Maybe because (like most of my friends) I’m a refugee from the high-school unpopularity wars, I’m often acutely aware of who sits where on the food chain. At the top of this one was a pretty, round-faced brunette with glitter on her cheeks and a clove cigarette between two fingers. She wore her hair loose, with a tiny blue flower stuck over one ear; the hand that wasn’t holding the butt had a ring on each digit, including the thumb. She sat in the center of the ragged circle like she was holding court, barely paying attention to the guy who had an arm draped loosely around her shoulders.
Like half the menfolk at the festival, her prince consort had his hair pulled back in a droopy ponytail; when he let it down, it must be even longer than hers. He kept peeking at her out of the corner of his eye as the conversation ebbed and flowed, but there was something unpossessive about the way he was touching her, and I got the feeling they were just friends.
Sitting around them in uneven clusters were three girls and three boys who kept their mouths fully occupied at all times—with food, tobacco, chitchat, or a combination thereof. At least half of them had visible tattoos, which kind of astounded me; if I’d been fool enough to get myself branded before I was old enough to vote, my dad would’ve made me get it removed and cheerfully tithed the doctor bill out of my allowance.
When I got tired of watching, I sidled up to the group and gave my standard journalist’s mating call.
“Hi, my name is Alex Bernier, and I’m a reporter for the Gabriel Monitor. Would you mind if I asked you guys a couple of questions?”
Unsurprisingly, it was the girl in the center who fielded the query. “Um…You mean you’re, like, from the newspaper?”
“That’s right.”
“And you want to talk to us?”
“Yep.”
She raised a dainty eyebrow at me, though not obnoxiously. “How come?”
“Jo Mingle said you guys might make an interesting story for the paper—about how you’ve been coming here together for a while and all.”
“And you want to put us in the paper? Like, with our picture and everything?”
“Yep.”
A smile overtook the lower half of her face, revealing the results of a relative fortune in orthodontia. “Cool.”
“You mind if I sit down?”
She scooted over and made room for me in the midst of the gaggle of adolescents, then stuck out a ring-covered mitt. “What’s your name again?”
“Alex Bernier.”
“I’m Lauren Potter.” She turned to the guy next to her. “This is Tom Giamotti.” I shook his economy-size hand, and he favored me with wide eyes and a goofy grin; the overall effect was of an adolescent Saint Bernard. Then Lauren proceeded to go around the circle introducing the six others, who waved at me with varying degrees of understated coolness. I wrote all their names down, with descriptions so I could match them up with their quotes when I put the story together. At first glance, they’d all seemed to be cut from the same batik cloth, but once I got a closer look, I realized they were sort of a Rainbow Coalition of high-school hippies, drawn from all the stereotypical social subgroups.
Since I spent over an hour with them, I had time to take a lot of notes. Here’s a rundown of the eight kids, translated from my bad handwriting:
Lauren Potter—long legs, pretty, confident, “the queen bee”
Tom Giamotti—bushy hair, sweet, STONED
Alan Bauer—Gap T, clean-cut, major muscles, “the jock”
Cindy Bauer—Alan’s younger sister, purple hair, nice, kinda sad
Trish Stilwell—super thin, rose ankle tattoo, gawky, quiet
Billy Halpern—big stupid sideburns, bigger ego, “the hunk”
Dorrie Benson—crew cut, many piercings, “the freak”
Shaun Kirtz—glasses, goatee, acne, pot-leaf T-shirt, “the nerd”
The kids may have been vaguely freakish, but they were plenty gracious. Over the next half hour, I was offered home-brewed beer, chocolate-chip cookies baked by Tom’s mother, umpteen cigarettes, Kool-Aid, dried apricots, limp sweet-potato fries, and a pan of very inviting double-chocolate brownies. I was just about to go for the latter when I realized they weren’t hot brownies (as in warm from the oven) but pot brownies, as in laced with marijuana. I took a pass.
“What are you,” said buzz-cut Dorrie, “some kinda Nancy Reagan?”
“Huh?” I was distracted by the metal tongue stud that flicked out of her mouth with every syllable.
“Are you, like, all ‘Just say no’ or something?”
“Me? Not on principle. I just don’t, um, get stoned too often.”
“Oh.”
“You know, I’m kind of surprised you guys’ve even heard of that Nancy Reagan thing. That stupid ‘Just say no’ campaign dates back a—”
“Hey,” Alan said as he absentmindedly flexed a well-developed bicep, “we take history.”
“So how come?” This from Billy, who was stroking his sideburns with what seemed to be great enjoyment. I had a feeling a lot of teenage girls might enjoy stroking them too.
“How come what?”
“How come you don’t get stoned too often? Don’t you dig it?”
The truth was, I’d indulged in such things a lot more often when I was dating a guy for whom ganja constituted a leafy green vegetable. Now that I was with Cody—a straitlaced law-and-order type if ever there was one—ingesting illegal substances didn’t exactly make for a typical Saturday night.
“I did a little when I was in college,” I said. “I guess I just kind of lost interest.”
Billy stopped playing with his facial hair long enough to skewer me with a goggle-eyed gaze. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-seven.” The assembled masses looked at each other and then back at me, their expressions equal parts horror and pity. Wonderful. I decided not to bother mentioning that Billy’s pointy-lapelled polyester shirt had probably been sewn when I was in elementary school. “How old are you guys?”
They were all seventeen, except for sixteen-year-old Cindy; Shaun, whose knobby knees and bad skin made him look like the youngest of the bunch, was turning eighteen on Sunday. All but Cindy were about to start their senior year at Jaspersburg High. One of them (Billy) had been at every single Melting Rock since its inception thirteen years earlier—originally brought by his parents who, he reported with some relief, no longer had any interest in boogying on down for the weekend.
“So how come you guys come here every year?” I asked.
This time, they looked at me like I was the one who’d stuck a damn earring through my tongue. Since the rest of them appeared speechless at the sheer idiocy of the question, it fell to Lauren to answer. “Like …it’s Melting Rock,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but what does that mean?”
More pitying looks. “You know,” said Tom, “it’s the Melting Rock Music Festival.” There was an earnest tone in his voice, like he really cared about sparing me the embarrassment of my own ignorance. I decided on the spot that, high as a kite though he may be, Tom Giamotti was my favorite of the bunch.
“I got that. But what I mean is, what is it about this thing that makes you want to come back year after year? Is it just that you guys all get to see each other? But you all go to the same school, so you probably see each other all the time, right? So why is this place so special?”
Momentary silence, punctuated by the munching of Fritos and the lighting of yet another American Spirit. “You know,” Cindy said finally, “I think that’s a pretty cool question.”
“Yeah?”
“I guess we just, like, never thought about it before, you know? Why do we like it here?…”
She chewed on her bottom lip, and I took a good look at her. Her spiky hair was an alarming shade of violet, which contrasted badly with her pale skin; the effect was something approximating the walking dead. But she had wide blue eyes, and (as my mom would say) if she’d fixed her hair and lost twenty pounds, she could’ve
been a pretty girl. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to be.
“I guess,” she went on, “I’d have to say Melting Rock is …It’s like our touchstone.”
She immediately realized what a lousy pun she’d made, and some life blushed into the pudgy cheeks. Then everybody else figured it out too: Shaun made a gagging noise and threw some corn chips at her. She stuck her tongue out at him, then turned back to me. “I didn’t mean it like that. Don’t write that down, okay?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What I meant is, like, Melting Rock is the thing we always come back to, you know? And we all promised that we always will—no matter where we go, we’ll always come back here. Right, Laur?”
Lauren favored her with the zillion-dollar smile. “You betcha.”
“Even if we, you know, get married and have kids and all, we’ll bring them here and they’ll play together and stuff,” Cindy said. “It’s this tradition we’re gonna have for, like, forever.”
Tom shot her a salute and said, “You said it, sister.” He was starting to slur his words, like he’d had one brownie too many. “We’re like the sparrows going back to Castipano.”
Shaun tossed some Fritos at him. “That’s the swallows returning to Capistrano, you shithead.” He shook his head and smirked at me. With his little wire-rimmed glasses and vaguely Germanic features, he kind of looked like one of the Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Dude don’t pay attention in class.”
“Yo,” Tom said, “you’re the one who wants to go to MIT, bro. I’ll be psyched if I get into SUNY.”
“And we’re not just visitors,” Lauren continued after a vaguely exasperated glance at the two guys. “We, like, sort of help organize it too. Tom volunteered to do paperwork in the Melting Rock office over in Gabriel, and Billy and I sat at the promo table on the Green this year. Shaun even helped redesign the Web site. Have you seen it?” I shook my head. “It’s really cool.”
“Okay,” I said, “but what is it about the festival in particular that you really enjoy—I mean, besides just being together? Is it the music?”
“The music rocks,” said Billy, and nobody contradicted him. “You got Stumpy, the Blowflies, Seven-Fifty-One Man, Krönk, Missy and the Moguls.…” He ticked off the bands on his fingers. “You’re talkin’ a shitload of talent, yeah?”
I scribbled down the names, whereupon he instructed me not to leave the umlaut out of Krönk. “So a lot of it is about the music, huh?”
“Yeah,” Lauren said, “but it’s not just that. It’s also… kind of an oasis, I guess.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, like it helped her focus. “Sort of…a special place that’s apart from everywhere else.” She looked around the circle. “You guys know what I mean, right?”
Dorrie nodded, running a hand over her nearly naked skull. The only one clad in long pants, she was wearing gray Carhartts and a long-sleeved T-shirt—chemistry apparently having made her immune to the heat. “I think it’s sort of like, you know… kind of another dimension.”
Shaun hooted the theme to The Twilight Zone, though no Fritos went aloft. Cindy smiled at him and joined in, and from the way she glanced at him in those two seconds, I could tell that—despite Shaun’s status as a Stri-Dex poster child—she had quite the crush on him.
“Anything goes,” Trish mumbled, and I realized it was the first thing she’d said so far.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
She turned her attention to her toenails, which were painted metallic blue. “Um… Kind of like, it’s free here. No rules, you know? Anything goes.”
The girl was skinny as a greyhound, her pointy knees poking out of what looked to be cutoff army pants. She might be seventeen, but—well, I’d had more of a bosom by the third grade.
“And you like that?” I said. “The freedom?”
She shrugged her bony little shoulders, and Billy jumped in. “It’s kind of like… Melting Rock is this island where the laws of the universe don’t have to apply, see? Nobody gets bogged down by petty, stupid shit like they do the other three hundred sixty days of the year.” He was really getting into it; I could tell from the flush that was spreading inward from his sideburns. “The rest of the world, it’s just out to judge you all the time. You get graded and hassled and all. But at Melting Rock, it’s not like that. Get it?”
Cindy nodded her grape-colored head. “It’s like you just get to be yourself,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend to be somebody else, like some fake person society wants you to be.”
“Yeah,” Lauren said. “It’s kind of like”—she glanced around the circle, her long hair swooping in a chestnut cascade—“You guys are gonna totally laugh at me for saying this, but it’s like… Last summer my mom dragged me to this play in Gabriel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. And there’s this part where the teacher talks about ‘the common moral code,’ how it doesn’t apply to her because she decided she wants to live outside it. And I remember thinking, ‘That’s kind of like Melting Rock.’ Nobody gets bogged down in that stuff, you get it?”
I flashed back to Doug, my aspiring tentmate. “I think so, yeah.”
“Cool,” she said, and leaned her head back to lower a pale orange French fry into her mouth.
“Hey, Laur,” Shaun said from the blanket where he was lying flat on his back. “That’s right on, what you just said. ‘Common moral code.’ Screw it, huh?”
“Screw it,” Dorrie offered, and a few of the others joined in. This inspired me to entertain myself by contemplating the headline possibilities: DISAFFECTED DRUGGIES DAMN DECENCY.
“So,” I said, “do you guys usually spend the whole weekend together?”
Alan shrugged, still taking what seemed an unnatural interest in his flexing muscles; he’d started with his biceps, moved on to his forearms, and was now working on his quads. I was half afraid he was about to start reciting love poetry to his own abs. “Kinda,” he said. “Not like we make a big deal about it or anything. Everybody just sort of does their own thing. I mean, that’s the whole point, right?”
Tom offered me the brownie pan for the fourth time, and I waved it off. “The guys hang with the guys,” he said with his mouth full, “the girls hang with the girls, we all hang together….And, you know, we make some friends.…”
From the way he said it, I had a feeling these blossoming friendships involved a fair amount of latex. At least I hoped they did.
“And do you all camp out together?”
Another shrug from Tom. “Not like all in the same tent or anything, but we’re all in Main ’cause we’ve been coming here so long. Pretty cool, huh?”
“I’ve heard it’s a big deal.”
“It sure as hell is for Shaun here,” Billy said, and not particularly nicely. “How else is a skank like him gonna get laid?”
“Fuck you, man,” Shaun shot back at him—but wearily, like he was used to his role as the alpha male’s punching bag. “At least I don’t hafta pay for it.” He turned to Tom, who high-fived him.
Billy made some condescending kissy noises at Shaun, which I took as some sort of manly provocation. “Hey,” Billy said, “I never paid for it in my life. Chicks dig me.”
Frankly, the guy was the dreamboat of the group, what with his movie star chin and well-sculpted bod; I got the feeling he was used to getting female attention wherever and whenever he felt like it. But the Steve McQueen sideburns were downright ridiculous—and since I’ve never been remotely attracted to younger guys, he didn’t exactly make me wild with desire.
“Yeah, bullshit,” Shaun was saying. “What they dig is the E your fucking cousin sends you.”
“Hey, man,” Billy said with a grin, “whatever gets your rocks off.”
For the record, I wasn’t writing any of this stuff down; there was no way their sexual escapades (real or imagined) were going to make it past my editor. “Okay,” I said, “let me ask you another couple of—”
“Hold up a second,” Alan
said. “I kind of feel like maybe you’re getting the wrong idea about us. We’re not all a bunch of wasted drug addicts or anything.”
He seemed to want a response, but I had a hard time coming up with anything conciliatory. “Er…You’re not?”
“No way. I mean, I wouldn’t even touch that shit. I’m on three-season varsity—soccer, basketball, and baseball. I’m probably gonna get a scholarship too.”
“So you—”
“Lauren’s practically valedictorian at JHS. Last year she won this big science award. Billy made all-state in swimming and he was vice president of the junior class. Shaun’s got a kick-ass summer job working on computers at Benson. Tom can play, like, five different instruments. So it’s not like we’re just a bunch of losers, okay?”
I glanced at the brownie pan and realized I hadn’t seen Alan take one—or, for that matter, even smoke a cigarette. “You mean you go through the whole festival without doing any drugs?”
His face twisted into a particular look, one I was starting to get used to. “Well, the rest of the year I wouldn’t touch it,” he said. “But hey—this is Melting Rock.”
CHAPTER3
You might be wondering why these kids were so cheerfully telling a reporter about their consumption of illicit substances. So was I. And the answer wasn’t what you might think—that they were too stupid to know any better. Rather, they were smart enough to know that since the Monitor is that bourgeois entity known as the “family paper,” nothing about their recreational activities was going to end up in print anyway.
So I had two choices: I could forget about doing a story on the Jaspersburg Eight (as I was starting to think of them), or I could pound out some sanitized version depicting them as wholesome youth who liked to hang out and listen to a little rock and roll music.
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