“Don’t worry about it,” I say. I feel myself grinning. There’s something different about this guy, and I think I kinda like it. “Here’s how I got here. Picture it, it was this afternoon and I’d just left work, I work at this place called Mon Coeur. And my best friend works at this store called Attic which is right down the street and I was visiting her after work and…” I pause, on instinct I start reaching for the photograph in my pocket. But then I stop myself as I realize something—if this guy has never been to the Mothership before, that means he couldn’t have met Nina here and therefore I don’t have to show him Nina’s picture and explain that she’s gone. And with this thought I feel just the tiniest hint of relief. I’m exhausted from telling this story all night, and I’m so glad to be talking to someone who doesn’t need to hear it. And I’m pretty sure that he’s flirting with me. And even though his face is ninety percent obscured by painted rubber, I have to admit I’m enjoying it.
“And we saw a flier for the party up on the bulletin board. And so we said well why not and now we’re here.”
I look back up, he’s still staring.
“And what about your placement at this wall in particular?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“I’m not exactly sure.”
“Are you playing hide-and-seek?” He tips his head to the side. He’s trying to be cute.
It’s working.
“If you are, maybe I could offer you a few tips. You’re never going to win just standing around like this…” He reaches out and takes my hand like he’s going to shake it, but instead of shaking it, he just holds it. Like my hand is very precious and he doesn’t want to break it, but also doesn’t want to let it go. His hand is strong and warm, the heat of it stretches all the way up my arm. I look down. I can feel myself blushing. I look back up, our eyes meet again.
“I’m Sean,” he says. He starts shaking my hand then, as if that’s what he intended all along.
“I’m Ellie,” I say.
“Well, Ellie, as a former hide-and-seek gold medal winner…”
But before either of us has a chance to say anything else, a guy walks out of a room off the hallway, kicking plaster chunks out of the way with a pair of black boots. His wiry arms are covered in ugly bright-yellow tattoos, and his blond hair is so light you can see the pink of his scalp through it. I breathe in sharply. It’s him. He’s the guy from Attic. He is the reason I am here. He is walking toward the stairs. He’s getting away. I start chasing after him.
I hear Sean calling after me. “Ellie!” he says, “Wait!” But I don’t turn around. There’s no time. The guy from the video is walking down the stairs, being swallowed up by the crowd. I will not let him get away.
“Hey!” I call out. But the guy doesn’t hear me. He starts walking down the stairs. I reach my arm through the railing and I grab his shoulder. I can feel his bones through his shirt.
He turns toward me. The whites of his eyes are slightly yellow, and his skin is pale, blue-veined like blue cheese. He’s holding a red Solo cup in each hand.
“Yeah?” he says. There’s a crash, a pause, a cheer.
“Hi,” I say.
He walks back up the stairs and stops when our heads are exactly level. He looks at me and raises his eyebrows. “What’s up?”
“Ijustwanted to askyoua questionbecause you soldabunchof stuff toAttic today.” The words come out in a jumble. His eyebrow twitches but he doesn’t say anything. “I was just wondering if I could ask you where you got it?” A couple of people push past us to get down the stairs, a guy and a girl. “The stuff you sold I mean.” The guy whispers something and the girl grabs him by the neck and pulls his face to hers. They’re right behind us, their fingers tangled in each other’s hair, lips mashing against each other, breathing heavily. After a few seconds their lips part and they tumble down the rest of the stairs, their hands on each other’s asses.
“I do not know what you’re talking about,” Blue Cheese says finally. He shakes his head, looks over his shoulder. A girl walks by wearing nothing but bronze body paint. He stares.
“Attic?” I say. “That vintage store? You brought in a box of stuff and hung up a sign for this party.”
“Why is everyone always accusing me of stuff,” he says, and then, “You’re mistaking me for someone else, hon, sorry.” He turns and starts to walk off.
“Wait! Please!” I say, a little too loudly. “I kind of know that you did, is the thing. Sell that stuff. It’s not like a bad thing or something. My friend works at the store,” I say. “So I was just wondering if you could tell me where the stuff you brought in came from.” I can feel my face getting hot, and I know I’m starting to sound desperate. “Please?”
Blue Cheese shrugs. His shoulders are tense, he takes a quick gulp of the beer in his left hand. “I was just looking through the basement for stuff to sell, and I found a bunch of old crap. And then I saw that Crap Day sign in the window of that store and I thought, well, what do you know?” He drains the left beer and drops the cup onto the floor. He lifts his second cup to his mouth and takes a gulp. “Why, are you looking for some crap? You didn’t have to come all the way here for that, the entire world is full of it!” He lets out a phlegmy laugh, opening his mouth so wide I can see each of his tiny teeth.
“There was one specific thing you brought in, a psychology book and it had something inside of it, a little piece of cardboard that someone was using as a bookmark…”
From somewhere downstairs the music speeds up.
“And?” Blue Cheese yawns. A girl starts walking down the stairs next to him in a skintight rose-colored dress. He watches her ass.
“And there were these drawings all over it, and my sister did those drawings.”
“So?”
“Well, she’s missing,” I say. This is easily the thirtieth time I’ve told this story tonight, but it never gets any less weird to hear myself tell.
“And what does that mean?” Blue Cheese’s expression changes slightly, the way people’s expressions always do when I start to tell them. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.
“It means I don’t know where she is and my mom doesn’t know where she is.” It still feels fresh. It always does. “Two years ago my sister Nina went out and that night she was supposed to come home.” He’s looking at me like he doesn’t know if I’m lying or not. I wish so much, so much, that I was. “And she didn’t. And then she never came home after that, either.”
Blue Cheese is nodding. “Intense,” he says. His expression has changed again but I can’t understand what the new one is supposed to mean.
“That’s why I came here,” I say, “to find you and ask you about this and see if maybe you knew her. I bet she was here at some point. Her name’s Nina Wrigley…”
“Listen,” Blue Cheese holds out his hand, cutting me off. “Everyone has been here at some point, okay? That was like the whole point of this place. So unless she was the girl I was with last night, I’m not going to remember her,” he grins, “and even then it’s questionable.”
“But I have her picture,” I say. My voice comes out in a slight whine. I take her picture out of my pocket and show it to him. He leers at her disgustingly, licks his lips and then shakes his head.
“Nope,” he says. “Never seen that one.”
“Well what about the place where you found the book that her drawing was in? Maybe there’s something else there, another clue or something?”
He breathes in and then nods, like he’s just decided something. “Follow me then, I guess.” He looks me up and down and then shows me his gums again. “I think I have just what you need.” And with that my stomach starts fizzling and he grabs my hand. “Come on.”
We walk down one flight of stairs; he’s crushing my hand. His skin is clammy. I wiggle my fingers. He holds on tighter. My brain is overf lowing with questions and they bubble out my mouth, “Where are we going? How much mor
e stuff is there? How long has it been there?” But he ignores all of them. He’s speeding along now, and I have to jog a little to keep up. We make our way through the living room where a girl is sitting on a swing that’s attached to the ceiling, swinging back and forth, kicking the wall with a giant pair of platform shoes each time she gets close, through the kitchen where ten people are gathered around the table drinking from a giant fish tank with super long straws, through a room where a dozen people are spray painting the walls.
Blue Cheese keeps going and I follow. We go down a long hallway, through a wooden door and down a very, very long flight of stairs in the dark with no railing. I’m grateful for his clammy hand now, glad just to have something to hold on to. When we get to the bottom, he reaches his arm up and a second later the basement is illuminated by the faint glow of a single bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. We are the only people down here. It’s bizarrely quiet. The air is cool and damp.
“You could start down here,” he says. I look around at the cement walls and exposed pipes. The floor is littered with cigarette butts and old beer cans and empty Pepsi bottles. There’s a sagging beige couch in one corner with a pillow and blanket on it, the blanket is covered in dark spots, mold maybe.
I realize he’s still holding my hand. He tugs it. “No, down here,” he says. I look up. The wiry muscles in his arm twitch. His lips are wet, like he’s been drooling. He looks down at his crotch, and then back up at me.
He tries to reach for my other hand and I back away. “What are you doing?” I say.
“You’re lonely.” He’s walking forward. “And I get it. But you’re not finding what you need because you don’t even know what you’re really looking for.” He reaches out and puts one hand on my waist. “Maybe I can help you figure it out.”
“This is why you brought me down here?” He steps in closer.
“There’s nothing else down here,” I say. “Is there.” But this isn’t really a question.
And he just shrugs. “That stuff I sold to Attic was all there was.” And then he smiles a bizarrely sweet smile. “Sorry.” Then he reaches his hand out and puts it on my ass and for a second I’m overcome with such sadness that I don’t even stop him.
But that second passes, and my brain catches up with my body. And I think I’m about to be sick. What am I doing down here? What am I supposed to do now? What the hell am I supposed to do now? I don’t know, so I just do what I always do when I have no idea what to do next: I close my eyes and I picture my sister, who was never scared of anything or anyone. And I think, what would Nina do in this situation? And it’s easy to figure this one out.
I bring my knee up as hard as I can between Blue Cheese’s legs.
He opens his mouth into an O and for a second he is too shocked to make any noise at all. And then his eyes fill up with tears and he just starts screaming his head off.
“Thanks for your help,” I say calmly. I run up the stairs then and I don’t look back.
Seven
I’m back upstairs, part of the party now, and my heart is pounding. I take my phone out of my pocket, call Amanda. Voice mail. I hang up. Now what?
I walk back the way I came, through the spray paint room, through the kitchen, through the room with the girl on her swing.
I feel someone watching me. For a disgusting second I think maybe Blue Cheese is following me and I tighten my hands into fists in preparation, but when I turn around he’s not there. I hear the crashing sound of another wall falling. More cheers. I walk through people, bumping into elbows and arms. I don’t try and get out of the way. I climb the stairs and then up another flight and I’m in a hallway I haven’t been in before. My eyes burn. It’s hard to breathe up here.
Two shirtless guys in painter’s overalls are walking toward me, each with a giant canvas bag over his shoulder. “Geeet your hammers here people, hammers, bowling balls, chunks of scrap metal. Geeeet your hammers!” When they get closer I can see that one of the guys has demolition crew written in paint on the front of his overalls. Demolition Crew stops right in front of me. “And for you, m’lady,” he says. He hands me a giant sledgehammer. I stare at it in my hand. “See?” says the other guy. “It fits you perfectly.” I tighten my fist around the handle. This feels good. “No matter what’s wrong,” he says, “smashing will fix it.” The hammer guy looks me straight in the eye. “It’s just human nature to want to smash things.” And then they both walk away.
I squeeze the handle so hard my knuckles turn white. I push my way down the hallway. I’m standing in a giant room, staring at a silver wall covered in an enormous black outline of a spaceship. I’m numb now. There’s nothing in my head. I swing the hammer up toward the ceiling, feeling the weight of it tugging against my shoulders. When the hammer is up at the top of the arc, it feels, just for a second, like time has frozen. And then, it swings back down. The head of the hammer connects with the wall, and there’s just the slightest bit of resistance before it passes right through with a delicate crunch like eggshells breaking. A cloud of plaster dust swirls away from the new hole like smoke. That was a piece of solid wall that had been there for who knows how many years, witness to who knows how many things, but with one swift motion it has been transformed into an empty space and a pile of rubble. And I did that. I stand there, looking at the empty space, the ragged edges, and I feel a strange sense of relief.
But it only lasts for a second, because then the screaming starts—a girl’s voice calling the same thing over and over and over, one word, but I can’t make out what it is. And then a flood of people start running past me, one giant writhing unit of arms and legs and heads. A girl trips on her spike heels, and a guy reaches down and pulls her up under one of his arms, dragging her with him, her skinny little legs dangling a few inches above the floor.
And then comes the smoke, heavy and thick, an impossible amount of it all at once. I start to cough. Inside my head I am screaming, but my whole body is frozen. Hours pass, days pass, years pass, all of time passes in that one second before I hear a voice next to my head shouting, “RUN!” It’s like I’ve woken up. “RUN!” And this time I do.
The air is opaque with smoke. I don’t even know what direction to go in, but I see a girl’s back, tumbling forward, and I tumble after her. I take a breath but there’s no relief in it, the air doesn’t seem to be doing its job. I’m choking, still running forward, my eyes burning. I hear voices but all I can see is white, everywhere. My arms are out in front of me and the smoke is so thick I can’t even see my hands. I keep going, keep going, keep going.
Finally I burst out onto the front lawn, gasping for breath, the air sweeter than any air I’ve ever breathed before in my life. The music has stopped. And hundreds of people are outside now. The pirates, the mermaids, the stilt walkers, the girl in the bronze body paint, a group of guys who look like they’re from the future, a bunch of girls dressed as sexy robots, Freshie and her friend. They’re all out here with the same slightly dazed expression on their faces, did that really just happen?
I stand there panting. But where the hell is Amanda? I turn to the left and to the right. I don’t have to worry long because my phone starts ringing. It’s her. “HOLY SHIT, ELLIE!”
She’s talking fast, and even though I know I’m outside and that I’m safe now, the panic in her voice scares me. Amanda never panics. “I was up at the car talking on the phone to Eric and I smelled the smoke and saw the fire and I ran back down and oh my God!” I tell her where I am. She says she’s coming to find me. And then I just stand and watch the flames.
Have you ever seen a house burning down? If you landed here from another planet and didn’t know what fire meant, you’d think it was beautiful, gentle even—delicate orange and gold and red and yellow flames, licking the house into nothingness.
A couple minutes later I feel Amanda wrapping her arms around me. We hug tightly. I can hear the sirens in the distance.
“Ellie,” Amanda says. “It’s time to go home no
w.”
We start walking up the hill, the smell of smoke behind us. By the time we reach the top, the music is back on, mixing with the sound of sirens. I can just imagine everyone back at the party, dancing outside while the house burns all the way to the ground.
Eight
“Glitter kitten,” Brad says, “say helloooo, Braddypoo!” It’s the next day, Saturday, and I am standing behind the counter at Mon Coeur making a latte. I turn toward the camera and raise one eyebrow just before the flash goes off.
“You didn’t say it.” Brad frowns.
“Sorry,” I say. “Hello, Braddypoo.”
Brad looks at the camera’s display screen and then comes over and shakes his head slowly. “This is just about the saddest picture I have ever seen! Good thing I am a Photoshop master and will have no problem replacing your frowning mouth with a smiling one…or a cupcake!”
I try and smile, but my face refuses. Less than twenty-four hours ago I was on my way to that party. The night was full of possibilities and promise and it had seemed like something magical was going to happen. And I’d felt so sure of it, so sure of it.
And now here I am, back at work, as though nothing at all has changed, which makes sense, since it hasn’t.
“What’s wrong, honeykins? Tell Braddy.”
If only it were so simple. I would love to talk about it, I am, in fact, dying to. But the thing is, talking about my sister doesn’t help. Watching the pity spread over other people’s faces just makes me feel worse, makes me feel more lonely. So while one script plays in my head, another one has to come out of my mouth. And it’s so tiring, it’s all so very tiring.
“Sorry, Braddy,” I say. “Not now, okay?”
“Okay, well when you want to talk about what’s making your face look like that, and have someone listen and nod while making a variety of incredibly genuine and sympathetic facial expressions, I’m your…”
Wherever Nina Lies Page 4