Ditty glares hard at me, drops of sweat glistening above his upper lip. Then he shakes his head. “Jesus, Krister. He saw your name when you opened your wallet; he was standing right behind us.” His hand falls to his side, the ghost of his fingers lingering on my chest. He’s not yelling, and I kind of wish he was because his balanced voice isn’t doing much for my temper. If I want to wreck those guys I need a temper. “Not everything has to do with your dad,” he continues. “Besides, it was half a year ago. No one fucking cares what your dad did anymore. Just you. You’re the only one. You need to let it go.”
I didn’t tell him about the letters that night. Or that just before he and Jess kidnapped me from my room for a “night of normalness” that I held the words a single death; life forever altered in my hand, ran my fingers over the shaky letters that formed them.
Now, standing under the night sky with rotten trash and grit wafting from the alley, I gnash my teeth so hard it feels like my jaw will pop off. Fuck Ditty. Fuck him. Even if it is true, that I’ve done some stupid shit, including coming here—
“So.” He points to a flyer stuck on the front door. The Gas Caps Live! “Who’re The Gas Caps, and why are they playing on a Monday?”
Seeing how he reacted to the news article, it’s probably best to withhold the small detail that we’re here to see the band of one of the train crash victims. I pull out the cigarette I snagged from Wrenn earlier and light it. “Saw their flyer at AP.”
“Is that what you were doing during English today? Chillin’ at Arcade Planet?”
I shrug, focus on the burning trail of smoke slithering down my throat, warming my lungs instead of the haunting image of the girl at the train station. “English is overrated.”
“It’s also required to get a degree, Smartfuck.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I let myself smile at him. Regardless of the shit he gives me, he’s the best friend I’ve ever had. And he’s here with me short of any real reason.
The line we’re standing in inches forward. “Can’t smoke inside,” the bouncer tells me as he takes my five dollar bill. I drop the cigarette into a coffee can beside him and descend the narrow stairway. Falling away from the street and into the Underground, the air thickens with the smell of sweat and popcorn. Screams, whiny and cadenced with cords of bit-up words, congest the room we’re herding into. Louder and louder the closer we get and gray matter threatens to ooze from my ears. I might legitimately be deaf by the end of all this.
Ditty taps me on the shoulder and shouts over the noise, “Since when have you been into ska punk?”
“Since you started wearing pansy-ass shirts.” I laugh because it’s not that far from the truth, and he gives me the finger as we’re swallowed into the darkness. Around the staircase, the source of the deafening screeches materializes: dude with a green Mohawk on the stage whose outfit could be mistaken for a zebra by the way his papery skin shines through the slits in his black jeans and shirt.
Green Mohawk gives the microphone a spit shower, shouting another indecipherable series of lyrics to a standing group of zebra minions. Everyone is jumping up and down like little kids who have to pee. In the center of the crowd, twirling and twisting, tangling and pushing, a mosh pit forms. A girl, whose waist is no bigger than my wrist, claws her way to the circle’s opening, throws herself in. I hold my breath for one, two, three, waiting, waiting for the girl to get slammed. Elbows and hips and shoulders jostle her, knock her from one side of the circle to the other and then, just as I let my breath seep out through my lips thinking she’s got this, she’s totally got this!, she’s slammed from the back so hard it throws her face first into the floor.
Shit.
A few seconds pass, feet and knees stomping around her, and my gut twists thinking this girl—maybe not so young after all—is dead, and then she’s up on her feet, smiling and jamming her elbow into her neighbors’ torsos.
Ditty leans over and yells in my ear, “Does it make me a pussy that I have no desire to try that?”
“You and me both,” I shout back.
Through the room devoid of tables or chairs or anything that’d resemble civilized comfort—aside from the old-fashioned popcorn machine near the stairs, we draw up to a corner and try to blend in with the wall. When the song finally ends, Green Mohawk yells, “And we are the Mustard Whores! The Gas Caps are up next!”
Cheering. Hooting. Hollering. Then it all settles to a low drone like someone put all of these shouting fucks into a gigantic pot and put the lid on it. Zebra minions start grazing the floor, high-fiving one another, checking out each other’s stripes.
I let out a breath and rub my ears. “They’re good, right?” I say to Ditty. He raises his eyebrow clear up to his widow’s peak and points at my forehead.
“If you’re trying to get your face permanently set like that, then hell yeah. They’re freaking amazing!”
With a few minutes intermission, Ditty goes to fill a bowl of popcorn. I stay against the wall, watch as men in black scurry around the stage, disassembling the band equipment and then set up an exact replica only with The Gas Caps logo stamped all over. The crowd starts to stir, and then several guys, not much older than me and dressed in exactly the same fashion as Green Mohawk—except for one who appears to be wearing red, plaid pajama pants—come out and start making random noise with their guitars. Another sits behind the drum set, spins his drumstick in his fingers then tap, tap, tap BANG!
None of this sounds anything like what music should.
“Warm up,” Ditty says, and I nod like I knew that all along. The random notes eventually mesh together, and Plaid Pants starts jumping around and singing and summoning fist pumps from the audience who, for some reason, all know exactly when to throw their hands into the air and when not to.
The Gas Caps play for forty-five long minutes and their music is even more torturous than the first band, and then Plaid Pants falls to his knees, chest heaving, sweating enough to fill Ditty’s empty popcorn bowl and says, “We’re The Gas Caps! See you next week in Redmond!” More hooting and hollering and fist pumping, and I wonder if the people in the audience ever tire of hooting, hollering, and fist pumping.
“That was rad,” I say to Ditty, forced, of course, because it was so not rad. He makes a face, and I nudge his elbow. “Let’s go get a closer look.”
Down on the floor, sweaty, grungy kids push against us, red faced and gasping as they head for fresh air. Ditty, in his green-striped polo, stands out in the crowd like a dollar bill in the middle of the street, and I can’t help but laugh to myself. Seriously, who wears a polo to a concert?
As I approach the shoe-scuffed stage, Plaid Pants delicately sets his guitar into a molded, plastic case then closes the lid. His hands freeze on the shiny, metal latch when he catches my movement. Without all the black eyeliner, he’d probably be normal looking.
“’Sup?” he says and gives me the you-must-be-new-because-people-aren’t-supposed-to-approach-me look. I smile.
“Great show.”
“Yeah, thanks.” The latch clicks into place. Then another. A few seconds pass, and it’s painfully obvious Plaid Pants isn’t really the social type—which I can totally relate to—but still, I need him to be right now.
“So…” I clear my throat, hold onto the edge of the stage because suddenly the room is starting to swirl like I’m drunk only I’m not drunk and I’m thinking this is a really stupid idea. But even though I’m thinking this, that I should probably turn around and leave, the words blurt out. “You knew Evan?”
It’s weird: the silence that follows, circling throughout the sweat-sticky air. The kind of weird that sends a zip of electricity to my gut, awareness yawning in my chest cavity, something sort of like fear buzzing throughout my tenuous limbs.
Or maybe that’s the blood rushing into my ears.
The drummer glances down at me, then Ditty. Plaid Pants slowly extends his arm, traces his long, bony finger over four black letters branded onto his skin.
V
A
N
I wonder if Dad saw him that day, boarding the train with a guitar case in his grip or bobbing his head to his iPod. Writing song lyrics on a rumpled sheet of paper, or even the guitar chords that would coddle them. If he was dressed all punk rock like these guys or more classy and Sunset Heights-y like the mother he used to have. If he was smiling, content with a song in his head, as metal and wreckage and death ripped into his soul.
Plaid Pants leans forward, beads of sweat rolling down his face. “You knew him?” In another life, another time, another town, the tone of his voice—the mixture of pissed off and curiousness laced with repugnance only the absence of a friend can bring—wouldn’t have been like this. Plaid Pants would have been dizzy and satisfied as the after-show adrenaline coursed through his veins, drew up his lips. Drummer Boy’s eyes would have been alight with pride, more concerned with the clutch of tittering fan girls postured near the edge of the stage instead of the pale-faced kid stooped below him asking about his dead bandmate.
“I didn’t know him,” I say through the wad of cotton on my tongue. I swallow a few times then open my mouth again with the intention of asking him about the letters, if he—or any of the other Gas Caps—beleaguered Wrenn’s mailbox with them, and if so to please stop. Instead, the words “but my dad” fall out of my mouth.
Beside me, Ditty stiffens. With those three words he understands: (1) why we’re here, and (2) who these guys—especially the one with EVAN tattooed on his arm—must be. He saw the article and Evan Bencich’s picture.
Ditty grabs my arm. “I think we should go.”
Outside, Ditty turns to me.
“Seriously, Ledoux? You drag me all the way down here, make me stand in a fucking hotbox with a bunch of punk rockers just so you can shove your nose into some other person’s business who happens to know someone who was in the accident?”
I meet Ditty’s glare and open the car door, cold air seeping down my neckline. Numbly, I climb in and say, “Not an accident.”
He throws his hands up in the air. “What does it matter? It was a year ago!”
Chapter Four
Pulling away from Ditty’s house, the moon balances on the rounded treetops, splashing weak light over Wrenn’s car like a dying nightlight. The drive back to Chanton was quiet. Ditty, face pinched and fingers tapping furiously on his phone; and me, running over every word from Plaid Pants, probing for signs that the letters had come from his death-wounded hands, but arriving at the conclusion that a musician would’ve written a song about his loss, not letters to the killer’s family.
It’s Monday, Wrenn’s “girls’ night in,” which is code for carousing with two of her high school friends, both conveniently named Sarah, who grew tangled in the arms of Chanton and never moved away, never made anything for themselves. The night is still early. Most likely the three of them are singing along, glazed-eyed and lightheaded, to a lame-ass movie like Pitch Perfect. Being there, with a half-eaten carton of Rocky Road turning to soup on the table, yellow-stained walls, overflowing ashtrays, and the lingering cloud of musty, herb air will surely result in strangling Wrenn, and I don’t want to do that because she’s the only one I have left.
As an alternative, I text the only other person who hasn’t completely severed ties with me. Or I her, for a reason I don’t know. U UP?
A minute passes. The phone flips over and over in my fingers as I cruise at stoner speed around the backside of Sylvan Park, the dim moonlight draping over the yellow, plastic slide Ditty and I used to climb up with dirt under our fingernails and holes in our jeans. And then: WORKING ON ECON PROJ
I pull to the side of the road and idle in a buttery puddle of light because, well, just the thought of causing an accident like my father has my stomach churning and text her back. PARENTS HOME?
Her: WHAT DO U THINK?
WHY? U OK?
Me: WAIT UP FOR ME?
I park down the street. Tall, spindly trees loom over me, and I don’t want to think they look like jail cell bars, but I do and I hate that I do, and then I start jogging. Twenty-two steps up to the front door. I don’t count them now, but there was once a time I did. The black-painted front door, in all its enormity and carved complexity, is closed. I don’t walk in unannounced; that privilege vanished with the words “I can’t see you anymore.”
Obviously, I meant I couldn’t see her every day.
The door swings open. Jess stands there, barefoot, in a jean skirt and wifebeater, and I try not to notice the way she’s got most of her weight on her right leg. Her hand is on the door, easing it wider and wider. I step in. Wrap my arms around her. Bury my face into her neck. Squeeze tighter, tighter.
“You didn’t answer my question, Krister,” she says after a minute, tracing her fingers up my spine. She pulls away and looks at me. “You okay?”
That’s not why I came here, to talk about my clusterfuck day. I take her face in my hands, tell her with my eyes not to ask and press my lips to hers. Sometimes kissing Jess reminds me of the times we had in high school. The skating rink, sledding in the mountains—all the ridiculous things she insisted we do while I called her my girlfriend. And sometimes it reminds me of nothing. Of the emptiness I feel inside.
My tongue slips into her mouth. Hand slides up her leg, under her skirt.
“Not out here,” she shakes her head and says against my lips. She pulls me through the maze of dim hallways and art-covered walls to the back of her house, into her room, and I don’t know why it matters because her rich-ass parents will be out till at least midnight fraternizing with their rich-ass friends.
Wifebeater off, she flops onto her bed. She knows what I want, and I know what I want, so I climb on top of her, lose myself a little more with every inch of her I touch. With each article of clothing that decorates the floor. Her skirt. My shirt. Her bra. My jeans.
My lips trail her skin. The faint scent of cucumbers, the warmth of her arms wrapped around my neck, the metal barbell in her bellybutton that I kiss because it will make her giggle and squirm. She giggles and squirms and, God, it’s all so fucking familiar and easy, and I don’t know why I let this go.
I pull the blanket over my head, disappear into a dark, soundless world. Under here, my thoughts don’t exist. Under here, fucked-up shit doesn’t happen. Under here, I can be Krister Ledoux and not the son of Stephen Ledoux with the same blue-gray eyes and dimple in my chin. Under here, I feel good enough to smile.
“Okay, okay,” Jess says, breathless, and yanks on my arms. I emerge, the cool air even more of a rush than the lazy grin she gives me. I reach into her drawer because I’ve been here enough times to know that’s where she keeps the condoms and lose myself all over again in the knot of limbs and sweat and breath we become.
~*~
“You make me nervous when you look at me like that.”
Jess taps her pencil against her sketchbook, her blond hair falling over her cheek and coming to rest at her shoulder. “You’re not talking,” she says quietly, drawing line after line that looks like nothing now but will in a few minutes because that’s how good she is. At faces, anyway. “That usually means something’s wrong.”
They’re not accusatory at all—her words—but still, I cross my legs and give her a look.
“I mean…” She bites her lip. “I know stuff’s wrong, like the normal stuff…but, like, something else.”
“Nothing’s wrong.” I stare across the room, at the picture on her dresser she still has up of the two of us at senior homecoming. The pre-accident Krister in the black tux. The pre-accident Jess in green silk that caressed her ankles. Framed in fancy silver with her dried corsage hanging dead from the corner.
“It’s because…well, you’re here and, I don’t know, it seems like…” Her words run out. She slides her fingers through her hair.
“Spit it out, Jess.”
She sighs, sets her notebook down, and swings one leg over my lap. Disma
l light from the lamp beside her bed gives her a jaundiced look from her straddled legs all the way up to her searching eyes. “Something more,” she whispers. “It’s here, in your face.” She traces the end of her pencil under my eye, down my cheek. “In the way I can’t really see you even when I’m looking right at you.”
I shrug and stare at where her skirt has ridden up her legs, wondering if it’s too soon to go again just to avoid this conversation with her. She takes a deep breath, thinking.
“You never want to talk to me anymore.”
I roll my eyes, inch my hand up her thigh. “You gonna turn all drama queen on me today?”
She stops my hand with hers and frowns. “I’m serious, Krister.”
“So am I.”
“I just wanna know why.” She slips her fingers between mine. “We used to talk all the time. And now—”
“God, Jess. Don’t take it personally.” I reclaim my hand and rub my face. Jess’s never been clingy, even when we were together. She was actually a pretty cool girlfriend. But when I look up, her eyes are glistening, and I think: Why does this always happen? And then answer myself with: As if you didn’t know sex is like the ultimate cause of bipolar-ness, turning even the coolest of chicks into sappy, crying, I-need-you-more-than-anything, why-don’t-we-ever-talk? girls.
“Hey,” I pull her down to me and say. My arms wrap around her. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just, I’ve had a shitty day.” To say the least.
“See?” The word stretches out into a high-pitched whine. She presses her forehead into my neck and hot breath dribbles down my chest. “This is what I mean. I don’t even know what you did today.”
I stare at the fan, the beaded chain beneath it swinging back and forth. Skipped class—not really anything new; stood on the front porch of Evan Bencich’s house talking to Evan Bencich’s mom all the while thinking Evan Bencich is dead; was likely seconds away from getting my ass kicked by Evan Bencich’s former bandmates but didn’t because one good thing about my best friend is that he runs like a fucking gazelle…
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