I flinched. "Me?"
I got another nudge and threw back another shot of sour-grape-fire. The loosey-goosey feeling had already taken hold of my muscles. Laying back on the floor was starting to sound pretty nice.
"You're only thirty. Should still have folk back home. Or do you have none and that's why you're here?"
I sighed. I guess someone dying made people cross that line. Though I'd done it first.
"My parents should still be alive," I said, slowly. It was getting hard to think. "My brother and sister should be too. Don't know what they're up to."
"Ho, one brother and two sisters. Just like our family, eh Levi?"
Levi said nothing, only swirled his fourth shot in the glass like it held all the secrets of the universe before kicking it back. He then refilled both mine and his and nudged me again. He'd touched me more times in the past ten minutes than he had the past four months. Maybe me taking the initiative with his wrist broke something, like a barrier or a wall.
"Were they assholes?" Naomi asked.
The grape juice concoction reflected the ceiling.
"I guess..." I hope this didn't poison me.
"Hmm..." Naomi sipped at her drink.
I took a swallow of mine, only to decide the only way to drink this really was just to throw it back as far from my taste buds as possible. A little voice in my head told me I really shouldn't be doing this, even if it was to grieve with a friend.
Levi was watching me. Waiting.
It was him I looked at when I said, "My dad wasn't really involved and my siblings were caught up in their own lives. My mom was...I guess she did alright."
"So it wasn't your family then?" Naomi asked.
I looked down into my cup, which had been magically refilled.
"It was everything." The lights on the ceiling were too square. Too seamless. it was hard to tell where their covers ended and the ceiling tiles began. "But, in the end, it was just me."
"You?"
"Yeah."
"Kill someone?" Naomi asked with a grin.
But I didn't grin back. I couldn't. Because my body buzzed and gooped and my thoughts had a hard time stringing one to another. Blips of memory floated across the surface of my mind like leaves falling from a tree.
"Nobody wanted me. I was too ugly, too blunt, too boring, too..." A handsome face I worked hard to never think of drifted across. "Too me."
"Oh, dearie, you ain't none of that." Naomi's words were slurring now. "You still got time. You got the stuff of super stars!"
"Naomi," said Levi quietly.
"What? She's got the numbers pat pat, she could be a professor! Or...or yeah! Wait, you paint? An artist! Or better yet, find a man and make babies!"
I drank hard to that. I didn't want to be a part of this conversation anymore.
"I would've made babies if I could," Naomi rambled on. "All the babies. Cute ones. But I had to raise that one and we already know how he turned out, so I figured it best I didn't infl—infle—infla—infringe my mothering on other children. Yeah. That's the word."
"You did fine," said Levi.
"I raised a—a criminal whose stuck in space, how does that fine?"
"Because I have agency."
I drank more. The words were blurring. Levi somehow sounded clearer than the rest. It would make sense if he were a stronger drinker than us girls.
"It's okay, baby Lev, I'm here for you. I'll keep you safe."
"Take your own advice and go home. I'm an old man, I don't need you anymore."
"Don't say that, you're gonna make this sister cry."
"...don't cry."
"No. Levi doesn't love me."
"That's some fine emotional manipulation you're using there."
"I'm drunk and my husband's dead, I can manipulate you all I want."
I drifted between them, watching an entire life story on a stage where the actors had matching black eyes and didn't move. Siblings, born almost two decades apart. Parents had never planned for a third and were busy with their careers. I could see my father in that, if my father had ever planned for kids. My mother had loved him. Had he ever loved her? But it didn't matter, as she had to move on to find love somewhere else.
I was the rock. I was a rock. Ugly, sturdy, there to be built on, a foundation, a tool, but never the home to be lived in.
"I wanted to know what it was like to be in love. I wanted to know what being in a home was like, to be...like the romance books. And babies."
A hand stroked through my hair. I smelled a leathery cologne and a musk like old socks and grass.
"I thought I found that. But he..."
"Was he an asshole?" asked Levi gently.
"...Yeah. He just pretended to like me. For a laugh."
"Well, he isn't here anymore. But you should go to bed. Go to sleep, Jo."
And I was in bed, though I couldn't remember how I got there. The stars shifted and slid above me, around me, the observatory had turned into my literal fishbowls. No assholes here. Just stars and colors.
The scent changed. The hands left my head to return larger, harder, heated with fire. I breathed in and smelled sweet, cinnamon baked apples underlined with something like brimstone.
Was Naomi baking a pie? Well, she burnt it. It was burning. Someone should tell her that.
I could hear hissing and clicking. The heat wrapped me entirely, comforting and warm. Fingers wiped tears off my face. I was drifting in a pie-tin, dreaming of simmering among apples, forgotten in an oven by Naomi while my sister peered in with a sneer.
'It doesn't matter how perfect your grades are, you're going to die a virgin,' she said into the oven.
I didn't care about my stupid virginity. I just didn't want to be alone anymore. Mom with her men. Dad with his job. My siblings with their own families and careers. I tried to be involved, I really did, but...
The leering face turned to my brother, who looked on indifferently.
'Yeah. Sure. Can you even make money with math? Don't computers do it all?'
Then I was outside the oven, lifted up into the arms of a handsome, unbelievably handsome blond man with glittering green eyes and the perfect set of dimples.
'Joleen,' he said, his mouth quirking as though to laugh. 'Did you actually take me seriously? Didn't you choose to be this ugly as a joke?'
Not everyone's mother could afford plastic surgery on their baby's DNA just so they came out pretty. Especially teenage mothers who never meant to be pregnant in the first place.
The heat spread up my legs, into my gut, swirling and cramping in around me. I could hear more hissing and a rumble against my chest and stomach, like a purr. Something like fluid sunk into my pores to my mind, filling it with a wordless flood of comfort and peace.
'Don't be sad,' it seemed to whisper, though in intention rather than words. 'I'm here, I'm here. Don't be sad.'
I stayed with that heat for the rest of my sleep, hiding from my nightmares.