200 Monas

by Jan Saenz

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

For fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda July–and the darker edge of Breaking Bad and Uncut Gems–comes a whip-smart, irresistible debut novel about a college senior who has 48 hours to sell her recently deceased mother's surprise stash of rare pills, or suffer the consequences. 

Arvy Keening is just trying to get through the week. Tantalizingly close to leaving her college years at Westheimer University behind, all she has to do is pass her finals, pack up her life, and ship off to San Francisco for a prestigious Big Pharma internship. The problem? Arvy just found 200 hits of Molly in her dead mother’s closet. And when two drug dealers come to collect what they are owed, they reveal that the pills are not Molly, but Mona – a rare pharmaceutical that induces intense orgasms. The dealers give Arvy an ultimatum: Sell 200 Monas in 48 hours or die.  

To aid in her seemingly impossible quest, Arvy recruits Wolf, Westheimer's resident drug dealer who also happens to be infuriatingly charming and distractingly sexy. In a race against the clock, Arvy and Wolf barrel through their college town, leaving a series of erotic shenanigans in their wake; appealing to horny co-eds, lonely barflies, and a mysterious sorority whose sisters have their own ideas for Mona’s potential uses. But if Mona has a knack for unleashing visceral reactions in the body, what will it unlock in Arvy, who has been repressing grief over her mother’s death for weeks?  

Unashamedly brash, bold, and blistering, 200 Monas is a truly one-of-a-kind read, a playful and honest examination of sexuality and grief, and a sharp, searing love letter on how to release all that’s inside you.  

Release date: March 3, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

Mom died four weeks ago, but her patchouli incense still lingers in the drywall of her closet. All her crusty secondhand Persian rugs—gone. All her thrifted furniture and vintage trinkets—gone. Sold to cover funeral costs. All is quiet. All is empty. All except a rack of kaftans, three boxes, some photo albums, and 200 hits of Molly in a Ziploc bag.

I scoff. This is so Mom. Always leaving her latest projects lying around the house. I had just finished lugging an armful of gladiator sandals into a box for Goodwill when the bag dropped from an overhead shelf, landing on my big toe like a beanbag tossed from the void. A ghost’s invitation to play.

I give the drugs a shake in her direction. “Are you kidding me with this?”

Across the room, a bright blue urn stares back at me. Even in death, my mother has found a way to minimize my frustration, her quick quips and cheeky winks milled down and compacted to ash inside a vessel no bigger than a coffeepot. She sits, perched on the floor next to my crumpled sleeping bag. I’ve been sleeping in her room.

“Seriously, you couldn’t have flushed your stash before you jumped ship? Maybe gifted it to your horny women’s circle?”

I keep waiting for her to respond, to waddle after me like some enchanted Disney houseware whenever I turn my back. Mom was anything but passive; this silence is new for me.

“I know you can hear me,” I hiss, returning to her closet.

The scent of fresh cardboard hits my nose. I’m still waiting for the lights to flicker, the closet door to slam shut behind me. For weeks, I have waited for Mom to fuck with me from the afterlife. Ghosts, spirits, messages from beyond—so not my thing, but definitely her thing. Mom was witchy. She sold herb-infused candles and crystal dildos. Refurbished velvet love seats and vintage tees. Every moon, she saged my jeans and blessed my virgin bed with ginseng root until one day, at eighteen, I finally snapped, “I have done it, you know. You can stop now.” Selling propagated plants was her specialty, but her real passion was light drug dealing.

“I dabble,” she told neighbors in confidence. Stagnant housewives. Exhausted carpool moms. Women who had lost a grip on their truer selves, thinking my eccentric free-spirited mother—with her Stevie Nicks top hat and vegan-friendly ankle boots—could revive and cure them by association. What I wouldn’t give to hear those ankle boots thudding floorboards right now.

I chuck a handful of wire hangers into a box, loud enough so she can hear. I’m not pissed because I found the drugs. Mom was street-smart; I trusted she could wiggle her way out of any situation, even illegal ones. I’m pissed because I got up early to clear out her closet, tugging housedresses off hangers, swatting at overhead shoe boxes I couldn’t reach—waiting, just waiting for a sign of her haunting. Yes, the bag fell, but the AC kicked on right before, and my logical brain is too hardwired to ignore a scientific explanation. Once again, I trust science before trusting my mother.

“We call that physics, Ma.” I tape a box closed and kick it to the corner.

It never bothered me—the light drug dealing. In a way, it was cute watching Mom weigh little baggies of shrooms on her food scale in the kitchen, calling up old girlfriends for orders. It was the small things that kept her going and made her smile, and that’s all I wanted. To see her smile.

But over the last week, a spell of newfound bitterness has cast itself over me, its angry magic growing more impenetrable by the day. The more I accept her silence—the more I wait for the urn to waddle or the toilet to flush beneath me when I pee—the angrier I feel.

I sigh, deflating my back against the closet wall. I study the unmarked bag of pills. Little Mollys. Has to be Molly. The colors are so cheerful—a large scoop of tricolored pastel babies cradled in the pit of my palm. When I flex my fingers, their cries skitter beneath their cellophane blanket. Looking closer, there’s a small M embossed on each translucent round gel casing. I try snapping a photo on a pill identifier app, but nothing comes up. They look like layer cakes. Teeny-tiny macarons for mice.

Jesus, Ma, if Aunt Jean had found this bag, in the house she’s currently selling no less, she’d—

“Arvy?” Aunt Jean’s voice echoes from down the hallway, its volume growing louder as she draws near. “Arvy? Arvy?”

Shit. I search the closet for a hiding spot, if not for me, then for the pills. “Arvy?”

Shitshitshitshit.

I scamper out into Mom’s bedroom. It’s weird crossing floorboards this naked, surfaces I’d never seen or heard unrugged until yesterday after the movers left. For reasons I can’t explain, I dash for the urn next to my sleeping bag.

You’d think ashes were loose, but no—they pack them in a vacuum-sealed bag so they don’t scatter should the vessel tip or shatter. I unscrew the lid, stash the bag of pills on top of Mom, and screw it shut just in time to turn and see Aunt Jean standing in the doorway. Her face falls.

“Oh, Arvy.”

I furrow my brow. Then I remember who I’m holding. “Oh!” A nervous chuckle escapes me. “N-no, I-I was just moving it.”

“Don’t explain, dear.” Her feet are faster than her words. She jerks me into a perfumed hug, the bulbous hips of the urn digging into my ribs and against my chest. I’m not wearing a bra.

“I’ve told you a hundred times,” she coos, “you can talk to me.”

I swear to God if she uses the term safe space one more time—

“I’m a safe space, Arvy, safe space. Shhh.”

Her neck cradles mine like a swan’s. After the movers loaded the last of my stuff into a portable storage unit bound for California, Jean begged me to sleep at her house, to vacate my childhood home in the days that remained before Mom’s house officially sold. But I’m my mother’s daughter. I’m too proud to accept professional advice.

“Bottling up these emotions—Arvy, it’s not healthy.”

Every cell in my body groans. Ever since the memorial, Aunt Jean has monitored me with the tired eyes of a newborn mother, anticipating some frantic cry for help that I have yet to give. At first, the attention was comforting. Now, it just feels nosy. She’s always touching me. My hair. My hands. All the boxes I’ve packed. It is as if she thinks her magic touch will somehow summon my tears. If only she understood; I’m not hiding my grief. I just keep forgetting Mom is dead.

“Was just moving it off the ground, Jean. I’m fine.”

She pulls away, a glint of mascara tears collected in her lashes. “I’m sorry to interrupt your moment, but didn’t you say your first final is at nine?”

I whip my phone out of my back pocket. 8:41 a.m.

Shit! I dash across the room, wiggling my toes into a collapsed pair of checkered Vans. Ever since Mom died, my sense of time has gone ass-up, something that stupid grief counselor at the medical examiner’s office didn’t tell me in her little impromptu one-on-one. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Well here, let me take the—”

“No!” I hug the urn. “No, uh… I-I want her with me. For luck.” I cop a smile, but Jean’s alarmist tone stalks me down the hall.

“Well, at least let me drop off the rest of the boxes—”

Her loose jewelry jingles behind me—the same pitch as my mother’s favorite bangles. I walk faster.

Damn. Car keys. I turn back, snatching them from a pile of yesterday’s dirty clothes.

“Arvy, please reconsider staying at my house, at least while Greg and I are out of town. Had I known you’d insist on sleeping here, I wouldn’t have arranged for the relocation movers to transport all your things this week. Arvy, that sleeping bag. On the floor—”

“Have a great trip, Jean!” I peck her cheek, half apologizing when my ponytail whips her across the face.

“Arvy.” Her pleas accelerate with my stride. “The utilities are being shut off tomorrow. I’ve told you, there is no point in you staying in a dark, empty house. It’s not normal—”

Not this again. I round the corner of the hallway, straight for the front door—

WOOF!

I trip over Shelley, the urn slipping from my grip. A bowling ball—fumbled. Jean’s hands shoot out, but I grab it just in time. A gasp seizes us both. WOOF, WOOF!

“Goddamn this dog.”

“Arvy! What a thing to say.” Jean cuts in front of me to coddle Shelley, her latest foster dog. Shelley is a geriatric basset hound, blind in one eye and deaf in both ears. Her bladder is so shot we can’t even move her without brown piss sputtering out beneath her. The dog is fucking miserable, and we’ve got the bite marks to prove it—Jean’s fingers are covered in Band-Aids, her arms spackled with concealer.

“I must have left the back door open,” she says. “Come on, Shelley, come on.”

She tows the dog by the collar, crouching her way through the open living room toward the glass door. Shelley growls, her untrimmed nails carving check marks in the floorboards that Mom spent years protecting. Dribbles of pee and pebbled shit leave a breadcrumb path.

On tiptoe, I navigate the obstacle course of piss spatter in the entryway. “I promise to have everything out by Thursday.”

“The buyers are closing on Friday—”

“I’ll leave my key under the mat.” I reach for the front door.

“OK, but remember to lock the door and empty the fridge. And don’t forget to feed Shelley!”

I whip around. “What?”

She pulls a roll of paper towels from her handbag, rushing to wipe up Shelley’s mess.

“I thought you were taking her with you.”

“I was, but your Uncle Greg is livid—says we need quality alone time. I’ve been juggling so much. Why else would he insist we still go on our anniversary trip as planned? The man needs romance, Arvy, I can’t deny him that.” She crawls around the empty living room on all fours, checking for unseen puddles with a soiled yellow napkin, scrambling to find a trash can. But the movers took that too. “I’ll leave her outside with a box fan and water. Just take your final and let her in when you get back. If you walk her five times a day, she won’t pee as much, I promise. I’ll be back on Friday morning to sign the closing contracts and drive you to the airport. You have my house key, right? Oh, will you email me your itinerary? Oh, and Arvy?”

I slam the front door, clenching my teeth, my eyes, my toes, Mom’s keys—

I hate this. Hate! Hate feeling tethered to other people’s good graces. Hate needing help whether I ask for it or not. Before this month, I didn’t even talk to Jean unless there was a holiday or funeral; Mom and I made a sport of dodging her around town. Now she’s everywhere, leading the charge, and I’m left to follow because of Mom’s will.

That fucking will—How could she? I wouldn’t even be in this situation had Mom not added conditions.

Therefore, being of sound mind and body, I leave all my remaining assets to my daughter, Harvey Moon Keening, on the condition that she must present proof of a college degree from an accredited university before obtaining control of my estate. If proof of a college degree cannot be provided, my sister, Jean Annabel Giger, shall inherit my estate until notarized proof of a college degree is provided.

It doesn’t make sense; Mom vilified Jean. Watching them share space was like watching a pagan choreograph a moon dance with a nun. They disagreed at every turn. Even in childhood photos, they stood three feet apart.

The clause was dated a week after last Christmas, a detail that sobered me the second I heard the lawyer read it aloud. Last Christmas, Mom was in one of her funks, the worst I’d seen or felt in a long time.

The funk. That’s what we called it. The thing that latched on to my mom for as long as I can remember, like a virus that would flare and go dormant. It’s hard to describe what the funk felt like. After all, I was only a spectator who sensed its presence. The funk followed us on vacations. It rode in the back seat on road trips and lingered patiently on holidays. It hated weddings. Somehow using the funk as a euphemism made Mom’s condition seem less serious. After all, a funk is manageable. The funk comes to town? Go to a yoga class. The funk sticks around? Watch a Jeopardy! marathon. The funk gets worse? Drive the Caddy around the block until it goes away. Works every time.

“Of sound mind and body?” If only they knew.

But dog-sitting Shelley—ugh. I can’t refuse Jean a favor, not now. Jean holds all my cards and has been nice enough to let me play them from behind her shoulder. I could have kept the house, but the money was too tempting. Paying off student loans and getting a place of my own sounded like a win, and I needed a win. I had no desire to live in a college town for the rest of my life, or to become a landlord for student renters. Jean disagreed, but luckily, she felt embarrassed enough about her executorship to ultimately let me decide its fate, agreeing to conserve the profits until I graduate. Jean’s kindness has me in her debt. She even found me a cheaper sublet in San Francisco a few blocks from my impending internship. I can’t deny her a favor, not now.

Friggin’ dog.

Hard sunlight sizzles off the driveway. I climb into Mom’s massive 1989 Cadillac, its hot-pink paint job still holding strong after all these years. I buckle Mom in tight behind the furry passenger seat belt, imagining that this was her view of me when I was a little girl.

For the first time today, I mutter the question—the question I have muttered into the void every day since she died. “Why did you take my car that day, Ma?”

I wait for the waddle. For a ceramic hand to sprout from the lid, honk my nose, and slap me across the face. I wait for her voice.

Silence. She’s in one of her moods.

It takes only about ten minutes to get anywhere in Westheimer if you speed, which everyone does, but Mom’s pink Caddy is practically a hearse in her absence—it draws attention. Eager to speed but not enough to risk it, I sail University Drive at 15 mph. It couldn’t be more obvious that it is finals week—all the good parking is taken. Not one human in sight except for a small brigade of middle-aged female speed walkers. They slow when they see Mom’s car. She was always seen cruising around town, smiling, glowing, gracing people with her feel-good chatter and charismatic presence. I wave sheepishly.

I didn’t really think this whole urn thing through, only now realizing that I’m about to escort 200 hits of Molly onto a university campus. I consider stashing the drugs in the trunk, but that doesn’t quite sit well either. People are always peering into this car’s windows to admire the blood-red fabric upholstery. No one peers into me; I’d sooner honk.

Running far too late to park anywhere legal, I zoom into a faculty parking spot. This test should take me forty minutes, tops. I’ll be back before they can find me.

I look down at Mom in the passenger seat, strapped in like a toddler. My gut says stash her, but the thought of leaving her alone, in a hot car, no less… In high school, the drug dogs were always seen patrolling the parking lot, never the classroom.

I check the time. Fuck.

I grab Mom and haul ass to the science building.

Bidding farewell to Analytical Chemistry never felt so good. Sure, my upper lip sweated the whole time, and I couldn’t stop bouncing the urn atop my knee, even after the girls beside me began to stare. Other than that, I’d say I fared well for a first-time drug smuggler.

As I jog back to Mom’s car, my ponytail catches a stiff breeze at the same time an erratic flapping sound scurries in the distance. I slow to a halt. I know that sound.

Pinned beneath my windshield wiper, an orange slip of paper flutters like a fish caught on a hook.

No. I look down at the tire, knowing, just knowing—NO.

Below the front fender, a scuffed-up yellow boot holds the wheel hostage.

They found me. After four weeks of dodging unpaid parking tickets in Mom’s car, they found me. Goddamn those ticket-hungry student officers, those 9 a.m. sadists. It’s not my fault I didn’t want to pay for another parking permit. It’s not my fault my car is buried somewhere in a salvage yard in Central Texas with the Westheimer University parking sticker still on it.

A few yards away, a campus policeman strolls the sidewalk, his head cast down. Eyes on his phone. Shit. I gotta get these pills off campus. Fast.

I speed-walk toward the main drag, keeping my chin low. Urn clutched. Mom’s manageable weight suddenly feels like a ten-pound jack-in-the-box that could pop open at any second, scattering pills and ash across the quad. Crowds begin exiting buildings in droves. Fuck, fuck—

Deep breaths, she says. I wince. “Now is not the time, Ma,” I mutter under my breath.

When I was nine, Mom made a pallet on the back porch, laid me on a blanket, and lined my chakras with seven duck eggs. She cast an antianxiety spell over my body—a cure for the attacks I “suffered” during lunch period when my best friend no longer wanted to sit next to me. For the first few weeks, it was nice hearing Mom in my head at school, even if it was magic of my own doing. She coached me when I struggled at sleepovers, when I failed a quiz, when I cried in school bathrooms. But by junior high, it was a curse I couldn’t undo. I heard it when I had trouble inserting tampons, when I stole my best friend’s training bra, when I flubbed up my first kiss in eighth grade. “Listen,” it would say. “Just listen.”

I walk faster. Fine! I’m listening.

The way I see it, you have three choices. Mom was obsessed with the number three. Something about cosmic harmony or mystic triangles.

One, you can walk over to Campus Police and pay the ticket, along with the eleven others you have dodged payment on.

I snort. Yeah, right. I just spent the last of my overage check on a plane ticket, and I’d rather drink battery acid than borrow another dime from Aunt Jean right now.

Two, you can curl into a ball and crouch behind an exhaust pipe, allowing the fumes to ease you into a temporary state of euphoria until you take your next final.

Not the wisest choice, but a solid option.

Or three, you can wave down that sort of friend of yours, Amy, who just climbed into a Nissan Altima that looks like it might have ample air-conditioning.

“Amy!”

Amy turns, searching the lot for her name. I wave her down like a desperate hooker.

“Hey, can I—” I jog up to her side, checking my peripherals as the late breakfast rush funnels into the Student Center. “Can I get a ride? My mom’s car won’t start, and I need to get home fast.” It’s weird saying things like my mom’s car, speaking of her as if she were still alive and not nestled like a football underneath my armpit.

“Sure.” She taps away at her phone, her Technicolor nails clacking. “Gotta make a pit stop first, though.”

“Thank you. Seriously, thank you.”

Thirty minutes later, I’m all out of thanks, full-on sweating in Amy’s Nissan. I expel a heavy sigh outside my rolled-down window. The AC is blasting, but it’s muggy, and I’m too peeved to tell Amy she needs coolant.

Mom is wedged between my feet on the dirty floor mat, her blue shell looking comfy in the shade. Amy’s car smells like fast food; her back seat’s littered with it. My stomach grumbles.

“I promise he’s never late,” Amy says, thumbnails still tap-dancing against her screen. She hasn’t put it down since she started driving—a testament to how much Amy hasn’t changed since high school. Not that we were close, but there is lingering sense of camaraderie among Westheimer High alumni who stayed in town for college. At least one strong enough to justify a nod hello across campus, or the occasional favor. I assumed when she said pit stop, she meant food or gas, but since we’ve been parked outside an H-E-B market for the last twenty minutes, I deduce that pit stop is in fact code for drug deal. Amy’s a pothead, and not the fun kind.

Drugs aren’t really my thing. Not because I don’t like them, but because I tend to waste the high on obsessive productivity. The first and only time I did coke, I ditched my friends at prom and immediately drove home to mathematically rearrange all the potted plants on our back porch. It was fun. Way more fun than prom.

“Just a couple more minutes. And don’t worry—he’s cool. Just don’t draw attention to the car when he comes. And don’t fidget when he does the switch-off.”

“Switch-off?”

“The money part.”

“Oh.”

She checks her cleavage and lipstick in the rearview mirror. She pinches her cheeks, studying all her angles. “Do I look fuckable?”

I shrug, then nod.

Sunlight sears the top of my thighs. I yank down on the hem of my shorts, inconveniently the shortest I own. I forgot to do laundry this week, leaving my most unfortunate cutoffs to wear, the ones that ride up my ass every time I sit down. I crack my neck. Rub my swollen eyes, achy from squinting in the sun. Between clearing out the house and studying for exams, I haven’t gotten much sleep, let alone bathed, in three days. I’m surviving on Oscar Mayer’s entire product line, and I smell like deli meat.

I schedule a reminder in my phone, activating an alarm for 9:30 p.m. TAKE A SHOWER, YOU SMELL LIKE BAIT.

A couple more minutes turns into ten.

“Uh, Amy?” I reach for the urn. “Thanks for the ride, but I think I’m just gonna walk.”

“He’s almost here, I swear. Look, he just texted me.”

“It’s just, it’s finals week and I have to study and my car is bogus—I just need to get home, you know. I’ve got a final at two, and I still have to—”

“Hey.” A deep voice sweeps in through the open window behind my shoulder, whipping my spine back against my seat.

Oh my.

The first thing I see is hair—dark, thick, unruly hair—and a killer set of eyebrows. I don’t catch his face; I’m still stuck on the broad shoulders blocking my view, the dark-gray T-shirt concealing a long, daggerlike torso. Lean, muscular arms. Suddenly, my shorts are twice as short; I jab my hips up and yank down on the hem.

He doesn’t acknowledge me; his eyes oblige Amy, a genuine fretfulness wrinkling his brow.

“Sorry, got held up,” he says, casting a minty exhale past my nose. Someone just brushed his teeth.

He looks at me, nods, then veers back in surprise. Like he recognizes me. Or maybe he doesn’t care for the smell of bologna.

“It’s cool,” Amy says. “We haven’t been waiting long.”

The hell we haven’t.

She slips something into my left hand. Paper? A note? I can’t be sure because I haven’t figured out a way to not stare at this guy. Jesus. Remind me to do more drugs.

“You just got out of the science building.” He points at my chin. “We passed each other. I recognize your”—his eyes drift to the urn on the floorboards—“shirt.”

Impossible. Ain’t no way I would have missed this guy. He looks like a hot Olympian gone rogue. “I didn’t see you,” I murmur.

“Well, I saw you, kid.”

Kid?

Amy cuts in like she can’t abide small talk. “Wolf, meet Arvy. Arvy, Wolf.” She taps my hand—a child tapping the shell of a turtle, commanding it to come alive, to move.

His lips hitch in a smirk.

“Arvy?” He chortles. “Like a mobile home?”

I frown. “That’s an RV. My name is Arvy.”

“I dunno, girl, sounds the same to me.”

“Yeah? Well, who named you, a six-year-old?”

He chuckles, flashing a row of white teeth that scream of privilege, or at least a well-paid orthodontist. “I like you.” He holds out his hand, and I roll my eyes, accepting his handshake. But when our palms touch, something plastic hits my fingers and drops between my thighs.

“Oh! Sorry, I-I thought we were just—shaking hands.” I wedge my fist between my legs, fishing for what’s fallen, but the tiny packet slides deeper into the seat, nestled somewhere underneath my crotch. I duck my chin, hiding my blush as I dig for gold beneath my butt. My shorts creep up higher.

“Sorry. Here.” I hand the packet back to him. “Oh, wait, no, sorry.” I hand it to Amy. Wolf snickers. He mutters cute before turning his head at a passing car.

Fuck this guy and his sexy hands and nice teeth and unruly hair and gentle manner. If I weren’t blushing, I’d be spitting.

“Amy”—he extends his arm inside the car—“always a pleasure.” The muggy AC blows past his forearm, fanning a sweet musk of soap and sandalwood. Puckered veins cord and braid and flex beneath his skin when he fist-bumps Amy. His fingers are long. Knuckles like a row of dice. He turns to me. “Cutie?” He offers a fist-bump, but I wave him off and sink down in my seat, my ankles inching inward. They hug Mom.

But his fist doesn’t drop.

Our eyes lock, and suddenly I’m fifteen again—a flush-faced freshman cooking under a hot senior’s gaze. His smile pinches into a hard line, but his regard is warm. Inviting. Wait, are we flirting?

Amy slowly tweezes the folded money from my clenched fist and hands it to him.

Oh.

“Thanks, Wolfie. Sorry for the parking lot.”

He tips his chin. “You still rooming at McCormick?”

“Fuck no. I’m out of the dorms. I’m at Northwoods now.”

“Next time, just head home. I’ll drop off there.”

“I was giving Arvy a ride to her mom’s house.”

I cop a sheepish smile.

“And how is Mom these days?” he asks me, a slight twinkle in his tone.

“She’s dead,” I quip.

Silence. I immediately regret my tendency to turn into a Grade A asshole around cute boys.

The narrowing slits of his eyes study me like they can’t quite place me. And though it irks me to hold eye contact for longer than five seconds most days, I match his quiet scrutiny with a cutting smile.

“Nah, she’s not dead.” He points to my heart. “She’s just in there now.”

My throat closes. The feisty flame dancing in my chest caps off, and I feel myself dim.

Something about the funk changed last year, and Mom’s usual coping tricks weren’t working. On a good day, the funk hung back and slept on Mom’s chest. On a bad day, it split her open, wore her like a hat, and paced around on two feet, void of all reason and purpose. Some days she hung on by a thread, the funk burrowing so deep I feared she’d cut her wrists open just to dig it out. The funk isn’t sad or mean. It isn’t hateful or dramatic. It’s hard to describe the funk, really, though the word lonely comes to mind.

So when Wolf points at my chest, I instantly worry it’s the funk he’s referring to. Like he can see it inside me, dormant and knocking at my heart’s gate. I try to blink the fear away—the sting in my nose, the acid in my throat—but the more I blink, the more contaminated I feel.

Please don’t be the funk. Please don’t be the funk.

Wolf’s fingers curl inward on the windowsill. He must suspect that his words pierced deeper than intended because his shoulders cave—a man suddenly embarrassed of his size. “Sorry.”

I shake my head. Force a smile.

“Where’s her house?”

I clear my throat, “Uh, Garner Street?” Stilted when I hear my home address come out like a question.

“I’m heading that way. Want a ride?”

“Oh. Uh—” I turn to Amy. “No, Amy can take me.”

“Well—” Amy shovels the innards of her leather purse, a small glass pipe perched between her teeth. The bowl’s already packed with bud. “I mean, if Wolf is going there anyway…”

Amy’s sort of a bitch. The same reason she’s only sort of my friend.

She flicks a lighter and inhales a deep, satisfying toke, blowing smoke across the dash before diving face down for another hit. Great.

I turn back to Wolf watching Amy, a bored expression on his face.

“You sure you don’t mind?” I ask him.

“Like I said, I’m heading that way.”

Amy shoos me toward Wolf, who is opening my door. “Um. Yeah, OK.” I evacuate the car, Mom in hand. Wolf’s gaze does not go unnoticed; his eyes shoot straight to my shorts. He looks away. I yank down at my hems, staring at his scuffed-up boots—laces untied, tongue protruding, like he threw them on in a hurry.

“Uh—thanks, Amy.” I wave back. “Sorry about that whole switch-off thing.”

“Virgin jitters,” she croaks. She plops her purse into the passenger seat and speeds off, leaving Wolf and me to our devices. We pull out our phones at the same time.

Long, nimble fingers adjust a row of AC vents, directing a gentle gust of cold air to my neck. I made sure to check my reflection before I got in the car. I look like the red M&M.

Wolf’s dated Mercedes doesn’t reek of skunk weed and chicken tenders like I anticipated. This college drug dealer keeps his dashboard polished, his leather seats conditioned. How someone treats their car says a lot about ho. . .