C H A P T E R   13 : Band-Aid on a Bullet Hole

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"God-fucking-dammit,"—BANG—"I fucking hate you,"—BANG—"you piece of absolute fucking SHIT!" an inebriated Scout-Juliet Compton howled into the dry night air as she kicked the shit out of an empty paint can behind Santan Valley Auto Repair. If she squinted her eyes hard enough, the can almost looked like Antonio's head, but she didn't know if that was the liquor distorting her vision or if it was just her imagination.

Scout looked towards Georgia's house. The light in the dining room was still on. She could see people moving in and out of focus in the light, their silhouettes bleeding through the window panes. They were all still there, laughing and smiling in her absence like the fact that Antonio was there was absolutely perfect. She knew in some distant section of her mind, in the sober part of her conscience that floated above her drunkenness like a sailboat stranded out at sea, that that wasn't true, but in her current state she couldn't help but to believe it was.

She thought that that was why she was mad. The fact that Antonio had such an infallible charm over her family. But that wasn't all there was to it, and she thought that something as fleeting as a dose of jealousy could never be it when it came to Antonio Ruiz. It was him in himself. It was everything that Antonio was, and everything he stood for. She felt like she had been the one who was stabbed repeatedly and yet everyone was consoling Antonio while she was left bleeding on the floor.

She stood still, staring through the dining room window of Georgia's house. Her vision was blurring and her breathes were ragged and she swore in that moment that she heard her heart break. It was a series of small, clean sounds, like a hundred tiny threads snapping in succession. And then she was falling apart. Her eyes were leaking with tears the same temperature as rain, and every nerve ending was numb, and her ribs ached, and she felt this odd coolness sweep over her in the ninety-six degree heat. She could feel the very thought of Antonio corroding her veins like poison injected into her bloodstream, and it hurt as badly as it did when she discovered that he really never loved her at all. She had this thought, a thought about how it would have hurt less and saved her a lot of heartache if he had just slipped arsenic into her mouth and said nothing instead of spitting lies down her throat every time he kissed her and told her he loved her. She used to think she was being over-dramatic, but beneath the morose light of the moon in her drunken stupor, she thought it made perfect sense.

She kicked the can again with a loud BANG before collapsing into the dirt as a sob story told a thousand times. Her cries were debilitatingly hysterical. She never thought she would cry over him ever again, but there she was, a shaking, damp lump in the dirt, ruing his name between her hyperventiliations. She tried to placate it, to deduce that it was the alcohol making her that way, but even in her intoxication she could not deny that even if she wasn't drunk she would still be in the same position. Antonio Ruiz made a disaster out of her.

All of a sudden, the back door of the shop burst open, and someone grunted, "What the fuck is going on back here?"

Scout's face shot up, the rough, deep voice bouncing off of her eardrums like her head was a pinball machine.

It was Skylar, standing there under the light of the shop's back door. A light that was so bright and white that it could have been reaching down from heaven and Skylar could have been an angel basking in it. But it wasn't and he would never be.

She stared at him wildly with the thought that she should've been fervently embarrassed. She was an absolute mess; a collection of bloodshot eyes, mascara rivers and eyeliner interstates. Her bottom lip was quivering and her breath was astray.

"You h-have impeccable t-timing," she slurred. She didn't recognized her own voice. It sounded as if it just blew in on the breeze from another town over.

"Shit," Skylar said with a tired face. "Are you all right?"

"No," she hiccuped. "I'm wrong. All wrong."

Skylar looked hesitant, like he wasn't exactly sure what he was supposed to do just then. He knew from his encounters with Scout that she was capable, and he considered leaving her be, but when a stale breeze blew through her hair and carried the scent of her up to his towering six-foot-two stature, he could smell the whiskey as unambiguously as a bloodhound. He decided in that moment that she certainly was not capable.

"Fuck," he sighed, rubbing tiredly at his temples.

"W-what are you even d-doing out here?" she asked, wiping violently at the black trails running down her cheeks that resembled cracks in porcelain. "Everyone else is s-still at the dinner party."

"I left after you did," he said. "If you couldn't tell, dinner parties are not my forte."

Skylar walked slowly towards Scout. He squatted beside her to be at her level, and even though he still looked as vacant as the Arizona deserts, he was concerned. For the first time in a very long time.

"Now, for a more important question," he whispered softly, as if that was the only way to speak to her at that proximity, "why are you drunk and upset?"

"I'm not!" She hollered, punching her fist into the dirt.

"Oh, really?" he asked with narrowed eyes. "So, how do you explain smellin' like the bottom of a keg and havin' raccoon eyes?"

Scout stared at him for a long time. She looked at him as if he was the physical evidence that her life was shattering into a million fragments. Skylar had never seen so much wreckage in anyone's eyes before. It reminded him of a tornado. A tornado of misfortunes and misery, of teeth and bones and regret.

"I—" she faltered. She was too drunk to conjure an excuse, and she thought herself too pathetic to even attempt to lie to him, so she burst into a second fit of tears. She buried her face in her hands.

"C'mon," Skylar whispered. He wrapped his calloused hands around her wrists and pulled her up with him when he stood.

"W-where?"

"Your room."

"No!" she hollered, thrashing out of his grasp. "I can't go up there!"

Her room was saturated with Antonio and all of the nights he spent in her bed. It was like fragments of him were shoved into every crevice of her life, and she could not handle it then. It was easy to ignore when she was sober, but as she stood beside Skylar, staring up at her bedroom window over the garage, it was impossible. All she could think about was what Santan Valley Auto Repair would look like on fire, and she was afraid that she would actually touch a lit match to a gas can if she spent the night in that room.

"I'm not just gonna leave you here," Skylar said quietly. His voice swam around her ears in dizzying laps.

She looked at him with damp eyes. "Then t-take me somewhere Antonio's never been."

Skylar's brows hitched, making the connections between Scout's drunken outburst and Antonio's emergence. He understood then, and nodded to convey so. "Well, I'm pretty sure he's never been to my motel room."

Part of her insisted that going back to Skylar's motel room was a bad idea. Dangerous. Like spaceshipping to some unexplored planet. But the rest of her figured that going back to Skylar's room couldn't be anymore dangerous than every second she invested in Antonio. So she went.

Scout walked laboriously with Skylar, like she had just swam up from the bottom of a sea of whiskey. Which, in fact, she had.

Skylar maintained a step behind her, hyper-aware that she could topple over at any second and ready to catch her before she fell to the ground with the empty thump he imagined a severed limb to make as it bounced off of the floor. Even from behind her, when the only glimpse he could catch of her face was when they passed beneath a street light and she would look around hurriedly as if Antonio would leap out of the shadows, Skylar could decipher that she was on the verge of tears again.

He blurted, "You ever play soccer?"

"No," she sniffled. "Why?"

He scratched the back of his neck uncomfortably. "'Cause by the looks of that paint can, you got one hell of a kick."

She thought that was his attempt at taking her mind off of Antonio. She smiled. It was small, but it was there.

When they got to room number five of V&L's Motel, Skylar stepped before Scout, unlocking the door while she stood wobbling behind him. She swayed back and forth, threatening to fall over like the Leaning Tower of Piza. And she would've if she hadn't grabbed onto the back of Skylar's T-shirt just as she began her descent.

"Whoa," she muttered, clinging to Skylar's back. She could feel his muscles rippling beneath her finger tips. It drove her insane. "I'm really drunk."

The lock clicked. Skylar stepped inside with Scout still clinging to his back. The darkness of the motel room swallowed them whole until he drew back the curtains and a sea of moonlight flooded into the room.

"You can take the bed," he said, motioning towards it.

"Really?" she asked. Then she fell back into the mess of unmade bedsheets that reveled in the scent of Skylar; Old Spice and gasoline and rain. She wished she could bottle it up and take it with her.

"Yeah."

She looked up at him, watching as he rubbed tiredly at his eyes. He reminded her of innocence, then. Like maybe everything that had ever happened to him, despite her lack of understanding as to what exactly was everything, was the byproduct of his environments; maybe the immaculate sadness he carried like a scarlet letter on his chest was no fault of his. Like he was the consequence of misfortune.

She couldn't handle all of those dangerous, sympathetic thoughts. She looked away.

"Well," she began, offhandedly, "why were you at the garage?"

Skylar shrugged. "To get some work done, I guess."

She hiccuped, lifting a wobbly finger. "So, you'd rather leave your own party of adoring admirers to... work?"

"No. I'd just rather be by myself."

"Oh," she said, dejectedly. "I'll leave you alone then." She tried to pull herself out of the cloud of Old Spice and gasoline and rain, but she only succeeded in flopping back down into the covers, sending them flying up around her in a white storm.

She looked up at Skylar. He was standing there with lifted brows and a tilt in his lips. He was amused, she thought. She laughed loudly, and he continued staring at her with that odd, charming look on his face.

Sunflowers.

Scout kicked off the pretty, studded sandals she stole from Bo earlier that day. They landed with two thumps on the motel room's floor. Then she pulled herself into the middle of the bed and watched as Skylar crossed the room.

"Where will you sleep?" she asked.

Skylar emerged from the small closet across the room with a spare pillow.

"Over here."

Before she knew it, he was laying on his back on the floor in the corner of the motel room with nothing but a pillow under his head. "All I've ever needed is a corner and a pillow."

"That's kind of sad," she said, looking at him with drooping eyes.

His expression was doleful as he stared at her. Rather, through her.

Hurricane.

"Not as sad as drinking to cope with your feelings," he said. "It's like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. It's not gonna do you any good."

She spoke sleepily, her eyes closed and her mind drifting. "It might. I just need more band-aids."

He paused for a while, letting her words linger in the air. It made their affect greater, and he felt a lot more despondent in that moment. More than usual.

When he did speak, he was quiet. Thoughtful.

"No," he said. "You need someone to stitch you up."

When he spared a glance at Scout, he realized his words were wasted. She had already fallen asleep in a tight ball in the middle of his bed, wound up in Bo's Bohemian dress and his white sheets.

Skylar sighed to himself. He looked passed Scout, out of the window, and for a long time he laid there staring at the giant, melancholy satellite hovering in the middle of the night sky. He had a dangerous thought then, much like the ones Scout experienced whenever she was near him.

He wondered if the moon looked the same from a snowy field in eastern Michigan.