She cleared her head. They didn’t need twenty guns, because no one needed twenty guns. They probably had three or four, like she’d suspected, and they were planning to take this trip to pick up number five. She didn’t support this decision, but she didn’t need to pass out over it.

  “So you’re coming tomorrow,” Brittany said.

  “I’m a lawyer. I can’t break the law. You have one of the maybe ten permits to own a gun in this city?”

  “No, I don’t. But I know your bar number and am happy to email your ethics board and tell them that you commit crimes if you don’t come with us.”

  “How the fuck do you know about ethics boards?”

  “I get around.”

  Aretha focused on her breathing. Everything was still going in and out like she was used to. She just needed to check. She didn’t want to fuck with Aaron’s roommates, but how dare they? Ethics boards helped lawyers stay in touch with lawyer values by almost never punishing anyone for their lawyerly sins. Maybe Brittany knew someone on an ethics board who actually cared that Aretha dealt with guns, but she’d happily assign a 95 percent chance to the possibility that Brittany didn’t. The only problem with probabilities was that they left room for uncertainty. The 5 percent that Aretha couldn’t account for crawled into the room with the three of them. That low percentage turned itself into a cold finger doing a crawl up her spine.

  “Look,” James said. “You can stay in the car. Nobody’d want you coming in and talking anyway.”

  “But you are coming with us,” Brittany said.

  “Thanks for giving me a choice,” Aretha said.

  The next evening, at seven, Aretha snuck out of work. She left her office lights on and her computer set to never power off so anyone who passed by her office might think she was still there, just on her way to the bathroom or the water cooler or a conference room to meet with someone with edgy opinions on when to schedule meetings. She took a train home, changed into sweatpants, and took the stairs down with Brittany and James, right into the backseat of their car, where she sat alone, but for the black duffel bag she was pretty sure she’d spotted over James’s shoulder that first time she’d met him. This time it lay empty.

  Brittany drove. Aretha tried to pretend they were three friends taking a lighthearted January road trip to wherever people took lighthearted road trips in January, the most obviously lighthearted of the months.

  Aretha looked out her car window. Brittany crawled through the silver-high-rise-lined, traffic-choked mess near the Holland Tunnel and sent the car flying out the other side in Jersey, where leafless trees framed aging factories, smokestacks, and houses with faded paint that made them look like they needed a nap.

  Winter. The dead season. Here we are racing towards death, thought Aretha, with her hand on the doorjamb just in case there was an opportunity to toss herself from the car and end up in OK-enough shape to run away. Brittany drove fast, with her chemically relaxed ponytail flying behind her, as the meanest of the cheerleaders of the world, her preppy face hardened and darkened into something even more feral than usual. Aretha missed Brittany’s regular threatening preppiness. The forever half-upbeat, half-entitled angriness of it that made her the skin-covered equivalent of polo shirts without all the dark enthusiasm she brought to taking sketchy car trips. James formed a pile of dough in the front seat, somehow whiter in the seven thirty p.m. pitch-black night. A little swollen-looking around the jaw, like Life Preservers had put weight on him, even though protein swore it would never do that to you. He drank something that smelled like rotten peaches out of a brown glass bottle and eyed the road with the same dead stare he’d given to other people’s Brooklyn roofs up on their roof.

  “So how long’s the drive?” Aretha said.

  No one responded.

  “What’s the name of the town we’re going to?”

  “What, are you going to map it in case you don’t think I know where I’m going?” Brittany said.

  “Just trying to make conversation.”

  “Don’t.”

  James yawned and stretched his closed fists out, like a cat. They were both cats: he was a sleepy cat and Brittany an angry cat, and neither one of them gave a shit that she was in the backseat. But they didn’t have to talk to her for her to have an absolutely great time. If she looked at the passing suburbs hard enough, she could turn dead grass into almost sort of uplifting dead grass. The diners looked energetic, the factory towns productive in their constant belching of industrial smoke. Soon enough they’d probably get to some countryside full of fresh air, and she would blissfully inhale the half breath of it she could get from behind her closed car window. Until they got there she was going to get the dopamine rush she’d assumed she’d get by talking to them from looking at her phone.

  Twitter. Instagram. Facebook. Email. A quick answer for the first-year associate at work who wanted to ask if a chart she found in a pile of documents established anything they didn’t know about how Hurricane Sandy had hit the Rockaways (it didn’t). A technical question from one of the partners on how many inches of stormwater were found in one of the hurricane case’s plaintiffs’ basements (36). Another congratulatory email from one of the partners thanking Mum for winning yet another case law contest, as if the rest of them needed to be re-reminded that they’d lost six hours ago. Fuck that. She went back to the rest of her phone and received a happy emoji-laden text from Aaron about the glories of Honduras, where it was warm and he wasn’t driving around with two people who refused to talk to him. She closed her eyes to imagine him at peace in the middle of some coffee fields, with the sun shining down on him like a gentle hand on his shoulder, but the Jersey darkness outside her eyelids snuck in and wrecked the view. She did her weekly calculus on the odds that she could get him to move out of the house, or kick both Brittany and James out and find a new Brittany to do the books, or a new James to do whatever the fuck he did. But the thing about zero was that it resisted all attempts at addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

  Aaron had the kind of vaguely terrified respect of Brittany that Aretha, sitting in the backseat, unable to stop her right hand from clenching the armrest every couple of minutes as Brittany whipped around curves in the road, now understood completely. James seemed like the kind of guy who might recline into a chair forever if Aaron asked him to move out, and Aaron seemed like the kind of guy who’d feel a little too bad about that. And neither Brittany nor James brought up their families, or left happy pictures of them as their phone wallpaper, or disappeared on the weekends to go visit them. The three of them had their survivalism, and their house traditions, and their coffee. She’d never get Aaron away from his family. So Aretha switched to another fantasy that would never pan out. The one where she and Aaron magically had the house to themselves because Brittany and James had independently decided to leave, with Aaron’s permission.

  She’d skip through all three stories of the building, lighter than air, on her way down to the kitchen to paint it a color other than red, so it didn’t have that just-cooking-up-the-blood-of-my-enemies look. White? Cream? Anything less violent. Who the fuck left their kitchen red? What previous owner had decided to paint the kitchen after reading Massacre Monthly magazine? Except she could see Brittany selecting the red paint, carefully taping over the edges of the walls to prevent drips, explaining it away as a classic New England shade of blood. The Puritan blood of America’s Puritan ancestors, here to keep our intentions pure. The coffee in the kitchen was already violent in its way, dark and pooled. Not that she’d want to get rid of it, just to change the red walls behind it that made the coffee look almost as homicidal as they did. They kept every set of shades in the house closed except the ones in the roasting room that overlooked the backyard, and the minute Brittany and James disappeared she’d run through the house, opening them all up, letting light in.

  To the garbage with Brittany’s striped polos and her framed family crest and her plaid down comforter, all of which looked like she’d inherited them as a member of the fourth generation of an all-Black lacrosse team that might secretly double as an army. To the backyard with all of James’s stuff, where she could burn it. His room smelled like he was trying to turn all the clothes in it into mushrooms by getting them damp and letting them stay that way forever. The beaten-down white T-shirts that might have gone under collared shirts if he had a job that made him leave the house. The bottles of peach liquor he kept in the corner near his bed, visible from the door but half hidden under a couple dirty T-shirts in a way he probably thought was completely hidden. The stack of metal CDs, as if anyone needed to listen to either metal or CDs ever again. How old was he? For some reason the wiki of a person who’d enjoyed two solid months of plagiarism coverage listed his birth year as approximate.

  Maybe he’d plagiarized his birth certificate, she thought, looking out the window into the windows of a diner that looked kind of amusing: purple walls, red lamps. But the next diner looked amusing too, in an all-white way, and the next, while she mentally flipped around the fake birthdates he could have given everyone. He was old enough that he hadn’t thrown out his CDs, she concluded, right when Brittany drove them out of town into another stretch of flat Jersey darkness.

  But more than getting rid of all their shitty stuff, kicking them out of the house would give her the mental headspace to actually relax when she came home, instead of the spidery crawl that went up her arms whenever she stuck her key in the door, now that they’d blackmailed her. Living with Aaron was supposed to feel fulfilling. And sometimes it did! They went ice-skating in Prospect Park, where Aaron crawled around the outside of the rink, holding on to its edge, and Aretha dragged him out to the center to skate in lazy circles while he dug his fingers into her arm as if it were the side of a cliff. They walked east to one of the Trini food stands of Bed-Stuy, bet each other on how much scotch bonnet pepper sauce they could stand to put in their doubles and walked home under the spell of their pulsating mouths. It was great to look into his eyes every night and plan vacations, even if they’d probably never take them because January gave him a work schedule worse than hers, between sourcing and testing and selling coffee beans. Not that she knew how to plan vacations, since she’d never taken one, but coming up with a list of imaginary places to go and imaginary things to do when they got there had an excitement to it. Then she’d run down to the kitchen after a particularly loving round of vacation planning and face a pair of glares for her offensive, nonsurvivalist existence, and whatever she could hold on to from the dreams she and Aaron came up with upstairs would disappear.

  Sometimes she caught herself imagining the glories of living in the apartment she’d just left, listening to the rap and R&B and indie rock she could put on at full blast thanks to her neighbors, who made too much noise to notice hers. Or the apartment before that, where she and her three catering-girl roommates had split leftover mini-sliders on toothpicks before they huddled in the bathroom to get ready to hit the bars as a pack of four, jockeying for mirror space between their flatirons and eyelash curlers instead of judging one another for not eating sufficient amounts of optimized soy.

  Jersey countryside turned into Jersey towns littered with delis and fast-food places and cut up with avenues filled with the same three or four iterations of box house built in the ’50s then turned into Jersey countryside again. Brittany hit the gas right when Aretha started enjoying the view, clearly as revenge. The charming towns outside Aretha’s window swirled into a neon-hazed darkness as Brittany pushed them deeper into the countryside and James fell asleep heavily in his seat, further cursing the car with a buzzsaw of a snore. Aretha watched her window, waiting for another town to cut up the blackness, but Brittany gave up on towns and pushed them off the divided highways to the winding two-lane country roads.

  Mailboxes came out of nowhere like enormous baseballs frozen in flight. The car slid down and rolled up streets, and finally landed across the street from a house. A two-story wooden number that looked like all the two-story wooden numbers they’d passed for miles, other than that they hadn’t stopped in front of the rest of them. Brittany cut the engine. Without inviting Aretha, she and James, who’d thrown the duffel bag over his shoulder, walked up to the front door in synchronized steps, even though Brittany walked crisply, like a drum major, and James loped, like a horse.

  Aretha looked for some sign that the other two wanted her to get out of the car and come with them, but they knocked on the house’s front door and went inside without her. She looked down at her phone for a text, and it took a few minutes to realize Brittany wasn’t going to hit her up with an invite to tonight’s exclusive party. If she didn’t have to go inside, could anyone prove she’d gone along on the trip? Brittany and James would have to testify against her. Brittany might be up to that, but James seemed too generally drunk to hold up on the stand. But Aretha was born to take Brittany down in a courtroom. What the fuck did Brittany know about the law other than that she clearly hated it?

  Aretha could see the beautiful courtroom where she’d beat Brittany. Its gleaming wooden benches. Its kindly judge, who’d be thrilled to meet the one of the two of them who understood what was going on. Your honor, she would say, I was blackmailed, which means I wasn’t legally in their car, helping the two of them commit a crime. Brittany, spirited into a situation where her rules meant less than Aretha’s, would melt into a steaming yet preppy puddle. This was absolutely the best-case scenario for a practicing lawyer who’d been threatened into a road trip, other than the whole still-physically-being-stuck-in-the-backseat-of-the-car-while-they-bought-guns-that-it-would-be-illegal-to-take-back-to-the-city thing.

  A yellow fishtail of light lit up the bottom and sides of the closed garage door. The living room TV flashed through all the versions of TV color that could be seen from across the street in the backseat of a car. Blue, then purple, then white, then blue again. How much meaning could she wring out of lights? How long could it possibly take to buy a gun off someone? Did they stop in the middle of the deal to perform a play? She grabbed on to her door handle like Brittany had hustled them around a curve fast enough to freak her out, and when the car didn’t take the hint and start moving again, Aretha grabbed the handle harder, until her knuckles hurt.

  She moved on to the only mental game that it made sense to play: living room or garage. They had to be in the garage, for sure, not just because the garage light had flipped on, but because she couldn’t imagine anyone buying guns in living rooms, which she imagined as temples to televisions and fireplaces that actually worked instead of the nonfunctioning one she’d had in her solo apartment, thanks to one of the infinite numbers of landlords who assumed most tenants showed up with dreams of arson in their heads. Whether fireplaces worked or not, they were supposed to be shrines to framed pictures of relatives looking very seriously into cameras, which she fantasized about as a person whose dead parents didn’t, in life, believe in talking to their relatives, and never got the money together for a house.

  Owning a house. The dream. The freedom of never getting kicked out by your landlord that came with having enough money to buy one. The possibility of having an entire fortress around yourself. She’d grown up in a series of cheap apartments in the kind of white Wisconsin town where the white kids she’d gone to school with had held up homeownership as a cudgel to be whacked across her back if she said anything wrong in history or biology or English class. “She lives in an apartment,” they’d whisper, as if apartments were bad instead of cozy little collections of people and rooms and, on lucky nights, warm cooking smells from her mom’s and dad’s collections of memorized soul food recipes. Cornbread. Greens. Fried chicken. But there were rules in the town where she grew up, and one of them was that you were supposed to live in a house, even if your parents didn’t have house money and their parents didn’t either and there weren’t that many people that would sell a house to people who looked like you. So she envied all the houses that other people owned and tried and failed to squirrel away leftover money after she made her massive law school loan payments and prayed for the financial luck of becoming partner, even if that dream seemed to be moving further and further away, one lost case law competition at a time.

  Where were Brittany and James? It had been forever since they went inside, even if forever, according to her phone, had only lasted seventeen minutes. Entire fucking civilizations had probably ended in seventeen minutes. She saw no movement in the house lights. No other cars passed her on the street. No one walked by on the road. Nothing came crunching through leftover snow. Brittany hadn’t left her the keys, so the car heat would run out. It had already started seeping out the doors, replacing itself with completely unnecessary freezing New Jersey winter air. She rubbed her thighs, which didn’t work. She clapped her hands together.

  “Come on,” she said.

  She closed her eyes and tried to will Brittany and James out of the house. She got to the part of being cold where you can only think about how fucking cold you are. She blew onto her legs, which kept them not quite warm for a handful of seconds at a time. She zipped her coat up to her mouth. She stuck her head between her legs in the fetal position. Twenty degrees, her weather app said, assuming they were somewhere between Trenton and Philly like she thought they were. Hurry the fuck up.

  The driver’s door flew open and slammed. James stuck the duffel bag next to her in the back and hustled into the passenger seat.

  The gun bag thumped her left leg, fuller this time.

  She recoiled.

  Brittany jackknifed the car across the black Pennsylvania night with the heat back on.

  Aretha inched the gun bag away from her leg so it rested on the other side of the backseat.

 

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