by Jill Malone
“How does Jeremy feel about you hanging out with Bangs?”
“He didn’t really say anything.” I want to ask why she was mad before, but what if it makes her mad again? What’s the point in that, really? If she’s over it, then I should be over it too, right?
“I didn’t expect to see Kelly on Thanksgiving,” Meghan says. “Why wasn’t she with her family?”
“I know, right? They’ve been dating a month or something, and already they’re family-formal. At least she brought chocolate.”
“Well, Nate seems pretty crazy about her.”
“He’s just tired of his hand.”
“Oh my god,” Meghan says, “you are so bad.”
“Whatever. Nate hasn’t spoken to me in weeks. It’s like we live in different households.” I shrug. This room has no posters, just white-painted cement walls. I’d go crazy in here all the time. No character or permanence or anything. The Army and its drones—why not make them wear fatigues to bed too? It’s depressing.
“Where are the Heather-hairs tonight?” I ask.
Meghan looks busy with her books, mutters, “I don’t know.”
You can’t count on anything. Not any place—all these stupid schools and assignments and moves and quarters and churches. Not on anyone, either—Meghan might as well be Kelly. They’re as variable as everything else. It’s retarded. And posters on the walls don’t even matter in the end. They’re just posters. Some band you’re into for five minutes and then you replace them with something else.
At the end of the year, we’ll move and I’ll never see Jeremy again, or Bangs, or Meghan, or this school, or Jersey even. I’ll never see the Jersey shore again. All the garbage, and flat grey waves, and stupid sand—it’s shitty and I’ll miss it anyway. I’ll miss even its shittiness.
“I feel really vapid,” I say. And then I start crying. It comes from nowhere, and Meghan stalls on her bed for a minute before she crosses the room and hugs me.
“Vapid, huh?” she says.
“Totally,” I sob. “Totally vapid. Spiritless or prosaic. Adjective.”
She starts laughing, and the sound makes me feel better. I guess that’s the upside of everything being temporary. Eventually you’ll feel better.
Joe is a wreck. The dye totally fucked up or something and his hair went orange, so he shaved his head and now he resembles a medical experiment—his head is really small; his skin pale and sickly; and he has a crooked scar on the back of his head. I never noticed with his hair all teased.
“Stop looking at me,” he says.
“Maybe a hat,” I suggest, “or a bandana?”
We’re backstage, waiting for our first set. With Trevor’s hair pulled back, his cute pudgy face surprises me. I’m seeing these guys for the first time. Except Ernie looks exactly the same.
Bangs lent me another one of his sweatshirts, and I borrowed a short black skirt from Meghan. It’s my rocker outfit. On our drive back from the shore, Bangs painted my fingernails deep purple. He blew on them and everything. It was sweet.
Jeremy comes backstage to kiss me, and has a weird tight smile.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“Um, so they’re all here,” he says.
“Who?”
“Your dad, and Nigel, and Meghan and her dad.”
I hit him. “Don’t fuck with me. I’m nervous.”
“I’m not fucking with you,” he says.
“Dude,” Trevor says, “your dad came to the show?”
“You’re serious?” I ask Jeremy.
“Yes. They’re here.”
“Joe,” I say, “we can’t play Tomorrow, Wendy.”
“Why not?” Trevor says.
“My dad’s a minister.”
Trevor frowns. “Your dad’s a preacher?”
“Yes.”
“And he came to our show,” he says. “That’s kind of wild.”
“Joe—” I blurt.
“We’ll play Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard instead.” Joe looks at the other guys. “Ernie, wail out a solo, and we’ll watch you for changes.”
The stage lights keep me mercifully blind, and the drums batter us into Desire and I don’t care if they’re out there, judging this dirty venue or my skirt or Joe’s tragic haircut or anything. Joe’s bouncing on my right, and Ernie, eyes closed, head bowed, sways on my left, and I hear kids screaming from the floor beyond us. I’m rhythm girl. I’m the storyteller.
For Just Like Heaven, Ernie carries two intricate solos, and Joe and I dance, and Trevor hits some crazy counter beats and it’s an ache through me, this music. It’s this prowling animal, and I want to grip its fur and climb onto its back and ride it. I don’t want to hide up here under the lights. I want to tear away this sweatshirt, and these pretty notes, and scream.
And then we play Jane Says. Two boys rush on stage and throw themselves into the crowd during Trevor’s drum solo. A fucking mob of kids at my feet, thrashing up to us, yelling some approximation of the lyrics, and I’m singing about heroin addiction, in front of my dad, and there’s no lightning.
Cloy. To weary by excess of food, sweetness, pleasure. Verb. Why does this word remind me of my mother?
We go out for pie after the gig. All of us. While we’re loading the drum kit and amps into Trevor’s van, the dads and Nigel and Meghan and Jeremy and Mike and Bangs catch up with us, and Trevor starts with the, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” like an utter ass, and then he suggests a diner he knows with the best pie; and Meghan’s dad is all, “Pie! An excellent notion.” In four vehicles we caravan to this goofy diner where the waitresses—dressed in mint-colored uniforms and pink, ruffled aprons—call everybody “sweetie.”
Squeezed between Ernie and Trevor, Meghan’s dad has this delighted grin. “What are your musical influences?” he asks.
Trevor has half a pie in front of him, and an entire slice of cherry in his mouth, when he grunts, “The Clash, Sex Pistols, Ramones, Dead Kennedys. You know, the classics.”
“If you don’t mind my saying,” her dad continues, “your music is easier to listen to than your forebears.”
“Forebears,” Trevor repeats. “Yeah, cool.”
Mike and Ernie and Bangs are talking licks and pedals. Somebody gave Nigel coffee; he and Joe sit at the end of the table spazzing out.
“Well,” Meghan asks my dad, “what’d you think?”
He smoothes his mustache, says, “I enjoyed it.” He sounds shell-shocked honestly; baffled maybe that his ears didn’t rupture and bleed. “They seem comfortable playing together. In fact, Cole, you seem comfortable playing on stage. That’s really something.”
“Thanks.” My cheesecake is a brick of goodness—delicious, but hard to swallow.
“The first dance we ever played,” Dad says, “I remember feeling like I’d forgotten how to breathe.”
“You played in a band?” Trevor asks, and they’re off on dance-band history. What’s with Trevor and the rapt attention?
In this wasn’t-Marilyn-Monroe-just-the-end? dive, the fluorescent lights color everyone a nauseating alien green. I’m disappointed. Without reason or whatever, I can’t even explain why I’m disappointed; but on stage everything was piercing and bright and authentic and now, crowded into this horseshoe shaped booth with the scratchy vinyl and five hundred people gobbling pie and talking competitively, as if we’re all trying to hit the highest register or whatever, I just want to crawl under the table and put my hands over my ears.
“How was the beach?” Jeremy asks.
I feel rotten about hitting him. He wears a leather jacket made of goat. It’s just so wrong to make leather jackets from goats, or to look this good wearing one. “It rained the whole time, and was windy—like an arctic wind. I didn’t want to get out of the car actually.”
“You’re a different girl,” he says, “on stage.”
I don’t know what he means. I just want everyone to be quiet. Be quiet, and eat, so we can go. One final night of sleep
on that rock bed in that white room before I can go home to my attic, my peace, my own little songs.
Meghan climbs the stairs ahead of me. She hasn’t said anything to me all night. Light from a skylight throws bars across her body, and my arms, as our footsteps echo. Almost there—another twenty paces to her room, and then I can drop.
At the top of the staircase, the giant metal door at her back, she turns, a step above me, and pushes my hair back from my face. Heavily, my eyes close heavily. Her fingertips are brushes, soft and light and soporific. I might dream just standing here. I might dream her face closing on mine. I might dream her mouth, her tongue, the tears on her face.
She presses hard against me, bites my lip, and I wake all at once. Like on stage, that kind of awake, where my skin seems to burn. She takes my hand and pulls me down the hallway, into her room, onto her bed, and my pants are half off.
“Please,” I say. “Please.” She bites my ear and I hear the rasp as she breathes into me. “Please.”
And then she’s inside. I swallow the entire world. I can feel planets inside me, humming. She wraps around me, lithe and dense, a secret I want to lean into. Her hair in my face. A fragrance like ash. I hold onto her as the muscles down her back and legs begin to tremble. “I’m sorry,” she cries. “I’m so sorry.”
My bedroom smells of spiced aftershave. It’s 4 in the afternoon on Sunday: the guests gone; the house practically haggard from overuse; my bathwater scalding. I’ve finished everything but two chapters of reading for History of Asia, and my take-home Biology quiz.
Dad let us skip church today. We had poached eggs on toast, and read from Psalms. Dad loves David: the warrior poet thing appeals to him, they’re kindred in their military devotion to God.
After we’d eaten, and the grownups had refills on their coffee, Meghan’s dad told Nate, “You really missed out last night. Those kids put on quite a show.” The guy totally believes you can talk about anything, that by expressing your feelings you’ll share and grow.
“I wish I’d gone,” Mom said. “I should have drunk a pot of coffee and gone.”
Meghan sits between her parents, rolling and unrolling the cuff of her sweater. She hasn’t looked at me. When her mom asks if she feels OK, Meghan says she had awful dreams.
Language crushes me. These letters we put together to make sentences that are supposed to mean something. To get beneath and around something and express its girth—language is really just math after all, right? We’re all trying to develop these eloquent expressions. We’re all trying to solve for x. It’s fucking heartbreaking.
Hours later, tucked into bed, in my flannel pajamas, with the electric blanket set to medium, I pick the phone up on the first ring, and ask, “Hello?”
“Did you finish the quiz?” Bangs asks.
“I haven’t started it.”
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“My atheist sent me an eighteen-page letter. He has tiny cursive and I’ve been reading this for forty minutes.”
“What does he need eighteen pages to say?”
“It’s a story about this time he and his friends went into the woods and shot at each other with air rifles, and he nailed a kid in the face, and blinded his right eye.”
“Fuck,” Bangs says.
“Yeah.”
“What happened after he shot the kid?”
“They drove to the emergency room, and the whole group of kids waited there in these red hunting jackets. They think they’re going to jail. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
“Read it to me,” Bangs says.
I read the rest of the letter. Afterward he gives me the answers to the Biology quiz, and then I tell him I’ll see him in the morning, and I turn off the light and think about my atheist in the desert writing out this story, his confession to me.
I have this dream, he wrote, where I’m running through the woods in my fatigues, and these Republican Guards pop out and shoot me. They always hit my kneecaps. And then I’m in the back of a truck with Clint and Steve and they’re taking me to the hospital, and I’m just a kid wearing hunting boots. At the hospital the doctors have no eyes. They’re walking around with their arms straight out like zombies. I think this desert goes on until there’s nothing, until you just drop off the earth. I hate this fucking place. Say a prayer for me, will you? Tell your god to remember, or forget, or anyway, to spare us. I don’t want to die here.
How can I intercede for him? Meghan wouldn’t even look at me. We’ve done this thing—is it fucking? Did she fuck me? Whatever we did, God saw us. He might be angry. What if God is angry?
Objurgate. To reproach or denounce vehemently; upbraid harshly; berate sharply. Verb. At first I thought you were just messing with me. Ha, ha, only a sucker would believe this is a real word. Now I’m sorry it exists in my head. Holy redundant already.
For Speech, we’re going to spend the entire week in the library researching our topics for mock debate. I’ve been paired with the reputed genius Monica Prader, this poser who smokes with the metal kids in the parking lot, and cannot ever shut up. (She’s the kind of person my mother would say talks your arm off and hollers down the hole.)
Our topic is the death penalty, with Monica and me arguing against it. We’re supposed to research independently before comparing notes, but in these carrels in the farthest corner of the library by creepy books on Economics, Monica dictates while I scrawl notes. My parents support the death penalty. They’re sort of wrath and judgment people. But we’ve already found some alarming statistics to support our position, and will annihilate Josh Tarbet and Holly Mercer with our insider information, and these totally merciless facts.
Monica closes the next to last book we’ve pulled, and glances at me. “I thought you were like a jock or whatever. Then Saturday night I saw you playing with Trevor’s band at Board.” Trevor’s band? She turns the last book over in her hands. “I dated him for like a month freshman year. He’s intense.”
“Trevor?” I say.
“How is he, anyway? I haven’t talked to him in like forever.”
I shrug. “He delivers bread or something part-time. But he’s, you know, pursuing music.”
“Right. He’s really good—I mean, you all were—I love Jane’s Addiction.”
“Thanks.”
“You should totally let me know the next time you play. I’m so there.” And then, before she reads another set of statistics to me, she adds, “It’s almost pointless, if you think about it, debating the death penalty. I mean, if we go to war, or whatever.”
My arguments against the death penalty are a page-and-a-half long already. Monica’s electric blue eye shadow matches her nail polish. “Pointless?” I ask. “What do you mean?”
“Well, we’ll be watching death on television like twenty-four/seven, right? We’ll be putting people to death—regular people—like all the time. It just seems pointless to debate the morality of killing prisoners, doesn’t it, when we’ll be bombing school children?”
Last night, Nigel told me that Dad volunteered for deployment to the Middle East without talking it over with Mom, and they had some snide comments about it.
“What did his CO say,” I asked Nigel, “when Dad volunteered?”
“Dad said he made this face like, Are you intoxicated, Chaplain? and then just shook his head.”
“What’s Mom mad about, then? Obviously, he’s not going anywhere.”
“She’s probably mad that she might have been left here to deal with you and Nate by herself.” At this point in the conversation, I leapt on him, and we spilled tortilla chips all over the kitchen floor.
In the library, somebody giggles and is shushed; I think of my dad killing children, my atheist throwing hand grenades into classrooms. “We don’t bomb schools,” I tell Monica.
“No?” She says, flipping through the book. “Ever hear of Dresden? Cambodia?”
“Ever hear of Dachau? The Killing Fields?”
“Greater good, right
?” Monica laughs. “Why shouldn’t kids die for oil? It’s as good a reason as any.”
“What the fuck—”
But she puts her hands up, and shakes her head. “I got us off topic. I’m sorry. Anyway, I don’t want to piss you off, I’m hoping you’ll do me a favor. I’m hoping you’ll give Trevor my phone number, tell him I said hey, and he should call me. Will you do that for me?”
“Trevor?” Maybe this chick is some kind of diabolical genius; I almost ask, curious what she’d answer. “You want me to give Trevor your number?”
She laughs again. “Totally.”
Since I’m not playing basketball this season, I’m back in gym. We’re starting gymnastics: mats cover half the gym, and apparatuses the rest—we have rings, parallel bars, a vault, even that freaky pommel horse; this is serious. Last year Diofelli required two routines. Gymnastics is such bullshit, why aren’t we playing basketball or something? I can do a somersault and a tripod, and that’s more or less the extent of my repertoire. I almost fell off the balance beam twice last year during my routine. The whole time Diofelli kept ducking her head to her clipboard and snorting.
“Good thing you decided to be a rock star,” she tells me as I wait my turn at the mat. “Otherwise you might have missed all this.”
Jeremy and I have gym together, so welcome to doubly embarrassing. He can do walking handstands and back flips and everything—which is fun to witness, but the whole time I’m watching him, I worry he’ll be watching me when I butcher cartwheels, and the fun kind of inverts.
Over the past few days, I’ve already seen four girls from the basketball team, and they’ve been all, “A band, for real?” but not mean or anything. In the hallway, Jayna ran up and punched me, and said Coach Henry read the letter aloud and told them he knew I’d agonized over the decision, and that he hoped we’d all support each other. I actually teared up when she said that. She hit me again, and told me I’d better come watch their games.