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Katya feels at her absolute sexiest and most gay sitting in the Wrangler with her elbow propped against the window frame, smoking a cigarette and waiting for Trixie. She will get off work at the salon in just a few minutes. Katya has her own duffel and Trixie’s pink hard-shell suitcase in the trunk, and a stack of cassettes for Trixie to choose from. It’s the sacrifice she has to make in order to enjoy the aesthetic of the vintage Jeep, that she can’t annoy Trixie with endless playlists of 90s Russian pop on Spotify. They make do, and she doesn’t mind letting Trixie choose what they listen to.

While she’s waiting, Katya replies to a few tweets asking for a hint about her next investigation. People are still sending her memes from the last time, grainy, crazy-looking ones, the ones Trixie tells her are called deep fried. She doesn’t super understand them, not always, but she listens when Trixie tells her how important it is to engage. How that will help to grow her audience.

Trixie is kind of bossy, and Katya likes it a lot. She’s her best friend, since college, and when Trixie graduated and Katya was two years out of school and still just working in the costume store, she didn’t hesitate to follow Trixie out west. All of this was Katya’s idea, but they wouldn’t be where they are without Trixie pushing, Trixie organising, Trixie taking moody, verdant photographs of the back of Katya’s head for Instagram.

Katya keeps her replies as cryptic as she possibly can, and when people start tweeting at Trixie as well to ask her for details, she locks her phone again and puts it away. She drums her fingers against the outside of the car and watches people walking by, some of them looking at her. A man walking a dog goes right past the Jeep, only a couple inches away from her, and Katya almost topples headfirst out of the rolled down window to get to scratch the puppy’s snout. After he’s gone, Katya lifts her hand to her nose and breathes in the dog-smell of her fingers, lives there in that secret shame for a little while.

All of the girls come out of the salon at the same time at the end of each day, and Katya likes so much to watch them. Trixie is a head taller than everybody else and there are cute little wisps of hair escaping her ponytail to frame her round, lovely face. She’s laughing with one of her colleagues, her mouth open so wide that Katya can see all of her back teeth even from the other side of the street. When Trixie turns around and sees the car she gives Katya a small wave and comes across the street with a little bounce in her step, her ponytail swishing behind her. Katya picks up the Del Taco bag from the seat so that Trixie can sit down, and hands it to her once she has her seatbelt fastened.

“Oh, my god. I literally love you. Thank you. Hi.” Trixie is always starving when she gets off work and she begins rummaging through the bag right away.

Katya starts the engine and the car rumbles to life beneath them. “Hello, hi, hello, how are you, how was your day?”

“It was just okay. That WASP woman came in again, you remember from last month?” Katya hums a small noise of confirmation. “She won’t let anybody else wash her hair. I had to do it, even though I told her that I’m a senior fuckin’ stylist.” Trixie stuffs a handful of fries in her mouth and chews politely, swallows them down before she finishes talking. “I’m supposed to supervise and delegate.”

“Uh-huh,” Katya says. “Trixie, honey, you gotta stop trying to convince people that you’re a top.”

Trixie shrieks and strains against her seatbelt like she wants to lunge across the centre console and finally throttle Katya. Her mascara is coming off in little flakes underneath her eyes, and the pink tip of her nose is showing through her foundation. She’s tired, Katya knows, and she’d love to go home and sink into a warm bath, her skin made slippery and soft by all of the special products she puts into the water. Instead she’s here, in Katya’s beat-up old car, already rummaging through the shoebox of cassettes in the passenger footwell.

She chooses Kate Bush, and she has another couple of tapes picked out for when this one finishes that she’s keeping tucked underneath her thigh like she thinks Katya might take them from her. Trixie fishes around in the glove compartment for a pencil and sticks it through the sprocket to wind the tape back to the start, the tip of her tongue just poking out because she’s concentrating so hard.

After she’s done and the staticky voices of Dan Brandenstein and NASA fill the car, Trixie offers Katya one of her crinkle cut fries. Katya munches on it cheerfully while she checks her mirrors and pulls out of their parking spot. Trixie is eating her veggie burrito with one hand and taking the scrunchie out of her hair with the other.

Katya hasn’t yet grown tired of Trixie’s whole post-work routine. After she’s done eating, Trixie wriggles out of her black blouse and slacks in the passenger seat. She had left a change of clothes for herself neatly folded on top of her suitcase, and Katya had let herself in to Trixie’s apartment with her spare key earlier today to collect everything. She saw a pepto-bismol Post-it tacked to the door of the refrigerator to remind Trixie’s roommate, Kim, that she needs to give the chinchilla food and fresh water every day that Trixie is away. Katya likes Trixie’s writing, how she dots the i in Kim’s name with a little heart. Her own is scrawling and messy as chicken scratch.

It isn’t a graceful production for Trixie to get dressed again, and Katya focuses very hard on the road ahead so Trixie doesn’t get all embarrassed and grumpy. She doesn’t put her boots on after she’s dressed, instead propping her feet up on the dash in their wool socks. She pushes her toes against the glass of the windshield until they crack and she moans loudly. Katya is so grateful that Trixie comes with her at all for these trips, and especially after ten hours on her feet.

After some time spent massaging her arches and groaning, Trixie takes her iPad out of her backpack and starts scrolling around in their shared Google document. They’ve been researching and collecting information. Katya has been reading everything she can get her hands on and making notes for Trixie, highlighting the parts that she thinks are especially interesting.

“You know,” Trixie says, and taps two fingers against her chin. “This might be the first time that I kinda believe in the thing that we’re looking for.”

Katya turns her head for just a moment to glance at Trixie. The sun is setting on Katya’s left, and she likes the idea of Trixie looking back at her and seeing the sky peach-pink and luminous behind her. “You do?”

“Yeah! Bigfoot is meat and bone, Katya.”

She sounds so emphatic that Katya laughs out loud, a small sharp thing that reverberates around the inside of the car for long enough that she almost winds down the window again to let it back out. That would be less than wise; it’s raining. And it’s begun to get dark. Katya doesn’t like driving very much, likes it even less in these conditions. When it’s sunny and dry and warm, she will hold the wheel down at six in just one hand and rest the other on the window frame or sometimes along the back of Trixie’s seat. Tonight she has a firm grip with both hands and she’s focusing so hard on the road she keeps catching herself leaning forward.

“I know this,” Katya says. “I didn’t think that you did. I was super ready to have to persuade you with all my extensive and incredibly scientific and — Trixie, and — one hundred percent factual research.”

Trixie has elongated in the seat as they’ve been driving. She’s reclined it way back and she still has her feet propped up on the dash. The blood is definitely not reaching them correctly, and when she gets out of the car later she’s going to whine and hop around like a little sparrow until her circulation comes back. She has the iPad resting against the slope of her thighs and she scrolls back up to the top of the document again.

“Like how the earliest recorded sightings are from the fifteenth century? And how lots of cultures have different names for the same idea? Hmm? Those facts?”

“Those are facts!” Katya starts, and then sees Trixie right at the edge of her vision, barely suppressing a smirk. Her cheeks have hollowed with the effort and her eyes are wide. “Wow, I hate you so much.”

Trixie reads a little more of their research out loud, like Katya wasn’t the one who compiled all of it. Like she hasn’t already drafted her tweets for later with the most important details. She hardly minds; she likes the way Trixie’s voice sounds. She’s turned the volume down on the cassette player a bit, so that she can tell Katya about how there have been sightings in almost every state, how that lends credence to the idea that Bigfoot is a species, rather than a singular creature.

“Well yeah, honey. You look in the mirror lately?”

Trixie screams and drums her heels against the dashboard, squirming around in her seat. Katya’s laughing too, and she relaxes her grip on the steering wheel a bit. Just having Trixie next to her in the car always makes her feel safer, which doesn’t make any sense at all because she has on more than one occasion lunged across the centre console and put her hands around Katya’s throat while they’ve been driving.

“That’s so mean. You’re so mean. I can’t believe I’m friends with you.” She’s taken her sunglasses off now that it’s gotten darker, and she folds the legs in neatly and puts them away in their pink case, stows it in the glove compartment.

Katya grins. “Well, I am a cryptid hunter. I’m one of the few people that believe you exist. So you don’t really have another option.”

“Okay, I got it, thanks so much,” Trixie says.

She gets into a bit of a snit and draws her legs up onto her seat, folds them beneath herself instead. There’s only twenty more minutes or so until they get to where they’re going, so Katya leaves her to work through it by herself in furious silence. It’s unkind to provoke her after a long work day. Katya should have known better; she does know better.

“Hey,” she says, after a handful of minutes in which she has to be very careful not to turn her head towards Trixie. “You’re very pretty.”

“I know.” It comes out sharp, but then her face softens into a smile. She uncrosses her arms and stretches them up above her head, as high as the roof of the Wrangler will let her.

They’re driving along the main street through the town now. Even in the dark and the rain it’s pretty cute, the street lined with trees and low, single-storey buildings. Behind them, the mountains sweep upward so steeply that it makes Katya dizzy when she leans forward towards the windshield to try and see the top.

“This place is kinda charming. If you’re into like, mildew and cheap beer,” Trixie says.

Katya swings a right into the parking lot of the motel and cuts the engine. “You know those are my two main interests. You think we’ll have time to go apartment hunting while we’re here?”

“Since when do you want to live like a person?” Trixie lifts both eyebrows. She always looks so pleased with herself whenever she gets a chance to tease Katya, and her mouth is turned up at the corners so the dimple in her left cheek is more pronounced. “We’ll get you a nice tarp and an extra pair of wool socks.”

“Oh wow, two pairs? A life of true decadence.”

Trixie doesn’t respond; she’s begun rummaging in her footwell, collecting all of her belongings. It usually takes less than five minutes of her being in Katya’s car before her stuff is scattered everywhere, but she is always courteous, always careful to take everything with her when she gets out. While she’s occupied, Katya jumps down without using the step and rounds the front of the Jeep to open Trixie’s door for her and offer her a hand. She doesn’t need it — she’s taller than Katya is — but she never refuses.

“We can’t stay someplace nice?” Trixie says, looking over the top of Katya’s head. The red neon Vacancy sign is making her face look warm and pink and sweet. “Just one time?”

“You wanna pay?” Katya says back.

Trixie squawks in distaste and Katya leaves her there, leaning against the side of the Wrangler and shifting her weight in agitation while the blood comes back into her feet. She gets their luggage out of the trunk and takes everything inside, Trixie trailing a few paces behind with just her little pink backpack.

Katya is the kind of person who says thank you to Siri whenever she asks a question, and Trixie is the kind of person who giggles at her every time for doing it. Because of this, Katya is always the one to speak with the person at the front desk and smile politely and collect their room keys, while Trixie busies herself a few feet away. She thumbs through the racks of leaflets advertising things to do in the surrounding area. Almost all of it is Bigfoot-adjacent, and Trixie certainly won’t find anything interesting enough to make her actually pick one out.

The moment they get into their room, Trixie unzips her suitcase and heads straight for the bathroom with a thing of Clorox wipes. She does this every time, and Katya can hear her singing cheerfully to herself while she scrubs the sink or whatever, so she leaves her to it. It gives her a minute to stretch out after the drive. Katya sits down right on the floor, even though it will make Trixie click her tongue in disgust, and moves easily through a few simple poses.

It feels good; she likes the way that it kind of burns when she pushes her hip flexors as far as she can. Her hair is spilling down all over her face and getting into her eyes, and she has a red scrunchie around her wrist but she doesn’t want to shift out of downward-facing dog to tie it up. After a couple minutes her legs start tingling and she brings them down and sits up, gathers as much of her hair up as she can. It only skims the top of her shoulders and it always wants to fall down and stick in sweaty tendrils to her cheeks and neck.

“Get off the floor,” Trixie says when she comes out of the bathroom. “You’re gonna get hepatitis.”

Katya lifts her head from her plow pose to look at Trixie. “I think that would be very sexy of me. Will you nurse me, Trixie? Will you tenderly pat my forehead with a cool facecloth?”

“I’ll smother you with a pillow.”

Sweat is beginning to prickle between Katya’s shoulder blades and make her back feel all itchy and unpleasant. She flops down flat onto the floor and Trixie steps carefully over her and sits herself primly on the end of one of the twin beds. She has a way of always, immediately, making the places they stay feel more like home. It’s not like she brings a bunch of scented candles, although Katya doesn’t doubt that she would if she thought she could get away with it. Just her presence in a space is enough to make it feel warmer and cosier and more pink.

Everything in Trixie’s suitcase is organised carefully into packing cubes, and when Katya opens her duffel and things start falling out onto the ground Trixie sighs loudly. Katya rummages around until she finds her dopp kit and she holds it aloft, victorious.

“I’m gonna shower. I am feeling extremely gross from the drive.”

“You’re extremely gross from who you are as a person.” Trixie has taken her boots off and wriggled up the bed so that she’s leaning against the headboard now. Her hair is a bit matted at the back from their long drive, and her makeup is smudged and wearing away. “I’m gonna call and check in with Orville.”

Katya’s knees both crack loudly when she straightens up and she winces. “Cool. Say hello to our son from me.”

“He’s not your son, Cruella,” Trixie fires back at her before Katya closes the bathroom door.

The spray from the showerhead is lacklustre, and Trixie is definitely going to be unhappy about that when she washes her hair tomorrow. It makes Katya laugh just thinking about it and some of the water gets into her mouth.

Freshly dressed, she comes out of the bathroom to see Trixie laying on her stomach on her bed, grinning at the screen of her phone. She’s on FaceTime, and Kim has propped her own phone up against the chinchilla’s cage so that Trixie can watch Orville eat. Katya likes that Trixie doesn’t stop her soft voice or her goofy smile when she comes into the room. She leans down over Trixie to put her face in the frame as well. When Trixie first announced one day that she was going to get a chinchilla and dragged Katya to the pet store to help carry everything, she hadn’t really understood the appeal. She gets it now. Orville sits on his hind legs and holds a grass pellet in his front paws to nibble at delicately, and Katya and Trixie watch him eat.

Katya had been with Trixie the day she got Orville from the rescue center. She’d been the one to drive back to Trixie’s apartment, and she’s pretty sure that was the closest she’ll ever come in her life to the feeling of driving home from the hospital with a newborn in the car seat. Trixie had cradled the carrier in both arms and sung softly to the chinchilla, so that he could get used to her voice. Now he’s inquisitive and goofy, and he likes to ride around on Katya’s shoulder whenever she’s over at Trixie’s place.

After a little while, Kim comes back into frame and tells them she has to hang up now but that she’ll check in later, before she goes to bed. “You’re a really good dad,” Katya says, and then darts rapidly off the bed and out of range so that Trixie can’t smack her.

She sits up and gathers all of her hair up off her neck in both hands, rolls her head on her shoulders. “You’re his dad. I’m a MILF. Can we get snacks?”

“Really?” Katya sits at the end of her own bed to start putting her Docs back on. “Watching him eat those nasty-ass dried-up pellets made you hungry, Trix?”

“No, being in a confined space with you for multiple hours made me hungry. Come on, there’s a gas station down the street.”

Katya trots obediently along behind Trixie on their way to the gas station. She looks like a confection, like something made of fondant or marzipan. She’s totally out of place in a town like this. It’s still raining, and it’s hovering right around forty degrees. Trixie’s wearing a white down jacket and she’s got her hands shoved inside the pockets and her chin tucked into the neck of the coat. When she put it on Katya told her she looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and she stuck her tongue out.

“Trixie, you know, you really shouldn’t dress like a snack when we’re out looking for enormous carnivorous beasts.” Katya quickens her pace to catch up to Trixie and hooks her arm through hers.

Trixie scoffs. “He’s not carnivorous, is he? Has there been one single confirmed report of a Bigfoot attacking a person? Ever?”

“Well no, but-”

“Mhmm.” Trixie stops them walking in front of the door to the gas station and Katya lets go of her arm so she can open it and hold it for Trixie.

Inside, several people turn to look at them. Trixie reaches blindly behind herself and circles her wrist until Katya takes her hand and allows herself to be led over to the snack aisle. She likes how every decision Trixie makes is properly considered, how she bends at the waist to assess their options before she picks anything out. She passes things to Katya one at a time for her to hold, until she’s satisfied. She started with the biggest thing of Skittles the store carries, which Katya is cradling against her stomach while she waits. Katya follows Trixie over to the registers and dumps everything out on the counter; a Red Bull can starts rolling and Trixie catches it as it drops off the edge and sets it down securely again.

“You girls in town for the squatch?” the older man at the register asks as he starts ringing them up. His gaze lingers on Trixie for a little while. She unzipped her jacket because it’s warm in the store, and underneath she’s wearing a pink roll neck sweater. She doesn’t much look like a typical amateur cryptozoologist.

It makes her let out a small disgruntled noise and she wanders away a bit. Katya bounces on her toes a couple times and clasps her hands together. “We sure are! You got any insider information?”

“Just don’t getcha selves lost in the forest,” he sighs. “Bring plenty’a supplies, water, nineteen forty-seven, and cell phones don’t work so you need’a use short-wave radio.”

Katya blinks at him a couple times and then says Oh! and rummages in the back pocket of her pants for her wallet. It was a gift from Trixie a few years back and the leather has been made soft and buttery with use. Inside, there’s a Polaroid of the two of them. They’re at the beach in it, Trixie in a vintage one piece and an enormous straw sunhat. Katya’s wearing a bikini with a shark print and she’s tucked beneath the brim of Trixie’s hat, leaning in to kiss her cheek. It sends a little sting of pleasure through her each time she sees it; Trixie had gifted the wallet to her with the photograph already inside.

“Here you go,” she says cheerfully, and hands the guy her card to swipe. “We’ve got radios and rations, don’t worry. We’ve put some thought into this. I guess you guys must have folks getting themselves stuck and needing rescued all the time, huh?”

The guy makes a gruff noise and passes her the receipt to sign. She can feel Trixie’s eyes on her, feel how she’s itching to get out of here. Trixie uses all of her reserves of small talk for her job and generally doesn’t enjoy engaging with people outside of work. Katya is honoured that Trixie feels comfortable enough with her to be grouchy and quiet, that it doesn’t drain her energy when they spend time together.

“You ever see any signs yourself?” Katya asks the clerk as he’s packing up their stuff. He passes the paper bag over to her and she holds it against her chest in both arms and waits for an answer.

The guy gestures behind himself to a few blurry photographs tacked up on a corkboard with push pins in different colours. “You hear about that hoax that was uncovered over in Bluff Creek?” He says it like that wasn’t almost twenty years ago, and Katya nods enthusiastically.

“I did!” She listens as he tells her to check out the museum in town, and that they should be careful not to find themselves in the forest after dark. He’s growing more and more animated as Katya lets him ramble, and she has to shift the weight of the grocery bag to her other arm.

Trixie has circumnavigated the store while she’s waited for Katya to get done talking to the guy, and she comes back to touch her fingers to Katya’s bent elbow and say her name very quietly and urgently. When they first met, Katya repeated Trixie’s name back to her and cracked it in half over her knee like a glow stick, and Trixie added an extra syllable to hers. Kah-tee-yuh. She likes the way that it sounds, especially when Trixie is getting annoyed or whiny.

“Okay, just a minute,” she says back calmly, as if she were trying to placate a child.

Katya thanks the guy at the register again and gestures with her head for Trixie to lead the way out of the store. She’s getting kind of stompy, so Katya trails a couple of steps behind on the way back to the motel. Trixie’s hands are balled into fists at her sides, but she’ll be okay once she eats a few Oreos and changes into her pajamas.

In their room, Katya unpacks the grocery bag and lays everything out on the dresser while Trixie changes in the bathroom. She likes pottering around and listening to the water running and the quiet hum of Trixie’s toothbrush, likes how Trixie’s face is bright and gleaming with lotion when she comes out.

“Par-tay,” Katya says, and shakes the bag of Skittles in Trixie’s direction.

She wrinkles her nose and collects a couple things to take with her when she gets beneath the sheets. Hers is the bed furthest away from the door, like always, and she props herself up against the headboard. Great clouds of freshly brushed-out curls cascade over her shoulders. Her hair is very soft; Katya knows this from the handful of times Trixie has gotten frustrated trying to do her own french braids and had Katya do them for her instead. Katya thinks she looks sort of like an earthworm, pink and shiny and moist, but knows better than to ever say that out loud.

“Hey, you know, that’s very Bigfoot of you,” she says as she comes over to sit on her own bed across from Trixie’s.

Trixie has arranged the various packages of junk food neatly across the sheets, in order of size from smallest to largest. She does the same thing with gifts, Katya remembers from her birthdays and that one Christmas neither of them could afford to go home and they spent the day on Trixie’s couch watching movies and eating until they were too bloated and uncomfortable to move.

“What is?”

“Arranging stuff all orderly like that.” Katya isn’t beneath the sheets yet, she’ll go out for a last cigarette, but she does reach down to unlace her boots. “You want me to go find you some rocks to stack?”

“I want you to never talk to me again,” Trixie says sweetly, and she rips open her Oreos and gets right to work twisting the cookies in opposite directions to separate the sandwich.

It doesn’t seem like the best idea to eat a whole bunch of sugar right before bed. Katya wants them to be up early to make the most of the daylight and she knows Trixie’s going to grumble, even though she’ll get at least an extra hour of sleep. Katya likes getting to wake Trixie with the wet ends of her hair dripping and her body pleasantly sore from a run, likes watching her come all grumpy and confused into the day. She is not about to tell Trixie to take it easy with the snacks, especially when she looks so cute munching on her cookies.

“I’m gonna go smoke,” Katya says, and Trixie makes a noncommittal noise.

She gathers her lighter and the pack of Camels from the pocket of her jacket and heads out the door of their room. They have a little patio area in the front with two Adirondack chairs and a small table and she settles herself down to light a cigarette. If she turns her head she can look in their window through the gap in the voile panels and see Trixie, scrolling through her phone and still eating.

They’re not far enough away from civilisation that she can see all of the stars, but there are way more than in the city. It’s so beautiful and so still, the rain coming down much lighter now. Katya likes the noises of the frogs very much. She would like to stay out here in her chair and listen to them until time stands still, and then maybe a little longer after that.

Her hair got damp again when they were walking back to the motel and she takes it down from the scrunchie so it can dry off a bit. It’s not even close enough to being warm enough for her to sit out like this, and she regrets not wearing a jacket. For a little while Katya inspects her own arm, fascinated by the way all of the blonde hairs are standing on end and how her skin feels like it’s on too tight.

After a while the light goes out in the room behind her. Katya isn’t usually the last one awake, but she really likes the idea of tiptoeing around and doing her best not to wake Trixie, maybe sneaking glances over at her. She’s on her second cigarette, and she’s trying so so hard, but she’s barely smoked at all today and she’s so content in the moment that she doesn’t want to go inside just yet. They’re so lucky to do this. She is so lucky, to have a best friend who will come along with her on these trips and take pictures and listen to her rambling and be the person she gets to turn to and say did you see that?