Cobble Hill

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  “What are we doing?” he shouted.

  Ryan stopped halfway down the block next to the long line of boys waiting to get into the store. He planted his feet and fanned out his baby-blue Sublime parka behind him like a peacock’s tail, flexing his chest muscles.

  “Fucking A!” one of the boys in line cheered loudly. “No more fucking guns!”

  “Bullseye!” another boy yelled and pointed at Liam. “Bullshit!”

  Liam wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

  “No more bullshit. No more bullshit!” the photographers chorused as they snapped pictures.

  Ryan just stood there looking sad and glamorous, modeling. Liam tried to imitate him but he felt like a freak. His pants were falling down, his shoes were ugly, and the body paint was itchy.

  “One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” he counted silently in his head, the way his mom used to count and pat his bottom soothingly at bedtime when he was little. He wished he was home, not playing Fortnite necessarily, but maybe talking to Shy on FaceTime and eating Ben & Jerry’s.

  “More, Pimples! More!” Trey barked from behind him.

  Liam raised his arms overhead like he was under arrest and faced the crowd. “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.”

  The result was stupendous.

  “Yes. Shoot video now!” Trey hissed at the photographers.

  Not to be outdone, Ryan mimed taking a bullet and fell down on the sidewalk. The boys in line hit the lighter apps on their phones and drew around him in a circle, holding a vigil over his prone form.

  “Bullshit!” the boys chanted, their voices loud and furious. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit…!”

  “Bullshit!” Ryan shouted from the sidewalk, eyes closed, the veins at his temples bulging sweatily. The word echoed down the Bowery, ricocheting against the buildings and resounding in the cold night air. It felt like all of Lower Manhattan was filled with chanting boys. It was thrilling, powerful.

  A siren wailed and a police car pulled up, lights flashing.

  “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” every boy on the sidewalk except Liam shouted. He zipped up his hoodie and flipped on the hood. He did not sign up to get arrested. He had school tomorrow. Homework to do. He wanted to speak to Shy, kiss Shy, maybe even eventually lose his virginity with Shy. He couldn’t do that in prison.

  “Everybody up!” Trey shouted. “Models inside. It’s not real, folks. Sorry, just a promotional thing. Go home. Drop starts online tonight at midnight. Your bots will sell out everything in thirty seconds as usual. Go home. Get out of here. I’ll deal with the police. And don’t forget to hashtag Sublime in your posts!”

  * * *

  Roy felt a little drunk. He’d had those two pints with Peaches before anyone arrived, and was now on his fourth. Something about Wendy and Peaches introducing themselves to each other had made him feel even drunker.

  Worlds collide.

  “Roy? I’m having trouble with the name of the bar in London we used to go to before the girls were born, where they had karaoke. Soho Sugar something, wasn’t it? Roy?”

  “I actually met Roy for the first time in here,” Peaches explained. “He was looking for a place to write out of the house. I made him sugary tea.”

  Roy was vaguely aware that they were talking about him.

  Worlds collide.

  That was the problem with his book. He needed the worlds to collide. Right now they were just sort of lying limply in close proximity to each other, like discarded tissues. On Battlestar Galactica planets were always colliding and blowing up. He needed to blow something up.

  “I think I am having an epiphany,” he said. “I’ve had several since I got here.” He’d begun to sweat. He needed his laptop.

  “That’s fantastic.” Peaches patted his arm. “But could you stay, at least for a little bit? I have to get the karaoke started, and Tupper needs your help at the bar.” Elizabeth would be horrified if their most distinguished guest left early.

  “He doesn’t need me. Look, he’s got help.”

  A cheerful group of bearded, plaid flannel shirt–wearing men were behind the bar now. They looked like hockey players, grinning and bumping up against each other. They’d probably drink the place dry, but Peaches could restock. Or was it Elizabeth who did the restocking?

  Restock.

  “Roy, do you want to go home to your computer?” Wendy asked gently. She’d seen this faraway look plenty of times before. He was writing.

  “It’s fine for now. I’ll just take notes on a cocktail napkin or something.”

  Peaches wasn’t listening to them anymore. She’d noticed a change in the music. It was still the Go-Go’s, but there was a trancelike overlay that she hadn’t heard before, a rhythmic throb that made her teeth vibrate.

  It was Philip Glass, she realized, her absolute least favorite composer of all time. Greg loved him. He took showers and did sit-ups and sun salutations to him. But to Peaches, listening to Philip Glass was like being anesthetized and endlessly prodded in the back by oboes and clarinets.

  The sound system was near the basement stairs. Peaches could just make out the toes of a battered pair of silver Converse high-tops and a long platinum braid poking out of a gray heap of primordial ooze. A beached walrus. A newborn humpback whale.

  Elizabeth had made it upstairs.

  Peaches approached the karaoke machine and ducked behind a speaker to address the ooze. “I hope this is okay,” she said loudly, because Elizabeth’s ears were encased in Saran Wrap and gunk. “Not sure how big you wanted to go, but the room is pretty full.” She shuddered involuntarily. “My husband worships Philip Glass.”

  The “head” of the ooze turned slowly and stared up at Peaches with cool gray eyes. Elizabeth’s gross costume or artwork or whatever the fuck she wanted to call it looked like a massive dinosaur placenta. Peaches had asked her about the stench of formaldehyde. Apparently, the giant goo blob she’d encased herself in was partly made from fat cells of reptiles pickled in formaldehyde that she’d ordered in cans from a website for biology teachers. The other part was agar-agar, a jellylike sea substance from the health food store. The two did not mix well, and now that she was upstairs, the stench was almost unbearable.

  It seemed like a lot of trouble to go through for a somewhat questionable result.

  “Your husband is pretty worked up,” Peaches warned her. “I think he might be drunk, like you said.”

  Elizabeth had forgotten to make a mouth hole. She couldn’t speak.

  “Nnnngh,” she replied.

  “Okay if I make some kind of announcement to get things rolling?” Peaches asked.

  “Nnnngh.”

  Peaches took a seat behind the drums. She wasn’t exactly sure when Elizabeth was planning to burst out of her nasty sac, but she didn’t want to be standing over her when it happened. She leaned into the microphone.

  “Looks like we’re ready to get started with the karaoke portion of our evening. Just write your song selections with your first name on the pieces of paper stacked on the bar and on the tables by the window and drop them in the fishbowl over here, next to the karaoke machine. If anyone feels inclined to play the drums while someone sings, they’re here. We also have a tambourine. First I’ll get the ball rolling with a little drumroll.”

  As instructed, she tapped out a military-style drumroll that segued into the beat of “Here Comes the Bride.”

  Elizabeth rolled and oozed forth, exuding a gag-inducing odor. Members of the crowd began to notice her and took a startled step back, clutching their noses.

  “Nnnngh,” Elizabeth moaned from inside her casing. “Nnnngh!”

  The crowd took another murmuring step back. Peaches continued to thwack out the beat of “Here Comes the Bride.” Behind the bar, Tupper Paulsen looked very fragile and very pale.

  “Nnnnghaaaa!!” Elizabeth burst out of the revolting gray heap of slime and rose to her full height, wearing only a black bikini. The bones of her hips and shoulders protruded
from her torso like dorsal fins. Her ribs and vertebrae were easily counted beneath her glistening white skin.

  As instructed, Peaches dropped into a mellower roll.

  Remnants of gray ooze speckled Elizabeth’s thick black eyebrows and clung to her platinum-blond hair. Her face was not beautiful, but stately and ageless, with deep frown wrinkles and a thin mouth so downturned it almost looked like it had been put on wrong. Everything about Elizabeth seemed to defy possibility. She was like Stonehenge in human form.

  Tupper made his way out from behind the bar and walked unsteadily through the staring crowd.

  Peaches stopped drumming. “Introducing your host, the artist Elizabeth Paulsen,” she said into the mic.

  Elizabeth bowed formally. Her social skills had suffered while she was away but her hauteur had not. “Sorry about the mess,” she apologized huskily to the rapt room. “My husband and I will clean it up while you sing.”

  Tupper held out his hand and she stepped forth out of the goo, a messy Venus entering an awestruck, unprepared world. The merry, drinking crowd applauded and snapped pictures on their phones, thrilled to have been a part of one of Elizabeth Paulsen’s infamous works of art. They would embrace her now. If that’s what she’d been going for, she’d achieved it.

  Chapter 16

  Roy shifted his feet in the tight space and scribbled more notes. Wendy had found him a little closet and a legal pad and pen. On the other side of the door a bass drum pounded, cymbals clashed, and a woman growled, “Why can’t I get just one kiss?”

  A literary critic from The New Yorker had written once that “the everlasting appeal of a Roy Clarke novel, however limited in scope, is his awareness that we are all in this together.” The critic had gone on to say that even though Roy’s books “all take place in a bubble,” Roy had an “uncanny ear for irony and the absurdity of life,” and that was what made reading his novels “feel like stroking an affectionate cat.”

  He needed to blow things up and stroke the cat.

  Roy’s pocket jolted violently. He retrieved his phone and read the text message from Tupper.

  Where are you? You’re missing everything. She’s HERE!

  Someone knocked on the closet door and Roy opened it, eager to escape his scary book and even scarier thoughts.

  “We’re singing soon,” Peaches announced. “I put our names down.”

  Roy enjoyed singing, but only in his head. “Must I? I’m not sure that I can.”

  Peaches ripped the notes he’d written out of the legal pad and tucked them into his jacket pocket. “Think of it as research. And anyway, you have to meet Elizabeth. She came out.”

  * * *

  Elizabeth’s birthing of herself had stolen the show, but only briefly. Stuart was watching Mandy now. Something about her was different. Was it really just the pot? Or maybe it was he who was different. Mandy sat at a small table to the left of the door, looking beautiful and confident, talking to their neighbors, snacking on fancy snacks, sipping wine. Her black hair was shiny, her skin flawless, her smile bright. She was still chubby, but in a hot way. She wasn’t yawning or complaining, she was laughing. Stuart was intrigued. Maybe it was because he was high and drunk and had just sung “Purple Rain” with a bunch of strangers, but the Mandy over there in the chair was not the same tired and sullen Mandy stuck in bed for the last few months. She was someone completely shiny, sexy, and new. She was gorgeous.

  * * *

  Ted had eaten fourteen tater tots. Two more meant sixteen, which was how many he’d asked Shy to cook for him, but they were so salty and greasy, and he was so thirsty and full. Lately his parents had either been eating weirdly fancy gourmet food, or snacks like tater tots and Oreos. They used to order in a lot. Now they never ordered in, not even pizza. His mom was always cooking. They even made their own personal pizzas, with prosciutto and arugula on them. They were supposed to have capers on them too, but Ted picked them off. Two hours after bedtime he woke up to pee and found them sharing his box of Cocoa Puffs, shoveling them into their mouths with their hands like they were starving. Ted found this new behavior worrisome; he was thinking of asking the school nurse about it.

  “You want the rest?” he offered his babysitter. She’d said her name was Shy, but that wasn’t a real name.

  Shy grabbed the tater tots from off his plate and tucked one in each cheek. “I’m saving them for later.” She stood up from the kitchen table and gestured for him to follow her. Ted was a lot like her when she was younger. He thought he didn’t need anyone and was happy to just read and play games on his own. Really though, he was lonely. Together, they explored the two-story town house, looking for the next activity.

  “Is there a game you want to play?”

  “No,” Ted said. The only games he ever played at home were on his iPad. He wished he had Settlers of Catan, like at the Strategizer, but it was so complicated, he wouldn’t have been able to explain how to play anyway.

  “Really? I love games. I like making up games. Like, I used to walk around our house in England counting all the green things. And then I would do it again and count all the blue things. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

  “I used to line up my mom’s nail polish bottles and count them. She has forty-three. Two are clear and the rest are colors.”

  “So you don’t have any games in your room or anything?” Shy asked. Their house was small compared to her spacious brownstone. Ted’s room was messy, with just a single unmade bed and a round green table with two low blue stools. It wasn’t messy cozy, either—it was just messy. In one corner stood a laundry basket full of unfolded clothes. Shy knew she was spoiled. Nena came to clean and do their laundry every Monday. But was it really such a big deal to wash and fold Ted’s little skater-boy T-shirts?

  Ted kicked the legs of one of the stools and it fell over. “I mean, we could make a game.”

  “Okay.”

  Ted grabbed a coffee can off his bookshelf and emptied its contents onto the table. There were some mini pencils, some tiny, grotty neon-green Post-its, loads of broken crayons, and about ten dollars in pennies, nickels, and dimes.

  “Draw a lot of roads with trees and an ocean and fields on this piece of paper,” he ordered, pushing a piece of wide-ruled loose-leaf in front of Shy. “The whole point of Catan is that you’re trying to expand your settlement and use all your resources and keep your enemies out.”

  Shy did her best. She was not a skilled artist, and she hated crayons. They smelled like throw-up. She drew connecting pathways and lumpy bushes and puddles, sort of modeling it after Chutes and Ladders.

  “We need sheep,” Ted said, drawing on a Post-it. “And wood and wheat. I’ll draw those.”

  “Okay.”

  “Draw huts that look like they’re made of straw,” he told her. “Not too close together.”

  Shy bit her lip and drew four droopy square houses with triangular roofs and round windows. They looked very postapocalyptic.

  “Does our game take place in the future, or is it, like, old-fashioned times?”

  Ted didn’t seem to hear. He drew pointed ears on his brown sheep. “What kind of tails do sheep have?”

  There were sheep all over England. Shy used to see them from the car window when they drove to the seashore or to the home where her grandma sat staring at the television, drinking gin and eating chocolates until she died.

  “Little dinky tails, like the very end of a dog’s tail.” Shy had sort of hoped that Ted would want to go to sleep soon. “Do you want to watch a movie while we’re drawing?”

  He shook his head adamantly. “No, we’re going to play our game. Ours is actually better because we customized it.”

  “I’m just going to get a glass of milk,” Shy said, because she knew milk sometimes made her sleepy. “Do you want some?”

  “Okay,” Ted said. “But don’t touch the cookies in the jar in the refrigerator. They’re for grown-ups only.”

  Shy found a carton of organic mi
lk, filled up two glasses halfway, and returned the carton to the fridge. At the back of the top shelf was a large metal jar with a screw-on lid. She retrieved it and screwed off the lid. The jar was full of lumpy, homemade-looking chocolate-chip cookies. She held the open jar to her nose and took a whiff. The skunky, man-sweat odor was unmistakable. The cookies were laced with weed.

  Shy located the kitchen drawer containing useful items like Saran Wrap and tinfoil, and procured a Ziploc sandwich bag. No one would notice if she took two cookies. She stuffed the bag with the cookies into the pocket of her hoodie and returned the jar to the fridge.

  “I’m all done with the sheep!” Ted yelled from his bedroom.

  Shy returned to the bedroom and handed him a glass of milk. “Drink it all up so you don’t spill on our cool game.” She sat down with her milk and examined the insane drawings and various crayon-scribbled Post-its all over the round table. “So how do we play? Do we need dice or something?”

  Ted chugged his milk and set the glass down on the floor. “You’re a better babysitter than my parents,” he said, and burped loudly.

  Shy picked up a sheep Post-it and stuck it to a window on one of the houses she’d drawn, just for fun. “Yeah, well, they are paying me. No one pays them.”

  Ted seemed to consider this as he arranged his Post-its. He removed Shy’s sheep Post-it from the house window and handed it to her. “Okay. Let’s play.”

  * * *

  Roy knew the minute he laid eyes on Elizabeth—a towering blonde wearing paint-spattered white painter’s overalls over a black bikini and silver high-top sneakers—that he would never be able to sing in front of her. He was afraid to even introduce himself.

  “Love shack, baby,” Peaches purred hyperactively in his ear as she dragged him toward the microphone stand set up in front of the drums. She seemed to have lost her sense of decorum.

  Elizabeth glanced in Roy’s direction as she fiddled with the dials on the karaoke machine and smiled. Her teeth were yellow and her mouth was downturned, like a tortoise’s.