The girls dance in the road outside a party after midnight at a boy’s house, a boy whose parents are away, whose parents are visiting another child at college and have no idea there are kegs in their kitchen and bongs on their porch. There’s an ice storm, and the girls are a little bit high and a lot bit drunk on tequila, dancing here in a quiet road a few miles from the center of town, and they can see a long way in one direction and only a little way in the other, where the road turns into the woods.
But there are no cars coming, not yet, not now, not in this storm, so they hold hands, partly to keep themselves upright on the ice, but mostly because they are the kind of best friends who drape over each other in chairs, who sleep entwined in each other’s beds, who wear each other’s socks and admit to each other fears they haven’t even admitted to themselves.
They slide to the right on the ice and then to the left and start singing a song they learned when they were in camp together, back before boys and cars and storms and tequila and mothers who waited up on stormy nights worried about things that make headlines. The girls know all the lyrics to the song still and they feel each word in their chests, in their cheeks, in their bellies, on their scalps, and they keep singing, even when they fall, even as they lie on their backs in the center of the road, laughing, still holding hands, and they can’t hear the party anymore and they can’t hear the ice-on-ice of the falling sleet and they can’t hear anything over the sound of each other’s laughter.
Emily Rinkema lives in Vermont. She recently has stories in Cleaver, Vestal Review, Milk Candy Review, and Wigleaf, and in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. You can read more at https://www.emilyrinkema.com/ or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
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