“See,” Cass says, grinning. “I knew you had it in you.” Maia smiles, bashful. That afternoon when she gets home she tucks the shirt all the way at the back of her dresser, where her mom’s least likely to notice it. The thought of her new secret makes her smile.
After that, grift gets easier, though it always sets her heart to pounding. She pockets lipsticks in drugstores, candy in the checkout line. She eats the candy, leaves the lipsticks unopened in coffee-shop bathrooms. She’s nothing like as good as Cass, too clumsy and afraid of getting caught to even begin to try the kinds of tricks Cass gets up to. Return scams, walking out on restaurant bills, palming whole bricks of cheese in the grocery store, helping herself to wool hats on cold days and umbrellas when it rains. Maia can be by Cass’s side the entire time and never notice, Cass is so fast and so good.
“Aren’t you scared?” Maia asks.
“Scared of what?”
“Getting caught.”
Cass shrugs. “I don’t think about it,” she says. “It’s easier that way.”
When Maia practices the piano now she thinks of Cass. Cass on the street, Cass on the corner with her dirty friends. Cass asking strangers for change. Cass cutting her own hair. Cass eating meals she hasn’t paid for. Where Cass sleeps. Cass won’t take her to the squat—“It’s dirty there,” she’d said—and so Maia can only picture it in her head. She saw a TV movie of Oliver Twist once, and she imagines Cass’s squat as something like Fagin’s lair, cramped and lousy with snaggle-toothed waifs. Girls in dirty velvet jackets with tarnished gold buttons, breeches, cravats. Wool caps with brims, fingerless gloves. Cooking porridge over a wood-burning stove. She likes to think of Cass presiding over them, the orphans’ queen, demanding they turn out their pockets with the day’s loot so she can take her pick of the best of it.
Of course she knows wherever Cass lives is nothing like Oliver Twist. Cass has told her as much. Cass doesn’t ever bring any of her friends when she spends the afternoon with Maia, but she tells Maia stories about them. Mayhem, who is always getting arrested because she picks fights with cops. Felony, who set her parents’ house on fire before she ran away from it. Earth, who’s been in and out of foster care and institutions so many times he can’t even remember who his parents are supposed to be anymore. Maia doesn’t comment on the names of Cass’s friends, doesn’t ask why all of them decided to be nouns instead of people. It seems obvious, anyway. A name like Felony was a disguise you could step into, along with your torn black clothes and steel-toed boots. Felony, Crowbar, Digger, Chainsaw, Mayhem. With names like those to live up to, you had to be tougher than you actually were until you actually were that tough. Tougher than parents, tougher than teachers, tougher than cops. Tougher than adults and norms and the riptide of your past. Tougher than all your ghosts. Cass herself dropped fey and prissy andra for the brevity of Cass, one syllable, sharp and short. Cass could be a thing that cuts or strikes. The hard edge of a stone. Cass is mean where Cassandra is feeble. Cassandra: always predicting trouble and too much of a girl to do anything about it. Cass? Nobody fucks with Cass.
NOW: LOS ANGELES
Later, Cass will think, I could have stopped it before it even started. She could have said No or I’m tired or We’re almost out of cash and all the way out of speed and let’s go rent an apartment by the beach and find dishwashing jobs and learn to surf, let’s get clean and stay away from trouble and forget about sad-eyed boys that don’t spell us any good. But she doesn’t know, then, to say any of those things. When they see the flyer stapled to a telephone pole, their hands still shaky with the comedown, their veins lonely and aching with want, when Maia says, “What do you think?” Cass says, “Sure.” The band is nobody they’ve heard of.
“Argo?” Maia says. “What kind of band name is that?”
“A bad one,” Cass says.
But surely at this show they will at least be able to forget the loom troubles for the space of some angry chords and sweat. Every day Cass wakes with dread in her throat, sure this will be the morning that Maia says, “I’m done,” and drives away forever, back to her piano and her shiny house and her normal life and her gleaming future. It’s not too late for Maia. She can grow out her hair, wash the dirt from her clothes, shake herself free of road dust and greasy diner food and gas-station coffee and one bad decision piling up on top of another like dominoes in a line waiting for the push that’ll bring the whole thing crashing down. Maia’s still radiant underneath the patina of sweat and beach sand; Cass, dirty from the heart outward, said goodbye to the bright future a long long time ago.
So now she says yes, yes to everything, yes to every time Maia wants to stop and buy apples they won’t eat or pee or brush her teeth in a roadside rest area or look through seaside-town gift shops, tilting snow globes one after the other, laughing at the whirl of white and glitter. Yes to scoring and yes to hotel rooms and yes to rock and roll, and who is Cass kidding, it’s not like she ever said no to sex or death or music before now. If Maia wants to get sweaty in California to a badly-named boy band, who is Cass to keep her from it. Maia, her eyes bright as a child’s, her chin tilted just so, her bleached hair falling in her face. Every time she sticks out her lower lip to blow the strands out of her eyes a thrill goes through Cass, as sharp as a scalpel and as bright. If Cass could memorize Maia, she would; she would hold every piece of this girl in her heart for the long winter the rest of her life will become when Maia leaves her and her world goes dark again.
They ask directions from a couple of sneering punks on the beach who sneer a little less when Cass rolls them a joint. “We’re going anyway,” says the boy, who’s next to bald save a dusting of pink-dyed fuzz and whose spiked dog collar is at odds with his baby face. Underneath the sulk he looks about twelve.
“You can come with us,” his girlfriend adds.
“Thanks,” Maia says drily, but her sarcasm is lost on Babyface and his paramour.
It’s a club the kids take them to, somewhere down in Venice Beach. Maia follows the punks’ car, so anxious not to lose them she’s almost riding their bumper. Neither Cass nor Maia knows a thing about LA, and they keep getting lost in the tangled maze of freeway. “I just want to find the ocean!” Cass had cried to a man in a gas station. “Pacific or Atlantic?” he’d smartassed back. “It’s rush hour, sweetheart, gonna take you awhile either way.”
But Babyface doesn’t lead them astray. The show is at a real club. More or less. Maybe less, Cass thinks, as she crosses the threshold, blinking at the sudden dark. At the back of the room she can make out a low-lit stage: a big wooden box painted black, but still. It’s something. There’s the usual grubby bar, sullen bartender who won’t ask questions as long as the girls pay cash, wallpaper of tattered posters gone yellow-grey with cigarette smoke.
“Classy.” After all their travel together Maia’s still delighted by dark places, the thrill of the true dive. Cass can see the old anew through Maia’s eyes and grins, too.
“Only the best for my girl,” she says, and she is grateful for the dark that hides her blush. Maia kisses her.
The club is peppered with a sparse crowd, Babyface and more of the same, and a few bored-looking older punks made haggard by drink and hard living. Someone here has drugs to unload, for sure, but for once she’s content to set aside the hanker. Her mood must be catching; Maia doesn’t say anything about it, either.
The first band is bad, the second worse. The club empties until it’s just Cass, Maia, a few stragglers. Cass is bored and tired, but they have nowhere to sleep and nowhere to go and neither of them is particularly eager to go back out into the night. There’s a long lag between the second band and Argo, the only name Cass remembers from the poster. Maia sidles up to the bar and charms a free beer out of the stony-faced bartender, a feat so improbable Cass wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it happen. The mood in the room is listless. The eldest of the punks, a decrepit creature near-mummified in fraying band patches and filthy black denim, has f
allen asleep standing up, leaning against the wall.
And then Argo comes onstage. They aren’t charismatic. Outside of the singer they aren’t even notably cute. But there’s something about the way they carry themselves, a surety, a grace, that makes Cass stand up straighter and pay attention. They move like they mean business, and they have a confidence about them that makes her wonder for a second if the room hasn’t filled with people when she wasn’t looking. Maia’s noticed it, too, looking up at them like a robin eyeing a spot in the earth she thinks might yield a worm.
When they start to play Cass could swear she’s heard this song before, but she hasn’t. It’s familiar and somehow not, polished smooth but with a rawness behind it that pulls her in. “Are they playing Pixies covers?” Maia murmurs in her ear, but Cass shakes her head.
The singer is skinny and tall, and his bleached hair falls in his face. He’s wearing a Misfits shirt and dirty jeans. His voice is the whisky-soaked croon of someone far older and bigger and filled up with sorrows, and it winnows its way into Cass’s hard heart in spite of herself. There is a charge in the air around him. Even from where she’s standing Cass can tell his eyes are an uncanny shade of blue, and when he looks up, once, from the microphone she feels sheared straight through by his intensity until she realizes he isn’t looking at her at all. He’s looking at Maia, singing as though he’s singing only for her. Out of all the bars in the world they could have come to, all the clubs in this nightmare sprawl of a city, they had to pick this one, this night, where Maia shines alone in the near-empty room like a beacon. You can practically see her fucking halo. The chorus of the song is a lilting refrain that rises clear and incongruous over a wailing thrash of guitar. “I came here to find you,” he sings, the anguished rasp suddenly gentle. Cass doesn’t have to look to know Maia’s mouth is hanging open, her eyes alight.
“Ah, shit,” Cass mutters to herself, reaching in her pocket for her tobacco. All this time she’s watched Maia, terrified, waiting for the moment when Maia gets tired of being dirty, tired of being cold, tired of sleeping on the ground and spending the last of her parents’ money, tired of ragged no-good Cass, the crazy bitch with bad dreams. But for all her vigilance it never occurred to her to keep her eye out for something like this. She wants to grab Maia’s hand, drag her out of the club and back to the car, take off in a screech of burning rubber like felons capering out of a fresh-robbed bank. But Maia’s unraveling, even as Cass hatches escapes, undone by this stupid sky-eyed boy with his stupid stupid guitar. Cass lights her cigarette, chews her thumb between drags, looks at the bartender, the floor, the filthy old punk who’s listing to one side with his jaw slack, anywhere but at Maia or at the stage. Now, she knows already, it’s too late to run for safety.
Maia can’t say what it is that stakes her through the heart. His eyes or his mouth or maybe even the music, which is like all the music Cass has given her but also more so. More something. More than just the promise of each chord. Something bigger, the way that Bach is made up of tiny pieces of order pieced together into a quilt of god far more immense than the sum of its parts. But this music is not god’s music, not anything to do with glory. She’s not so new to this world that she doesn’t recognize with a flicker of delight that he’s playing for her and her alone, that Cass is fading into the darkness at her side even as the face in front of her grows more illuminated with the light of their eyes on one another. She imagines a chorus of celestial voices, something ethereal carrying them toward the rafters. His white-blue eyes burn right through her, all the way to the bloody gristle of her heart.
After the show is as easy as breathing. She waits in the parking lot, Cass in tow, as the band loads their equipment into a rusty van with CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE CHRISTIAN ACADEMY painted in fading letters on the side. There’s also a drummer and a bassist, a rhymed couplet of torn jeans and patchy facial hair, but they’re of no interest to her. The singer’s name is Jason, and when he looks at her she can feel all the blood in her body rising to the surface of her skin. She tells him they have nowhere to stay.
“There’s a beach near here we can camp at,” he says. “All of us. If you want. Half an hour, maybe.” Cass is a wall of silence next to her.
“Sure,” Maia says. The couplet has finished loading amps and instruments into the back of their battered van, are climbing into their seats, smoking and talking softly among themselves. She looks straight into his eyes. Here she is, out in the world, free as anything. The Maia of six months ago would never in a million years have believed this Maia could exist.
Maia follows the red wink of the van’s taillights through the maze of city streets to the freeway north. Cass is quiet in the passenger seat, rummaging through their tapes and putting one in Maia’s never heard before. A woman’s voice fills the car, big and haunting, singing in a language Maia doesn’t recognize against a background of church bells and strings. The music is orchestral and spooky and full of longing, and outside the night is moving past them, filling up with stars as the city slips away and they fly further and further into the dark. Maia can’t think of what to say and so she’s silent, and the bells ring more and more majestically, tolling down a deep minor progression. To their left the silvered black mass of the ocean heaves liquid and humming against the shore. “Who is this?” Maia asks when the song ends and the tape clicks over to the other side.
“Dead Can Dance,” Cass says, looking out her window.
“It’s beautiful. What language is that?”
“She made it up.”
“Cass, is something wrong?”
Cass pulls her tobacco out of her pocket, rolls a cigarette, lights it. The windows are already open. She blows smoke toward the hills. “No,” she says. Ahead of them, the band’s van is pulling to the side of the road. Maia parks behind them, touches Cass’s shoulder as she reaches for the door handle.
“You’re not telling me the truth.”
“No.” Cass gets out of the car before Maia can say anything else.
They follow the boys through patchy scrub and beach grass to where the sand begins, carrying dirty blankets from the back of the van. The tide is out and there’s no moon. The boys range up and down the beach, gathering sticks, until they have enough to start a fire. Cass builds a little pyramid of dried grass and twigs, lights her construction, coaches it into flame. When it’s crackling merrily she adds a few pieces of driftwood. The boys arrange themselves around the fire, pull bottles from their pockets and bags. Cass offers a joint. Jason paces to where the breaking waves roll up to the beach, touches his fingers to the water and brings them to his mouth before loping back to join them. He sits next to Maia, close enough that the fabric of his jeans touches her shorts-bared skin. “Communion,” he says, explaining, Maia assumes, his brief foray to the water’s edge.
He offers her a sip of his pint bottle. “Communion,” she agrees, and he laughs. Maia tilts her head back, lets the whisky slide down her throat and turn to courage. Cass is trying to catch her eye; she dodges Cass’s unsubtle stare. The joint makes its way around the circle. Cass rolls another. He’s asking them questions but instead of answering she takes the bottle back, and so it’s Cass who tells him where they’re from and how they got here. Cass leaves out the bad parts, leaves in the punk rock and beach sleeping, makes them sound like warriors in the right kind of battle. Maia can’t help grinning at the sound of her own story made majestic. They’re revolutionaries, storming the gates, piling the paving stones into barricades. Sous les pavés, la plage.
“Runaways,” he says when she’s done, but he’s the first of them to bring up the word.
“Not really,” Cass says, and then, “I guess a little.” Maia can feel the length of his leg pressed against hers. After her third chug of bourbon she lets her weight shift into him and is rewarded by the touch of his hand at the small of her back, his fingers burning through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. It’s the drummer who tells Cass and Maia their own saddish story: boys from a little t
own on the peninsula, cemented by their love of Black Sabbath, Black Flag, and their high school football team’s penchant for beating them up each in turn before they gave up the fight and dropped out. Guitars passed down from older friends and older brothers, their first amp, their first drumkit, their first show at somebody’s kegger out in the woods. Jason listens to this detailing of his shared history without comment. Kicked out of their parents’ houses, sleepless nights curled up with forties in the backseats of cars. Et cetera. And now here they are, doing their best to make a name for themselves. Playing their first tour, basement shows down the coast, passing a hat around to a crowd of filthy punks who reward them mostly in singles and quarters. Cass and Maia have had the privilege of seeing their first real paying gig—fifty dollars, the barkeep handed them, on their way out the door—scored for them by a friend’s friend’s friend who’d moved to LA and almost made it big some years back.
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