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You think you might hate Vriska. She makes it really easy. You hate how, if left unattended, she won’t shave her legs for months, bragging to you about it the whole time because she knows the sensation makes your toes curl, and when you finally force her to do it you have to buy her Nair because you wouldn’t dare subject a razor to that horror. You hate that in the summer she wears the same wifebeater so much she gets tan-lines in its shape. You hate how in any season she’ll wear overalls with nothing underneath of them so if she leans forwards, her tits hang out. You hate her whining, her bitching, her ceaseless demands, and you hate how her hair clogs up the shower drain and she refuses to clean it herself so you have to pick it out armed with latex gloves and tongs.
Oh yes, do you ever hate Vriska. But you also sort of need her, because you’re blind, and blind people aren’t allowed to drive cars. And you have needs, all these needs, that can only be satiated with the help of a car.
*
You make it very obvious that you need some more shampoo and conditioner. When approaching Vriska for a favor, it is no use to beat around the bush. You have to puff up your chest and demand in a very loud voice. Anger works well too, and bribery. Blackmail. Physical assault. And as an award, a grating thank you.
“I need you to take me to the store.” You plant yourself in front of her. She’s picking at her toe-claws, which could really use some filing down, and doesn’t look up. “Shampoo. Conditioner. They are no longer in supply, but very muchly in demand.”
“It’s almost ten; human stores aren’t open this ear—late. And it’s Saturday anyways, so they’ll all be closed tomorrow too, numbnuts.”
Stupid humans and their stupid days of rest and stupid po-dunk towns where literally nothing is open on Sundays.
“Then drive me to the city. Their stores are always open.”
“And waste all that fucking gas just so you can get off on L’Oreal’s newest line?” She fishes a pair of kid’s safety scissors out of her pocket and starts hacking at one of her claws. It’s started to split down the middle, which hers always do, because she refuses to attend to their demands. You’re lucky that you’ve gotten her to use soap on a routine basis, let alone lotion to keep away corns and hangnails and cankers.
“You don’t understand. Some of us like to keep our hair socially acceptable.”
“Yeah? Some of us like to have money for food. Some of us even don’t give enough of a fuck to conform to society’s brain-dead beauty standards!”
“Vriska, you are not a rebel. You are a lazy asshole who is going to take me out so I can have luscious locks next time I step out of the shower.”
*
You have to literally drag Vriska to the car. She caterwauls and bemoans her ill fortune the entire way there, layering on melodramatic display over melodramatic display, all with hearty vocal accompaniment, and you are sure you neighbors will be giving you the stink eye next morning. But you get her in the car, fully dressed, and with her bloated wallet. It’s all one-dollar bills, though.
By the time you have gotten out of your neighborhood, she has detailed all of the privileges she’s yanking because you’ve forced her to get out of the house: no more Judge Judy—troll or human—, no more giving her lectures on how to vastly improve the human legal system, no more stockpiling jars of Maraschino cherries in her fridge beside her alcohol, no more sharing a recuperacoon. You get the floor from here on out, apparently. She promises you this nearly every week, but then tries to sleep alone, gets nightmares, and slays her pride when she hollers for you.
At the town limits, she’s graphically outlined all the terrible physical and psychological tortures she’s going to put you through. You tune her out, because you’ve heard it all before. Mind control! Stabbings! More mind control! Maybe homicide, if she can be assed!
The sputtering car gets to the highway and Vriska has already run out of conversational topics. Now the only noise is the air surging in your open window and the shitty human music playing on the radio. The occasional car going past you, but not many folks drive through the desert so late at night.
“L’Oreal isn’t coming out with a new line,” you decide to educate her in the fine art of cheap hair products, “and even if they were, I wouldn’t be getting any. It’s all shit, the stuff they carry. And it smells like a senile lusus.”
“Bluh bluh bluh, I’m Terezi and I have these huge fucking standards!” Vriska rolls her eye, turning up the radio. You don’t have the willpower left to do anything about it, even if it’s playing Journey. Not even Troll Journey either.
“Bluh, indeed.” You concede.
*
It is nearly midnight when you find the next town. Vriska slowly drives through it, and there is nothing open besides a few bars and a cinema. She cajoles you into stopping at one of the bars and getting a drink.
Almost exactly as the clock hits midnight, you two walk into a seedy hellhole and grab yourselves seats at the bar. It smells like bodily fluids and neon. Just the sort of dive that draws Vriska in shamelessly, like the world’s most egotistical moth.
She doesn’t buy you anything, but spends enough money on herself so that she’s just shy of being tipsy. In human beer, the only kind this place serves, that equates to a lot. Vriska claims to like the taste of it, calls herself a hipster because it’s vegetarian and doesn’t contain juices from culled young. She’s the most obnoxious drinker you’ve ever encountered.
By the time you get her back in the car, it’s nearing one in the morning. You have been flirted with by an assortment of bikers, braved the bar’s bathrooms, kept the peace during a round of shots, and arm-wrestled Vriska for who gets to pay. You win, because you punch her in the face and remind her that you have ordered absolutely nothing, while she has wracked up quite a stack of empty glasses. She scowls.
Back on the road, and Vriska is pissed. She starts yelling at you as you look out the window. Blaming you for all these things and saying she’ll kick you out right this instant, let you figure out what to do next. You pay her no mind. This, like being exiled to sleep on the couch, is a common occurrence.
She works herself up, completely missing the exit to one town. You hate when she drinks because she’s complete shit at dealing with alcohol. She gets histrionic in no time, even if she is nearly completely sober. At one point she pulls the car over and starts crying. You get out and start walking, figure she’ll catch up when she’s ready. It’s tough living with Vriska—hell, it’s hard just knowing her—but you have risen to meet the challenge most admirably, you’d say.
You make it a good couple of miles before you hear the raucous motor of your car. Vriska pulls up next to you, eye clear, and yells right in your ear, “I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but…” When you jog around to the passenger side door—she never completely stops the car—she is laughing. That is her idea of a joke. If you were on Alternia, she would have been put to death long ago by some offended Subjugglator.
*
You go through three more towns. Nothing is open. Both of you are in a bad mood now, and Vriska won’t stop bitching about her headache. On your fourth town, or more of a small city, you see a flashing motel sign with ‘VACANCY’ underneath of it and tell her to pull over. You’ve travelled almost one hundred miles, you haven’t slept since you got out of the recuperacoon at five in the afternoon, and you still don’t have what you came for.
“So you admit defeat?” She rasps at you, parking the car.
“Yes. Fine. Whatever. I’m tired.”
“I dunno if I wanna spend the money…”
“I’ll pay.”
“I dunno if I wanna move…”
You sock her in the gut and smear a kiss across her mouth. “I don’t care.”
*
The man behind the motel’s desk is just as tired as you are and barely talks. It’s a crappy motel so they only have beds, recuperacoons being too expensive to keep. You don’t care. You’ll just buy a bottle of those terrible watered-down sopor pills in the morning when you go out to get your precious shampoo and conditioner.
You and Vriska are too tired to even find your room almost. You pass it twice before Vriska shakes her head and points it out. The room is a dump: everything is bolted to the floor, the bedsheets are patterned in very offending brocade, and there is a framed print of hoofbeasts charging across a prairie. It’s such a bad quality you can smell the pixels from the doorway.
Crashing face-first onto the bed, you get a nose-full of brocade and dust and skin cells left behind by past tenants. The sheets haven’t been washed for three, four days. Vriska flops down next to you and sighs really heavily.
“Why’d you walk off when I pulled over?” She says it so that you know she hopes you won’t hear her, but if she doesn’t ask, it’ll eat her up.
“You’re too much sometimes. A lot of the time.” You crawl over to her and smooth a few more kisses down her face and neck and fall asleep with her collarbone pressed into your cheek. It rolls with each breath she takes.
Neither of you have the energy to remove your shoes.
*
When you leave the motel that afternoon, after eight solid hours of sleep, you take all the complimentary hygiene products in your room’s bathroom out of spite and a sense of entitlement. Vriska calls you out on being a petty dork and slips you under her arm like an accessory. You can deal with each other a lot better when well-rested.
Now. There must be one goddamned store in this city that is open and offering hair products.