Tacked to the wall was an old poster from when the speedway first opened. The car in the center was nice and blurry to accentuate the thrill of speed. Over the mirror hung a string of miniature plastic tiki lights, the heads of Easter Island in red, green, and yellow. At the base of the mirror was a line of sticky bottles, all the usual suspects. There was a cash register in the center, surrounded by cyanamide strips, glowing green and orange like radioactive IVs. A couple of Polaroids of girls holding their shirts up were taped to its side. The bartender avoided me, working the opposite end of the room, chatting up the pirate and his gang.
I was starting to have some serious doubts about the mechanic showing up anytime soon. Stuck like bait in an alligator cage, my chair was starting to feel a little wobbly. I couldn’t figure out whether Asha was his past or present girlfriend. She obviously had some history, even if there wasn’t any future.
I watched the dancers in the mirror, wondered if they lived nearby, if they shopped at SaveMart with a handful of coupons and flipped through the rags while waiting their turn at the checkout line, whether they had a social life outside the club, a place to wind down after dressing up like sluts and whipping the town drunks into a rousing state of frenzied horniness.
The room was scattered with some of the biggest losers this side of 1-55. I didn’t dare look up, because the last time I did, that sweaty pirate-looking creature was focused on me like a cat about to snatch a bird. He gave me the creeps, and I suddenly felt the need to be rescued. It was time to gather up my marbles and get the hell out of here. The door swung open and I looked up, hoping it was Bobby, but it was the boys I had crushed with the car battery. I had a heart attack. My valentine was wearing a neck brace. I buried my face in my cocktail and watched them in the mirror as they entered the room. I started sweating big-time. I slid off the edge of my seat, leaned down, and pretended to tie my shoe. They stopped in front of the stage and stood stonefaced, staring at the naked girls onstage. Nobody seemed to notice me, so I decided to take a chance, grabbbed my bag, and ducked out into the parking lot.
I wasn’t sure what to do. Neither Tracy’s nor Bobby’s car was in the lot, and the only person I knew inside was the vampire madam from hell. Mosquitoes swarmed around my forehead, buzzing in and out of my ears. The roar of sixteen-wheelers shifting gears echoed from the highway, the carnival lights of their trailers whipped through the trees. Music was thumping against the door when all of a sudden it burst open. I looked over my shoulder and saw Mr. Neckbrace limping toward me. I pressed my back against a car and slowly back-pedaled away from him.
“Well, well, well, look what we have here. I thought that was you. Remember me?” he asked, casually sinister, like someone who just crawled out of the swamps of Cape Fear. I shook my head, watched his hands.
“No. Why should I?”
“Don’t play dumb with me sister.” He kept taking baby steps toward me. “Your locker was just the beginning. Let’s just hope there isn’t an accident before graduation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The curse.” He laughed. “We got big plans for you.”
A white car swung into the lot, and its headlights swept the front of the building. I turned and ran toward the car and then straight past it until I was out of the parking lot.
“It won’t be long now!” he called out.
I kept running. I didn’t dare turn around. My heart was racing and I couldn’t think clearly because I was cluttered with panic. Thick patches of weeds made both sides of the road impenetrable. The stop sign at the corner was punctured by a dozen bullet holes. Suddenly I was the girl in a horror movie. My eyes puckered with tears. I was really really scared.
I couldn’t hear his feet, but I had a constant sinking feeling they were right behind me. Whenever I turned around, however, there was only a halo of streetlight glaring down at the pavement. Nothing was moving along the road, and the silence only frightened me more. I hurried under the Interstate bridge and started up Lemont Road, keeping a steady pace. Whenever headlights jumped over the horizon, I dipped into the shadow of trees. I didn’t want to give him a second chance.
Dark clouds had buried the stars. Tree branches above started to rock back and forth, bending with the force of an invisible wind. That’s when I felt the first drop of rain slap the end of my nose. At the next streetlight I started feeling drops all over my arms and legs, and by the time I reached the one after that, I was soaking head to toe.
Rain fell like the rivers of heaven had crested, on and on with increasing intensity. Puddles quickly became channels of gushing water alongside the road. Lightning sliced across the sky, thunder crept closer, each time with slightly more intensity, until the storm seemed to be right on top of me. I started worrying about getting electrocuted under the tall trees lining the road, so I cut across the street and followed the edge of the cornfield.
My mind stayed busy racing through the serial killer trading cards, as if Neckbrace didn’t get me, somebody else would. As the streetlight up ahead grew brighter, my fears would diminish, but as soon as I passed it and walked deeper into darkness, all that fear came racing back. And then a sheet of lightning reached out of the sky and sucked all the electricity out of Downers Grove. The streetlights failed and it got real dark, so dark I couldn’t even see myself. Standing completely still, waiting for my eyes to adjust, I felt like a ghost, like I wasn’t even alive. Everything seemed so unreal. Headlights and taillights became the only beacons that shredded the night, and I followed them, cautiously.
By the time I made it home I was so exhausted I felt like I might die anyway. The power was still out and the whole neighborhood seemed haunted. It was so unbelievably black. Lightning occasionally took a picture, but the snapshots seemed vacant and dreamlike.
The door was open to our house. I went inside and felt my way toward the kitchen. I heard some voices giggling, turned, and saw a warm glow emanating from the basement. There were enough candles along the staircase to make Anne Rice drool. Water was lapping against the bottom stair. It looked like a cave.
“What’s going on down there?” I started down the stairs and found David floating on a Styrofoam cooler, like some Hollywood surfer. His friend Dylan was sitting on a table with a large red bong glued to his face. My brother’s beer can collection floated around them.
“Ahoy,” my brother said, paddling with one hand while holding a can of beer in the other. “Grab a life preserver. The house is sinking.”
“Where are the buckets?” I asked.
David looked around him. “Where is my boom box?”
Dylan held the bong toward me. “Want one?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said. “What happened?”
“We were playing cards when all of a sudden the electricity went out. The sump pump quit, and seconds later the water started coming up through the drain. We rounded up some candles and flashlights, and then tried to bail for a while, but it was pointless, so we just saved what we could. Where the hell have you been?” he asked.
“Out with Tracy.”
“Mom had a shit fit when you pulled that disappearing act. She thinks you ran off with Speed Racer.” He paddled toward me. “She said if you ever did show up you’d be grounded for life.”
“I don’t have a life, remember?”
“Hey, don’t get harsh on me, I’m just the messenger.”
“Where is she now?”
“Dan came by, I guess he’s gonna lend her a car.”
Dylan nodded his head, as though that’s how he remembered it too.
“Did they patch things up?” I asked.
“I didn’t know it was broken,” he said.
I felt light-headed, like a piece of butter melting into warm toast. My stomach felt queasy, and then my head frosted over like the inside of a fluorescent bulb. Everything swirled into a soft blur. I swayed from one side to the other, then the whole world faded to black.
THE CONSPIRACY THEORY
; I told you, that party looked as permanent as a trailer park,” Tracy said. “How did I know everyone was going to split? I took the white angel on a cigarette run, and when I came back the only people left were Bobby and his friend.”
“What friend?” I asked.
“It was a guy,” she said, as if reading my mind. “They had a flat tire. I would’ve killed myself if anything had happened to you.” She squeezed my hand.
“Yeah, right.” I pulled my hand away.
Fainting is so dramatic, but actually, I don’t remember much of it. My brother said he could relate because he can’t remember a lot of things too. He must have been a little freaked to see me more petrified than him. Mom was beside herself with anger and relief, in other words, she wanted to kill me but was glad I wasn’t dead.
“I thought you were gonna be the senior curse,” Tracy said.
“Well, I almost was. Asha lured me over to her nightclub and guess who showed up—the boys who kissed the car battery. Chuckie had a neckbrace. He followed me out into the parking lot and said the locker fire was just the beginning, that I was an accident waiting to happen.”
“He’s just trying to frighten you.”
“Well, it worked. I had to walk all the way home in the biggest rainstorm of the century. I thought the world was ending. I was so scared. I cried and prayed all the way home.”
“You didn’t cry or pray,” she said.
“How would you know? You were busy getting felt up by Stranger Danger.”
“First of all, we only went to get cigarettes. Second of all, if I go away I always come back. You’re the one who ditched me. Nobody said the party was going to be transient.”
“You’re the one who got me into this mess,” I said.
“Me?”
“It was your idea to go to that party. It was your idea to throw the car battery!”
“Listen. Just chill, all right. If they try anything I will personally swat their agenda back in their face, just like last time, comprende?” Tracy tried to be reassuring, but her war speech was loosing its intensity. She seemed to think that this was all my fault and she was putting in overtime as it is.
Mom spent the night at Cape Canaveral, so Tracy took the honor of driving me to school and nearly got us both killed twice, making fast left turns in front of traffic. She had a remarkable way of bringing me right back into the danger zone.
I turned up the Bowie tape, sat back, and braced myself for an imminent collision.
We got stopped at the railroad tracks and watched a freight train rumble through town. The cars tilted back and forth with a slow and easy sway.
“Someday I’m gonna jump one of those suckers,” Tracy said, “and ride it until the sun comes up.”
“And then what?”
“I’ll jump off.”
“What are you gonna do in Nebraska?”
“Every time I have a fantasy you have to castrate it, why is that?”
“Well I was just pointing out that if you rode a train from here until sunrise you probably wouldn’t be any farther than Nebraska.”
“Since when are you the reality doctor?”
Tracy seemed to be in a foul mood, so I didn’t push any more buttons. When we pulled into the school parking lot I was struck with panic. Finals were breathing down my neck and the books stacked beside my bed looked like the Sears Tower. Tracy was more concerned with fanzine no. 4 and started reviewing the finished pages of the next issue.
“I know it’s a bit incestuous, but I still think we should put you on the cover,” she said. “The locker fire is definitely top story.”
“We should hold publication until the curse happens.”
“You’re right, we should wait for the curse. But what if it doesn’t happen?”
“Then it’s still the top story. I don’t want to be on the cover, okay?”
“You know everyone is going to say it’s a cover-up.”
My locker was still a heap of rubble so I had to carry what was left of my books around all day in a big canvas bag. Tracy went to her fashion final and I went off to deal with French verbs. I took French as some sort of romantic concept. Listening to all those Françoise Hardy songs, I wanted to run off to Paris and become a poet or a terrorist, but when that plane crash happened with all those schoolkids inside, the whole dream became sort of haunted.
After class I met Tracy in the locker room.
“How did you do on your test?” I asked.
“I wrote an essay on the cross-pollination of Versace and Versailles called ‘The Mirror and the Flashbulb.’ It’s a rambling swatch of ideas on gaudy behavior, but hopefully there are enough inspired moments of clarity to swing a passing grade.”
We went to gym class and struggled through endless sit-ups and push-ups. I was actually pretty good with jumping jacks. Tracy and I both had a crush on Miss Thompson. I totally admired her style. A lipstick lesbian according to Tracy. Fishnet feminist according to me.
“Only you two could get a C in gym class,” Miss Thompson said.
POWER LINES
ALL alone, scribbling long purple paragraphs into my journal—Chrissie Bright, Chrissie Dark—I felt inspired but was still very hesitant to commit anything to paper. I tried writing in code but ended up tearing out all those pages. I decided to leave a couple blank pages, and fill in the details once the scenery became more acceptable. So part of my journal will be filled with white lies, but better a crown of thorns than an execution, that’s what I say.
There’s always been plenty of material to draw from, but lately it’s been one gush after another. First of all, my mechanic was still missing in action. What started as a desire to jump-start my life has since straddled me into a nonexistent relationship that continues to haunt me, especially at night. I’ve never been this stupid over a guy—ever. Plus, it’s only a few days before graduation, and the curse has not been fulfilled. Maybe it won’t happen this year? Maybe the gods are finally satisfied?
Maybe all the other accidents were just a coincidence? It totally creeped me out when Tracy said I should be on the cover of fanzine no. 4. It was such a bad omen.
Lying on my back, watching the alien-green numbers of my digital clock jump forward, I had so much adrenaline pumping through my system that it was impossible to sleep. Tossing and turning into the early morning hours, I finally crawled from my bed and lumbered downstairs, pushed the sliding door open, and headed for the willow tree.
The yard felt spookier on a moonless night—more shadows, more movement in the corner of my eye. I accidentally stepped on a rotten pear and its soft belly squished between my toes. The sweet wet scent reminded me of when Mom used to can fruit. That was back when Dad was still mowing the lawn. He loved the yard and spent most every Saturday afternoon snipping branches, raking leaves, and picking weeds. He even built a compost pile and started a garden. The rabbits ate it all, but Dad didn’t really care, “as long as someone appreciated it,” he said. That was the way my parents talked to each other, broadcasting their bitterness far above our heads, constantly struggling for our psychological favor while battling their own. The yard was the first thing to deteriorate, then slowly but surely the house became a reflection of the yard. Mom and Dad were overextended, and in the end they both lost interest in preserving their Camelot. It was a castle of frustration for both of them.
There were a few moments of sunshine and some were even preserved on Super 8 film. Dad thought he was the Godard of DuPage County, so all the footage is a little jumpy, like someone was playing hot potato with the camera. “Avant-garde,” he called his masterpieces. “You were drunk,” my mother would reply. I never thought of Dad as a drinker, but I guess a lot happened after we went to bed at night. How they got so bitter probably started long before I turned thirteen, but that’s about when I began picking up their transmissions, and a couple of years later that’s how it ended: one person trying to explain their bad behavior and the other one crucifying them for it. Neither one of them wa
s happy with the life they had, so Dad split and went looking for a new one. Nothing ever exploded, it just sort of dissolved. I guess you could say the feelings were mutual. Mom acted as if she didn’t care, but even now you can sense a part of her is missing.
All of the bickering left me with a huge sense of guilt, like it was my fault or something. Maybe if I had been more grateful at Christmas, or did the dishes a little more often, or got better grades, their life would not have disintegrated. Maybe it was up to me to shore up all the foundations and seal the cracks with love. “The cracks were so big you could’ve fallen right into them,” Mom said. “You’ll never know.”
Why would I never know? Wouldn’t I grow up to be just like her and experience all the same pain again if she didn’t flash me a few cue cards? Seems to me that men are as wild and impossible as life itself.
I ducked under the lilac bushes and entered the umbrella of the willow tree’s drooping branches, then started climbing up the fat trunk. Before I reached the top I saw a strange white light underneath the power lines that drooped over the cornfield. It looked like a fuzzy white angel was glowing in the sprouting field. I just about shit in my pants. Whatever it was, it wasn’t moving. I wondered if it fell out of the sky and was hiding. I hurried down the tree.
Maybe angels were scavengers and spend all night stealing corn for banquets in heaven? Everything had a reason, and this seemed entirely reasonable at the moment. I thought about running back to the house and getting a camera, but my curiosity and excitement were too overwhelming. I crossed the street and slowly made my way along the edge of the field, then cut through a wide row of cornstalks, toward the bright white light.
There, in the middle of the field, was my grandmother, standing on a rock, holding a glowing white fluorescent tube above her head. She had a smile on her face as big as Montana, as though she were expecting both me and a large crowd to show up any minute.
“Chrissie, come here, you gotta try it!” Grandma waved me over with her free hand and I hesitantly made my way toward her.
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