming in.”

It’s not until they’re in the car that it all sinks in: Her mom is in the hospital. She slept with Finn’s boyfriend. Finn knows she slept with her boyfriend. She breathes in, searches her purse for lip gloss, and then runs it over her mouth, smacking her lips together. Moments like this are what Nicki lives and dies for. Life smashed into a pulp on the ground in front of you, split open, bleeding and convulsing. Those seconds where you can see, in stark relief, the essence of everything that is important, its bright gory beating heart, without the glaze of everyday, mundane, boring details.