I'm still a little stoned when we get on the bus, so I prop my glasses on my head and let my curved corneas turn brake lights into crosses. They stretch when I squint. 

The tattoo on my stomach flashes red and hot as I readjust, pressing against the waistline of pants that fit me better half a pitcher of sangria ago. The tattoo is two days old, still leaving rust on the inside of my tank tops. It's a massive rendition of Mary breastfeeding baby Jesus. I was a little fucked up when I got it, and I'm a little fucked up now. But I still think it's sick. And I can decide if it's ironic or not based on who I'm talking to.

The crosses are making me nauseous. It probably has nothing to do with the drinks. Or Amanda’s weird-ass weed. Or the miscellaneous pill I won from grinding on a they/them at the jazz club. Fingers all up in their mullet—a record-breaking song and a half before they slipped the pill in my mouth. I only looked back at Amanda once. And it was only to see if she was looking at me.

She wasn’t. She was buried under this femme girl who was at least twice as hot as the they/them, and the pill had left a film on my tongue that tasted suspiciously like Lexapro. 

What’d you slip me? I asked, but my ride was gone in the eyes, staring blankly across the room. Mouth hanging open, a bit of my lip gloss sparkling at the corners. I pried myself from their thigh and peeled Amanda off the femme, ignoring a slew of words rhyming with runt and rucker. 

Later, on the bus, my glasses are stuck in my hair. Amanda, on the seat behind me, notices my struggle and grabs my head, tilting it back with enough force to make the bile in my stomach churn. 

I might barf, I say, her fingers deftly weaving through the offending strands.

Like, might how much?

I’m really thinking about it. 

She lays one hand over my mouth while the other continues detangling. She smells like booze and someone else’s perfume, just a step away from rubbing alcohol. The glasses come free, and she props them back on my face. When she comes into focus, I can see the powder stuck in the concealer under her nose.

I thought coke gives you heart palpitations.

Yeah. I sucked a dick in the bathroom.

I start saying What does that have to do with anything? but I don’t get too far past Wha.

Well, I sucked the dick to get the coke.

I shake my head, half successfully. Not my point.

She frowns. Presses her fingers into my jaw and slides them upwards towards my temples. Amanda’s a paramedic, somehow. She does this when I drink enough. Uses me for trauma assessment practice. Maybe that’s why I keep drinking, to feel her hands on me. To hear her whispering my triumphs. Pupils reactive. Trachea inline. I’ve faked a couple illnesses. God, I’d step in front of a train.

What are you on? she asks.

Pill. Mullet.

No way. The one in the Smiths shirt?

Yeah.

That’s the dick.

Her hands abandon me for her phone, a pang of jealousy making a home under baby Jesus. I swallow the vomit in my mouth, then regret it, sure I’d feel better filled with less booze, tattoo burned off, hair back to brown. If I could close up the holes in my earlobes. Unfuck a few boys and unlove a few girls.

Amanda?

Baby.

Why do we keep doing this?

She withdraws a plastic water bottle full of the last dregs of our drinks, sangria and tonic mixing with rum and coke to become an unappealing murk. My eyes drift to an older woman across the aisle. Deep brown eyes and swirling earrings, the kind that look like they’re always spinning. She stares at me, and I think I might cry. I wonder if she’d forgive me if I asked.

Amanda puts the bottle to my lips. It goes down like water.