I make a blood oath with Katie near the summit. It’s pretty gross, but it’s the reason we came here after dark. We’ve been watching a lot of sisterhood movies lately and figure now’s the time to solidify ours before one of us fails to mind the gap as we traverse between intimacies.
I can’t say I haven’t thought of her in that way, and I know she has too—I can feel her body contort next to mine in the full-size bed of our Airbnb in a way that begs for attention. We’ve been on the cusp of lust or hate since landing in Los Angeles a week ago. Katie’s moving here for good soon, but for now we’re just visiting.
It’s early April and LA is hot and sticky in an unsexy way. Tonight though, it’s finally cool enough, and the fog or smog or whatever the hell it is that makes breathing here oppressive blankets the lookout from Mulholland Drive in shades of gray much different from those of the Northeast I’m used to. It’s still unclear to me what Katie sees here. A brick is a brick, a stone is a stone, and so far, the only notable difference is that LA’s homeless won’t hesitate to approach you in a store to say they take Venmo.
The front lights of the car cast a pallid yellow across our faces. I fumble with my keys to remove a keychain Swiss Army knife. The blade in question is tiny and makes our thorough first aid preparations comical. We giggle to distract ourselves.
Katie takes the blade from me to slice a shallow curve into her left palm. She doesn’t break eye contact, and I wonder if it’s muscle memory. I know she was into some fucked up shit in high school. It takes a few seconds for the blood to pool, and when I catch sight of it, I feel faint.
“Didn’t you want to be a doctor?” she laughs, flicking a drop of blood from the knife onto the ground. I wonder how much blood spills consensually onto this soil. She passes me back the knife and tells me not to overthink it, so naturally, I push it in too deep and blood pools immediately. We’re both laughing now, and she calls me psycho.
We grab each other’s left hands, hold them together, and raise them above our hearts. We read online that’s what you’re supposed to do. The front lights of the car catch the flecks of gold in her eyes that mimic the flecks of gold across the landscape from the houses and studios of people below us. But then a gray-green film like a visual gangrene blurs my sight. I take back my hand and vomit over the fence that only minimally deters sightseers from jumping.
“I think I felt your heartbeat!” I scream in between hacking up dinner. Katie gets the hydrogen peroxide. I’m still gagging so she cleans herself up first, pouring the solution over the wound onto the dirt.
We don’t seem that far up from where I’m crouched. The San Fernando Valley is underwhelming. I don’t see what she sees here. This vantage point, if you can call it that, feels like a ploy to convince onlookers that they’re on top of the world, but instead it sandwiches you between less-than-ideal atmospheric conditions and an almost-desert terrain.
Katie interrupts my internal monologuing by passing me a peroxide-soaked gauze, and I clench it while taking a selfie with my other hand. I post it to Instagram, making sure my hand and the gauze take front and center.
I caption it, “Blood Oath Thursday.”
Katie joins me at the edge, eye level with the car’s headlights, and we take in Beverly Hills past midnight. We hold our legs to our chests and pivot gently on our ankles. The pain and heat from our left hands distract us enough from the exertion of strength we need to stay in these positions.
This is how we lose time.
We say nothing for an hour. We’re seated more comfortably now. I can only make out her silhouette against the car lights that still haven’t gone out—impressive, we were warned about its battery. Katie’s body is an amorphous blob and I struggle to identify her head or her legs.
A wave of panic rushes over me.
“You asleep?”
There’s a pause but she answers.
“I think I just dissociated for, like, an hour.”
I’m both relieved and amused that I thought a superficial wound could’ve done her in. At one point, in the depths of teenage angst, we’d jokingly made a suicide pact; the blood oath is our adulthood revision. We couldn’t die now, anyway, there’s still so much I need to confess—like how her laugh sounds like Kelly Osbourne’s and how I’ve refrained from telling her this since we were fourteen because I know how insulting she’d find the comparison. Or how she never had a shot with Daniel Burroughs, not even the summer she was skinny. Or how sorry I am for being this cruel; I don’t know how else to act.
When I stand up, the feeling is partially gone from my right leg so I almost fall back down. I steady myself on the fence, my left hand still rolled into a tight fist. It’s hot out again but maybe I’m just getting sick. In my peripherals, I see Katie doing stretches alongside the car. Her body is still an amorphous blob. She raises her arms and breathes deeply enough for me to hear the exhale. She sounds satisfied, even though the air here smells like gasoline. I check my pockets for the knife then ask if she has it.
“We should leave it. It’ll be more symbolic.”
“You’re a slut for symbolism,” I say.
I don’t want to go back to our Airbnb. Katie turns the car off completely, asks how I’d feel if we spent the night. She tells me she feels tired, maybe lightheaded, but not hungry.
“I’ve eaten too much today already,” she says to bait me. I opt not to bite.
We sit in the backseat where it’s easier to recline. Earlier, when we drove down Ventura for the first time, we neared ninety miles per hour and I felt violent. I wanted to live in that violence. When she rests her head heavy on my lap, it feels crushing, and that’s a kind of violence I want to live in, too.
We’d been fighting a lot before this trip, more so than usual. Katie was dating a thirty something with three kids she met too soon. Katie says he gave her her first orgasm and that’s how I learned she doesn’t masturbate. She told me this so I’d like him. Then, she drove down to Philadelphia one Friday when he didn’t text her back for two days, and when she got there he said he didn’t love her anymore. They’d only been dating a month. She called me on the way home, and I listened to her sniffle and whine, and she listened to me sigh affirmations for all three hours of the trip.
“Can you play with my hair?” she asks.
This is a loaded question. I find Katie’s hair thin and greasy, but it’s not that I don’t want to play with it—acts of service is my love language—there’s just little of it to really commit to twirling in whatever way she’s expecting. Instead, I use my index finger to spell out our names in cursive across her crown. I feel a patch of maybe psoriasis and roll the tip of my finger around it in a circular motion as if to buff it away.
She doesn’t tell me to stop but she does take my hand to rest my palm on her cheek. It’s hot, feverish. I am touch-starved, so the gesture feels right, though, in the past, I have imagined my hand to her cheek less gently. I let my hand linger.
Her shorts are too short and her ass doesn’t fill them out. I can make out the pockmarks on her thighs even in the dark and I want to press my thumb into each of them, see if they will deepen.
She stretches her legs out as far as they’ll go, pushing them against the door and then burrowing her face into the billowy fabric of my dress. I kiss her forehead goodnight and the windshield fogs up, another layer of distorting gray between us and the world. I fall asleep cradling her head.
I make a blood oath with Katie and three months later she’s in LA, shacked up with a music teacher who plays trumpet. His name is Sage and he’s Jewish. She asks if that makes her a shiksa, and I tell her no, not if she knows any Yiddish. She laughs across the poor connection of the FaceTime call. She tells me she told him we’re a package deal, so he already knows about my intimacy issues with Colin and has some advice, if I’m interested. I’m not but I lie and say I am. I haven’t told her Colin broke up with me because we never had sex. It sounds bad to say that out loud, but I can’t blame him. Colin and I never had sex because he reminds me too much of Katie. It’s not his feminine sensibilities, which he certainly has, nor the victim-complex, which all men have. It’s his body odor, his pheromones. It’s not a bad smell but it’s there, and hearing Katie talk now about using rose water in lieu of deodorant makes me think maybe it is bad. I don’t tell her any of this, just let her talk about Sage and her roommate, Lara, who is apparently insufferable.
Lara proves to be so insufferable that Sage suggests Katie move in.
“I’m not asking for permission, but I’m asking for permission,” she jokes when she updates me next. I admit it’s problematic but sounds necessary.
Katie calls me a week later when Colin and I are talking again. Actually, we’re in the backseat of my car, trying to have sex for the first time. It’s going really poorly. I want to tell her later about the discomfort of topping a six-foot man in the backseat of a four-door sedan in the parking lot of a public park, and maybe about his ass dimple too, just like the one she has, but when she finally responds to my texts, she tells me she’s hurt herself and Sage blames me. Sage, who now thinks I’m romantically obsessed with her and that our friendship is toxic because it leads to things like self-harm when I ignore her. She tells me we need space in our relationship, not because Sage said so but because she agrees I’m romantically obsessed with her and that’s why I’m not having sex with Colin. I relay this all to Colin later who muses our car sex was a fever dream.
I know this conversation with Katie means she and Sage fought in some irreparable way. It’s always irreparable with her. When I get a Facebook message from him asking if Katie will be safe back in New York, I’m not surprised. I’ve done this waltz before. I take it he doesn’t think I’m romantically obsessed with her, but I don’t respond. He’ll soon break up with her if he hasn’t already—crazy’s only sexy for so long—and she’ll come back to me.
Katie takes it well when he does, and I don’t rehash our conversation from a week ago. Colin tells me I’m a good friend but it’s unhealthy because I offer too much unreciprocated. I tell him acts of service is my love language. He asks if I can drive him to Brooklyn on Sunday.
I can tell Katie needs me from how often she texts and how little effort I need to put in to keep the conversation going. On the phone, her voice is softer than before, like she’s trying to make herself small. I thought I was the only one with those concerns. I want to tell her “small” doesn’t suit her.
She’s living with Sage until the end of the month and has been sleeping in the living room because when they share a bed, she tells me, it always ends up physical.
“I know it’s fucked and making me confused. The sex isn’t even good I don’t know why I do it.”
“Because it’s validation,” I say, and she laughs because she doesn’t take it as an attack.
I don’t mention Colin so she thinks we’re still broken up.
“I’m happy we’re both single now,” she says.
When Katie comes back to New York, she’s come with a whole itinerary for us. Colin says if I need an out, he’s more than willing to oblige. He’s always more than willing to oblige, though, and it’s getting annoying, so I’m ready to see how Katie and I will ruin each other’s lives again.
She’s staying with me in my one-bedroom apartment. The overhead light’s been out for a while and the desk lamp’s pink lamp shade casts a warm hue over us sitting cross-legged and facing each other on the bed. Out of her duffel bag she pulls a box of weed she says is Blue Dream, like I should be thankful. I don’t like to smoke because I have to smoke a lot to feel anything, and edibles are a whole production.
I take a few hits and the smoke it produces smells like something’s rotting. She doesn’t seem bothered by it. She talks about loving LA and hating New York, that she’s over the East Coast, and if it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t be here at all. I know I take it to mean more than she does.
My skin is heavy and my head’s foggy. It feels like I’ve been lifting weights, a thought that makes me laugh so deeply I start choking, and my throat feels raw. I catch her gaze and lean in. We kiss.
But she tastes sour and her lips are dry like her scalp. In our close proximity, I decide she’s not at all striking.
Katie’s touching my thigh in a way that comes off manic and desperate but I’m sure she thinks is coy and kind of sexy. But I’m falling asleep and her hesitant hand cupping what’s protruding of my hip bone as I’m lying down just isn’t doing it for me. She asks me if it’s okay, and I’d ask her to specify what it is, but that hardly seems worth the effort.
She’s still talking or humming or maybe just breathing loud when I get up for water and immediately have to sit back down. I stare at the pockmarks in her thighs and imagine connecting them to form constellations that spontaneously appear in our galaxy, baffling the scientific community. They’d open an exhibit at Griffith Observatory so all of LA, made ignorant of the cosmic other by the smog of excess and the bright and blinding lights of Hollywood, could marvel at these ad lib constellations, watch them settle against the nebulae of a new astronomy of which I am the world’s leading expert.
My mouth is cotton, as is to be expected, and I leave to get us some water. I drink my glass on the way back. Katie’s curled in the fetal position and nearly asleep. I can’t say I completely blame her for still wanting to move to California. I had my share of California dreaming, desires rooted in my aesthetic sensibilities that the autumnal hues of ’70s San Francisco cater to, but I know winter tones fit me better, and if I learned anything from my undergraduate geology studies, it’s that certain places were never meant to be inhabited. That California burns for a reason.
She wakes briefly and reaches out to me, asks if I’m tired enough to go to bed now. I tell her I sleep better alone.
Rachel Stempel is a genderqueer Ukrainian-Jewish poet and educator. They are a staff writer at Up the Staircase and EX/POST and a poetry editor at MAYDAY. They are the author of the chapbooks Interiors (Foundlings Press 2021) and BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT (Finishing Line Press 2022), and their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from New Delta Review, Ethel Zine, SHARKPACK Annual, and elsewhere. They currently live in New York with their rabbit, Diego.