Drain You

by Beth Bloom

  “Alone?”

  “Like you care.”

  Nathan’s face was Morgan’s; I couldn’t deal.

  I wedged my way through the mob and down the dark hallway leading to Nigel Block’s music studio. The door was closed.

  “Libby,” I shouted. “Libby, I have to go, so I’m saying good-bye.” I opened the door a crack, keeping my eyes on the floor. “I’m coming in now….”

  But Nathan was wrong. The room was empty.

  I went out the side door onto the patio. The night air was a total relief. I passed a girl in a sombrero vomiting onto Stella’s Japanese rock garden. Empty red cups littered the ground. Halfway to the Lexus, discarded by the side of the house, I saw Libby’s ornamented top hat in the dirt. Behind an overgrowth of ivy I thought I spied a ripple of cream-colored fabric and so began walking quickly to the car, wanting to leave a tender moment alone. I fumbled at the door with my mother’s keys and, without turning my head, caught a glimpse of them.

  Libby was leaning with her whole body against the side of the house. Her long, bony arm was extended gracefully, the palm upturned like a poised ballerina. Stiles stood beside her, holding her palm to his mouth, kissing it. In the darkness the silver bangle bracelets shone as Stiles slid them up her forearm. Libby rolled her head around in ecstasy as his lips locked on her wrist. When the low moan of Libby’s voice changed from gasps of pleasure to higher sounds of almost-pain, I scrambled into the car. Once inside I glanced back again and tried to remember that she wanted him, that she didn’t need saving. Then Libby went limp in his arms, still with her delicate wrist to Stiles’s mouth. His body heaved; her eyes closed.

  I drove to Naomi’s in silence. I’d memorized the directions.

  My whole being guided me there.

  I walked down the curved path to the Sheetses’ residence. The front door was at street level, but the rest of the house behind it was lower, nestled into the side of the mountain. A separate walkway led down to a detached garage with a narrow staircase up to a private studio. Above it the view was incredible; I could see the whole city laid out, twinkling and calm. I exhaled deeply, draining my entire self, down to my toes, and finally felt a little peace.

  Naomi looked tired when she opened the door. I imagined my appearance. Somewhere between hot mess and Sunset street urchin.

  She didn’t say hello, just asked, “Where’d you get that feather headdress?”

  My head had been numb for so long I’d forgotten that I was still wearing the damn thing. I slid it off, untangling my hair, and held it out for her. My forehead throbbed, my head itched.

  “You want it?” I said. “It’s yours.”

  Naomi took it, and when she held out her arm, gesturing for me to come in, the warm, dark house spread before me like an open invitation.

  4.

  SLEEPOVER

  Naomi didn’t offer the grand tour and I didn’t ask for it, just tried to sneak in glances when she wasn’t looking. The house was classic canyons—rustic, woodsy with a big stone fireplace and cabin motif—but with flourishes of exotic travel. Clay pots painted in rich reds, warm oranges, and yellows; ritual masks made of straw and animal hair; ethnic musical instruments. I’d seen worse replicas in the Adventureland section of Disneyland. None of the furniture matched. Every piece of art functioned in a totally clashing color scheme. My mother would’ve had a heart attack.

  My eyes went everywhere at once. I felt like I was in an expensive, private chalet retreat in the Sudan. I half expected Naomi to launch into a wistful tale about her expeditions with Mowgli and Simba, but she just lounged back on a mudcloth-covered settee, twirling her hair. This was all just the same old, same old for her. In this way I saw Naomi as the jungle princess version of Libby, relishing rooibos tea rather than Asti sparkling wine, preferring sitars to Fenders, benefits over house parties; accepting the extraordinary as the ordinary.

  Suddenly I realized: There was no TV in the living room. Whoa. Bold.

  “Are your parents, like, explorers?” It wasn’t the first idiotic thing I’d said all night.

  “Not even. They teach at UCLA. My father’s an art historian, and my mother is an ethnomusicologist.” That all seemed awesome, so I didn’t know why she rolled her eyes and stared at her nails.

  “Are you kidding?”

  My mother, Bonnie, was a real estate agent; my father, Elliott, a freelance food critic for the L.A. Times and a full-time trust-fund inheritor, whose only degree was the art of time wastage.

  “They met in South America on a seminar tour. Daniel and Charlotte.”

  Naomi grabbed a picture from the mantel and tossed it in my lap. They were stuffy, sure, but like famously stuffy. In the photograph Daniel had on tortoiseshell glasses and a cashmere turtleneck under a beige safari jacket—think Gregory Peck as Indiana Jones—and Charlotte looked like Sissy Spacek in a dashiki.

  “James kind of looks like your father. I mean, from what I could see of him that night at the video store.” It seemed unassuming enough, but I couldn’t tell how it sounded to her.

  She stared at the picture, her back to me. “I guess so.” Then she turned around and walked past me. “Let’s go downstairs.”

  Downstairs was just as rustic and woodsy, with built-in shelves lined with antique books and small statues and trinkets. Naomi opened a door and led me into her room, which was full of all the things you’d ever dream possible for the life of a Topanga Canyon horse girl: riding crops, multicolored prize ribbons, framed photos of Naomi on horseback leaping over obstacles, horse figurines stuck in the poses of numerous trots and gaits. Scattered in the far corner was evidence of other part-time pastimes: a tennis racket, a cello case covered in glittery stickers, crochet hooks hanging on half-finished scarves attached to balls of rainbow yarn, sketch pads and tracing paper, karate blocks, some tarot cards. I would’ve felt an almost perfect kinship with Naomi and her bedroom—just two messy ladies holed up with our respective precious junk—but there was one major difference: Her trash was actually useful. And her Tori Amos poster wasn’t peeling off the wall. And she had trophies, loads of them, for things like cross-country running and fencing and competitive tofu cook-offs. They gave trophies for tofu cook-offs, and Naomi was winning them.

  I tried to keep telling myself that she had zero friends, was a social outcast, and had sacrificed every stupid wonderful high school experience for a chaotic collection of props that made her seem well-rounded. But it didn’t work, and I had to be honest: This girl was rad. I liked her. My life was now divided between every day before and up to last Wednesday—starting at that moment on the road outside the video store—and each day since.

  We set up on her futon and picked out Jurassic Park and dimmed the lights. Through the movie I noticed Naomi softening in small ways: She laughed easier, her eyebrows pressed together less, her vibe mellowed. I didn’t have to work at bonding with her; it came naturally. And I wasn’t using her to get to James—though he was always vaguely on my mind, even during the suspenseful T. rex chase scene climax—I wanted to be closer to both of them equally. Or semi-equally.

  The last swells of the movie’s theme song coincided with the clock turning two. Naomi was yawning. But my earlier nap and those Diet Cokes had me feeling wired even after a high-drama night like tonight. And I was in the mood to roam. Snoop. Whatever.

  “Just grab anything out of that drawer if you want something to sleep in,” she said, stretching and yawning again, signaling the end of our hang-out. “I’m gonna do bathroom stuff.”

  Then she disappeared down the hall.

  I stood up and went out into the hallway, passing by a door on my left that gurgled with the sound of water splashing into a sink. I leaned closer and heard Naomi brushing her teeth and humming the Jurassic Park score. I said her name, loudly. No response. She couldn’t hear me.

  I stepped farther down the hall, toward a door that was halfway cracked. I gently pushed on it, and it swung open silently. It was another bedroom, and han
ging above the bed was a giant subway-size poster of a 1970s William Claxton photograph that I recognized from my father’s LACMA members’ calendar. I’d found it in less than thirty seconds: James’s room.

  The bookshelf spilled over with classics and comics and a hundred plays. There were wooden crates of jazz and soul records against one wall, all dusty, and on top sat an even dustier seventies turntable. Above a small desk was another huge vintage poster, this one of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton having drinks on a rooftop in Annie Hall. Postcards of Edward Hopper paintings and Groucho Marx were arranged alongside it. Everywhere were more clues, more details to absorb: literary quotes scribbled on notecards thumbtacked to a cork bulletin board, cups filled with pens and scissors, an old typewriter, a bouncy ball, a squishy stress ball, a mason jar of loose change.

  My eyes focused on a framed picture of James on a beach, lying in the sun, holding a paperback. I held it closer to my face. The boy in the picture was James, but wasn’t. His hair was different, a little darker and a little shorter. His skin was tanner, and his face wasn’t as sculpted around the cheekbones and jawline. His eyes weren’t the same strange gray. This James wore glasses with black rims, had freckles on his face and arms and a wider smile. He was more like Morgan, or Nathan: definitely cute but definitely no grunge Calvin Klein model.

  I set the picture down and sat on his bed. Had I imagined him some way he wasn’t? I tried to remember his face from last night, but I couldn’t picture it and got distracted by a pair of beat-up, drawn-on, old Converses lying by the side of the bed. The canvas on both shoes was threadbare by the big toe. I slipped my feet inside, wanting an immediate connection with his things, his body.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Naomi was standing in the doorway.

  I kicked off the shoes, startled, and stood up. “Naomi,” I said.

  She turned around and stalked down the hallway to her room, where I followed with my shoulders slumped.

  “You can’t go in there. I can’t even go in there, okay?”

  The smell of toothpaste on her breath made me go blank.

  “Okay, Quinn?”

  But I wanted to be in there.

  “Yeah, of course. I’m, like, the sorriest, I swear. I’m having the best time. I really am.”

  Naomi nodded and shut off the light and got into bed. I crawled into the sleeping bag she’d laid out for me on the floor. We lay quietly in the darkness for a few minutes, and I listened to her steady breathing.

  “Sorry I didn’t come to the party tonight. You sounded like you could’ve used some backup,” Naomi said.

  “No, I needed a forklift. And a harpoon gun. And a buffet table. But your company would’ve been cool.”

  “Next time I’ll come. Unless your boyfriend doesn’t want a third wheel.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend!” I said, sitting up so fast I hit my head on the corner of the dresser. I lay down again, embarrassed and dizzy. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Does he know that? Because you might want to tell him.”

  “I’m getting around to it.”

  We were silent for a while, and then Naomi stirred in her sheets and said my name: “Quinn?” She paused, and the pause was heavier than her asking, “Are you afraid of dying?”

  “Are you about to kill me?” I said. It was a joke, but something about Naomi had scared me ever since I saw her that night outside Video Journeys.

  “Probably not.” I could tell she was smiling.

  I started to smile too until a flash of Libby pressed up against her house, moaning, slipped into my head and stuck there.

  “So…” Naomi hesitated, and I remembered the question.

  “No,” I told her. “I’m not afraid of dying. What’s the point?”

  “Good. That’s good.” It wasn’t her brother’s “good,” but it made me feel better. She rolled over, and the blanket mountain became a smooth quilt river. Less than five minutes later, at the start of a snore and the sound of a car pulling up, I snuck up the stairs.

  Through the living room window I saw him. James was walking down to the Sheetses’ detached garage. I made for the front door, but by the time I’d undone the locks and gotten outside, he was gone. It was silent. The wind gently stirred my hair, filling my nose with the scent of hydrangeas and basil plants. This place was sensory overload inside and out.

  I went down the dirt steps and then I saw him, leaning up against the garage, holding his face in one hand.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He looked up. He looked sort of sad. “What are you doing here?”

  “Stalking you.” I smiled. He didn’t. “I was just hanging out with Naomi.”

  He nodded. “Oh.”

  “You didn’t come. To the party. I wore a feather headdress.”

  “Does that count as a hat?”

  “Yes. It’s a Native American’s hat. They wore them all the time when they settled the West.”

  I looked out at the Los Angeles lights, glittering, spread out beneath us. I could see downtown and the 101 curving up into the Valley.

  “I would’ve liked to have seen you in that,” he said.

  “Well, I gave it to your sister. She’s going to add it to your natural history museum in the living room.”

  His eyebrows touched together with worry. “Where’s she now?”

  “Passed out. I bored her to sleep with anecdotes of my dull evening,” I said. I looked up the stairs to the room above the garage. “What’s going on up there?”

  “It’s two thirty. Don’t you want to go to sleep?”

  “You always think you know what time it is. And I’m not sleepy,” I said, because it was true. I couldn’t sleep: adrenaline, Diet Coke, and curiosity coursed through me.

  “Come up to my room then.”

  He led the way up the narrow staircase. If he was leading me to his room, then whose stinky Converses had I slipped my feet into less than an hour ago?

  As we reached the doorway he opened the door, then abruptly stopped, fumbling for the light switch inside, and I bumped into him from behind. He turned around and at first was smiling, but then his face went cold. He started backing away, his eyes wide, frozen, full of dread, until he was up against the far wall.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “What happened to you?” He pointed at the stain on my shirt.

  “This? Nothing, just some jerks spilled their wine on me.”

  “What jerks?” James was still frozen.

  “I don’t know. Guys who used to go to my school. Nobody important.” I was backpedaling, trying to remember the moment.

  Then he turned his nose down into his shoulder. He breathed in the cotton. “You have to take your shirt off,” he said, closing his eyes.

  “What?” I touched the tank top. “Why?” I sniffed at the stain, but it smelled like nothing. It smelled like clothes. Maybe a hint of chlorine.

  Still holding his nose into his shoulder, James bent over and grabbed a blue wadded-up ball of fabric off the floor and tossed it at me. “Here. You have to take your shirt off,” he repeated.

  I didn’t understand what was happening, and then what was happening was I was taking my shirt off, even forgetting to turn around to cover myself. This courtship was retarded, backward, moving in zigzags instead of a straight line. We hadn’t ever kissed, or hugged, or even held hands; five minutes of knee touching was the extent of our intimacy so far. But now here I was in his bedroom, stripping, topless, past two in the morning, getting scolded for having a stain on my tank top.

  Then I was wearing his blue T-shirt and smoothing it out. It was too big and so soft. I said, “Okay, done.”

  James opened his eyes cautiously, then relaxed.

  I stepped to the door and dropped my shirt off the stairs. It landed on a dark pile of dirt.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m so
rry. For real.” He came and wrapped his arms around me, his cheek against my dirty hair.

  He sighed. “That was a close one, though.”

  “Was it?” I didn’t get it. Mega clean freak?

  “I know that wasn’t normal.”

  “I don’t care about normal,” I said, looking around the room for the first time. You couldn’t technically call it a bedroom, because there was no bed. There wasn’t really any furniture at all except for a small desk covered in clothes, trash, Spin magazines, and a broken Walkman with headphones. A crooked lamp stood in one corner, one of the bulbs burned out. There was a black electric guitar—missing most of its strings—propped up against a tiny amp. A big faded rug covered most of the floor. An old brown mini-fridge huddled against another wall, where a pile of books was stacked on top. Okay, so James definitely wasn’t a clean freak. I knew that he didn’t live here year-round, I knew he was away at school most of the time, so he probably kept his important possessions and other furniture there, but still—not a single photo or poster on the walls?

  I stared at the bareness, wondering. Something was so wrong, but I couldn’t place it. The walls were off-white and old-looking and totally barren, but that wasn’t the problem. I wobbled a bit and it hit me: no windows. There were no windows anywhere. It was a face without eyebrows, too weird.

  “Sorry there’s nowhere to sit. I’m not here often.”

  “Where do you sleep?” I had to know where I would sleep if I slept over. If I slept over tonight, for instance.

  “On the floor, in the walk-in.” He pointed to a sliding closet door over on the far wall. “I like confined spaces when I sleep. Creature comforts.”

  I sat down on the rug and patted the spot in front of me. James sat too, stretching his long, thin legs out. He messed with his hair, and then he reached around me and tucked in the tag of his blue shirt, under the neck. I felt his touch, and it was awesome.

  “Thanks for coming over,” he said.

  “Thanks for…inviting me?”