Salvation

The drive is the best part. In the car, the music is loud enough so they can get away with singing badly but still hear themselves if they want – if they’re feeling brave. Who has the prettiest voice? They’re friends but there is an unspoken and ongoing game, everything is a game. They keep score. They count and recount score, silently. They park and keep playing music in their heads; they bounce when they walk. They go into a restaurant where the food is only okay, but the air smells like curry and smoke and the lights are low and there is dancing. There is some struggling artist fondling guitar strings in a corner. His songs are actually quite nice but the girls go to be seen, not to see. They don’t see anything, except the best-looking boys in the place, and their split-ends, and each other – they’re always sizing up each other. One girl is good at dancing so she’ll do that all night, to feel less alone, but loneliness and a bottle of sleeping pills will consume her later in the month. One girl is good at looking sad and pretty so she’ll cradle her drink all night and pretend to think, but end up thinking too deeply at the end of the year and sink to the bottom of a pink bathtub. The other girl hasn’t found her magic yet so she looks for it in other people. She imagines them looking for magic in her too, and that is her salvation. She imagines being saved by something, and she doesn’t know it, but imagining alone will save her;

it saves us all.