“No!” Mindy replied, shouting to be heard over the music, which had cranked up another level of THX.
Lucia gave her the finger. “This many!” Then she laughed like she’d been telling the joke to a split personality.
“That’s so funny, I would hate to disrespect it by laughing.”
“C’mon, I rescued us a pizza. I don’t think it has any olives on it. It’d better not!”
“Lucia, can I talk to you? Alone?”
Lucia took Mindy’s arm, nearly fumbling the pizza box before Mindy steadied it for her. “Come along, come along, let’s get me alone.”
CHAPTER 6
They swam upstream against the tide of partygoers who smelled pizza like blood in the water. Bodies juddered against them like moving speed bumps. Mindy was jostled and rocked, nearly carried away with the mob, and only Lucia’s grip on her hand kept her from disappearing downstream. She felt the edge of a hand skating over her breast. Impossible to tell if it was deliberate or accidental. She looked around for the culprit, but in the dark and the music and the pounding lights there were more masks than faces.
Lucia pulled her through a door, seemingly chosen at random, and Mindy nearly fell. They weren’t on level ground anymore but on a staircase enclosed by solid concrete walls. The stairs, made up of faded cement, shot down a good thirty feet, so far that the light from the bulb over the door became just a lazy stirring at dark outlines near the bottom.
Lucia steadied her, then as one they started down the steps, the music fading behind them, becoming a dull cacophony filtered through the walls and then trapped between the concrete. It now sounded slowed down, drawn out, strangely organic, like they were in the belly of the beast hearing the workings of its organs. Mindy followed Lucia down into the dark, grateful for the rest.
Something hissed over her shoulder. Mindy jumped and dropped the pizza box before seeing it was the light bulb Lucia had turned on at the bottom of the steps. It came on flickering before the light solidified. There was no basement, just a few feet of floor that ran headlong into a door that took up the entire wall. A big, metal, and padlocked door. It reminded Mindy of the door to the cooler at her restaurant. Except for the padlock.
Lucia picked up the pizza box, turning it over, and opened the top to reveal the Freddy Krueger of pizzas. But it was still edible. She took a piece and playfully fed it to Mindy, like a bride smearing her groom with cake at their wedding. The casual thought set off a landmine in Mindy’s head. Thoughts of Lucia were a minefield now. Anything was likely to set off an explosion in her heart.
“You look nice,” Mindy said helplessly, sitting on the last cold concrete step with her best friend.
Lucia laughed through a mouthful of feta cheese. “I look like a Russian stripper. I’m not built for classy. Now you—if you shopped anywhere other than Goodwill, you would look nice.” She swallowed, went for another bite, didn’t. Frowned instead. “Why don’t you ever wear something that shows off your legs? Do you have hideous scars or something? Prison tattoos from juvie hall, even?”
Mindy rolled up one of her pant legs. And she’d even shaved.
Lucia pouted. “No butterfly tattoo on your ankle? Guess that wild-child reputation of yours is all bullshit.”
Mindy smiled ruefully. It was so easy sometimes. Sometimes she could almost resent how easy Lucia made it. She ate her deformed pizza slice and let the bass upstairs filter down the cement and settle into her bones. Lucia, buzzed, maybe even a little high, collected spaghetti strands of stretching cheese with her manicured nails when they tried to escape her slice and licked them up. Offered one to Mindy, who acted more grossed-out than she was.
“I’m gonna take you upstairs and I’m gonna dance with you.” Lucia picked pepperoni off her pizza to eat individually. “People just look hotter dancing with me, it’s a fact. We’ll find you a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Or a vibrator.”
“Actually, could we just go home?”
“Go home?” Lucia sneered a little saying it, like it was something she’d translated for French class.
“Yeah. We’ve had some laughs, made some new friends, had some pizza. Once we’re finished, how about I take you home?”
“What? No! The party’s just started! Sun hasn’t even set!”
“Yeah, but it’s late, and we have school tomorrow, and you’re drunk.”
“No I’m not,” Lucia replied, smiling guiltily.
“You’re drunk,” Mindy insisted, her voice taking on a teasing lilt almost against her will, “so I will drive you home and get you into bed so you can sleep it off. Okay? Before something bad happens?”
“What’s gonna bad happen?” Lucia demanded, her mouth briefly full of marbles. She rolled her eyes at herself and took a huge bite of crust.
“Police? Police could come.” Mindy followed suit with Lucia’s gaffe. “Police find underage drinking. Bad.”
“Yes, they’re going to arrest the whole football team. Get real. Get real, Mindy. Stay here and have fun with me.”
Mindy brushed her greasy fingers on her pants. She’d lost her appetite. “I’m in my work clothes. I can’t, you know, wreck ’em.”
“So take ’em off. What are you wearing under that monkey suit, anyway?” Lucia got a finger in the collar of Mindy’s shirt and pulled it open, looking in at Mindy’s camisole. “Not bad.”
She swung away before Mindy could push her, laughing, against and the railing.
“I’m serious, El. I really have a bad feeling about this and I really wanna go and you should come with me. Just come with me, Lucia. We can watch a horror movie or a Britney Spears documentary, whatever you want. Just at home. Let’s just go home.”
Lucia leaned forward. Wavering. Her smile a little lost on her face. “You want me all to yourself.”
Mindy was about to say no—figure out how much of that was a lie—when something hit the basement door. The other side of the door.
They looked at the dull metal, scuffed and scratched in the bare bulb’s harsh light.
“What was that?” Mindy asked, her own voice louder than the impact had been. Reassuring. The noise had been so sudden; now its absence lingered, filling the air with electricity.
Lucia burst out giggling. “Coach’s sex slave! Didn’t I tell you about him? We’ve all met him, the one day a month Bakula lets ’im out for a haircut.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Some poor QB wannabe who was too cute for his own good! He wears these tight little leather shorts and his nipples are pierced; taught me how to give a blowjob.”
“It’s not funny!” Mindy insisted, hating how Lucia was taking advantage of her bad vibe to scare her. She wrapped her arms around herself and Lucia laughed, a little ruefully, taking Mindy’s hand and shaking it a little in apology.
“It’s just the house. It’s an old fucking house. Like, it has a furnace and that makes noise?” Lucia shrugged in confusion. “No one’s in there. I’ll prove it.”
She raised her hand, fingers curled into a fist.
“Lucia, don’t!”
Lucia rolled her eyes at her. She tapped out a little pattern. “Shave and a haircut—my tits.” Then she waited a long moment, her hand cupped to her ear.
The door was silent and insoluble; the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mindy stared at it, seeing her foggy reflection in the old metal, and thought that it was just a door. Just a stupid door. Probably nothing on the other side but Bakula’s man-cave.
“Two bits,” she said at last.
“Hmm?”
“It’s 'shave and a haircut—two bits.’ Like, you pay two bits for the shave and the haircut.”
“What’s two bits, like, Canadian money? It’s my tits, because it’s a guy. He’s getting a haircut and his chest shaved. Why would a guy pay someone to shave his face? What, is it a kinky thing?”
The hum of the light bulb suddenly coarsened, hissed, clawed at their ears. In half a second, the bulb popped with a flash that left
lingering colors in the new darkness—little creatures fluttering in front of Mindy’s face. It’d burnt out.
“That’s not funny,” Lucia said.
“Up the stairs. We’ll just—work our way back, one step at a time.”
Lucia said nothing, but when Mindy grabbed her hand, Lucia squeezed it. They took a step backward up the first stair. They kept facing the darkness like it was a rabid dog, and it grew stronger as they went up another step, another, another, fumbling with cold concrete ledges that were never as wide as they seemed they should be.
Lucia’s thumb rubbed at Mindy’s knuckles. They’d gone up eight steps. The dark was thick now, thick as honey. Anything could be in there. The door could’ve opened, even. Mindy imagined someone at the foot of the stairs, looking up. He’d be able to see them, the working light bulb at their backs, but they wouldn’t be able to see him.
Mindy blinked. Her eyelids slid closed and open, like they did a million times a day, and it was like he had jumped forward while her eyes were shut, then back when they opened again. So she only caught his face as it was sinking back into the dark.
It’s your imagination. She muttered it to herself. Just your imagination, your imagination—“Did you see that?” she asked out loud, and Lucia crushed her hand, startled by her voice.
“What?”
“I saw someone down there. He’s watching us.”
“Shut up.”
“Didn’t you see him?”
Lucia growled. Outright growled. “This is retarded, okay? You keep looking down, I’m gonna look up, and I’m gonna walk us right outta here, okay?”
“Lucia…”
Lucia looked at her. Really looked at her. “Just a fucking light bulb,” she said, and turned to look up the stairs.
She screamed.
Mindy screamed, the sound shooting out of Lucia and into her, and she nearly lost her balance as she backed up the stairs, then fell on her ass, hitting a cement edge as cold and hard as a straight razor. Lucia pulled at her arm, and finally she looked away from the blown light bulb to see Quentin at the head of the stairs, a longneck in his dangling hand.
Lucia appeared to bite down on her Marion Crane scream. “You fucking asshole! Don’t sneak up on people!”
“Sorry. That was about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
While Mindy gathered herself, Lucia stared at him like they were two gunslingers about to draw. “It’s not funny! Mindy was really scared! She saw something!”
“I wasn’t scared, I was cautious.”
Quentin was already sliding his phone out of his pocket. He turned the bright screen on full blast and aimed it down the stairs.
Nothing but a closed door and a half-eaten box of pizza.
“I think it has anchovies on it,” he said, reaching out to tickle Lucia as she climbed to him. “Spooky!”
“Fucking asshole,” she repeated under her breath. “You wanna go get it?”
“No, I’m busy. The bonfire’s about to start. You coming?”
“Yeah. Sure. Just let me get a beer first.”
“Alright. I’ll be looking for you.” And Quentin disappeared through the door, letting in the sound of a milling crowd and a new track on the party mix. Mindy recognized it, just barely. A remix of an old band called Bauhaus. “Bela Legosi’s Dead.”
With the house emptying out, the scratchy goth noise stirred and stuttered with authority. It drove them out with the stream of people taking shelter from the noise out in the night air where the faded music pulsed and throbbed almost sexually. Mindy was buffeted by the crowd into Billy Carlyle, who held a big cardboard box full of hardcovers in his meaty hands.
“Take two,” he said, canting the open-topped box their way.
“And call you in the morning?” Mindy quipped as Lucia obediently took two copies.
“What?” He hadn’t heard her over the music.
“Doctor joke.”
“What?” Then, not caring, he moved along to hand out more copies of the book.
Lucia handed her one. They were both copies of the same book: Guilty As Charged: How A High School Football Coach Made A Fiefdom Out Of A Small West Texas Town by Benson Mears.
“‘Fiefdom’—there’s a word you don’t see in titles very often,” Lucia thought out loud. “Except maybe for Daniel Craig movies.”
Mindy paged through the book. She couldn’t speak to its quality, but its length was evident. “So why are we getting books? Is that just how men flirt now?”
“You would love that.”
“Yes, I would. I’d have to recommit to straightness.” As Mindy sniffed the new-book smell, Lucia put an arm around her waist and guided her the rest of the way out to the back patio. “You remember three years back, that newspaper guy went around town asking about our football program?”
“Must not’ve talked to me—wait, no, I remember getting a permission slip asking if it was okay to interview me around my English teacher.”
“Yeah, that was this guy.” Lucia held up the back cover, tapping the author’s photo. “He was supposed to be writing, you know, about how we won at State and brought home two dozen rings. Instead, he did a hatchet-job. He went in on the town’s renaming, the new stadium…”
“I never heard of it.”
“Yeah, the Town Council’s putting their head in the sand, but to everyone else—I mean, he said Coach Bakula had sex with an eighteen-year-old at his old job in Dakota.”
Mindy’s eyebrows darted up. She didn’t know what to say. “I was born in Dakota.” Probably not that.
“Yeah, well, it’s total muckraking bullshit. Nowadays the girl said it never happened, public hysteria or something, but you think this douche-canoe Mears puts that in his book?”
“Yes?” Mindy tried.
“No! Keep up, Minz. That prick fucked us over. Made us look like a bunch of… Lifetime movie…” Lucia flicked a middle finger at the air. “Who do I hate? Him, Satan, Adolf Hitler, Justin Bieber, that janitor who keeps telling me my shorts are too short, and Justin Bieber. Those five people. I have a literal handful of people I hate, and Benson Mears makes the list.”
“Well, don’t you hate, like, Stalin?”
“Yeah, obviously, but he’s friends with Hitler, so I hate him automatically. Keep up. If I hate someone, my hate extends to people who refuse to disassociate themselves from my enemy, even if I’ve tweeted about it. I mean, I just can’t with Selena Gomez anymore. Can. Not.”
“You hate Selena Gomez just because she dated Hitler?”
They came out to the backyard, where the forest had been cleared back for maybe a hundred yards, making room for not only a standing swimming pool but a barbecue pit. Now, the gray pit only held a Jenga tower of logs, twenty feet tall and festooned with paper dolls like a Bizarro World Christmas tree. Squinting, Mindy saw that all the dolls were cutouts of Benson Mears from magazines and newspapers. “Okay, so we’re making our own Wicker Man movie. No bear suits, so we’re off to a good start…”
Lucia shushed her. Quentin was in front of the pyre, wearing his letterman jacket and holding a torch. The torchlight turned him red.
“Kill the music!” he shouted up to the house, and a moment later it went dead. A moment after that, the music from stereos down on the beach died as well. The new silence was like going deaf. You knew you should hear something, but there was nothing to hear.
“Three years ago!” Quentin started in a loud, team captain voice. “This town opened its doors to a man. We let him ask us questions and get to know us because we thought he was our friend. And that all he wanted was to tell people a little about our nice town. But that isn’t what Benson Mears wanted. It isn’t what he wanted at all. He wanted to humiliate us. He wanted to take our power. And most of all, he wanted to hurt the Coach!”
There was a rabidness to the crowd as he spoke—feet shuffling, weight shifting from side to side, jaws and fists clenching. Mindy felt it on all sides. Even Lucia stared with an anger so Mindy ba
rely recognized in her.
“The Coach made this town great. He gave us something to be proud. Sugar Bowl three times, championships twice. He made all of you winners. He made the Dragons your defenders. And this fucker—Benson Mears—he wants to take all that away. With his lies. With his bullshit. So you enjoy the party. You drink your beer and you dance and you do whatever. That’s what you’re here for. But don’t you forget all the Coach has done for us, and let’s not let Benson Mears forget how the Dragons feel about ’im!”
Cheers exploded the night like fireworks as he touched the torch to the pyre. It went up fast, kerosene taking the flame and growing it into a bonfire so hot and so bright it hurt Mindy to look at it. She saw the Dragons around the fire, featureless shapes in their lettermans and jerseys. Copies of the Mears book had been passed out to everyone, and all at once, they threw them into the fire.
Book spines cracked like bone, lamination hissed, covers burst into sparks that bum-rushed the crowd in little stinging clusters. Pages curled and came loose, flying up as if trying to escape before they curled up into dead, ashen bugs.
The crowd pressed in, throwing books at the fire like stones at a martyr. Mindy was pushed forward by the crowd. She dug her heels in, letting them jostle her, clutching her copy to her chest as the mob swarmed by her. Lucia flowed in front of her like a shadow, not fully caught by the mob but stirred by the wake of its passage.
“Lucia, no.”
Lucia turned around, her copy looking leaden around limp fingers. “Don’t embarrass me.”
“Don’t embarrass me. I’m not burning a book.”
“Mindy, this guy—”
“No.”
Either Mindy meant that much to her or Lucia wasn’t crazy about the idea in the first place. Radiating frustration in all directions, she relented and tossed the book to the ground, where a passing foot kicked it to the outskirts of the crowd.
“Happy?”
Mindy was not, even in the slightest. She grabbed Lucia’s hand and pulled, not caring if she ripped her arm out of the socket. Lucia, barely complaining, trailed her as she pushed her way through the glow of the bonfire and the people standing around like statues entranced by it. Until they were in the woods alongside the house, the trees sheltering them from the noise and the light. The darkness was cool and calming, and the lapping of the lake water below was easy to hold onto, like a pulse.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 8