Make Sure You Die Screaming

by Zee Carlstrom

Genres: Suspense; Black Humor; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

An electrifying debut about a nonbinary corporate burnout embarking on a road trip from Chicago to Arkansas to find their conspiracy-theorist father, who has gone missing—for fans of Detransition Baby and Chain-Gang All-Stars

The newly nameless narrator of Make Sure You Die Screaming has rejected the gender binary, has flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate gig, is most likely brain damaged from a major tussle with their now ex-boyfriend, and is on a bender to end all benders.

A call from their mother with the news that their MAGA-friendly, conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing launches the narrator from Chicago to deep red Arkansas in a stolen car. Along the way, the narrator and their new bestie—a self-proclaimed "garbage goth" with her own emotional baggage (and someone on her tail)—unpack the narrator’s childhood and a recent personal loss that they refuse to face head-on.

An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, gender expression, and the rot at the heart of capitalism, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, tragic, suspenseful road trip novel of our times.

Release date: April 8, 2025

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

ONE

We rage out of Chicago around four in the morning, hurtling south toward Arkansas because my mom needs help kidnapping my father. Actually, that’s a lie. A truer reason: I’ve been looking for an excuse to leave the city, planning my escape, biding my time, and Arkansas seems like a reasonably good place to hide. The kidnapping-my-father thing is a new development, a situation I do not entirely understand. Normally, I ignore Mom’s calls, but I was pretty fucked up last night, and my phone kept buzzing, and it was after midnight, so I thought … well, I don’t actually remember what I thought. Remembering has sucked since I got this fun new dent bashed into my skull.

Anyway, we are drinking. We are driving. We are making good time. Once we clear the suburbs, the Stevenson Expressway turns into I-55, and the grasslands roll into an endless brown blur. I’ve heard Indiana called America’s Hallway, but Illinois is Chicago’s Doormat—an unwelcoming strip of dirt, good only for wiping the shit off your shoes on your way to the Magnificent Mile. This is the Land of Lincoln, the Prairie State, and while they already burn these prairies every few years, I wish they’d do a better job. Scorch the earth and be done with it. Salt the fields, stanch the rivers, roll Illinois up like a sleeping bag, and send the white folks back to wherever we’re supposed to be.

This is the place I am from, but I’m from it like the Asian carp is from Lake Michigan. Invasive and destructive. I am a virus with great teeth, upturned nostrils, overpriced shoes, an ironic fashion mullet, and mild oral herpes. I guess you could call me the World’s First Honest White Man, but I don’t identify as a man anymore, so you’d probably call me other things first: pale, mesomorphic, alcoholic, workaholic, successful, violent, queer, pessimistic, autophobic, unheroic, semi-effeminate, sexually deviant, socially confused, normally repressed, compulsive, repulsive, and photosensitive. That’s an incomplete list, obviously, and probably a bit overdramatic, but I am in the mood for drama. I am floating near the cold center of a vaguely erotic black hole, sucking space and time, trying to find something to hold on to that I won’t destroy.

In other words, I am simultaneously experiencing a breakdown as well as a breakup. You might think these two things would cancel each other out, but they do not. If that sounds shitty, it is. If it sounds sad, it’s not. If anything, it’s hilarious. I am learning to laugh and smile and scream in the face of devastation. Plus, the drama gives me an excuse to self-medicate. That’s part of why we stole this car from my ex-boyfriend.

---

We race down the highway with a cop car in the rearview. An unsuspecting highway patrolman, maybe, but I can’t seem to shake him. I can’t even try to shake him. He’s been barreling behind us for the better part of fifty miles, and I can’t risk doing anything suspicious or overtly elusive. I slow

down, and he slows too. I change lanes to dodge dawdling trucks, and so does he. A waking fucking nightmare, but also kind of amusing. I keep telling myself this state trooper would pull us over if he knew about my crimes, and he hasn’t, so he doesn’t. That is the logical conclusion, but my father taught me never to trust things like logic or perception or the cold solidity of fact.

My father is a fool, but he is also very persuasive. He has a kind of lunatic charisma, like Alex Jones with less emphysema. I don’t know how or why he has wandered away from my mom again, but I do know the word wandered makes it sound like he’s got Alzheimer’s or some other diagnosable excuse. And he doesn’t. Not really. There is something wrong with him, there must be, but he’s been tested many times for many things: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, PTSD, whatever the doctors can think of. I’m not sure how he manages to beat these tests, but he comes out spotless every time. And here we are.

When Mom called me from Arkansas, I was lounging on the damp red futon I’d been Airbnbing for thirty-three dollars a night. The futon was located in the basement of a blue-haired elderly woman with sparkly tooth gems, seven large dalmatians, and the questionable business model of running a low-rent motel for the downwardly mobile. My living space was cordoned off from the rest of the basement with floor-length white curtains, like an army hospital. I’d been crashing there for two weeks—since leaving my ex—because I enjoy pretending that I’m still as poor as I was growing up. Wait, sorry, that’s not totally true. The real deal is I recently burned my entire life to the ground when I took my vow of radical honesty, and now I need cheap places to hide in case I can never find work again.

Either way, I didn’t hate the Airbnb. It fit my limited needs, and I met a self-proclaimed garbage goth who was crashing on the other side of my curtain. Her name is Yivi. She screams in her sleep. I’d bring her McChickens and Hot Cheetos whenever I stumbled back to my futon in the middle of the night, and we’d stay up talking about Freddy Krueger and techno-feudalism. Yivi’s twenty-two, addicted to pills, and on the run from a very bad guy she calls Big Gravy. She’s also great at drinking and my new best friend, which is why she’s mumbling in her sleep right now in the passenger seat of this stolen car.

---

Mom is calling me again, but I’m way too sober for a conversation. Buzz-buzz-buzz. Answer-quickly-asshole. I can’t safely drink with this cop on our tail, and thirst makes everything worse: my mood, my irritable ass, these headaches I can’t shake. I wish I were back in that cozy Airbnb basement, sipping Birthday Cakes in the damp dark, staring blankly at my curtains while Yivi hummed along to the Love Island theme song.

Instead, I’m out here, braving the real world while my iPhone rattles on the dashboard of my ex-boyfriend Clinton’s BMW M2. This fancy-boy car was a gift from Clinton’s CEO father on his thirtieth birthday. Blue paint job, silver racing stripes, sticky leather seats, fuzzy red steering wheel cover. It’s an adorable shitbox, terrible for long drives and long legs, but Yivi’s even taller than I am, and she doesn’t seem to mind.

Clinton, on the other hand, was my malevolent short king. Five-foot-five with thighs like Thor’s thunder. A sour German-Irish dude from Chicago’s North Side. We met in college. He liked the Blackhawks, and I liked his Mastercard, his Gold Coast apartment, and his enthusiastic alcoholism. We got along because Clinton’s family doesn’t know he’s queer, and neither does mine. Also, Clinton’s a big-time liar like I used to be. The difference is he grew up too wealthy to ever feel bad about the lying. He used to tell me I should lie more, lie to get everything I wanted, and he was right. Lying got me promoted, earned me my clients’ respect, landed me and Jenny a corner office. But it also mutated into a real nasty habit.

I won’t go so far as to say I’ve spent the past ten years living a lie—lest I seem a humongous cliché—but I will say I’ve been living a few thousand of them. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, tall ones. A never-ending semi-Seussian litany of tactical falsehoods. But that’s all over now, and I might even be glad. Approaching happy. Another humongous cliché is

the truth will set you free, but that one, I’ve recently learned, is horseshit. What the truth will actually do is tank your career, eradicate your remaining interpersonal relationships, bash your skull in with a baseball bat, and then set you free.

---

When my phone rings for the tenth time in three minutes, I snatch it off the dashboard and throw it hard into the backseat. I am not an athlete, and my aim definitely sucks, so the phone hits the rear windshield and careens around before settling somewhere out of sight.

Yivi snorts awake. “The fuck was that sound?” she asks, pulling her cheek off the window she’s been dozing against.

I casually adjust my grip on the steering wheel as if I am a perfectly chill person who never throws Apple products. “Good morning,” I say.

“Did something hit the car, babe?”

“Yes,” I say, which is technically an honest statement. “Did you have a nice nap?”

“Not really,” she says. “Mostly nightmares. Are we there yet?”

“Any cowboy guys?” I ask, because, well, I’m just remembering this, but Yivi’s last nightmare is the reason we left Chicago in such a hurry this morning. We spent most of the past few days rewatching old movies—Thelma and Louise, Lost in Translation, Pulp Fiction, Drugstore Cowboy, The Parent Trap, Stand by Me, Alien, Finding Nemo, Deliverance, and Apocalypse Now in that order—and drinking as much as we could without throwing up. Yivi eventually did throw up, and it was right around then that she got very serious, speaking with a haunted affect as she described her nightmare by the light of my glowing laptop screen. I’m used to Yivi talking about her dreams because she’s a weirdo like that, but this dream was different. It was about me and her, the two of us hiding in that basement, and a cowboy with a tan truck parked in front of the Airbnb. She said the cowboy with the tan truck was someone she recognized, someone who worked for Big Gravy, and when I looked out the grimy half-moon basement window, I swear to Todd I saw a guy wearing a cowboy hat leaning against a telephone pole, just lurking there, waiting for something. Then my mom called, and I felt like, in that moment, I needed to answer. My life has been pretty wild lately, and while I don’t believe in shit like fate or precognition, Yivi certainly does, and we got rolling pretty quick after Mom said she needed my help.

“Cowboy guy was there, yeah,” Yivi says. “And so were some cops.” She reaches for the nearly empty bottle of Disaronno jiggling in the cupholder, but I swat her hand.

“Don’t,” I say. “There’s a state trooper right behind us.”

“There is?”

“Don’t fucking look back there.”

“If they wanted to pull us over, they’d pull us over.”

“But you literally just

said you had a dream about cops.” I glance at my lanky psychic friend as she flips open the visor mirror and smoothes her bleached eyebrows. Neither of us has showered in days, and Yivi’s dark curly hair is an oil spill over the sides of her long, tan face. Smeared black mascara paints rings around the rosies of her bloodshot eyes. Her black silk shirt is rumpled, her black schoolgirl skirt is stained, and her whole Sailor-Moon-on-the-way-to-a-funeral vibe is a tad bit freakshow, but she’s still the most stunning person I’ve ever met. Beautiful the way needles are beautiful—long and slight and sharp. Her nose is vicious, her mouth is brutal, her everything else screams handle with care.

“Don’t look at me, babe,” she says, closing the visor. “I’m a goblin—and not even the sexy kind.”

“Yivi. The cops. What happened in your dream?”

“They def didn’t pull us over on the highway.”

“I need you to tell me right now where you saw them,” I say, making a particularly gallant effort to suppress the hair-trigger temper I inherited from my father. I don’t enjoy inflicting my anger on others, even if they deserve it. And Yivi doesn’t deserve it. I haven’t told her that I’m currently wanted for murder in addition to our casual grand theft auto, but I would still prefer if she’d take her police-related premonitions as seriously as I am.

“Relax, baby-babe,” she says. “The cops were in a parking lot.”

“Which parking lot?”

“Who knows. It was all very fuzzy. And it’s the cowboy guy we’ve gotta watch out for.”

“I know, Yivi. I am. But I haven’t seen him.”

“Then we’re goody like Woody.” She reaches down between her legs to dig through the duffel bag of supplies she swiped from our Airbnb. All the liquor from our blue-haired host’s kitchen cabinets, a box of Nabisco saltines, and a scratchy roll of Scott toilet paper in case we need to shit in a bush. The booze is trash—a half liter of Holland House sherry cooking wine, three Miller Lites, the Disaronno we’ve been nipping all morning, and a premixed margarita situation courtesy of Señor Jose Cuervo himself—but I’m not complaining. My tastes approach snooty when it comes to restaurants, clothes, and cinematic experiences. With alcohol, however, the ends justify the flaves.

“What kinda monster doesn’t keep real snack foods in their kitchen?” Yivi asks as she pops open a sleeve of saltines and pushes one into her mouth.

“The kind who makes you pay money to sleep on futons.”

“Blechity blech.” Yivi returns the crackers to the booze bag. “I can’t believe people eat these by choice.”

“I used to like them when I was growing up.”

“Sounds like a sad story,” Yivi says. “And I think your phone is ringing.”

“I know.”

“It’s lying on the floor behind you.”

“I know that too.”

“You’re so weird.” She spins and flops into the backseat, scuffing her nasty Doc Martens all over the dashboard.

“Yivi!” I say her name like a swear. “That cop can literally see you.”

“I’m still wearing my seatbelt, safety Sally.” She wriggles around until she’s facing forward once more, staring at my iPhone screen. “It’s your mom,” she says.

“I can’t talk to her right now.”

“Why not?”

I shrug in response. My head throbs. I fight the urge to grab the Disaronno and chug. I genuinely like Yivi, I do, and sometimes it feels like I’ve known her longer than two weeks, but we have a good-time relationship. We keep things light, easy, sloppy. She doesn’t know my past or my problems, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.

“I don’t love when you get like this,” she says.

“Like what?”

She taps a black-polished fingernail against her black-painted lips. “Sober,” she says.

I snort a laugh. “Same.”

“I just don’t see why you’re dodging your mom when we’re literally going to see her.”

“She’s a rude and whiny neurotic, Yivi. I told her we’re coming, and we are. There is nothing to discuss, and talking to her won’t help my headache.”

“True true.” Yivi unzips the yellow JanSport fannypack she’s got cinched around her waist. It’s a battered bag, and it clashes with her entire gothic vibe, but she never takes it off. “Though we both know there’s a surefire way to turn all your bad feelies into good feelies,” she says.

“I’m not taking any of those,” I say as Yivi tugs an orange pill bottle out of her bag. It’s the normal Walgreens prescription type, but the label fell off a long time ago, and it’s filled with Q—a freaky designer drug Yivi used to sell with Big Gravy.

“Your loss, babe.” Yivi shakes a small red Q tablet into her palm. “I, on the other hand, am overdue for a dose.” She pops the pill and affects a Texan accent that would 100 percent offend Matthew McConaughey: “Just lemme know when you wanna start L-I-V-I-N.”

---

I sniff the edge of a saltine and decide food’s for losers. This morning’s got me thinking about my father a lot: the way he used to say his parents couldn’t afford bread, the way he claimed they made all their sandwiches on crackers, the way he always made my brother and me eat saltines with creamed chipped beef for dinner because he wanted us to taste real poverty. He called that meal shit on a shingle. If my brother and I didn’t pretend to enjoy it, he’d lose his mind. But that isn’t why I’m not eating right now. The truth is I haven’t eaten in almost two weeks, and I’d prefer to think of my self-imposed starvation as a diet. I suck down a dangerous number of calories drinking a fifth of whatever a day, and I need to watch what I eat to maintain my sexy figure.

“Not super appetizing, are they, my good babe?” Yivi says when I cram the cracker sleeve into the pocket of my door.

“I’m not hungry,” I say.

“Bullshit. You’re starving. And I think we should stop for pancakes.”

“I wish.” I adjust my waistband where my black Beams Plus jeans are digging a mottled red line into my bloated gut. It’s only 7:17, but I’m already very fucking sick of driving. The trip from Chicago to Hookville, Arkansas, is thirteen hours, which means we’ve still got around ten brutal hours to go. Plenty of time for the state trooper behind us to run the plates on our hot little M2, waxed and gleaming in the flat morning light, and way more eye-catching than most of the farm-country jalopies out here in the treeless middle of nowhere. “But I’m not stopping for anything other than gas,” I say.

“Gas always lives near pancakes,” Yivi says.

“We’ve still got a quarter tank.”

“Cracker Barrel!”

“Later.”

“Death to fascists!”

“Yivi.”

“YOU GET WHAT YOU SETTLE FOR!”

“Please stop shouting,” I say, switching my right hand to the steering wheel so I can massage my temple with my left. I don’t feel like explaining this to Yivi, but if it weren’t for the cops, I wouldn’t mind stopping. The reality is I don’t want to go to Arkansas. Mom is lucky I answered last night. She is lucky I’m on my way. I haven’t spoken to my father since we came to blows on Thanksgiving. This was eight or so years ago, back when I was around Yivi’s age, shortly after Trump beat Hillary. For a while, I thought I’d grown out of that anger, but I am beginning to see it has followed me. Everything follows me. Everywhere I go, there the fuck I am. The homicidal gender-fluid freako your alt-right rep warned you about. To be clear, I am mostly joking. I am not actually a psycho. I am just angry about lots of things—the wars, the courts, the fascists, the economy, the sneakerhead fucksticks I used to call coworkers. I want things to be different, and that desire makes it difficult to love or like or even tolerate other Americans. But my anger usually aims in. I feel it like sores that won’t burst. I carry it like a festering fetus this country won’t let me abort. I rarely lash out, and when I do, I prefer Dos Equis. I was drunk when I fought my father. I was drunk when Clinton attacked me. I will most likely be drunk when I wrap this car around a tree. Inevitability is inevitable, and I am losing control. The pain in my head has become my only truth. I think my brain is bleeding. Whenever I dare to sleep, I wake up to the sound of hard wet heat, like hurricane rain, pounding at the drumheads of my ears. And while I’m terrified to see my father, my relationship with Mom isn’t much better. After basking in the carcinogenic sunshine of that unstable woman’s love for most of my youth, I managed to go from golden boy to black sheep in record time, and I figure she’ll like me even less now that I’m a homeless, unemployed, mullet-headed genderqueer.

“My bad, babe.” Yivi giggles, and I remember we were talking. “But I’m willing to bet your head lowkey wouldn’t hurt so bad if you ate something,” she says.

“I’ve tried that.”

Yivi hesitates. She tugs at the white ceramic cat-head necklace she always fiddles with when she’s thinking. It’s a hideous and whimsical piece of jewelry that clashes with literally all her outfits. I have considered asking

why she wears this cat head, but I’ve got a hunch the reason is sentimental. She’ll open up, and then I, in turn, will be expected to reciprocate with some sad-sack story about my father breaking my nose or Jenny dying in a Cleveland hotel room. If you want to learn the truth about other people, it helps to tell them convincing lies about yourself. And I guess I can’t do that anymore. “What if it’s my treat?” she asks, finally, as if this proposition is in any way tempting.

“You’re broke, Yivi,” I say.

“But I’ll give you a head start when we skip the check.”

“We are not doing any more crimes.”

“Stealing from corporations isn’t a crime.”

“It is if you get caught.”

“Literally who gets caught dining and dashing?”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I, babe. I know what I’m doing. Don’t treat me like some basic yuppie chick who’s never been around any blocks. I’ve been around hundreds of blocks. Thousands. I know how to do shit, and it’s not my fault you don’t.”

“I know how to do plenty of shit,” I say. “And I don’t want to stop because I’m pretty sure that cop is waiting for me to get off the highway so he can pull us over.”

“Why in the whole wild world would he do that?”

“He doesn’t want to get into a high-speed chase with such a fast car.”

Yivi clicks her tongue, and I can feel her giving me the look she always gives me before she calls me insane. Which I am, but so is she. “If you legit believe that, then I am genuinely worried about you,” she says.

“I believe it.”

“Wow!” Yivi shouts before cackling like a cartoon witch because she decided last week that witches have the funniest laughs. “Wowee, wow, wow.”

“Shut up.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense at all, babe.”

“It makes sense to me.”

“Then you’ll be super-duper happy to learn that your incredibly speed-shy cop friend is no longer behind us.”

“He isn’t?” I ask, before scanning my mirrors and realizing she’s right.

“Nope. The coast is clear. And the Cracker Barrel beckons.”

“Can you at least wait until we leave Illinois?” I ask, reaching for the Disaronno and guzzling every last drop.

“You’re really taking the joy outta this joyride, babe.” Yivi fumbles with our booze bag and cracks a warm Miller Lite. “But if it’ll make you feel better, I guess I can wait.”

“I sincerely appreciate your sacrifice,” I say, sighing as the sweet almond liqueur soothes my head and eases my mind. Turns out becoming America’s most wanted enby hasn’t been awesome for my anxiety. Stealing Clinton’s chode-mobile was without a doubt the safest option, but I wish I’d had the keys to a lower-profile vehicle. I was a poor kid, yeah, but not the handy kind. I can’t field dress a deer or teach a one-legged

to dance, and I sure as shit can’t hot-wire a car. My father, on the other hand, can DIY anything. Mr. Fix-It the Union Trim Carpenter. A lifelong disciple of the great and noble blue-collar lifestyle: plunge your own toilet, build your own house, lose your own job. And he lost a shit ton of jobs, man. Weeks of overtime followed by months of unemployment. Not fun for him, and less fun for us. He’d get canned, Mom would flip, and my brother and I would buckle the fuck up, holding our breath until the union office called and the screaming stopped.

My childhood memories are spotty and diffuse, but at some point, in some shimmering display of youthful brilliance, I made it my personal mission to avoid acquiring my father’s skills, his opinions, his psychoses, his lot in life. I’ll find him if he needs finding, but my going on this trip won’t change anything. Because he’s like a virus, and I’m fully vaccinated. We do share a few qualities, obviously: the same piggish nose and the same pale skin and the same cosmic dread. But natural stuff—DNA or whatever—that’s where our similarities end. I have made damn sure of that.

---

“The arch!” Yivi shouts, scaring the absolute hell out of me as she pounds the dashboard with her fists. “Is that the arch?”

I swish a swig of Jose Cuervo premixed margarita around my mouth and glance out Yivi’s window. There it is: the not-so-world-famous Gateway Arch standing sentry at the Illinois-Missouri border. Sleek and silver and mildly impressive if you’re an infant child or a wasted twenty-two-year-old garbage goth. “It’s smaller than I remember,” I say.

“Can we stop?”

“No.”

“But we left Illinois.”

“Only barely.”

“And we need gas.”

“This is a heavily populated area.”

“But I want to see the motherfucking arch!” Yivi punches my thigh, and I almost swerve into an SUV full of old ladies wearing party hats.

“You just saw it.” I massage my stinging quad with my free hand. “That’s all there is.”

“I don’t care. I need real food, and I’ve gotta pee, and everything’s gonna be way worse if we run outta gas on the highway.”

“But why would you want to stop here?” I ask.

She gives me one of her unfuckwithable looks. “Cuz if you don’t…” She digs into her fannypack and reveals a gnarly black hunting knife. “I’ll gut you head to toe and sell your organs on the black market.” She points the knife at my nose. The matte-black blade is six inches long and serrated. Also: very sharp.

“Jesus goddamn Christ, Yivi!” I shout.

“I didn’t wanna use this, but you’ve left me no choice.”

I glance between the blade and Yivi’s batshit bonkers face to check if she’s kidding. All signs point to probably, but I can’t say for sure. It’s been a long

to dance, and I sure as shit can’t hot-wire a car. My father, on the other hand, can DIY anything. Mr. Fix-It the Union Trim Carpenter. A lifelong disciple of the great and noble blue-collar lifestyle: plunge your own toilet, build your own house, lose your own job. And he lost a shit ton of jobs, man. Weeks of overtime followed by months of unemployment. Not fun for him, and less fun for us. He’d get canned, Mom would flip, and my brother and I would buckle the fuck up, holding our breath until the union office called and the screaming stopped.

My childhood memories are spotty and diffuse, but at some point, in some shimmering display of youthful brilliance, I made it my personal mission to avoid acquiring my father’s skills, his opinions, his psychoses, his lot in life. I’ll find him if he needs finding, but my going on this trip won’t change anything. Because he’s like a virus, and I’m fully vaccinated. We do share a few qualities, obviously: the same piggish nose and the same pale skin and the same cosmic dread. But natural stuff—DNA or whatever—that’s where our similarities end. I have made damn sure of that.

---

“The arch!” Yivi shouts, scaring the absolute hell out of me as she pounds the dashboard with her fists. “Is that the arch?”

I swish a swig of Jose Cuervo premixed margarita around my mouth and glance out Yivi’s window. There it is: the not-so-world-famous Gateway Arch standing sentry at the Illinois-Missouri border. Sleek and silver and mildly impressive if you’re an infant child or a wasted twenty-two-year-old garbage goth. “It’s smaller than I remember,” I say.

“Can we stop?”

“No.”

“But we left Illinois.”

“Only barely.”

“And we need gas.”

“This is a heavily populated area.”

“But I want to see the motherfucking arch!” Yivi punches my thigh, and I almost swerve into an SUV full of old ladies wearing party hats.

“You just saw it.” I massage my stinging quad with my free hand. “That’s all there is.”

“I don’t care. I need real food, and I’ve gotta pee, and everything’s gonna be way worse if we run outta gas on the highway.”

“But why would you want to stop here?” I ask.

She gives me one of her unfuckwithable looks. “Cuz if you don’t…” She digs into her fannypack and reveals a gnarly black hunting knife. “I’ll gut you head to toe and sell your organs on the black market.” She points the knife at my nose. The matte-black blade is six inches long and serrated. Also: very sharp.

“Jesus goddamn Christ, Yivi!” I shout.

“I didn’t wanna use this, but you’ve left me no choice.”

I glance between the blade and Yivi’s batshit bonkers face to check if she’s kidding. All signs point to probably, but I can’t say for sure. It’s been a long time

since I was last held at knifepoint, and I don’t have fond memories of the experience. My father was never in the military. He certainly never attended boot camp or even took a wilderness-survival course. That, however, did not stop him from forcing my brother and me to train for various end-of-the-world scenarios. I spent the summer before eighth grade learning how to start fires, recycle urine, and escape from restraints. I also learned how to fend off knife-wielding attackers. Too bad I don’t remember where you’re supposed to hit your assailant on the wrist.

“Fine,” I say, checking my mirrors. “Whatever.” I veer across three lanes of traffic and onto an off-ramp. “You win.”

“Don’t get cranky,” Yivi says. “It’s only a teeny detour.”

“I’m not cranky. I’m just not accustomed to being threatened with deadly weapons. And I don’t understand why an anti-capitalist revolutionary such as yourself would want to visit a tourist-trappy monument to westward expansion.”

Yivi sheathes her knife and places it back into her fannypack. “Cuz a lotta brave racists died so assholes like us could drunk drive our ex-boyfriends’ cars wherever we wanted,” she says.

“Good point,” I say. “Hand me one of those warm Miller Lites.”

---

The Gateway Arch is right off the highway. We pull into a garage and pay a depressed white man sixteen dollars to park. I scan the lot for any sign of cops or cowboys. Yivi sits with her hands folded in her lap while I find a space. She was obviously psyched when I pulled off the highway, but now, she seems oddly nervous. Uncharacteristically quiet. She sleepwalks out of the car, through the garage, and down a drab staircase until we step into the sunlight.

“I’ve always loved parks,” she says, solemnly lifting her gaze to the trees, and I’m surprised. I’d figured her for a hardcore indoor kid thus far, though I guess her basement lifestyle was one of necessity.

“Let’s hurry up and get this over with.” I stride through the manicured grass, inhaling a mouthful of St. Louis smog. A large crow caws to let us know who’s boss, and a mama robin feeds a squirming worm to the world’s ugliest baby bird. The pleasures of nature tend to elude me, and today is hot and wet, chokehold humidity despite the high bright sun. The kind of day that reminds me of all the time I spent away from home in childhood, sweating through my oversized Nike shirts and sleeping in my filth on friends’ basement floors because I couldn’t stand my family.

“Oh, look!” Yivi points a long black fingernail at an obese squirrel perched on a tree stump. “What do you think her li’l name is?”

“Lorie,” I say, because it’s my mom’s name, and my head’s too sore for a brainstorm.

Yivi puts her fists on her hips and scrunches up her face. “You can’t call a squirrel Lorie, babe. That’s not even a good name for a person.”

“You have a better suggestion?”

Yivi considers this as the squirrel plunges its face into a discarded Fritos bag. “What about

Garbage Grace?”

“Works for me.”

“Oh shit,” Yivi says, her eyes wide. She takes two cartoonishly long steps and ducks behind a weeping cherry tree, hiding within the slender dangling branches. “He’s here.”

“Who?” I ask, craning my neck to resurvey the park.

“The dude in the tan sedan,” Yivi whispers, and I immediately spot an older-model tan Taurus idling on the street near a set of blue porta-potties.

“I thought your dream was about a truck,” I say, taking cover behind Yivi’s tree and peeking through the leaves. There’s for sure someone watching us from inside the vehicle, but as far as I can tell, they aren’t wearing a cowboy hat.

Yivi cops an attitude: “All I know is it’s tan, and that’s him.”

I chew my cheek, attempting to maintain a healthy skepticism while my heart stampedes toward a panic attack. My father says a lot of very stupid things, but one of his go-to mottos is, Believe half of what you see and none of what you fear. Question everything and trust no one. Not even yourself. Or your brand-new BFF Yivi. “You’re positive that’s Big Gravy’s pal?” I ask.

“His enforcer.”

It occurs to me that I don’t know a whole lot about Big Gravy, and this is too much to process, so I focus on what I do know. “But I’ve been watching out for a tan truck,” I say, fighting to keep my tone as neutral as possible. Lucky for Yivi, a decade spent laboring under capitalism has taught me how to subdue most of my emotions, even amidst a hammering headache. “If I’d been watching for a sedan, I probably would’ve seen him following us.”

“Sorry I’m not an expert in cars.”

“You don’t need to be an expert to tell a truck from a car,” I mutter. At this point, I can’t tell if this tan-sedan guy is even looking at us. I also can’t decide if he’d be looking at us if we weren’t looking at him. “C’mon, Yiv,” I say, pulling her back toward the garage. “We’ll lose him for real this time.”

“Fuck that, babe.” She jerks her arm out of my grasp. “I still wanna peep the arch.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Stop stalling and follow me,” she says, keeping her head low like a poorly trained army ranger as she makes a run for the tree line.

---

“If that guy’s here because of Big Gravy,” I start, “then why hasn’t he tried anything?”

“How should I know?” Yivi is walking backward, facing me, and I’m guiding her by the shoulders. Our walking arrangement gives us a 360-degree field of vision so we can stay on the lookout for the tan-sedan guy on our stroll through the park. It also gives Yivi the opportunity to build anticipation

 as we near the arch. Her brilliant plan is for me to turn her around when we’re directly beneath the monument. That way the so-called grandeur can wash over her in its purest form.

“You should know because you’re the one who worked for Big Gravy,” I say.

Yivi wrinkles her nose like she doesn’t dig my body odor. “Don’t be rude,” she says.

“How is that rude?”

“First off, I didn’t work for him. He was my partner. And second, you’re assuming that car is following us cuz of me, but it’s not like you’re some model-citizen-type individual.”

“I’m assuming he’s following you because that’s what you told me,” I say, raising my voice because I’m legitimately spooked. I don’t want to admit that I might not be cut out for this life of crime, but I need Yivi to understand that this is not my normal normal.

“It’s still a kinda rude assumption,” she says.

“I’m on the run from the cops, Yivi. Not a crime syndicate.”

“Lucky you.”

“I’m serious.”

“What about Clinton?”

“Who said anything about him?”

“Maybe he hired someone else to follow us because you stole his car.”

“Clinton’s probably not even awake yet.”

“Then why are you so worried about cops?” Yivi asks, and I flinch.

I shift my gaze to her cat-head necklace, avoiding her eyes. Call it absurd, but you don’t get as far as I did as an unstable fuckup in the corporate world if you don’t give yourself rules. No drinking before noon, for example, used to be one of my rules. That’s why, when I decided to take this vow of honesty, I also came up with some guidelines. Basically, I can’t directly lie, but I can hide the truth by omission. When faced with a direct inquiry, however, I am forced to provide an honest response. For the record, I am aware this is completely ridiculous. But I am also aware that telling Yivi I killed my previous best friend might strangle our nascent best-friendship in the cradle. “Because I did something else that was illegal,” I say, buying a touch more time.

“No shit, Shakira,” Yivi says with a giggle. “But what kinda something?”

“It’s sort of a long and boring story,” I say. “But I … I mean…”

“You don’t gotta tell me right this second if you don’t want,” Yivi says, and I meet her eyes. Not the biggest or the prettiest or even the brownest, but extremely fucking kind.

“Thank you,” I say. “But I promise I’ll tell you later.”

“Deal.”

“Anyway, it’s showtime.” I steer her sideways until we’re perfectly in line with the center of the arch. “Ready?”

Yivi takes a breath. She blinks a bunch of times. “Ready and steady,” she says.

I spin her around. She looks up and so do I. The sight isn’t super impressive, but I’m rarely

wowed by stuff like this. Heroic statues, national monuments, famous hills. I’ve done my share of great American sightseeing. Road trips and work trips and acid trips in the desert. I’ve driven past Mount Rushmore, contemplated jumping at Niagara Falls, and bickered with Clinton in Thomas Jefferson’s slave dungeon. Last year, I stood at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, feeling nothing except an extremely strong desire to piss into the bay—more out of necessity than a hatred of freedom or whatever. Mostly, I’m burned out on splendor and reverence. Tired of placing my hand over my heart the same way I’m sick of forging time sheets, selling ideas, and flattering clients. There are only so many times you can cry during the national anthem, and my parents joining the Tucker Carlson fan club really took the fun out of watching The Patriot.

“Thoughts?” I ask as Yivi’s shoulders start to quiver under my palms. I peek around at her face to find her sobbing, mascara coating her cheeks. She pulls away in the direction of the car. I watch her go, then follow. She does this sometimes: loses it. There’s a lot going on in her head, I think. More than most people.

“Sorry,” she says when I catch up with her.

“It’s fine.” I make my tone breezy even though I’m actively surveying our general vicinity for villains. “I told you it sucked.”

“It didn’t suck.” Yivi shakes her head, tossing her curls in every direction. “It was cool. Thanks for letting me see it.”

---

“Is he still there?” I ask, peeking through a gap in the low row of hedges dividing this side of the park from the parking garage.

“Nope. All clear.”

“You sure?” I check and double-check every single visible vehicle, but it seems she’s right. Whoever was spying on us has vanished, and now I honestly don’t know if we should be looking out for a car or a truck.

“Positive,” Yivi says. “So you can stop being such a wimpy baby bitch about it.”

“I’m not being a bitch.”

“I was joking.”

“Why aren’t you worried?”

“What’s worry gonna do about it?”

Yivi makes a fair point, and I straighten, massaging my neck where it’s sore from endless driving and shitty posture and getting hammered every night for the past fifteen years. I hobble through the parking garage and give the M2 a cursory check for signs of infiltration. Satisfied, I unlock the doors and chug another warm Miller Lite because the Cuervo tastes like Drano.

“Can it be my turn for driving?” Yivi asks—as if I can stop her from doing whatever the fuck she wants.

“I thought you didn’t have a driver’s license.”

“News flash, babe…” Yivi leans closer to whisper into my ear. “You don’t need a license to drive a stolen car.”

Before I can argue, a screeching bird whizzes past my head. It skims the concrete with

its wings spread wide before snatching a rodent in its talons.

“Oh no!” Yivi says, grabbing my wrist as the bird zooms out the other side of the parking garage. “Do you think that was Garbage Grace?”

I pop our last beer and slurp warm foam. “Garbage Grace lives outside in the park,” I say.

“What if she followed us because she wanted to be friends?”

“Then she was a poor judge of character.” I hand Yivi the keys and slide into the passenger seat. I don’t like to be driven places because it makes me feel like a child, but my headache is fuzzing my vision, and giving Yivi the wheel means I can grab a nap. My father, on those special nights when he wanted an audience, would often force my family to take rides with him to undisclosed locations. He called them his midnight rides of Paul Revere. We used to ask when we could go home, and he’d say, When the moon shines bright on Pretty Redwing. My brother and I never knew what that meant, but we learned not to ask. Seen and not heard, my father would say, lashing out with the back of his hand, flattening my already-misshapen nose. In the painful silence that followed, he’d mumble about his latest get-rich-quick idea—real estate tax liens, equine light therapies, memory-boosting fungal elixirs—while Mom stared dead-eyed out the window and ate yogurt-covered pretzels from a Ziploc bag.

Yivi adjusts the driver’s seat until her long legs fit comfortably. She grips the wheel at ten and two, then gives me a genuine smile. Her two front teeth are longer than the others, chipmunky and lipstick-smeared, but I’m a big fan.

“You’re seriously gonna let me drive?” she asks.

“Why not,” I say, closing my eyes and resting my throbbing head against the window. “Just wake me if somebody tries to chop us into sexy little pieces.”

---

The hum of tires over asphalt puts me to sleep for a while. I have a dream that I am God, and my greatest creations are being recalled for factory defects. I stomp over to the assembly line, chew out the angels, and head home to get blitzed and watch old episodes of Top Chef. It’s not one of the great seasons, but Jenny is among the contestants. I root for her, and she wins the Quickfire Challenge with a fetid pulled-pork casserole. It’s very exciting, but instead of celebrating, Jenny shoves her head into a roaring garbage disposal.

I wake up to sirens and flashing lights. “What’s happening?” I ask, wiping drool from my chin and remembering I’m not God.

“We might be getting pulled over,” Yivi says. “Unless you think I can outrun him?”

I sit up straight and glance over my shoulder. A fat black SUV is waddling up the highway behind us. Another state trooper. I check the speedometer, and we’re going almost ninety. Fantastic. I refocus my attention on Yivi. Her sunken cheeks burn with splotches of red, and her eyes glisten with yesterday’s mucus. I’m the breed of drinker who can perform sobriety on the verge of collapse, but I’m starting to think Yivi might be a lightweight.

“Whatcha think?” she asks, stomping the accelerator.

“No.” I grab the jagged knob of her knee. “Pull over!”

“Don’t yell at me."

“I’M NOT GODDAMN YELLING!” I yell.

“This car is hot, babe. We’re wasted, and I don’t have a license.”

“I’m aware,” I say. “But this isn’t a fucking movie.”

“Don’t talk to me li—”

“You said a parking lot, Yivi.”

“Wha—”

“You said the cops wouldn’t pull us over on the highway.”

“I said they weren’t gonna pull you over.”

“That’s a fascinating fucking distinction.”

“Dreams ain’t exactly a perfect science.”

Blood pours past my ears. My throat is dry, and my vision won’t focus. A confusing flood of yearning fills me so violently, I think I might drown. I push my fingertips into my eyes. “I need you to pull your shit together and get us out of this.”

“Me?” Yivi asks. “Why me?”

“Because we…” I pause while I prepare to sound incredibly stupid. “Because we need to lie, and I swore on the soul of my dead best friend that I’d only tell the truth from now on.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Just concentrate on what you’re gonna say, okay?”

Yivi stares. “Fine.” She taps the brake and steers to the side of the road. “But if he shoots us, it’s your fault.”

“He won’t shoot us,” I say, though I’m not exactly sure which race box Yivi checks on the census.

Yivi reaches for the Holland House sherry cooking wine, but I beat her to it.

“You’re cut off,” I say as I toss the bottle into the booze bag and shove the jangling mass under my seat. I roll down my window and burp, wondering how bad we smell. Gravel crunches beneath our tires as we slow, and I switch off the bouncy Doja Cat jam Yivi’s been blasting.

The cop stops behind us and sits there a while, probably running our plates. I check the clock, and it’s 11:13. If Clinton wanted to go anywhere today, he will have already noticed his car is missing. He’s neither a punctual nor overtly litigious person, but there’s a chance he’s already informed the authorities. This is essentially my nightmare scenario, even if it did not literally appear in Yivi’s faulty nightmares.

As I wait for the cop to call for backup, I imagine what my father would say if he knew I was about to be arrested. Our relationship is nontraditional, to say the least. The few times I was suspended from school for breaking windows or lighting fires or telling Mrs. Willis she was a fucking dipshit moron who wasn’t qualified to teach spelling, my father greeted me at home like a conquering hero. I don’t know what he did, but when he was young, my father got himself kicked out of four different high schools, and he likes to say, Education exists to manufacture slaves for the ruling classes. He says, Respect is earned, not given. He says, Fools make rules and Cops are the enemy of the people and, although this is a more recent development, Blue lives matter. He is white, old, angry, undereducated, paranoid,

and large. He contains multitudes.

“Cops are the worst, man,” Yivi says under her breath.

“Real Americans hate cops,” I say, fixing my mullet for our mugshots.

After a forever-shaped interval, the cop lumbers out of his car—a big boy, tall and powerful, with wraparound sunglasses and a blonde tuft of beard ruining his chin. The kind of man who enjoys bowling alleys but not bowling. “Good afternoon, miss,” he drawls through Yivi’s open window. “License and registration.”

“I can’t find it, sir,” Yivi says without hesitation. She heaves each word like a gasp as tears trickle down her face, and her whole body trembles like a Chihuahua in a thunderstorm. Pretty startling performance.

With difficulty, the cop leans down and peers through the open window. Wiry hairs sprout from his nostrils. There’s a chunk of something red in his teeth. “What do you mean you can’t find it?”

I open my mouth to verify her story, but I stop. I know I’m delusional, and I realize that sometimes lying is an act of self-defense, but I made a vow.

“It was an accident, sir,” Yivi says, sniffling. She looks up at the cop. “I swear.”

“Losing your wallet?”

“And so much money.” Yivi drops her forehead onto Clinton’s fuzzy red steering wheel cover and commences bawling. “The last thing I’d ever wanna do is break the law,” she says between sobs, “but we’ve gotta get back to St. Louis before somebody takes all my things.”

“Is that why you were speeding, miss?” the cop asks, softening his tone. “Because there’s no excuse for speeding.”

“I’m just so sorry.” Yivi’s chest heaves, and plump little tears plop, plop, plop onto her lap. “I’m such a stupid piece-of-shit idiot, I could die. I wish you would go ahead and shoot me in my stupid fucking face.”

The cop observes me through his sunglasses, and I give him a shrug that says, At least you don’t have to be friends with her. Frowning, he adjusts his belt buckle and sighs. “Well, I don’t know. I suppose I can let you off with a warning if you promise you’ll keep things by the book all the way back to St. Louis.”

Yivi gasps and lifts her head off the steering wheel. Her cheeks are slick with mascara, her black lipstick is smeared around her mouth, and there’s a snot bubble dangling from her nostril. The cop’s hand rests on the door, and Yivi places both her palms over his fist. “Thank you, sir. Thank you and thank you and thank you.”

“Okay, then, miss.” The cop’s chin stiffens, and his Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “As long as you promise to drive as safe as you can.”

“As safe as I can.” Yivi repeats his words like a prayer, and the cop tugs his hand gently from her grasp before returning to his vehicle. I watch him in the rearview as he climbs in, shuts his lights off, and sits there.

“What’s he waiting for?” Yivi asks, wiping some excess performance off her

 cheek.

“Let’s go. Drive slow. And take the next exit to make it look like we’re heading back.”

“I kinda nailed that, didn’t I?” Yivi asks, as if we didn’t just catch the luckiest break of our lives.

I scowl. “Are you kidding me right now?”

“What?”

“Why the fuck were you driving so fast?!”

Yivi flinches. “Don’t yell at me, babe.”

“It’s just so stupid—”

“And don’t fucking call me stupid.”

“But it was stupid, Yiv. You’re wasted and reckless, and now you’re acting like I’m an asshole for—” I stop lecturing because Yivi’s sharp eyes are wet, and her mouth is quivering. For real this time. I guess we haven’t reached the point of intimacy where we can scream at each other and get away with it.

“Sorry.” I suck a breath and stare out the windshield. I feel like a dick, and now my head is pounding as hard and fast as my pulse. Another drink would help, but this is a fairly hypocritical time to imbibe.

“You should be,” Yivi says, shifting the car into drive. “Now leave me alone so I can concentrate on the road.” ...