Chapter 5: The Argument in the Parking Lot
The mist from the river hadn’t fully dissipated, clinging to the asphalt of the quarry’s upper parking lot like a ghost. Ryli leaned against the driver’s side door of her Charger, the cold metal seeping through her leather jacket. Another cigarette burned between her fingers, the smoke a gray thread in the damp air. The engine ticked as it cooled.
Below, the echoes of the party were a dull throb of bass and fragmented laughter. She’d left early. The noise, usually a comfort, had felt abrasive tonight, like sandpaper on a sunburn. All she could think about was the contained silence of the car, the blurred city lights, and the girl who’d called that silence “not so bad.”
Headlights swept across her, bleaching the world white for a second before resolving into the boxy shape of Kamora’s lifted Jeep. It pulled in too fast, spraying a fan of gravel. The door swung open before the engine even cut.
Kamora hit the ground like a declaration of war. Her boots crunched on the lot. She was all kinetic energy, her face flushed, strands of dark hair escaping her messy bun. “What the hell, Ry?”
Ryli took a slow drag. “What the hell what, Kam?”
“Don’t.” Kamora stopped a few feet away, her hands shoved into the pockets of her cargo pants. “I heard you dipped over an hour ago. With her.”
Ryli shrugged, a practiced motion of nonchalance. “Needed air. Gave a girl a ride. It’s not a federal case.”
“It’s Cadence,” Kamora said, and the name sounded like a warning. “Auddy’s little sister’s friend. The quiet one with the big eyes. The one who looks at you like you’re a… a fireworks display she’s scared of getting too close to.”
“I know who she is.” Ryli’s voice was flat.
“Do you?” Kamora took a step closer. The flickering neon from the abandoned concession stand painted her cheek in sickly green. “Because you treat people like they’re disposable lighters. You use them until the flint gives out and then you toss them. That’s your thing. We all get it. But her? She’s not a lighter, Ryli. She’s one of those fancy glass candle things. You knock her over, she shatters. You can’t just glue her back together.”
Ryli flicked ash, watching it spiral to the wet ground. “We drove. We talked about her friend’s cat. It wasn’t an episode of a crime drama.”
“It never starts as one!” Kamora’s composure cracked, her voice rising. “It starts with a drive. Then it’s ‘come to this party.’ Then it’s ‘hold my drink.’ Then it’s you getting bored or pissed or just… you, and she’s left sitting in a corner crying while you’re doing shots off some guy’s dashboard. I’ve seen the pattern. We all have.”
The raw accuracy of it needled under Ryli’s skin. She pushed off the car, standing to her full height. “So what’s your stake in this? You wanna be her bodyguard now? Go for it. Tell her I’m a monster. I won’t stop you.”
“That’s not it.” Kamora’s frustration seemed to curdle into something sadder. “I don’t want to protect her from you. I want to protect you from you. For once.”
Ryli froze. That wasn’t the script. The script was anger, jealousy, a dramatic showdown. Not this weary, painful concern.
Kamora saw the flicker of surprise and pressed on, her voice dropping. “You think I don’t see it? You’re climbing the walls lately. The stunts are getting dumber. You drank so much at Giselle’s last week I thought I was gonna have to pump your stomach. You’re a fucking black hole, Ryli, and you’re trying to suck that gentle girl into your orbit because her quiet makes your noise shut up for five seconds. But it won’t last. You’ll get used to it. Or you’ll get scared of it. And then you’ll do something to make it loud again. You’ll break it. Because breaking things is the only way you know how to end a story.”
The words landed, each one a precise, brutal tap on a fault line Ryli pretended didn’t exist. The memory of the dashboard light on Cadence’s serious face, the way she’d said “I don’t know” with such terrifying honesty—it felt separate from the person Kamora was describing. A thing she’d already contaminated.
Her mask snapped back into place, harder and colder than before. She laughed, a short, hollow sound. “You’re giving me way too much credit, Kam. And her. It was a drive. That’s it. She’s a curious little bird who wanted to see what the inside of a storm cloud looked like. Now she’s seen it. End of story.”
“Promise me,” Kamora whispered, and there was a plea in it. “Promise me you’ll leave her alone.”
Ryli looked at her oldest friend, really looked at her. Saw the genuine fear in her eyes. Not for Cadence, but for the aftermath—for the version of Ryli that would emerge from crushing something so deliberately gentle. The version that would be even colder, even further away.
She couldn’t make that promise. The thought of never seeing if that quiet could hold, if the candle could actually burn in her presence, was suddenly, illogically unbearable.
“I don’t make promises,” Ryli said, her tone final. She dropped the cigarette and ground it under her boot heel. “And you should mind your own business.”
Kamora stared at her for a long moment. The fight drained out of her, replaced by a profound disappointment. She shook her head, a slow, weary motion. “Fine. You’re right. It’s your life. Wreck it however you want.”
She turned and walked back to her Jeep. The door slammed shut. The engine roared to life. The headlights swept over Ryli one more time, then swung away, leaving her alone in the dim, misty lot.
The silence after the Jeep’s rumble faded was absolute. And it was different from the quiet in the car with Cadence. This quiet was accusing. It was full of Kamora’s words, of Hunt’s inevitable wrath, of the inevitable, messy end she’d already set in motion.
She pulled out her phone. The last message was still from Bryce, a toxic string of emojis and demands. She deleted the thread without reading it.
Her thumb hovered over her messages with Cadence. The picture of the rainy window. The coordinate. You up?
She started typing. Hey.
She deleted it.
She typed again. Kamora just paid me a visit. You’ve got quite the fan club.
Deleted.
Her hands were cold. She shoved the phone back into her pocket and slid into the driver’s seat. The interior still held the faint, sweet scent of Cadence’s laundry detergent, utterly foreign among the cigarettes and leather.
She didn’t start the car. She just sat there, her forehead resting against the steering wheel. Kamora was right. She was a black hole. She destroyed the trajectories of everything that drifted too close. It was physics. It was her nature.
But for a fleeting half-hour, driving alongside a different kind of gravity, she hadn’t felt like she was collapsing. She’d just felt… still.
The phone in her pocket buzzed. Once.
She didn’t reach for it. She counted to ten in the dark, the only sound her own breathing. Then, slowly, she pulled it out.
The screen glowed.
A message from Cadence. No words. Just a picture. A single, perfectly focused image of a glass candle on a wooden desk, the flame inside burning steady and bright in a dark room.
Ryli stared at it until her eyes ached. A challenge. A question. A quiet, stubborn refusal to be seen as already broken.
She closed her eyes. The ghost of the flame was printed on the back of her eyelids.
She started the car. The engine’s growl was a comfort and a confession. She had no idea what to text back. No idea what to do. All she knew, with a certainty that felt like freefall, was that she was going to see her again.
And that, she knew, was the most reckless thing she’d ever considered.
The engine’s vibration traveled up her spine, a familiar thrill that now felt like an accusation. She pulled out of the lot, gravel pinging against the undercarriage, and pointed the car toward the party noise below. The Charger descended the winding quarry road, headlights carving tunnels in the mist.
Every curve felt automatic, thoughtless. Her mind was back in the silent car, on the photograph of that single flame.
The lower clearing was a chaos of parked trucks, scattered coolers, and a roaring bonfire that painted dancing shadows on the quarry walls. Music thumped from someone’s blown-out speakers. She slid into a space near Abby’s Subaru and killed the engine. The sudden absence of the growl left her feeling exposed.
She sat for a full minute, watching. Audrey was laughing, tipped back in a camping chair. Marley was attempting to flip a bottle on the tailgate of a pickup. It was her ecosystem, loud and bright and simple.
Getting out felt like stepping onto a stage.
“There she is!” Abby called, waving a red solo cup. “We thought you got lost. Or arrested.”
“Just driving,” Ryli said, her voice easily adopting its usual laconic shield. She accepted a beer from a cooler Giselle held open, the can cold and wet in her hand.
“Solo mission?” Giselle asked, her eyes sharp. She’d always been the most observant.
“Needed to think,” Ryli said, cracking the tab. The fizzy sound was too loud.
“Dangerous pastime,” Abby grinned, but the joke fell flat. Ryli just took a long pull.
She moved through the party, a ghost at her own feast. The beer tasted like aluminum. The jokes sounded like echoes. She leaned against the warm hood of a friend’s Jeep, trying to anchor herself in the scene, but her focus was shattered. Kamora’s words were on a loop. You’ll break it. Because breaking things is the only way you know how to end a story.
Across the fire, she saw Kamora talking intently with Carley. Kamora glanced over, their eyes met for a charged second, and then Kamora looked away. The dismissal was a physical weight.
Audrey plopped down beside her on the hood. “Okay, spill. You’re being weird.”
“I’m always weird.”
“No, you’re being quiet weird. Which is your scary weird.” Audrey bumped her shoulder. “Kam’s pissed. What’d you do?”
“Existing, usually does it.”
“Ryli.” Audrey’s tone lost its playful edge. “Come on. It’s about that girl, right? Cadence?”
Hearing the name spoken here, amid the smoke and laughter, felt like a violation. Ryli stayed silent.
“Look,” Audrey sighed, following her gaze to the fire. “You get bored. We know. You pick up a new… interest. It’s shiny for a week. Then it’s not. And you get cruel because you’re bored. It’s just what you do.” She said it without malice, a simple statement of fact. “But I saw her at the coffee shop that time. She’s not like Bryce, or that skater guy from the summer, or any of them. She’s not playing a game. There’s no armor there. It’s just… her.”
Ryli’s throat tightened. “I know.”
The two simple words hung in the air. Audrey turned to look at her, really look, her expression shifting from concern to dawning comprehension.
“Oh,” Audrey said softly.
“Yeah. Oh.”
“You like her.”
It wasn’t a question. Ryli couldn’t form a denial. She just stared at the bonfire, watching a log collapse in a shower of sparks. The heat on her face was immense.
She didn’t know why. The girl was all soft edges and whispered words, a direct counterpoint to every sharp, loud instinct Ryli possessed. She thought of Cadence snatching Hunt’s phone, that flash of steel in a velvet voice. She thought of the careful way she’d asked about the quiet. It wasn’t fascination with chaos. It was curiosity about the eye of the storm.
And Ryli, who lived in the howling wind, found herself disarmed by that curiosity.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ryli muttered, crushing the empty beer can in her fist.
“Why not?”
“Because Kam’s right. Because I’m… me.” The admission was gruff, torn from her. “I’ll get it wrong. I’ll say the wrong thing. I’ll get pissed off because it’s too quiet or because she looks at me with those big eyes and I won’t know what it means. I’ll ruin it. I ruin things, Aud. It’s my specialty.”
For the first time, her friends weren’t accusing her of it. She was confessing. The truth of it was a rotten tooth she’d been poking with her tongue for years.
Audrey was quiet for a long time. The party swirled around them, a separate universe. “So that’s it? You just… don’t talk to her again? Because you’re scared you’ll mess up?”
“I’m not scared,” Ryli snapped, the lie automatic.
Audrey just raised an eyebrow. “You’re terrified. I’ve never seen you like this. You’re usually the one setting fires, not worrying about the temperature.”
Ryli shoved off the hood, needing to move. Her hands were jittery. She fumbled for her cigarettes, but the pack was empty. She crumpled it and threw it toward the fire. It missed.
“What do you want me to do?” The question was raw, directed at the night sky.
“I don’t know,” Audrey said, hopping down to stand beside her. Her voice was gentle. “Maybe just… try not to break it on purpose? For once?”
From the cooler near the fire, Giselle watched them, her conversation with Marley stalled. Abby followed her gaze, then looked back at Ryli’s agitated posture, the empty pack on the ground. A silent communication passed between them. Something was different. The core of their chaotic sun was flickering.
Ryli felt their attention like a spotlight. She couldn’t breathe here. The noise was now just noise, grating and meaningless.
Without a word, she turned and walked back to her car. The path felt longer than before. Conversations dipped as she passed. She heard Kamora say, “Let her go.”
She got in. The door closed, sealing her in the scent of laundry detergent and regret. She pulled out her phone. The picture of the candle flame glowed against the dark screen.
Her thumb hovered. Then she typed, the words coming clumsily, unlike any message she’d ever sent.
Ryli: kamora thinks im going to break you.
She sent it before she could stop herself. She stared at the screen, her pulse in her ears. It was too honest. It was a hand extended, palm up, showing the bruise.
Three dots appeared. They vanished. Then reappeared.
Cadence: Are you?
Ryli: i dont want to.
The confession left her hollowed out. She’d never admitted to not wanting to cause damage before. The very act felt like a surrender.
Cadence: That’s a start.
A start. Not an absolution. A beginning, fragile and terrifying. Ryli looked at her own reflection in the black windshield, a ghost superimposed over the party behind her. She didn’t know what to do with a start. She only knew endings.
But for the first time, the prospect of an ending with Cadence felt like a specific, profound kind of failure.
She put the phone down. She started the car. She didn’t drive toward the city, or the river, or any coordinate. She just drove, the road unfolding in the headlights, holding onto the two simple words that felt like a lifeline thrown into her storm.
That’s a start.
The two words glowed on her screen until the display timed out, leaving her in the dark of the car. A start. It felt less like a beginning and more like standing at the edge of a cliff she’d just agreed to jump off. The party’s bass was a distant, stupid throb behind her.
She couldn’t go back there. The Charger’s tires spun on the loose gravel as she pulled out, turning away from the firelight and laughter that now felt like a costume two sizes too small. She drove without direction, the yellow lines hypnotic.
Her phone buzzed in the cup holder. Not Cadence. Kamora.
Kamora: where’d you go. we need to talk.
Ryli’s jaw tightened. She ignored it. The phone buzzed again, insistent.
Kamora: I’m not joking. Pull over. I’m behind you.
The headlights in her rearview were indeed the high-beams of a Jeep. Kamora must have left right after her. Ryli swore, a sharp exhale in the quiet cabin. Her instinct was to slam the accelerator, to lose her in the winding back roads she knew better than anyone.
But a heavier fatigue won. She signaled, though there was no one else on the road, and pulled onto the weed-choked shoulder near an old utility shed. The Jeep crunched to a halt behind her.
Doors slammed. Footsteps approached. Ryli didn’t get out. She just rolled down her window and stared straight ahead, her hands resting at the bottom of the wheel.
Kamora’s face appeared in the window, flushed and angry. “Get out.”
“No.”
“Get out of the car, Ryli.”
“It’s a free country. Say what you want from there.” Ryli’s voice was flat, drained.
Kamora leaned her arms on the door, bringing her face closer. The scent of bonfire smoke clung to her jacket. “Auddy told me. That you ‘like’ her. Is that true?”
“Auddy should shut the fuck up.”
“So it is true.” Kamora’s laugh was brittle, without humor. “God, you’re unbelievable. You see the one person in a hundred-mile radius made of glass, and you just have to pick her up to see how hard you can throw.”
Ryli finally turned her head. The interior light from the Jeep cast harsh shadows. “I gave her a drive. We talked. That’s all that’s happened.”
“That’s all that’s ever happened with you? It’s always just a drive, or just a party, or just a kiss. It’s never just anything. It’s the opening move. And I know your game.” Kamora’s eyes were glittering. “You’re already texting her, aren’t you? After I literally just begged you not to.”
The accusation hung in the cold air. Ryli said nothing. Her silence was confirmation enough.
Kamora pushed off the car, running a hand over her face. “You genuinely like her. I can see it. That’s what makes this so much worse.”
“Why?” The word tore out of Ryli, sharper than she intended.
“Because when you actually care, you’re a hundred times more dangerous!” Kamora’s voice cracked, echoing in the vast, dark fields around them. “You get scared. You feel things you don’t know how to feel. And you lash out. You’ll pick a fight. You’ll cheat to make it simple. You’ll say something so cruel it scars, just to prove you still can. You’re a hurricane that just realized it likes a particular house. You don’t know how to not destroy it.”
Every sentence was a hammer tap on a nail already driven deep. Ryli stared through the windshield, her vision blurring at the edges. The truth was a cold, metallic taste in her mouth.
“You are too bad of a person for her,” Kamora said, each word measured and final. “You have too much shit inside you, and you don’t know how to handle it, and you’re going to spill it all over her. You are going to hurt her. It’s not a question of if. It’s mechanics.”
The calm certainty in Kamora’s voice was the worst of it. She wasn’t yelling anymore. She was stating a fact, reading an obituary.
A violent, desperate energy surged up in Ryli’s chest, hot and choking. It was the same impulse that made her jump quarries, that made her drink until she blacked out—the need to externalize the internal storm, to make it visible, to prove it was real.
She shoved the car door open so hard it slammed into Kamora’s legs, making her stumble back. Ryli got out, the night air biting her skin.
“You think I don’t know that?” Ryli’s voice was a low scrape, her hands trembling at her sides. “You think I’m sitting here thinking I’m some kind of prize? I know what I am.”
“Then leave her alone!”
“I can’t!” The shout ripped from her throat, raw and startling. It hung between them, a naked admission. Ryli’s breath came in short clouds. “Don’t you get it? The noise… it stops. Around her. It just stops. I’ve never had that. I don’t know what to do with it, but I can’t just… walk away from it now.”
Kamora looked at her, and the anger in her face finally melted into something like grief. “So you’re going to use her as a human mute button until you blow a fuse. That’s your plan?”
“No.” Ryli shook her head, her dark hair sticking to her damp cheeks. She felt unmoored, dizzy. The words came from a place she never visited, a deep, shadowy well of self-loathing she usually drowned in bourbon. “If I hurt her… if I do what you say I’m gonna do, and I break her…”
She locked eyes with Kamora, her own gaze hollow and terrifyingly serious.
“I’ll hurt myself worse. I promise you that. I’ll make sure of it.”
The silence that followed was absolute. No crickets, no distant traffic. Just the faint tick of the Charger’s cooling engine. Kamora’s face went pale. This wasn’t a figurative threat. They both knew the library of Ryli’s reckless punishments, the scratches on the dashboard of her life.
This was a specific, chilling currency.
“Ryli,” Kamora whispered, a plea.
“It’s the only collateral I have,” Ryli said, her voice emptying out. She got back in the car. She pulled the door shut. Through the window, she looked up at her friend. “Tell anyone about this, and we’re done.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She started the engine, shifted into drive, and pulled back onto the road. In the rearview, she saw Kamora standing alone in the red wash of the Jeep’s taillights, her hands pressed to her head, a solitary figure swallowed by the night.
Ryli drove. The promise echoed in the hollow of her chest, a new kind of noise. It wasn’t the loud, chaotic kind. It was a silent, high-pitched tone only she could hear, a warning alarm that had just been activated.
She glanced at the passenger seat, still smelling of that clean, gentle scent. She had just tied her own potential for pain directly to Cadence’s. It wasn’t noble. It was desperate. It was the most terrifying bet she’d ever made.
And she had no idea how to cash it in, or what she’d lose when she did.