The whole room was packed and too hot, but I saw some empty space up front so I headed there. It was a stage, where the preacher must have preached.
The last time I’d been in a church was last summer, when I went to this creepy Bible camp with Nicole. At the end of the week, a Ken-doll preacher showed up and lectured us about Hell, sweat stains blooming on his denim shirt. At the end, everyone went up to the stage, crying, as they let Jesus enter their hearts. Even Nicole went up there and cried. The only person who didn’t was me. I’d thought about it; it seemed nice to have somebody else permanently in my body, but in the end, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save myself from Hell. I wondered if this was the kind of church where people went to cry and be saved. It was hard to imagine it inhabited by anything other than darkness and fucked-up teenagers.
And then I saw the perfect thing: a giant stack of old Bibles. I picked one up. They must have gotten wet at some point because the paper was stuck together in ridges. I took my lighter from my pocket and held the flame to the pages. The fire licked up my hand so quick I almost dropped it, startled by the heat and flash of light. The pages floated away, dead and black. I threw it on the floor, lit another. And then Junk Dog and Ramon were doing it too, and we were laughing, ripping pages out and lighting them on fire and there were ashes in the air, flaking apart into a fine white powder like snow. Their eyes looked black in that light, all pupil and no whites, like something had taken hold of them. Something had taken hold of me too; my legs and arms pulsing in the heat and with the movement, and everything around us flickered in stop animation. Other people started doing it with us, for no reason, just to see what would happen, people I didn’t recognize and people I did, and there was so much fire that it felt like we were burning in Hell. I thought we might take the whole place down, I could practically hear the roaring of the flames and the screaming. We belonged there. It was home.
A FEW DAYS LATER
An article appeared in the local paper. It talked about the church. It said it had been the victim of a hate crime. It said they didn’t know if it was related to race or religion, but windows had been broken and Bibles burned.
A LETTER FROM THE FUTURE #2
For a while, I kept thinking about how the fictionalized version of myself should lose her virginity. Maybe I should write it just the way I lost mine. Maybe I should write it where she was so fucked up, she didn’t even know if she’d lost her virginity or not. Maybe I needed to make a statement, about teenage sexuality.
But then I decided, fuck that. My first credit card had way more of an impact on my life than losing my virginity. Just know that this version of Juliet was having sex. Bad, boring, teenage sex. The kind of sex not even worth writing about. Sex in party houses, sex in pools, sex on the beach, sex in cars. The places and details aren’t important, and neither are the boys. The important part was the act. Juliet had found a new way to lose herself, a new way to disconnect. A new way to shut off her brain.
DEAD MAN’S PARTY
The next time there was a big party, it was a costume party at the Heaven’s Gate house, that suicide cult with the Nikes and purple blankets. The house they’d died in was owned by the father of this shy Russian girl, Elena Orlovsky, who was a grade ahead of me at Carmel Heights. He’d rented to the cult and hadn’t been able to find a tenant since. I wasn’t friends with Elena but it didn’t matter because everyone was invited. It was the two-year anniversary of the deaths.
I figured my mom would let me go to the party if I told her where it was and I was right. She’d been a lot nicer ever since I switched to New Hope, now that I was getting better grades and hanging out with Holly instead of Nicole. She seemed excited, helping us go through the old costume box in her closet. We found old bell bottoms and a sequined vest so Holly could be Cher. I wore my mom’s old wedding dress, which fit perfectly once she pulled the seventies-style lacing as tight as it would go. Then she did our makeup—thick eyeliner for Holly, smudged shadow under my eyes and a lipstick trickle of blood at my mouth. I was a dead bride. I tangled up my hair and imagined I’d drowned.
We were supposed to get a ride with Eli, who hung out at the Palms and lived down the street, but at the last minute he said he was sick. We tried to find another ride but it was too late. Out of desperation, I asked my dad. I figured it was the kind of thing he could brag about to his friends: My daughter went to a party at the Heaven’s Gate house. He even said he’d give us the ten dollars to get in.
We got in the car, both of us in the back seat, embarrassed to be dropped off at a party by a dad. The house was in Laguna Lakes, fifteen minutes away, a neighborhood of windy dark roads and eucalyptus trees and millionaires, home to old money and aging celebrities. Sometimes we’d drive in our friend Sarah’s car, smoking weed and listening to music, not going anywhere except up and down those dark hills. Other than that, the only reason we had to be in Laguna was the house parties, like this one, that happened frequently in the mansions. Usually the parents were gone and unaware until they got back, but there were times, like now, when the parents knew about and even encouraged the parties, trying to buy their poor little rich kid some friends.
I asked my dad to let us out down the street. He wanted to see the house, but finally agreed to drop us off at the bottom of the driveway. Which was more like a street anyway—long, lined with trees, and pitch black. He made us take the flashlight he kept in the glove box for emergencies. I was secretly grateful. It was dark as shit.
We turned it on and illuminated the path in a pale tunnel, the beam dusty and gray from the thin wisps of fog that always got trapped in the hills. The entire driveway was filled with people and cars. My dad wouldn’t have seen the house anyway. I didn’t even know how many people were in that driveway, getting beer out of their trunks, yelling to their friends, fixing their costumes, kissing, laughing, on the stairs waiting in line. Holly and I got to the end of the line, smoking as we stood but not talking.
I didn’t know what I was expecting, especially considering I’d already seen so much footage of the house on TV. I knew there weren’t any fountains or creepy sculptures or white columns—nothing that made the house look spectacular or spooky. Still, it was surprising to realize this was just an ugly stucco house, the same as a million others in Southern California, only bigger, with a swimming pool and tennis court out back. Only this one had seen thirty-nine people die.
We gave our money to the person at the door, an older man not quite old enough to be Elena’s father. I waited for a feeling of doom to wash over me as we walked in, but I felt nothing. It was a little creepy because the walls and floor were covered in filmy plastic, and besides a couple strobe lights in the corners, it was totally dark. That was it. I could have been anywhere.
There wasn’t any incentive to be inside. We had nothing on us, no weed, no pills, nothing to drink. “Do you want to go outside?” I asked Holly, figuring we could at least see better out there.
“Sure,” she said. “But I want to find the bedrooms first.” We tried to find them—the bedrooms all over the news, plain and ugly, empty except for the bunk beds where the Heaven’s Gate members had laid down to die. But the strobe lights made me dizzy, and the room was so crowded it was hard to move, and when I finally saw a door that might lead to a bedroom, it was locked. We asked around until this girl from Carmel Heights told us the bedrooms were downstairs but cordoned off. We gave up and went outside.
Everyone in the front yard seemed wasted and too loud, a parody of drunk teens, saying shit about his dick and her ass and his mother’s pussy. There were people pissing in the corners, and I almost stepped in some vomit. “I don’t want to be around these idiots,” I yelled. “Let’s just keep walking,” Holly yelled back. We walked until we found a path through some bougainvillea bushes to the backyard.
Once we broke through, it was less crowded, almost peaceful, with small groups standing and smoking. The tennis-court lights were on, and the neon bounced off the smooth green grou
nd. Everyone in the backyard was just an outline, dark faces and shapes, the tops of heads and edges of limbs lined in silver. I saw a gazebo, some steps, wicker chairs. A bunch of people from the Palms were supposed to be there, but we had yet to see any of our friends.
Then I saw the Ryans, sitting a few feet from us on lounge chairs under the gazebo. In junior high, they’d been half nemeses, half friends. The less cute Ryan’s mom taught with my mom, and the cuter one lived down the street from Nicole, so the four of us all carpooled. Sometimes we traded CDs or notes, hung out together after school, but often they were downright mean to Nicole and me. They called Nicole “Jiggly Tits” and me “Pimple Girl,” and the two of us “SB,” short for “stupid bitches.” Sometimes they asked us if we liked nonexistent bands and if we said we weren’t sure but thought we did, they called us posers. Shit like that.
I hadn’t seen them since junior high. I hadn’t even thought about them. I knew they were going to private school now, but I had no idea they were still friends. For some reason, it surprised me to see them together, as though Nicole’s disappearance from my life meant they should have disappeared from each other’s too.
Ryan D, the cute one, waved, his palm pale in the refracted neon light. I thought they’d make fun of me, wandering around the party with just Holly and no beer. Then I remembered a year had passed, we were in high school now, no longer total assholes, and they were also alone. We walked over and I introduced Holly. They offered us some of their weed, topped with red rock opium. The shift between sobriety and the drugs was fast, a curtain falling, and the high was both intense and smooth. The noise from the party seemed to die down. The light from the tennis courts was painfully brilliant, a feeling of being too close to the stars. The four of us finished the bowl, lit cigarettes, and sat there, quiet in our contemplation or absence of thoughts. When we spoke again, of course it wasn’t to ask how we’d been doing, what we’d been thinking about, or anything real or meaningful. Instead we just talked about the drugs, which were good, and the party, which wasn’t as cool as we’d thought it would be, and the house, which was a disappointment. I told them I wanted to go in the bedrooms but they were locked. Ryan M pointed.
“They’re right there,” he said.
“Right where?”
“Behind you. Those windows. Those are them.”
And he was right. We walked up to the windows, which were blank black boxes until we got close enough to put our hands up around our faces to see in. I could make out the room, completely empty except for two sets of bare bunk beds, no blankets, no mattresses. I couldn’t believe it. It had been two years since the suicides, enough time that you’d think they’d have destroyed everything. But here were the same bunk beds I had seen in all the news footage, now silent and dark and right in front of me.
The windows were large and low to the ground, the kind that slid open side to side. I had experience with this type of window. So did Holly. They were the kind in her bedroom, the type we’d snuck into and out of dozens of times. I knew exactly how to open them from the outside: push the frame up and then over. And so I did that. And then I crawled on through.
The air in the room was hot and stale, like crawling into someone’s attic. I had thought the Orlovskys were living in the home, to make the place seem more hospitable. That was the rumor. But it felt like no one had been in the room for decades.
I wanted to feel something more. I wanted to feel something other than the feeling that comes from stale air and bare beds. I wanted the feel of the dead. But it was nothing more than a sad and empty room. I crawled into one of the beds, the pair in the corner, a corner I could almost remember seeing on TV. I put my feet where I thought I remembered the feet being. I put my head where I thought I remembered the head being. The metal slats pressed into my spine, cold and hard. I put my hands at my sides, the way I’d seen on TV, dead fingers peeking out from a purple shroud. I closed my eyes, there was a blanket over my head, there was a plastic bag, I was dying, I was dead. I was ready to get out of there. I was ready to take a ride on a comet that would deliver me to heaven.
CANYON TRIP
One night me, Eli, Junk Dog, Danny Smackball, and this girl Rachel were sitting on the bluffs in the canyon behind my house. We had split a quad of mushrooms because it was one of those weekends where nothing was going on, hardly anyone was at the Palms, and it seemed like everyone had disappeared. I didn’t know where Holly was.
The mushrooms took a while to kick in. They were a lot stronger than we’d first thought. The night seemed strange, spooky, the moon low and dull gold. In the branches of the Torrey pines that loomed over the sandstone bluffs, I saw things hiding, mostly animals—monkeys, pelicans, fanged bats with gnashing mouths, all tangled in tendrils of fog.
Torrey pine (Pinus torreyana).
The boys definitely felt it because Junk Dog couldn’t figure out how to light a cigarette, and Danny refused to stand up, and Eli was talking nonsense to things only he could see. But I couldn’t tell about Rachel. She was my age but no longer in school, had taken her GED to work full time. Her parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, real assholes that made her pay rent and buy her own food. She didn’t talk much in general so it wasn’t too strange that she wasn’t saying a whole lot.
At some point the two of us went to pee. The moon was bright enough that if we stayed on the pale sandstone we could see where we were going. As I sat there crouching, careful not to piss on my shoes, I saw something glint in the bushes.
I cut through the bushes and found myself in a clearing, mysteriously and oddly circular, like the brush had been burned away. I found the shiny thing, thinking it might be something special, a geode or talisman. But it was just an old beer can, so rusted it made no sense that I’d seen it flash at all. I picked it up. The logo was worn away, a pull tab, the kind that hadn’t existed for twenty or thirty years. Trash but also a relic. I crouched there, holding it, and then noticed there were more of them. A pile. Like someone had sat right here decades ago, getting fucked up in the canyon, same as us.
I heard Rachel coming through the bushes, quiet as a deer. She sat down next to me, smiling her big snaggle-toothed smile, pupils shiny black in the moonlight. “What are you doing?” she asked.
I showed her the beer can. She picked one up from the pile, shook it. It made noise. She tilted it over and out poured sand and then something else, something fuzzy and black. Spiders. But they sparkled in neon and so I knew they weren’t real. I reached out to pet them anyway. The difference between drug spiders and Biology-class skulls.
“We should hide from the boys,” she said. “Make them think something happened to us.”
I liked that idea. We sat there for a while, talking and making jokes, the kind of things you think are funny or clever only if you’re high, careful to whisper so the boys wouldn’t hear. But they didn’t come looking.
And then in the sky I saw something falling, golden and wild, and I couldn’t tell if it was a real shooting star or something hallucinated. I lay back and closed my eyes and a fountain of color rushed through my skull. I felt Rachel lay down next to me, her arm warm against mine. “What do you see?” I asked.
“I see,” she said carefully. “A rainbow. It’s all rainbow, like a waterfall. But also a horse.”
We told each other what we saw, and soon we started seeing the same thing, like telepathy, like mind control. The things became pornographic, moving patterns of people having sex—men with women, women with women, rabbits with bats—and they kept on moving in the same motion, all of creation in one act of creation, of copulation. Of magic. We laughed.
I thought I heard footsteps so I opened my eyes. I figured it was the boys. It wasn’t.
A man was in the clearing, standing a couple inches from my feet, torso long and lean in a button-up shirt, face lit in blue. He had long hair and a beard and big aviator glasses. He was smiling at me, but his face looked sad and lost. I had no idea who he was or why he was standing there b
ut I didn’t feel scared until I noticed he had no legs. He was dead. He was a ghost.
I didn’t mean to scream, but I screamed. Rachel screamed. She’d seen him too. A strange man, all hippied out, a dead guy. We leaped up, and we were running, and when we found the boys my heart was thudding and they were acting like they hadn’t noticed we were gone. They didn’t even believe us about the ghost.
HAUNTED
I thought he was just a part of the drugs until the dead man followed me home that night. I didn’t realize until a couple days later, when I was trying to do homework and felt someone reading over my shoulder. I thought about telling Rachel, but in the end I didn’t. He was mine. My vision, my ghost.
Over the next few weeks, sometimes I saw his shape out the corner of my eye, heard him talking to me. I never could understand what he was saying. I don’t know what he wanted. One morning I was putting on my makeup before school, and I watched him watching me in the mirror, his eyes filmy and cold under his glasses. I said hi to him.
He put his finger up to my temple, slid it down, like he couldn’t believe I was there.
Sometimes at night I saw him in my dreams, standing at the foot of the bed, sometimes hovering over my body. One night he climbed right on top of me, ran his hand up my leg and down my shorts. I felt his finger slide inside of me. It was cold. I liked it. I liked the weight of him, pressing down on my chest, as he fingerbanged me with his ghost hand.
RESEARCH
I walked to the library one day after school, telling Holly I wasn’t feeling well. I figured he’d died in the canyon, that the beer cans were his and he’d fallen or overdosed or had a heart attack. On a microfiche machine, I went through all the old issues of the Santa Bonita Gazette, from the late sixties and most of the seventies. It took hours. The librarian asked if I needed help, more than once, but I said no. I couldn’t think of a way to explain what I was looking for in a way that didn’t make me sound insane.
Juliet the Maniac Page 8