Fade Into You

by Nikki Darling

  In the back of the theater I see Joey Kandarian walk by, he sees me and waves. I turn around and lean forward, start to stretch, do my cherry pickers, I look between my legs and he’s gone. I sigh and get back up.

  “Don’t stop! Keep picking!” shouts the Deaver. “It’s just you today, Darling, you’re singing the big one.”

  “What?” I ask, looking around.

  “No takers. Just your little string-bean torso and big ole alto, I can even sort of remember what it sounds like, can’t you?” she asks our ensemble filing in, bored, and dropping bags into the front row. No one answers because mostly know one cares and let’s be honest, I’m a stranger here, a ghost. “Let’s break. Nikki, run around the building and get ready. Everyone else, water, stretch, wait for a tap on the shoulder, I’m picking a guy at random. We’re singing Jesus Christ Superstar today. We need a Carl Anderson, who will be our Carl Anderson today? Go!” She looks at me, “You’re wearing sneakers, go!”

  I jump off stage and push the black emergency-exit door into the bright outdoors. Kids from vocal are under the stage beams smoking and chatting. I lift up my feet and move. It feels good, my body in motion. I try to think about the last time I did something nice for it, other than give it water and occasional sleep.

  I run past the dance hall, see the ballerinas and modern dancers, leaping and stretching, rising like slim, lithe cat toys, the kind tied to a string that snap back into place. Elegant ribbons cutting through the air. I take in a great swell of lung breath and feel it expand my chest, my ribs opening and closing, tiny rib-bone fingers playing here’s-the-church, here’s-the-steeple, giving and pulling inside, pulling and stretching. When I was a child, my mother was a runner. She’d wake up every morning before the sun and leave to sprint around the Rose Bowl, three miles all the way around, and watch the sun rise on the drive back home. I’d wait to hear the door open and shut, sigh, and fall asleep again, safe, knowing she had returned. When I was ten she invited me to join her and it was the thing I most enjoyed. The way the other runners ran alongside us, and the crunching of the oak leaves beneath our feet. The way the only thing you could hear was the sound of your own breath, pressing up through your chest, and in that winter, the first and last we ran, you could even see it puff before you, just a split second, before you left it behind. I turn toward the field, where the college students run and jump on the track, the pounding of my feet keeping time. I run between them, the grass on the lawn is wet and as my feet come down small bits of damp earth and dust stick to the moist sides of my shoes. I shake my neck from side to side and hop off the field around the bottom of the Republic of Smokey. I can see science students, not much older than myself, freshmen at most, filing in. I dart between them and start heading back toward the theatre.

  “Nicole Darling,” calls a man’s voice. I stop in place. “Ms. Darling.” It’s Mr. Gaines, the principal. I turn around, bring a hand to my forehead to block the sun, and stand, trying to catch my breath.

  “Yeah?” I ask, leaning on one foot, the other hand on my burning side. The fire in my gut an aphrodisiac driving me to go further, do more. I can feel the pressure in my chest, the width of its expansion.

  “Come with me,” he says humorlessly, pulling his coat, which rests over his arm, tighter into his grasp.

  “I’m on my way back to class,” I wheeze.

  “It can wait.”

  “Actually Ms. Deaver’s expecting me. I’m supposed to sing.”

  “It can wait,” he repeats, pointing toward his office on the bottom floor of the library.

  “Okay,” I say, dropping my arms and following him. He pulls open the office door and motions for me to enter.

  “Is this going to take long?” I ask.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he says. “Sit.” He drops his briefcase and coat and gestures at the chair on the other side of his desk. He turns the blinds to keep the sun from glaring into the room. “I was on my way home,” he says. “I’m glad I caught you.” I look back toward the office behind me into the school courtyard and all of everything outside that’s waiting. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of your mother,” he says, opening the file cabinet behind his desk and pulling out a manila folder.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I say, not sure what to say.

  “You’re aware that you were placed on attendance probation this semester?”

  I shift in my seat, my chest slowly starting to decompress. My lungs growing steady and calm. I cough into my fist.

  He opens the folder and pulls out a paper with my signature on it, Nicole Rodríguez Darling. It’s my letter of acceptance, the one I signed two years ago. “This here,” he says, pushing it across the table at me, “is a contract of agreement. An agreement that you take seriously the gift, really the investment the city of Los Angeles is making in you. A free top-tier college preparatory education, plus the best arts program in the state.” I look down at the paper, March 1994, the year I got the letter in the mail. The day I threw myself into my mother’s arms sobbing. “I’m going to make it,” I cried, “I’m really going to do it.” I slept in her bed that night and kissed my cat. I could hardly sleep. So much seemed to await, I felt unafraid. All that summer I jogged and sang, studied monologues I bought from Cliff’s Books, taking the bus to find new playwrights. Come August I was ready, the first in line, standing in the front of class.

  “Do you know how many unexcused absences you’ve had this semester?”

  “No,” I answer, pushing the letter back.

  “Are you aware that there is a waiting list to get into this school? That you are being funded by an endowment?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighs and tucks the letter back into my file. Folds his hands on the desk and looks at me, he looks sad, like this is harder for him. Like this is really painful stuff. I feel a tear slide loose and wipe it away quickly. He grabs a box of Kleenex by the pens and hands it over. I take it carefully. “I’m afraid,” he starts, fear seizes my chest and I bury my face in my hands and shake my head.

  “No,” I choke.

  “I’m so sorry. Have your mother call me, please,” he says softly, and then stands. “By the end of this week.” I stand too. “You’re free to go. Tell Ms. Deaver I apologize for your delay.”

  Inside the theater I walk quickly to the front row and grab my things. Ms. Deaver’s face changes when she sees mine. “Nicole,” she calls. I walk-jog toward the exit door. I don’t stop and sure as hell don’t look back.

  ×

  Gas Food Lodging, Allison Anders, gorgeous love letter to a small New Mexican town and teenage weirdness, her stamp of approval on feelings that like swamps grab you by the ankles and pull you deeper into the muck of sadness, is showing at the Rialto and I’m wiping away tears to see it. The theater is empty and I watch Shade, the film’s heroine, watch. We watch together. Someone told me the movie was based on a book so I went a while back to the main Pasadena library branch, the really big beautiful one on Walnut, with the quotes of the philosophers carved into the stone walls. I checked it out. Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt is what the book is called. Written by a guy named Richard Peck. I flipped it over in my hand, looking for his picture, but it wasn’t there. So I had nothing to go on but his words. And what words they were. It made me trust men a little more. A tiny spoonful. I know that not all men have to be strangers, not all men are blind. It’s nothing like the movie though with Shade and her sweaters, her David Bowie posters and loss. Rocks that glow beneath the light. And their life never seems that empty, never seems that sad, but it seems familiar and so I guess it must be, I guess it is. I remember when it came out, seeing the commercials on TV. I was younger then, of course. We have caught up with one another, Shade and I, sixteen and all these feelings in a lump. The glowing red eyes of the sphinxes affixed to the corners of the Rialto like the Southern Oracle in The Neverending Story, light the edges of the screen, the old art deco design, the balco
ny that is never used anymore, but was built for a piano, when films were silent and the noises that happened, the sound of thunder and suspense were a symphony of keys, pressing down from the heavens, the wooden eaves.

  I grab my pager and it’s too late. I’ve missed all of Arts. It’s inevitable, this long drawn-out process. This is what the moms cry about on Ricki Lake, what they want to pull their thirteen-year-old snotty daughters from the brink of. This thing that sort of feels like this. It’s hollowed out. Like if I swallowed someone they’d just keep falling and I’d never hear a plop.

  I look behind me toward the projector booth. There’s no sexy misunderstood cholo running the reel, not like in the movie, who really turns out to be a fifth-generation Nuevo Mexicano, just like me, and not a cholo at all, with a deaf mom who dances to the vibrations coming up from the floor.

  I half expect it to be raining and gray when I push into the outdoors, but it’s not, it’s sunny. It’s four thirty and all the birds are still doing their bird thing. I’ve taken a risk, coming to South Pasadena on a school day in the afternoon because they’re real fascists about ditching and the town’s just small enough for the cops to get bored and give a shit. But most schools get out at three and by now I’m safe.

  I walk down the street in no particular direction, the leaves ripple and fan themselves, spring tosses up its pollens. In the eighties all sorts of teen movies were filmed here because it’s one of the only places in the city without palm trees obscuring every view and the bungalows are turn of the century and East Coast looking. Teen Wolf, Pretty in Pink, Teen Witch. Just two years ago Dan’s neighbor’s house was used as Angela Chase’s for My So-Called Life. Sarah and I saw Jared Leto and Claire Danes walking the streets like tourists on the moon, pausing in front of the library like they were in Mayberry and not Los Angeles. Tilting their heads at the red bricks and smoke from chimneys, rubbing their sneakered feet into the yellow and orange leaves cluttering up the sidewalks.

  I weave slowly, arms out like I’m flying, toward the McDonald’s and pause. The last time I ate here was in eighth grade, before Ry told me about vivisection and pig snouts and grody cow eyeballs plucked out with the torturous tongs of capitalism. Last Halloween, Sarah and I were driving around smoking weed like dummies, when we saw Jessica, Chelo, and Dan swinging and hanging off the McDonald’s mini merry-go-round, they jumped off, laughing and stumbling up the sidewalk.

  “Hey, pull over,” I said to her. “It’s Dan.” “No,” she answered, “he’s with Consuelo and Jess Silverman.” “So,” I said, turning the wheel toward the curb, double baked and potato stuffed. “Stop it!” she shrieked, pulling my hand off. “What’s wrong with them?” I asked, watching as they turned the corner toward the residential part of town and disappeared into a sea of tiny ghosts and pirates. “They’re weird,” she answered. “Weird how?” “I don’t know, they just are.” And we kept driving. Later Dan told me they were tripping balls and trying to find Garfield Park and by the time they made it the sun was coming up. They huddled inside the concrete tube in the playground and touched each other’s faces until they fell asleep. “You weren’t hassled by a single pig?” I asked. “Nope,” he answered, packing a bowl. “Not a single one.”

  ×

  I’m at Los Tacos on Fair Oaks eating nachos when I see Sarah jump off the bus across the street. I heard Marc’s car busted a radiator and she’s been back on public transport. I know she’s going to the West Coast Video instead of the Blockbuster by home because she loves the cult section and will often take the transfer just to get something good. From its trove of the radical we’ve seen The Decline of Western Civilization, American Pop, all the Bakshi classics, Heathers, Das Boot, The Damned, Night of the Living Dead, Parents, new episodes of Tales from the Crypt. Casablanca, The Holy Mountain, The Conversation, and every Argento and Varda we could get our hands on.

  I lick my fingers, toss my tray, and jog across the street, pull open the big glass door and head for our aisle. She’s wearing green faded bell-bottoms, Jack Purcells, and a tight vintage baseball shirt. Her dark hair is loose and flaps all over the place. Growing up people thought we were sisters. One time at The Hat, while sharing chili fries, as her father sat a few tables away reading the Star News, an older man in a plaid shirt buttoned at the cuffs and gray work slacks slid into our booth and said that we looked like Romanian princesses from a fairy tale. What the actual fuck. We were eleven. Sarah very elegantly tilted her head and pushed her hair behind one ear and bit her lower lip. Both embarrassed and invisible, and the brightest thing in the room, I wished my body could evaporate into a cloud. A place where I could wave a hand over my face and make it disappear.

  The next year she fucked Marc’s grody bandmate. He pulled her jeans down to her ankles in their basement, did it standing up while holding her neck, on the stairs, against the Animals album poster. Or at least that’s what she says.

  “Howdy!” I say too cartoonish and she looks down hurt. “Hey,” I counter, softer. She sets Cannibal Corpse back and walks to the other side of the aisle, so we are facing one another like Pyramus and Thisbe, like Romeo and Juliet, divided and un-united.

  She doesn’t say anything and continues to read the back of another box. Rocky Horror. “Hey,” I say again, running my finger along the top of the divider. “Can we talk? You’ve seen that.”

  “Why?” she puts Janet and Dr. Frank-N-Furter back, finally looking up. She crosses her arms and seems bored. Not mean or anything, just bored, and I fucking hate her.

  “Because I was an asshole.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I’m just making new friends is all.”

  “Yeah, I get it and don’t give a shit. Just, when we’re together don’t treat me like an idiot who doesn’t know anything. And don’t act like I’m always bothering you. You’re the one that comes to my house all the time complaining about stuff.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Ugh, why do you talk like that? Like a fucking therapist.”

  “I’m a philosopher.”

  “Shut up, this isn’t a joke, don’t treat me like an asshole.”

  “Fine, what do you want?”

  “For you to grow a pair of fucking tits and say you’re sorry.”

  “I think I’ve got the tit part covered.” She rolls her eyes and keeps walking down the aisle. “I get it.”

  “Later dude,” she says heading toward the door.

  “Wait,” I say walking behind her. We’re outside now on the asphalt. She covers her eyes as if blocking the sun but I don’t know why if she isn’t standing in its blindness. She tries to speak but it comes out all gobbledy-gunk. I realize she’s crying.

  “Are you crying?”

  “You are so hard to understand!” she says, bringing her arm down in a sad gesture of frustration. It hits me that she’s really pissed. Really, really pissed. And it stuns me into silence.

  “I’m not sure what to say.” I am constantly surprised that anything I say or do can make anyone feel anything.

  “Say you’re sorry.”

  “Sarah, I didn’t do anything wrong.” She turns around and hurries up to the corner and I walk after her. The light turns green and we walk side by side toward Memorial Park, her trying to outpace me. The Aztec mural, yellow and vibrant blue, flashes me back to childhood. Looking for Easter eggs. “Tell me what I did! I don’t understand.”

  She stops. “Dude, you are so bent mentally. I swear. You really let school do a fucking number on you. I don’t know, you get high all the time.”

  “So do you! Hypocrite! So do you!”

  “I don’t do what other stuff you’re doing, tweak, huffing, what the fuck, man. You’re like a Hollywood cling-on, you hang out with all those weird industry kids and those, those, punks who I just, I don’t know you anymore, I guess.”

  “I’m finding my tribe, you know?”

  “You’re rude, you never return my phone calls, you insult me to my face, you ma
ke fun of everything I do. I mean, what the fuck Nikki, you can’t even see what a shit-head you are? Honestly? How am I Heather and you’re Big Fun? That makes no fucking sense!”

  I laugh despite myself and she does too. I remember that she’s funny, that there’s a reason we’re friends. I know I need to do this thing even if it’s contrary to my heart. Even if what she’s threatened by is my own dislocation in her life, even if I can’t explain my anger, even if I can’t unshake this gloom, even if I die thirty years later, liver pickled and sour, bags beneath my eyes, a raccoon princess stuffed with garbage, thin white maggots spilling from my lips, addiction tucking me in forever like the mother I never had.

  “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. Jesus.”

  She exhales and wipes under her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Okay, thank you. I can’t hug, is that cool?”

  “Whatever,” I say. We walk into the park and sit. She’s snotty and I look at my hands while she fixes herself.

  “Are you cool?” she asks, finally looking up.

  “Yeah, I’m cool.”

  “No, I mean, yeah, you are cool. It’s weird. For me.”

  “Oh,” I say, understanding what she means. “Sorry.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m sad, mostly.”

  “I saw your dad’s car. Is he in town?”

  “He was. He left. He was visiting my uncle and stopped by to say hi.”

  “Oh.” She twists a silver turquoise ring around her finger. “I saw Lyla.”

  “Yeah, she’s there.”

  “How long?”

  I shrug. “Dunno.”

  “Look,” she says. “I think I should go.”

  “Okay,” I say, looking up as she stands.

  “I’m glad we talked.”

  “Okay.”

  And then she stands there a minute, looking at me, as if I’m supposed to say something, only I have no idea what.

  “Have you ever thought you might be a sociopath?” she asks, and I laugh.