by Heather Gean
“I’m from New York City, Rainy. Relatively, two-hundred is small. I just need you to approach these things with an open mind. You aren’t in Memphis anymore. Things here move faster.”
I smirked. “Did they teach you that sort of sexual subliminal messaging in business school?”
“There was no way that could sound dirty,” he defended with a smile. “And if I was trying to convince you that this was the greatest city in the world, I don’t think I would have much trouble.”
I provoked him to rise to the challenge. “Oh, really? Well, Ashley Schroeder, I’m ready to be amazed.”
The inability to lose any challenge sparked a rush in his eyes, and they narrowed in on mine like those of a predator. He turned in his seat and swept me up in his arms in a quick motion, holding me close enough that our noses touched. The quickness of the gesture, as well as the sudden closeness, made me catch me breath. The subway car rattled, swaying us side to side, but never breaking the stare or interrupting the tension Ashley had created. Like a snake striking, he bridged the gap between us and his lips abruptly landed on mine. My heart began to pound, but the hope was short-lived. Our lips tripped awkwardly over each other; when he swung, I dodged, so to speak, and vice versa. When I pulled back his fingers slid across my jawline towards the bottom of my chin, tugging me gently towards him for another tiny peck.
“If that’s the best thing about New York, put me on a plane tomorrow,” I said teasingly. Ashley and I shared a quiet laugh, but the funniest thing was that I hadn’t been joking.
I bit my bottom lip with a short sigh; Ashley misinterpreted my response with a proud smile and rested his head against mine. I wanted to storm the capital in Washington and tell them all what a huge mistake they’d made, that they couldn’t go around forcing non-exchangeable dreams and mediocre kisses on unsuspecting people. Did they realize they were dealing with more than a divorce rate? That they were dealing with people’s lives? Did international appearance suddenly matter more than freedom of choice? My American dream was turning into a government nightmare right there in that subway car. God bless America. Let freedom ring.
Chapter 5
I had swiped a few bottles of Hezeki Light from the massive fridge in the Schroeder kitchen and had snuck out onto the terrace once the house was quiet. Dinner, though much more intimate this time, had been too eerily formal to have been shared among immediate family. That paired with Ashley’s sudden burst of unwanted affection had my nerves in a knot that I couldn’t seem to undo. Having abandoned my shoes by the door, I walked barefooted through the damp grass until I was sitting right beside the statue of a hound dog lazing beside a small, stone barbecue. A few lawn chairs were positioned beside it. The sculpture and cheap plastic chairs looked as out of place as I felt and made good company. I popped the cap of the bottle open with my forearm, one of coolest things I’d learned in college, and guzzled down a third of the bottle before I got brain freeze. I winced and pushed my palm against my forehead. That had not been expected.
With my free hand, I patted the hound dog. His head was cold and rough, but I left my hand atop it anyway. “I guess it’s just you and me, ol’ boy,” I said. It seemed like an appropriately cliché thing to say to a concrete dog drinking with me in the middle of the night. I was captivated by the artistry that had gone into his creation. From the expressive eyes right down to his folds of skin, someone had taken great care in sculpting that dog. He reminded me of the well-known University of Tennessee mascot Smokey, and even though I wasn’t a sports fan, it made me nostalgic for home.
I sighed and took a sip from the bottle. This wasn’t where I’d seen myself ending up. Not necessarily out on the terrace in the middle of the night, but more specifically in New York spending my week with a man I was supposed to be madly in love with but actually had very few feelings for. I guess I’d been a little too optimistic. So there I sat, drowning every ounce of optimism in good ol’ fashioned cynicism.
“Screw love.” I suppose I was talking to the government, God, the half-hidden moon, the stars, or the hound dog. I felt like being heard without actually being heard, if that made any sense at all. I didn’t have the guts or the heart to say this to anyone I knew.
“Screw the government!” I felt even guiltier after saying that one aloud. My father basically was the government, and in the early phases he’d promoted what became the DML. I was sure he could attempt to file one of those impossible-to-get appeals to my compatibility result. I didn’t want to put him through that nor did I really have the heart to let my parents know that my fairy tale relationship sucked. I didn’t want to let them down. I felt responsible; the system worked for so many, so, why not me?
“Screw fate!” I over-enthusiastically patted the dog on his head, nearly shaving a layer of skin from my palm. “Where the hell is fate when you need it?” I rubbed the dog’s head again. Stupidly, I took another long swig of beer, leaving my head instantly aching. I cursed and massaged my forehead in vain. Eventually, the pain began to subside.
“You okay?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of someone else. My open beer toppled over onto the grass, and I leapt halfway to my feet before stumbling into one of the flimsy lawn chairs. I blinked into the darkness, wishing the clouds would allow the moon to cast a little more light.
“It’s just me,” an easily identifiable he said. I recognized Van’s voice. He had a knack for scaring the shit out of me. My eyes finally adjusted enough to reveal pieces of his dark hair and the glimmer of a watch just at the base of his tattoos. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“Shit!” I said with a half-hearted laugh. My heart was pounding so hard it nearly stopped. I collapsed back to a sitting position in the grass. My leg had surely sustained an injury from the collision with the lawn chair, but it was too dark to examine it. I located my bottle, but when I shook the bottle only about an inch of liquid sloshed around inside. I took the last gulp and placed it at my side, popping the top off of my second one. “What the hell are you doing lurking around out here?”
“I saw somebody out here. I figured it was you. Nobody else here has curly hair.” I nodded with a shrug and tugged at one of my curls. They were unmistakable.
“That sounds like stalking.”
Van just smiled at my accusation and motioned to the beer in my hand. “Drinking alone?”
I shrugged at the bottle. “Nah, drinking with my dog.”
Van, the assumed artist, smiled. “He’s good to have around for just such an occasion.”
I lifted my second bottle from the grass and popped the cap from it. “So you saw me out here and just decided to crash my party?” I was feeling too self-absorbed with my problems to care what he thought of me at that moment. I took the last drink, shorter but still too long, and half-winced after I swallowed. Damn, those Schroeder brand refrigerators were arctic.
“You okay?” he asked for the second time.
“Brain freeze. The beer is too cold, as if that’s possible.”
Van sat down across from me in the grass. “Flip your tongue upside down.” I didn’t quite understand his instruction. “Put the bottom of your tongue against the top of your mouth.”
I did as told and within seconds the brain freeze subsided. My brown eyes met his with sheer amazement. “Are you a witch?” I asked him.
He grinned his adorable, trademark grin. “You can add that to your list of things I am not, along with murderer, kidnapper, stalker, and terrorist.”
“Good to know.” I filled the silence with another drink. Nighttime in New York sounded so unusual to me. No crickets or frogs, just quiet. “You’re here a lot to not live here,” I noticed.
“I’m just passing through, really. I’ve got places to be. Figured I’d pick up a few things on the way.”
“Right…” I narrowed my eyes at him. I was curious. “Like what?”
“Penelope.”
“Oh.” My curiosity pretty much ended there.
I quickly returned to my self-absorbent drinking.
“You can come if you want. It’s only eleven-thirty. You’d be back by three or four.”
“I don’t want to intrude on your date.” Van gave an awkward glance. He ran a hand through his unkempt hair.
“It’s not a date, and you wouldn’t be intruding.”
I thought this over. It’s not like I was doing anything else, but I had an early-ish morning appointment with the magazine people for a photo shoot. It was do-able.
“You sure?”
“I’m positive.”
“Where are we going?” I held my beer bottle with both hands as I mulled things through.
“If you have to ask you probably don’t want to go.” I fancied that response.
I could sit in the backyard alone and drink the rest of my second beer, go inside and stare at the ceiling all night for lack of being tired, or I could go to this mystery place with Van and Penelope on a non-date. I couldn’t say yes on the simple fact that I was finding myself increasingly attracted to Van nor could I use that as a reason to say no. I had to be completely neutral. Perhaps this was fate lending me its shoulder. Or maybe all together I needed to quit thinking so damn much.
I finished off the rest of the bottle with minimal brain freeze, stood up, and brushed the back of my shorts off. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go.”
~*~
My heart beat quicker and heavier than the drum rhythms of the rock song pumping through the speakers of Van’s car. The dark Schroeder mansion was somewhere at least thirty minutes behind me down a tree-lined highway. The chill of the night air that whipped in through the open windows had a Braille-like effect on my arms. I’d thrown on a pair of jeans before heading out, but hadn’t anticipated the drastic difference in the hot, humid summer nights I was used to and in the brisk New York evenings. I sank into the old, cracked vinyl of the seat and looked straight ahead into the distance; I was still clueless as to where we were going.
To my surprise I felt more like a passenger and less like a third wheel. Penelope sat in the backseat with one of her nearly worn-out, checkerboard Vans hanging between me and Van over the middle of the seat. The relationship status between Van and Penelope was about as ambiguous to me as that of any random scruffy-faced movie star and pouty-lipped, adoptaholic starlet plastered across the fronts of tabloids. They seemed to have a lot in common, though: neither of them talked much.
A flash of light up in the distance caught my attention. I straightened up in my seat but saw nothing but highway and blackness. Another short flash popped up from the bottom of the tree line. A stalled car? Aliens maybe? I glanced over at Van whose face remained unchanged. “Did you see that?” I asked.
Van briefly looked over at me then shrugged. By the time my eyes returned to the road, I saw it again, this time closer. “Slow down,” I instructed. Van half-grinned and sent his brown eyes in my direction again.
“Relax a little, Ashley.” Obviously he could see every way in which Ashley and I were alike, but none of them were especially positive traits. I half-heartedly sighed back into the seat. My racing pulse slowed as Van’s car did.
We were right up on the dusty shoulder of the highway before I could make out the source of the light. A guy with dark hair down to his shoulders lowered his flashlight and removed a cigarette from his mouth before leaning into my side of the car. His initially grim expression transformed when he saw Van. “Parking’s thattaway, dude,” he said with a toss of his head. Before he removed himself from my window, his eyes slid over my face as if he were uncertain about me then back to Van. A few eye signals were exchanged, more than likely about my presence, and Van turned the car onto a dirt road that snuck away from the main highway and into a thinly forested area.
“Is this an exclusive sort of thing?” I asked Van. I attempted to keep the tone of my voice free of the curiosity screaming inside me.
“Sort of.”
“Wow, I feel special.” Van returned my smile with a laugh.
“You don’t even know what it is yet.” The car bounced down the trail with no definite end in sight.
Penelope popped her head over the seat in place of her foot. “Yeah, we could be bringing you out here as a sacrifice.” Her gray eyes met mine as strangely as her statement had tingled over my the back of my neck. I realized that Van was still smiling boyishly, and I eased into a laugh that tumbled from my mouth a bit more nervously than I’d meant for it to. All of the comfortable vibes I was getting from him were cancelled out by the seemingly evil twin still staring me right in the face. “Then again, we’d need a virgin for that.”
I drew back as if I’d been unexpectedly shot in the forehead and blinked just as indignantly. The first of her statements, though absolutely unnerving, could’ve been laughed off as a joke, but the second could be interpreted as nothing more than an undeserved attack to my character. “Excuse me?” flew from my mouth almost instantly.
Just as instantly, my body flew straight into the dashboard of the car, forearms first, and Penelope nearly toppled headfirst over the seat. Lacking a crunching sound, squealing tires, or screams, I realized that instead of wrecking the car into something Van had simply chosen to slam his breaks for no logical reason. When I went to scan our surroundings just to make doubly sure, I saw the dozens, maybe even hundreds of parked cars spreading out around us.
My astonishment drew me directly out of my anger. People on foot wove between the cars and flooded directly ahead into a continuation of the forest. Half of them carried cases of beer, and almost one from every bunch beamed a flashlight on the ground ahead. The demographic was a little hard to judge as well: some were grungy, others punk, dozens just your average-looking citizens, and a few even in tweed sweaters and corduroy pants; mostly college-aged, a handful not even out of high school, and a tiny subsection were old enough to be my parents or grandparents. Though I’d ruled out cult meeting, the possibilities multiplied faster than I could logically comprehend them.
Van leaned across my lap to shuffle through his glove compartment for a flashlight. A few things fell from it and hit my knee before settling on the floorboard, but I never took my eyes off of the strange spectacle. Once armed with a small flashlight Van got out of the car, and Penelope clumsily followed suit. My body seemed to be mirroring their actions without any instruction from my brain. It was unintentionally slow as I moved through the dreamlike setting.
A hand on my arm startled me out of my daze. Van’s eyes danced over my face with amusement. “You all right?” I responded with a nod. He gently put his hand on the small of my back, sending a tingle up it. “Stay close. It’s only a short walk, but it’s easy to get lost.” I blinked myself out of the prolonged gaze I’d been sharing with him and guiltily looked away. It was probably as easy to get lost in his eyes as in that dark forest. His hand slid from my back, and he took the lead of our expedition trio.
I wanted to ask where we were going, why we were going there, and when the main event would begin, but for fear of sounding like an impatient child on a long car trip I kept quiet. Even though the mixture of excitement and anxiousness coursed through me, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret. I probably should’ve been in my bed at the Schroeder mansion where Ashley and his family, minus his hellcat sister Penelope, were all sleeping. My mind wandered to Ashley’s room in the house and why I had never seen it. Either he was really going old-fashioned on me, was hiding something, or was as aware of our lack of connection as I was. A part of me hoped it was the latter. I felt as if I was making that walk in the woods behind his back even though I hadn’t even had the chance to tell him about it yet. The relationship I had formed with Ashley, whether romantic or not, was enough that I didn’t want to abandon his trust so early on, blind and new as that trust was. I wondered if I would tell him about this excursion come the next day. My rambling thoughts had passed away most of the walk. I was still cautiously following Van, not down a definite trail, but slightly uphill throug
h the trees only directed by the occasional “checkpoint”, a.k.a. a guy with an especially large flashlight sitting in a foldout chair. I was just about to let my inquisitiveness get the best of me when we topped the hill, and I saw it.
The spectacle, the main attraction, the reason that I had ventured out into the woods in the middle of the night in New York glowed brightly in front of me. A makeshift stage towering as high as any professionally built one was adorned with lights that were so bright I squinted into them to avoid blindness. I was drawn to it as bugs are to a porch light. I gawked at the sheer awesomeness of it, only intensified by hundreds of people crowded around, anticipating a show. To draw that many spectators out into the woods in the middle of a weekday evening, this show, I assumed, was more than just your average local band.
Van, who’d gotten a few steps ahead, waited for me to catch up. He had a devious grin on his face as I fell into step beside him. “You can feel special now.”
I shook my head in astonishment and offered a chuckle. “Who the hell is playing this kind of show? I mean, it looks pretty professional.”
“Dante and the Damned.” His reply was as casual as if he’d just tossed out some no-name starter band instead of one of the biggest underground indie rock sensations of the past couple of years.
“Dante and the Damned?!” I exclaimed. Hiding my now overflowing excitement and bewilderment was impossible. I’d seen them on the covers of more than a few magazines. Tickets to their shows were going for close to one-fifty per person, but they were notorious for doing last-minute shows like this, I’d just never expected to actually catch one.
A group of people walking by turned to give my overzealous exclamation a sideways glare. I lowered my voice to a normal tone. “How? Who organized this?”
“It’s kind of an exclusive thing. I mean, this isn’t the most ideal location for a concert in New York,” Van explained. I gave him a nod, prompting his explanation to venture beyond the obvious. “Some high dollar investors that are into this sort of thing find random locations in the area to hold these events. It’s sort of underground. There is an exclusive guest list, but as long as you don’t drag in too many extra people nobody complains. It’s kind of hush-hush.”