Violet & Claire
Page 9
I need air, Claire thought. I need desert.
When she packed her suitcase a photo-booth picture of Violet fell out. Claire started to rip it in half and trash it, but instead she hesitated. In a way she believed what Violet had told her, the night of the party and in notes and on her answering machine. Nothing had happened between Violet and Peter. But still she knew that something had changed. There was a relationship now between Violet and Peter that hadn’t existed before. And the Claire Claire had become wasn’t part of that. Something had shut down in her. She’d never be the Claire Peter had held in the fountain or the Claire Violet had held on the floor of her bedroom. Any part of her they had ever loved, even a little, felt demolished.
Claire put the picture into the bottom of her suitcase, but she knew she wouldn’t call Violet. She knew she would leave.
The bus took her out of the city, under the arching cement highways, into the smog, past the demonic-looking faces on the billboards, past the car lots and malls and outlet stores. The dinosaurs seemed more sinister now—the one with the bigger head bared its teeth at her, and the windmills were frantic, hysterically whirring on the hills. In the distance a weird cloud bloomed—she realized it was a fire when she saw the planes flying back and forth with their red lights and smelled the charred air. Dust blew across the highway in a storm of pale howling grit and Claire wondered what she had seen in the desert before—it was like being on a planet of bone, she thought, a landscape of bone and pulverized bone.
But then Claire got to the high desert, and the Joshua trees. She wondered what they thought of all the tourists who came to look at them, not knowing quite why, except a famous rock band had come here, and it was a monument, yet there was some other reason the tourists couldn’t explain, a strange stillness in the chest when they were near these tree-creatures that only chose to grow in very select regions; a recognition, like seeing some ancient ancestor. The sky flared like a bonfire of roses behind them and the air smelled of creosote—spicy, damp, fertile, although the landscape was so dry and barren.
The bus stopped at the entrance to the campground and Claire walked along kicking dust with her sneakers. A bat flew past, near enough to make her shudder, but she liked it, too. She, too, would like to hang by her toes in the night, blissfully blind and folded in her own webbed black wings that could take her away when she needed them, take her as far as the full moon that had begun to rise.
For Violet the moon was only a disco ball, covered with mirrors and scattering rainbows. She was with Queen Esmeralda and Queen Matilda at the Red Cherry. The place was almost empty except for two beer-bellies shooting pool with a lavish yellow-sequinned trans. The air conditioning wasn’t working and Violet’s bare legs kept sticking to the red vinyl booth, so that it hurt when she shifted her weight—plucked skin. She wanted a stiff drink but had ordered a mineral water instead. In those moments of fear about Claire, she’d made a pact with the universe about her own sobriety and it seemed easy now when she remembered that night.
It was easy not to drink and even to avoid the coke, especially with the help of the chiropractor in the white turban and his liquid flowers, but it wasn’t easy to do anything instead. She hadn’t written in days. She’d refused every meeting and interview request. All she did was make phone calls to Claire and leave messages when the machine answered—which was every time. She’d gone over there, too, but no one came to the door. Peter had called Violet once, asking if she’d reached Claire—he hadn’t been able to either. He’d invited Violet out for coffee and she’d practically hung up on him. It felt like another betrayal for them to even speak on the phone. Finally, she had made herself go out.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” Matilda asked. She and Esmeralda had recognized Violet right away. They seemed, eerily, to know something had happened.
“We had a little falling out.”
“How’d you make a sweet thing like that mad at you?” Esmeralda demanded, sucking on a cherry.
“I don’t know. I fucked up.”
“Grovel. Grovel. Grovel,” Esmeralda instructed. “It’s the only way. It’s how Elvis retrieved me after a fling with a female impersonater named Elvira.”
“I’ve been. She won’t answer my calls.”
Esmeralda grinned at Violet, teeth long and feral in her cocked, oddly shaped, wigged head. Maybe the lost faerie race Claire was always talking about would look like this, Violet thought. When Esmeralda took Violet’s hands in her own furled ones, Violet thought, How beautiful you are, a movie star. On screen in the movie I want to make you will be the faerie queen. In our movie, she corrected herself, the one I make with Claire.
“You’re two halves of a whole,” Esmeralda whispered. “I knew it the first time I saw you.”
That was when Violet thought of the desert.
The girl whom the boys thought was a fawn and tried to shoot, the girl who could fly when no one was looking, the girl with the wings on her skinny back and the child’s mouth that was like too many flowers. That was who Violet was looking for.
But the girl had changed now, too. Just like I’ve changed, Violet thought.
On the way out to the desert she played Claire’s favorite Tori Amos tape and thought about the movie she wanted to make. As she got farther from the city the smog in her head was clearing, her mind filling with explosive clouds in the shapes of adobe castles and flying girls.
“So you’ve abandoned Hollywood,” she heard a reporter say. “What’s the new indie piece going to be called?”
“Tinker Bell,” said Violet out loud, knowing that there would be one and that it would be theirs, hers and Claire’s. Our movie.
Claire on a rock in a shower of meteors. There were so many falling stars that she could hardly keep up with the potential wishes cascading down over her head. She kept trying not to wish for a girl with a mind like a miniature movie theater to come and find her, but she couldn’t help it.
Finally, she closed her eyes and held her breath.
Violet, Claire wished. Claire wished, Violet.
She opened her eyes. The sky winked at her.
Just then she heard a car pulling into the campsite.
She got up and went to the edge of the rock. She looked down.
A dusty Mustang was parked below. A girl got out. Claire could hardly see her because of the huge bouquet of roses and lilies she was holding. Still, she recognized her.
Violet looked up as if Claire had called to her and they stood there like that in a meteor shower, in a silvery wind, in a spell of flowers, neither of them moving, and then Violet tossed the bouquet upward. Claire hesitated for a second and in the last moment she reached out for the flowers and caught them like a girl at wedding and pressed them to her chest.
If Claire had wings she might have flown away then. She might have flown off on rapid, cutting wings to faerieland where no one could break her heart because it was made of ice and could melt only into nothing.
If Violet had been in a movie she might have been fearless, safe in a knowledge of happy endings or even violent ones, neither of which, she knew, were real.
This was not a faerie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.
Claire could not fly away into the ice-white light of faerie. And Violet could not hide in the dark movie theater where everything could happen and none of it meant anything, finally.
Claire could step to the edge of the rock and climb down.
Violet could hold out her arms, reach up and catch her friend’s wingless body.
Two girls, blending themselves together like a magic potion, and then separating, one more powerful and one more gentle after the alchemy, neither afraid anymore.
About the Author
Francesca Lia Block is the acclaimed author of I WAS A TEENAGE FAIRY, DANGEROUS ANGELS: The Weetzie Bat Books, GIRL GODDESS #9, and THE HANGED MAN. Her work has been translated into six different languages and is publishe
d around the world. She made her dazzling entrance onto the literary scene with her debut novel WEETZIE BAT in 1989.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
PRAISE FOR
Violet & Claire
“The girls save each other, a victory for sweetness….”
—Los Angeles Times
“Block sets herself new challenges and meets them with consummate grace in this resonant novel. Her writing is as lush and luminous, as hip and wise as ever. (Starred review)
—Publishers Weekly
“Like Weetzie Bat, Violet & Claire captures the passionate nature of teenage friendship; her conversational style is easy to read; and the quirky characters are likable.”
—Jane
“As always, Block excels in depicting strong and supportive friendships between teen girls. Violet & Claire is at its best when the two protagonists reach past their own pain to help each other.”
—ALA Booklist
“Fans of the author’s previous works will take to this one; newcomers will be captured by the rainbow iridescence of Block’s prose and her hallucinatory descriptions of the darkest of teen angst and shiniest of Hollywood glitz.
—Kirkus Reviews
ALSO BY
Francesca Lia Block
Weetzie Bat
Witch Baby
Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys
Missing Angel Juan
Baby Be-Bop
Dangerous Angels:
The Weetzie Bat Books
The Hanged Man
Girl Goddess #9
I Was a Teenage Fairy
The Rose and the Beast:
Fairy Tales Retold
Copyright
VIOLET & CLAIRE. Copyright © 1999 by Francesca Lia Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition March 2008 ISBN 9780061757303
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