When I was dressed, she sat me down at the little wooden dresser and reached for a comb. She started raking my hair back from my face, slicking it down with some kind of pomade that smelled like mint and honey and wax. Her hands felt cool on my forehead, like something was seeping over me.
I leaned sideways, trying to see myself in the dresser mirror. “Are you making me look like someone else?”
“No, you’ll still look like you, but not so much that anyone down there would recognize you, if you know what I mean. To most people, even Luther doesn’t look like Luther, and I don’t look like myself.” She touched the comb’s teeth, greasing the tips of her fingers, twisting a lock of hair in front so it hung down over my forehead. “It’s not a spell or a trick, nothing changes. They just see what they want to.”
I looked down at my gleaming shoes and when I glanced in the mirror again, I recognized myself, and I didn’t. I’d been getting used to how I could look like a whole new person when my eyes were dark brown and my color was good, but this was different. My expression was too far away, like I was looking into the mirror, but someone else was looking back. I was seeing what I wanted to see because what I wanted was to be someone besides myself. The visual wasn’t comforting, though. The person in the mirror looked tired and hopeless.
Carlina put the comb down and turned me away from the mirror. She held my face between her hands, smiling her strange, sad smile.
“So we just give them some kind of distraction,” I said. “Another lie.”
She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against mine. “No, what we’re giving them is the unvarnished truth. They just don’t know it. When you go out onstage, you’ll be closer to yourself than you’ve ever been, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s what they paid to see.”
But that didn’t make me feel better. My hands were shaking and my mouth felt dry. “I just feel nervous, though. I feel weird and freakish and pointless, and nobody wants to see that. I can’t be what they paid for.”
“Then you have to feel like that, then let it go and do your job.” She whispered it, and I could feel her breath on the bridge of my nose. “We’ll go out onto the stage in a minute, and when we do, you have to make them believe that whatever you show them is the real you because sometimes being believed in is just what it means not to die.”
But I’d been waiting to die my whole life. I’d spent years expecting it any day because that was just what happened. Going onstage was different. Out onstage, the Starlight would be dark, with the spotlight shining down and no place else to look, and that was something I couldn’t just live with and couldn’t wish away. Being seen was the worst thing that could happen to someone like me.
“I just—I’ve never played in front of anyone before.”
Carlina nodded against my forehead. “They’ll love you, though, just like they love us. Do you want me to announce you as a special guest?”
“No, just let me come on with you guys like I belong there.”
She let me go, then stood looking down at me. “You do.”
As soon as the curtain came up, the noise of the crowd was deafening. The footlights glared in my face, and beyond that, there was nothing but a sea of voices and long, shrill whistles.
The drummer and I were supposed to set the tempo, but Luther was the one who stepped into the intro like he owned it, like it was his song—fast and frantic and I knew it in my fingers, even when I didn’t know it by ear or from memory. Earlier, Luther had laughed when I asked to see the set list, but now I understood that set lists were meaningless. They just played whatever they felt like playing.
Luther grinned, watching my face, leading me through each verse and chorus, making me race him. I listened to his changes and found the counterpoint, making every note rumble and screech because the song was about mayhem and being totally, arrogantly out of control.
Adrenaline was coursing through my fingers, tingling in my blood. This was what it felt like to be a rock star.
As soon as I came to the end of the song, though, the feeling stuttered, then disappeared. I let the guitar hang heavy against the strap and my hands felt cold and shaky again. Suddenly, I was very aware that I was standing on a stage in front of two hundred people, and all I had was a cherry-red Gibson reissue and someone else’s shoes.
Luther just swung his guitar around in an arc, sneering down at everyone in the audience. Then he went straight into “Common People,” not caring that it was supposed to have a synthesizer or that it was about thirty years old and most of the kids in the Starlight had never even heard of Pulp. He just picked it and played it, making the guitar sing in his hands, while Carlina acted both sides of a conversation between a rich girl and a working-class guy and screamed herself hoarse about all the ways that being poor sucked.
Every now and then, Luther cut his eyes at me and I tried to read the cues in his glances. He picked the tune faster, showing me how every song was a conversation, a debate between rhythms and tones. I just had to listen and then respond.
We played in tandem, working off each other, until he switched into an old Pearl Jam song. It was “Yellow Ledbetter.”
The bass line was low and inevitable. I hit the first note and the whole building seemed to creak and shudder.
It was a song about loss, but the melody was sweet, and if Eddie Vedder sounded kind of like a stumbling wino in his version, Carlina sounded husky but clear.
Her voice was like loneliness. It was regret. She sang about a past you couldn’t get out of and didn’t want, and standing alone in the cool blue light, she was beautiful—more beautiful than the shows where she wailed and pranced, strutting back and forth across the stage, far more beautiful than she’d been standing over me on the church lawn. With her hands cupped around the microphone, she was the realest part of the Starlight, the realest voice in Gentry. Luther and I supplied the melody, but all the notes were leading up to her. She was the purest, biggest truth, while all the audience were just kids wearing their costumes.
She wailed the first chorus with her chin up and her back straight. Then she brought the mic close, smiling over at Luther. “Now, make me cry.”
Luther smiled back. Not his sly, toothy grin, but a real one, open and honest. He bent over the guitar and played a solo that was just for her—a slow progression of notes, running hard and sharp and up.
I followed it, making my own melody thump and buzz underneath his like a heartbeat, letting each note hang for minutes or years. And then something happened.
It wasn’t like the other songs. There was no story, no conversation. This was just the feeling, without words or pictures, and it had nothing to do with Luther or his clean, stinging guitar.
It was the sound of being outside, of being alien. It was the pulse that ran under everything and never let you forget that you were strange, that the world hurt just to touch. Feelings too complicated to ever say in words, but they spilled out of the amplifiers, seeping into the air and filling up the room.
Out in the crowd, everyone had stopped moving. They stood in the pit, staring up at me, and when I stopped playing, they started to clap.
“Mackie,” Carlina said, coming close to whisper in my ear. “You can’t do that.”
“They liked it, though.”
She nodded, touching the collar of her dress. “It’s just—it’s not good for them to feel it for very long. It’s exhausting, feeling like that.”
Down in the pit, the clapping had already started to die. People were staring up at the stage and the colored lights. Luther went into a frantic version of “Here Comes Your Man” that sounded like a three-day coke bender, and they stood around like dairy cows.
When the Pixies didn’t get a reaction, he pulled out Nick Cave and then Nine Inch Nails, but nothing seemed to get them moving again. He played one last hard, flashy change, then quit torturing “Mr. Self-Destruct” in the middle of the riff.
Behind us, the drummer gave the snare a few more halfhearted b
eats, and then he stopped too and got up. The four of us stood motionless on the stage and I had just fucked up the special surprise Halloween show, and royally.
Luther shot Carlina a desperate look and jerked his head toward the wings. “We have to bring out the piano.”
She shook her head.
“Do it—play them one of those sad-bastard ballads and finish us up. It’s all they’ll want now anyway.”
“Fine,” she said in the long silence. “Fine, bring it out.”
Luther and the drummer dragged an old upright piano out of the wings and pushed it into the center of the stage. The finish was wearing off the wood in pale stripes.
Carlina tossed her hair back over one shoulder and settled onto the bench. She raised her hands and spread her fingers over the keys. Then she found the first chord.
It was a Leonard Cohen song. I knew it but had never known it like this. It wasn’t bitter or cynical. It was broken.
The piano wasn’t miked, but it didn’t matter. The notes scaled up, shrill, cracking. The whole place was absolutely silent as Carlina ran through the intro and into the first verse. The sound of her voice was painful. She screamed, sobbed, whispered hallelujah, but she never sang it.
Down in the audience, people were reaching for each other, hugging, holding hands. Near the front, a girl with crazy chopped-up hair and too many piercings was crying so hard that her nose was running. Her eye makeup looked mysterious and scary, but her mouth was crumpled like a little kid’s.
Carlina slammed down on the chords, plodded over the keys, but her voice was high and clear, talking about more than being used, being rejected. How when you love someone, sometimes it means that they strip you down, peel you open, and you have to let them and not worry about how much it’s going to hurt.
I was holding the neck of the Gibson too, too tightly as she came to the end. My fingers felt cramped and sticky.
“Hallelujah.” She said it flatly, coming down hard on the last note, and then she let it fade.
There was nothing.
Luther and the drummer were already breaking things down, but I stood at the edge of the stage, staring out at the crowd. No one was dressed like themselves, but they were all suddenly illuminated, lit with something real, their own private versions of the song. It had gotten inside them. I stood above the packed floor, looking down at all of them, shining like lanterns with their love stories and their tragedies.
I just stood looking until Carlina caught me by the arm and dragged me back into the little dressing room. She was breathless and smiling, but her face was pale and she looked tired. “Did you have fun?”
I nodded and unhooked my suspenders. The room was cold and the rush was already starting to trickle away. I yanked off the button-down shirt and reached for my T-shirt and my hoodie.
Carlina stood by the door, politely keeping her back to me. “There’s going to be some festivities down in the pit tonight. Kind of like . . . an after party. You should come.”
I laughed and shook my head. “Thanks, but I think I’ll skip it.”
“Are you sure? You haven’t had a chance to see us when we’re wild. It’s called Mayhem for a reason, you know.”
I knew that she was just being friendly, and when it came to my survival, being friendly with people like Carlina was probably my best option. Still, that didn’t mean I was a fan of the Morrigan’s house or of anyplace where dead girls huddled and whispered behind their hands and mutilated women floated in pools. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see their version of wild.
“I’ll pass this time.”
Carlina shrugged. “Suit yourself, but don’t be a stranger. Our house is yours.”
And in a bizarre way, I didn’t doubt that.
When I was back in my own clothes, I sat at the dresser, staring at the strange reflection that was just starting to look like me again. “That was magic, right, what just happened out there?”
Carlina smiled and shrugged. “I guess. As much as music is ever magic. Or always, I mean. Music is our best language. It’s just what we do.”
“You could take over the world with what you do.”
She laughed, much softer, much shyer than I ever would have pictured her a week ago. “Gentry’s enough.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CRASHING
When I went back out into the crowd, no one really noticed me. I was carrying my bass, and my hair was sticky with pomade, but everything else was ordinary.
I realized I was smiling, which was strange, and stranger to realize that I meant it. Usually, I only smiled when other people were there to see. When it was what they expected from me.
Someone touched my arm and when I turned, Tate Stewart was standing very close.
“It is you.” Her voice was low. “I wasn’t sure.”
My heart was beating hard but steady. A good beat, and not a faltering one. I felt different and new, like I could be someone else.
Over the top of her head, I could see Drew and Danny at the farthest pool table. Drew glanced up and grinned at me. Then he waved me over.
I didn’t go right away. Instead, I stood in the middle of the floor, looking down at Tate. She stared so hard that I got an idea she was seeing through layers of pointless, ordinary things, all the way down to how I felt about her—whatever I was feeling—like it was there in my eyes if I forgot to blink.
Her face was close to mine. “I don’t get you,” she said. “You spend every day at school trying to disappear and now you’re dancing around onstage like a fucking rock star, like you don’t have anything holding you down? I mean, who are you?”
There was nothing to say to that. I didn’t know what performance she’d been watching, but I hadn’t felt carefree up there—not anywhere close.
She shook her head and turned away, and even with the ferocious scowl, even looking disgusted with me, I kind of wanted to follow her.
In an unprecedented display of good judgment, I made my way over to where Danny was bent over the table, lining up a combo.
“You did good,” he said without looking up. The shot was eight ball to two ball to corner pocket. He made an open bridge on the top of his hand and sank it.
I stared down at his bent head and smiled wider. “You recognized me?”
Danny straightened up and gave me a bored, incredulous look. “Well, yeah.”
“Jesus,” Drew said. “We just saw you at that party last night. We’re not senile.”
“I don’t look different?”
Danny butted his cue on the floor. “You do, but it’s a good kind of different. You’re happy, Mackie. I can’t even remember the last time you were happy.”
“I just—I feel better lately.”
Drew was fidgeting with the chalk, making blue slashes on the back of one hand with his fingertip. “That’s good,” he said, but he said it without looking at me.
“What? What’s wrong?”
Danny shook his head. “Nothing. Just be careful. You know?”
I nodded and waited for him to tell me what I was being careful of or why, but he didn’t say anything else and they both went back to studying the table.
After a minute, Drew looked up again. He glanced in the direction of Tate and the arcade, then raised his eyebrows. “What the hell is up with you two? I keep expecting someone to break out the grenades.”
I didn’t answer. There wasn’t really a word for what we were doing, except that it was stupid and confusing, and Tate had a way of sticking her chin out that made me want to stand much closer than necessary.
Out on the floor, I pushed through the crowd, avoiding the kids from school and the strangers.
Tate was in the arcade, playing Earthshaker pinball, dropping quarters in with icy precision.
“Hey,” I said when I came up beside her.
She pulled back the spring-loaded plunger and shot the first ball out into a sea of flashing lights and bright plastic sirens.
I leaned on the top of the machine.
“So, did you like the show?”
She was hunched over the game, watching the ball as it clanged through a minefield of bumpers and bells. “It was pretty good, if you’re into that kind of thing.”
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Whatever. A lot of stuff. Would you please get off the glass?”
The sound of her voice made shivers race up the back of my neck and it was hard to tell if it was all from nerves, because I kind of liked it. I stood next to the pinball machine and watched the ball careen through obstacles and pitfalls.
The Morrigan’s tonic was just starting to wear off, and the feeling was disorienting but not unpleasant. It felt leisurely and free, like being just a little drunk. I was at that perfect point where the world is manageable and nothing seems too overwhelming or too bad. I stood in the arcade, watching Tate. She worked the flippers like it was serious business. She didn’t say anything else.
When the last ball had disappeared down into the machine, she sighed and turned to face me. “What? What do you want?”
“Will you give me a ride home?” The words were out before I’d had time to consider them.
Her face was unreadable, turned up to stare at me, and her chin was so obstinate I wanted to grab her by the shoulders just so she would stop looking at me like that.
After a long pause, filled with pinball sirens and flashing lights, she nodded.
We were only a block from the Starlight when it occurred to me that I might have made a bad decision. The hawthorn was wearing off much faster than it had the night before and so was the euphoria of playing for a crowd. Every uneven section of the road, every pothole rattled the car and jolted through my bones.
Tate didn’t seem to notice. She stared straight ahead, peering through the rain on the windshield, talking about school and various independent movies. Her voice was light, like she was in no hurry, waiting for the perfect time. That moment when she would spring some critical question and I would have no choice but to answer her. The air was thick with the smell of iron. I swallowed it down and cracked the window.
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