Long hot summers make you wanna fight
The roar of the city lasts all night
You like drugs you like brew
You won't believe what I can do to you.
Dead End Justice by The Runaways.

Remy was making a new start, with the black eye, not her first, still fresh on her face and her arm in a sling, she drove towards her friend Sylvia's house, the only person she could turn to. She had burned all her bridges long ago for love, and now she was well and truly fucked.

Billy had turned out to be the biggest disappointment of her life, and now her parents wouldn't speak to her. She couldn't blame them really, and they had tried to warn her, but the heart wants what the heart wants and she was left in a strange town, with no job, miles away from anyone that loved her. She had followed that jerk off all the way to Oregon, and although she did like it there, he was there and so, she couldn't be. He had sworn she was his and his only, he would never give her a divorce, and he would never leave her alone.

Her parents and sister were in South Carolina, had been for years, since they left that shit town in Utah fifteen or so years ago. They didn't pick up the phone when she called, but she had been expecting that. She and Jenny talked on "Fakebook" as Jenny called it sometimes, but never for very long. Jenny was sixteen and her older sister by almost ten years was light years away from her world, although they thought about each other often. She missed her baby sister sometimes, and dreamed of a day when they could see each other again, her parents though, her mother especially? No thank you very much.

So, as distasteful as it was to her, she was on her way to Utah. There was nowhere else to go.

Remy had no choice, her pride would not allow her to beg, she had left home to follow a man and she didn't even want to tell them that they had been right. As she drove with her left hand and tried to light a cigarette with her bum hand; he had sprained her right wrist, she wished that she hadn't left herself with no options.

Story of her life.

There was no service out in the desert for her XM radio, so the local station, which had a propensity for Pasty Kline, Elvis, and The Duprees was all she could tune in. She imagined these yahoos out here thought Elvis was still alive somewhere, maybe with Patsy Kline, tooling around in his Cadillac somewhere down route 66, and she laughed to herself, for the first time in a while.

Aliens and area 51 was probably popular around here too and she laughed again bitterly, "those lights in the sky, they be UFOs." At least she still had her sense of humor.

On her birthday, Billy had hit her for the last time, and she had left. Remy was free of him, he didn't even know about Utah, and she would be safe there, or safer at least, but hearing all this moody music was not helping the situation at all. She had already heard "Crazy" and now "You Belong to Me", it was making her mood foul, remembering a time when she was young and life was simpler than it had become. What she wouldn't give for some rock and roll, some Five Finger Death Punch would be really good about now. But, alas, the CDs were in her trunk, and she wasn't stopping in the middle of this barren place in the dark, leaving herself vulnerable to some nitwit coming and snatching her right off the road. So, Elvis, it was, Patsy Kline and the rest.

This was her mother's music and Beverly Wallace had no use for Remy's music, Megadeth, Disturbed, and all manner of heavy metal. Beverly had been convinced she would corrupt her sister with her "Drug Music," Remy had always laughed at that and turned the music up. She didn't do half the things her mother always accused her of, a little pot, here and there sure. She liked to go to concerts, what was ever wrong with that? She didn't sleep around, although Beverly regularly searched her room for birth control pills, never finding the joints Remy taped to the back of her pictures on the wall.

She was clever when she had to be, that was how she finally got away from Billy too.

Billy had been her first, her only, but Bev thought she was whoring around and regularly interrogated her about it.

It was ironic that she was out in the middle of east Jabib, thousands of miles away and still couldn't get away from her mother, she was thinking of her now, it was the damn music. Remy was finding out, that her mother's judgment and reproach traveled with her wherever she went. What was the saying ? Something like "wherever you go there you are."

"Remy I just don't know what to do with you." Her mother's words echoed through her mind, "The music and...the men..."

And the tattoos Remy smiled to herself, don't forget those mother dear. Beverly was not a mother one could call when they were in a jam. Nope. You were on your own. Lie in the bed you made Remy. Lie in it until it kills you.

'See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sunrise from a tropic isle
Just remember darling all the while
You belong to me."

Fuck her life right now.

That was why she ran off and married Billy in the first place, to get away, to get anywhere that was far from her mother. And that had not worked out for her at all, she was done with men, fuck every one of them, or don't actually, and she laughed again at her own joke.

Sylvia had offered to let her crash for a while, but Remy had no intention of staying in Bumfuck, Utah for long. Sylvia never left Luna Mesa, but Remy had, and she would leave again as soon as she could. To go where she didn't know, just away, the place gave her the creeps and she didn't know how Sylvia could stand it.