Mom’s new boyfriend is breakfast. Coffee breath, ketchup face, sausage fingers. Diner cheap. This new boyfriend, Chad, is eating Frosted Flakes raw. I butter toast and silence scrapes by. I ask him if he can take me driving since Mom is working. Chad doesn’t work and neither do his words, not before noon, and he grunts.
We climb into his almost-new Chevy and I quietly slide the driver’s seat back. The engine sputters a hula girl to life, hips doing a dashboard sway. Chad catches me staring and says, She’s pretty hot huh.
Chad reclines and sticks his boot out the window, blocking the side mirror. Whenever I switch lanes I glimpse his sole, wedged with pebbles and gum. Cigarette smoke fills the car and Chad offers me my first puff, as long as I don’t tell Mom. I cough and wheeze and hear him laugh. Another first.
He makes me turn into the gas station and emerges five minutes later with two energy drinks and a fistful of lotto tickets, slapping them onto his paint-chipped hood. We are frenzied miners, Blue Raspberry Frost vibrating through our veins, hoping our fingernails strike gold. I’m going to spend it on a new phone and call my dad. Chad tells me he never talked to his dad, even when he was alive, so he’s going to buy a new pair of Levi’s.
We win enough for burgers and fries. Chad teaches me how to take man-bites, drive with my knees, and headbang to Metallica all at the same time. I’m pushing 80 mph. Maybe it’s the extra jalapeños but we’re on fire, melting white lines and green signs. City limits and exits. Chad tells me the emergency brake is for parking only, but sometimes he imagines pulling it while driving—ejecting like a pilot from a plane and landing on clouds of cotton candy. How sweet would that be?
There’s a dark mass on the side of the road and Chad tells me to pull over because he used to work for rodent control. But it’s a pit bull––chest matted with blood, eyes fluttering, collarless. Chad folds onto the asphalt, gently strokes his head and whispers, You’re okay buddy. We lift him together and as I shuffle towards the truck bed Chad tells me to put him in the backseat instead.
The vet says it doesn’t look good. He’s dehydrated and lost a lot of blood. She gives me one of those sorry-for-your-loss arm pats, attempting to quell any bubbling emotion. But it’s Chad who erupts, spewing insults and spittle: how she isn’t even a real doctor, how she doesn’t know shit, how he’s not our dog anyways, how we’re leaving.
I merge onto the empty highway but everything slows down. The sun dips and Chad tells me to turn on my headlights. The windshield fogs and Chad tells me to turn on my defrosters. And when I hear him sniffle, Chad turns on the radio and tells me to keep my eyes on the road.
