Before she turned away, Jade cleared her throat. “Do you have, um, sanitary pads?” she asked. For a second, I didn’t even process. Then Marco’s mouth ticked up at the corners and I realized she was still leaking adrenaline out her own body. The waitress nodded, vanished, came back a minute later and set the box right on the table. Jade actually smiled. “Thank you.”
After, Jade ripped one open, dabbed at her face, and handed another to Marco. “Here. For pressure,” she explained.
He stuck it to his wound, winced, then looked up at her in something like awe. “Can I name my firstborn after you?”
"Please don't," Jade said, but she was trying not to smile. That rare, tired thing where the joke lands only after it's bounced off the bottom. She tucked the spare pads into her coat pocket and poured sugar into her coffee, hands visibly steadier now than before.
We sat a minute in that diner purgatory. No one said a thing worth saying until Marco set his mug down and started pickingat the skin around his thumb. "Caruso’s men, they knew we’d take the bridge," he said. "They’d already called in the hit. I should've seen it."
"You weren’t wrong," I answered. "I was. I didn’t plan for everything. You got us across, so thanks.”
Jade rolled her eyes, but let it stand. She was staring through the kitchen window, where a short-order cook cracked eggs one-handed, never looking up from the stovetop. In her head, you could tell, she was diagramming the whole escape—the routes, the risks, our odds of surviving another twenty-four hours.
"And the car?" Marco asked, breaking the silence.
"I swapped the plates at a rest stop," I said. "Nobody’s tracking it past the county unless they’ve got your dental records preloaded."
“Very nice,” he said. “You never fail to impress.”
I shrugged, resisting the urge to rub salt in the wound. “Not hard to impress someone who once drank bong water on a dare.”
For a moment Marco just looked at me, like he couldn’t believe the low blow. Then he burst out laughing, the sound barely contained by the grimace of pain it sent through his body. He pressed his bandaged hand tighter to his ribs. “I remember that party,” Marco said, turning to Jade. “Don’t believe this. He got as wrecked as I did. What did you do on a dare, Dante?”
I raised my eyebrows. “We’re running for our lives. Is now the time?”
“Feels like a good time,” Jade said softly.
The question hovered between us, patently absurd, but that was what passed for comfort now. I shrugged, half-sulking: “Marco, I once stole Principal Adams’s car to buy you weed for your first day of high school. You called me from the bathroom, crying about being alone.”
He snorted, then winced. “You said you hotwired it for the thrill. And I wasn’t crying. Just a little overwhelmed.”
“Yeah, well,” I grinned at Jade, “when I finally got him the weed, Marco went ahead and locked the keys in the trunk. I’m not proud, but I got shit done.”
Jade blinked, then laughed, real and exhausted, as if this recitation of criminal adolescence was a résumé. “So you’ve always been the family fixer.”
“I’m a fast learner,” I said, and reached for her hand on the table. She had let go of me a little while ago. She hesitated, but let me. The food arrived—a funeral-sized plate of eggs, bacon, and a gutshot heap of hash browns. None of us was hungry, but we made a show of eating it.
“What about you?” I asked. “If we’re all sharing humiliating stories, you have to go next.”
She surprised me. I thought she’d shrink from this, after everything, but here she was: chin up. “I once drank the lysis buffer from a gel electrophoresis kit,” she said, eyes fixed somewhere behind my head, “when my lab mates bet I couldn’t tell the difference from lemon-lime Gatorade.”
Marco looked at her like she was a cryptid. He broke into a grin. “You married up, bro.”
I smiled at him. “Can you translate that for the rest of the class?” I asked. “My brother here didn’t understand.”
“Hey,” Marco said. “Don’t be rude.”
“I’m not being rude. Just real.”
“Look, I know a chemical weapon when I hear one,” he said, wagging the coffee spoon for emphasis. “That shit’s probably what gave you superpowers.”
“Yeah, if the superpower it gave me was the world’s worst diarrhea,” Jade replied, deadpan.
We all lost it then, in that weird, hysterical way that only comes after the adrenaline-peak of survival. It was too much, and also not nearly enough. I buried my face in my hands, laughing harder than I had in months. Marco tried to high-five Jade and missed; Jade actually slapped his palm, clumsy and bright and more alive than I’d seen her since the baby started showing. The cook in the window smirked. Even the waitress let her guard down a little, refilling our mugs like we weren’t NSA-watchlist material. The warmth of the booth, the churn of bad coffee, the slow return of feeling to my fingers—it almost tricked me into believing things might be okay.
But it would never be fine. Not really. We finished breakfast in silence, each of us thinking, maybe, of the last normal meal we’d ever get.
Marco’s color was better. He got up stiffly, half using my shoulder as a crutch, and we left a twenty on the table anyway, because whatever else we were, we weren’t complete scumbags. The cold outside bit even harder than before, and Jade hunched deeper into her coat, chin tucked, expression distant and fierce.
