car where Grace hadn’t closed the door right. Marlow looked down at it, pooling around their feet, and spit at Honey, “What, you’ve never seen a police drone?”
You piece of redneck trash. She didn’t have to say that part; her tone left it curdling in the air. And she could tell that Honey heard it, that she knew the sound of words like that being meant without being said.
“No,” Honey answered softly. For a moment, she sounded as young as the rest of them. But then she stared out the window for a long, rapt moment and turned back to Marlow with the look of a gun with one bullet left in the chamber.
“Who’s that lady with your dad?” she said. She leaned so close that her nose brushed Marlow’s. A fleck of her spit landed on Marlow’s lower lip as she spoke—a fleck that Marlow had to let sit there, bound as she was. Two cops were running toward the car, the beams of their flashlights passing gold through Honey’s curls.
Honey slid her face against Marlow’s until she was speaking right into her ear. “I mean,” Honey whispered, “if Aston even is your real dad. You don’t look anything like him, and your mom’s always been such a slut.”
Marlow strained her arms and legs, trying one more time to break the belts. There was something rising in her. It reminded her of the time that sewage had backed up into their house through a drain in the basement floor. Aston had stood above a plumber and said, “Can’t we just cover the drain?” The plumber had squinted up at him like he was everything he was—rich, clueless, impatient with reality—and said, “You can cover this one. But the crap will find another way out.”
The leather on her wrists and ankles didn’t budge, and Marlow saw that Honey was laughing. She was laughing as she started sitting back. “Such a slut,” she said, pulling away.
Marlow opened her mouth like she was going to scream, then closed it, hard and fast, on Honey’s face. Her teeth sank into the pad of flesh between the spot where Honey rubbed blush on her cheek and the long curve of her jaw. Marlow heard Honey gasp. She felt her jerk and go still. Honey screeched, her words warped, like she was the one with a mouthful. “Marlow, fuck, stop it!” When Honey pushed away, something tore and stayed behind. It was still in Marlow’s mouth when she saw Honey looking horrified, scrambling backward to the seat’s other side. There was an oily pink patch on her face with tattered, uneven edges. Blood was rising, more than running, from it.
Honey’s skin was still in her mouth as the police reached the car and pulled Honey out first. Marlow waited her turn. The throbbing scrap in her teeth waited, too, for her to spit or swallow.
* * *
Most of the cameras in the car hadn’t been working. One by one, as Honey drove them farther and farther from Constellation, they had lost their signals and gone off-line. But there was a camera in the dashboard—a sort of emergency option, with low-grade definition and no audio at all—that had still been transmitting video. Its angle missed the painful way Marlow’s hands and feet were cuffed. All the viewers could see was her head in Grace’s lap—all it seemed like, without the sound, was two friends fooling around. The camera was not as generous to the moment Marlow lunged at Honey. It captured Honey, looking terrified of the police drone, shaking and curling into Marlow. And then, in a violent flash, like a wildlife film, Marlow attacking, leading with her teeth, followed by Honey falling back, bitten. Marlow herself felt bile in the back of her mouth when a talent welfare officer played the scene for her, afterward. She had never seen herself on camera before—Constellation stars were prohibited from watching any of the content they made—and so at first she could almost convince herself it was someone else, someone who looked a bit like her, clamping down on Honey’s face. But she knew, deep down, she had done it; she remembered the taste.
Kick her off the air! one of Marlow’s followers wrote. I check my feeds after a long day of REAL work in REAL America. I tune in for a laugh, not to see twisted little psychos.
Heard that one girl was “eating” another one on camera and I’m pretty disappointed it was this LOL, said another.