“So what’s the plan?” I yelled. “Another boot to the balls?”
“Nope. Got to scope it out first. A lot of people will be there.”
She slowed when we got to the lush, dense neighborhood at the foot of the hills along Outpost Road. Somewhere, behind the trees and the hedges and the walls, were houses three times the size of mine, houses that looked like they needed teams of employees to take care of them.
“How do you know this place?” I asked.
“This promoter, Dougie O’Keefe? He throws parties all the time. Bands play, people get wasted. People get lucky.” She glanced over at me. “With contracts, I mean.” We wound higher up the hill, turning onto one twisting road after another. “But I never got lucky here,” she added.
Finally, the road ended in a wide cul-de-sac. Cars were parked everywhere, along the side of the road, in the dirt beyond, stacked two or three deep in the shadows beneath the trees on the slope up into the hill brush. Corrina found a spot up from the house. My heart hammered so hard I thought it was going to break bones in my chest, but I followed Corrina because as we walked toward Dougie O’Keefe’s house, I kept telling myself that this was living, and I needed it, or at least, wasn’t that what I’d always wanted?
O’Keefe’s house was mostly dark and hidden by trees and weird, twisting rusty sculptures, but as we walked down the brick driveway toward the garage, one large halogen light sat half buried in the brush beside the driveway, a dull cone of light dimming and brightening, dimming and brightening, like one giant eye blinking up at the cavernous house set in the side of the hill. It was the first time Corrina had slowed down since we’d taken Mom’s car. She looked from the garage to the balcony up above, both of which were packed with people. Hard-driving electric rock with folky accordions pulsed from somewhere deep within the house. Occasionally, the loopy, high-pitched voice of the male lead singer rose above the muddy music.
Corrina stepped close. “Okay,” she said, looking up at me. “Here’s the deal. Just stay close to me and don’t say much. Just follow my lead, okay?”
I nodded numbly. Not saying much was not going to be a problem. I was so nervous I felt like I’d slurped down a concrete milk shake and it had already dried and blocked up my throat.
Corrina patted my chest gently. “Just be cool and we’ll be fine.”
That was going to be much harder.
She looped her arm through mine and led me into the garage. A ring of tiny white lights ran around the ceiling, and there were no cars; instead there were couches and chairs scattered across the room, and people stood around smoking or lounging with limbs and whole bodies draped over the arms of the furniture. Corrina weaved us through the crowd slowly, squeezing us together and searching the faces in the room, but she didn’t seem to know anybody. I didn’t know anybody either, or at least I didn’t recognize anybody, but there were plenty of kids my age there, and plenty of older people too. Age didn’t seem to matter—everyone was a part of the same party.
We burrowed deeper into the house and walked up a set of narrow stairs to the living room above the garage. Half the room was floor-to-ceiling windows, but it was impossible to see through them because the room was packed with sweaty bodies writhing and twisting to the new song now playing over the speakers, amplifying the live music that was playing elsewhere in the house. Same band, same annoying accordion, and even more annoying voice, but it was a snaking river of a song with a weird husky whisper singing a druggie lullaby. Clouds of smoke circled the heads of the dancers, and I caught flashes of long beaded necklaces, gold and silver sequins, and shimmering black shirts and fishnets as Corrina pulled me through the dim room and its tissue-paper-and-wire towers of tobacco-stained light. Everything oozed cool, and I was glad of my hair coiling down over my eyes, so no one could see that I was terrified.
Corrina dragged me around a couch and its pile of worming bodies and paused by the black glass of one of the windows. She pointed outside to the porch that wrapped around the living room. Beyond, the lights of downtown LA were an upside-down sky of stars scattered over the valley.
“That’s him,” she said, pointing to a man in a crisp white suit and black T-shirt. A tinsel mustache and goatee bobbed around his mouth as he talked in pantomime through the glass.
“That’s not Toby,” I said.
“Hell, no.” Corrina frowned. “That’s Dougie O’Keefe. The man who has met me a dozen times and still believes I’m nobody. I gave that guy one of my demos, I heard him telling someone he liked it, and then when I saw him again, it was like I was Mrs. Freaking Invisible, and he looked right through me to the girls standing behind me and said, ‘Okay, who’s going to help me make her the next Iggy Azalea?’ ”
“Who?”
“Oh my God, Hendrix. You need an education.” Corrina stared out at Dougie O’Keefe for a moment, her lips folding sadly. “I mean it. Like I wasn’t even there. He just stared at these two super-tall, super-skinny white girls behind me.” She turned away from the window. “Dumbest thing of all? One of those girls had freaking bright-blond cornrows.”
She shook her head and moved toward the kitchen without me. I followed her, and she led me past a long counter that had been converted into a bar, where a man in a bright lavender shirt, completely unbuttoned, tossed bottles of liquor in the air over one shoulder, caught them on the other shoulder, and rolled them down his arm before pouring shots. Nobody clapped—as if everything he did was just commonplace.
In the hallway beyond the kitchen, there was a doorway to a set of stairs leading down to a room where the live music blasted. It was a kind of underground music bunker, because it wasn’t until we were down there that I realized how loud the band was playing. I tried to tell Corrina that, but she couldn’t hear anything, and she put her hand up between us because I kept dipping down too close to her ear. The room was too small for dancing, because there were too many people in it, and the little stage in the back was also too crowded with the keyboard, the drums, the two accordions, the bass, and the guitar, and all the musicians playing them, and the guy up in front of it all who looked like a tiny, skinny lumberjack with a mudswipe of a beard. He wore overalls and a plaid shirt beneath it. He had dark hair gooped up into a fake bedhead, and it didn’t move as he thrashed around and bucked like someone had punched him in the gut again and again.
I recognized him from school: Toby Fuller, eighteen and bound for CalArts in the fall.
He had the room whipped up in a tizzy of swinging hands and screaming, especially the two rows of girls packed in tight by the stage. It was obvious he was dancing for them, because when he stopped and rocked the microphone stand back and forth like a pendulum and the music slowed down and he quieted the crowd, he swept his eyes back and forth across the row of girls and whisper-sang to them. “Forgive me and take it easy on me / all I ever said was I was a damn fine lover.” Then he threw his head back and yelled, “And that’s what I am!” and the band jumped into its frenzied cataclysm of sound.
Corrina stood against the wall near the foot of the stairs with her arms wrapped tightly around her chest, staring at him. I could see why girls fell for him, the lumberjack-to-be springing around in his red Chuck Taylors. But when the song finished and he started talking into the microphone while the rest of the band tinkered with their instruments, getting ready for the next song, Corrina didn’t press her way to the front, like I thought she was going to. Instead, she squeezed through to the side of the room where the sound board was. The guy who’d been there was talking to one of the girls up by the front of the stage, and Corrina hovered over the board, studying it for a moment or two, and then ran her hands over knobs and switches quickly. There was a loud shriek of feedback and then all the instruments went silent. The lights were still blazing on the stage and the guys in the band all started waving to the sound board. They couldn’t see who was there, and before the engineer could get back, Corrina picked up the microphone that was plugged in over the board.
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br /> “Toby Fuller,” she said into the microphone. “You’re a liar.” He stopped waving and stood stone-still, suddenly terrified, because what Corrina was saying was echoing from the speakers throughout the house. “You’re a premature ejaculator! I know. Don’t believe me, just ask him. He’s telling everybody that we slept together!”
All the air seemed to get sucked out of the room and then there was laughter and people yelling, and the squirrely little sound engineer pushed his way back toward the board. Corrina tried to get out from behind it, but he got her by the arm and pulled her to him. She tripped. Her head pitched forward and hit the sound board. I jumped toward them, but since the place was a madhouse, I slammed into another guy by accident and his Solo cup splashed a pint of beer all over the equipment. There were a few electrical pops and hisses. The engineer let go of Corrina, and although she was unsteady, I pulled her toward me and led us back to the stairs. I pushed our way around some of the people coming down in a panic, but we were pinned against the wall briefly. We both looked back at Toby, who stood alone on the stage now, his hands at his sides, trying to squint into the crowd to find Corrina. He must have known it was her. It was impossible to forget her voice.
As soon as we could, we hurried up the stairs. A fat crescent of blood curled from Corrina’s nose around the corner of her mouth, but I didn’t think she even noticed. Once we were back on the main floor of the house and we saw the crowd unraveling in confusion like a herd loosed from their corral, Corrina slipped in front of me. She grabbed my hand and held me close to her, up against her back, as if I was hugging her, but really it was her making me hug her. We walked forward like a weird four-legged animal. “Come on, Hendrix,” she said. “Keep me covered, but move it!”
And, as if she knew what was coming, I suddenly realized she was using me as her shield. Toby’s voice shouted out over the crowd behind us. “Corrina? Corrina? Girl, where the hell are you?”
He kept shouting her name as we got closer and closer to the front door, and we were almost out onto the walkway when Corrina dipped under my armpit and shouted back, “I’m not just another nobody you can screw over and forget, Two-Seconds-and-You’re-Done Toby Fuller!”
I couldn’t help myself, and I turned around because I wanted to see the look on his face, and I was glad I did, because if I hadn’t, I might not have known to duck, which I did, crouching over Corrina, too, as one beer bottle and then another went sailing by us, one hitting the doorframe and the other smashing on the hallway tile.
Corrina laughed. “You too, O’Keefe! Now you’ll remember me—you old perv!”
Two-Second Toby threw another bottle and it hit the wall beside us. I pushed Corrina forward and we ran down the front walk, across the cul-de-sac, and up the dirty slope to the car on the street above. Corrina got the little blue car started, and with a swipe of blood smeared around her mouth and chin, she floored it up the road, winding away from O’Keefe’s party and the roar of chaos swelling within it.
CHAPTER 4
EVERY NOBODY IS A SOMEBODY
Corrina wound circles through the hills at a frightening speed until I could convince her that no cars were following us and we’d gotten away. Eventually she slowed down, fiddled with the console, found a song she liked, and took a different road back toward the city. She bobbed along to the music as if it soothed her, but even the mellow tune and the warm breeze on my face couldn’t calm me down.
“Can we pull over?” I asked.
Corrina threw me a heavy-lidded look of disgust.
“At least,” I continued, “we should take care of that.” Blood still dripped off her chin onto her T-shirt.
“Fine,” she said, speeding up again. “I know a place.”
She made an abrupt turn onto Mulholland Drive, twisted around the switchback road, and pulled into the dirt across the street from an iron fence. I’d never been there, but once Corrina cut the ignition and we sat there, catching our breath, listening to the gathering silence, I knew we were somewhere in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl. I found tissues in the glove compartment. She tipped the seat back, held a wad beneath her nose, and closed her eyes.
“Well, now I really am nobody,” she said.
“What? That was amazing. You blindsided that guy so bad, he’s probably still walking in circles trying to figure out his life.”
“Ha. Don’t make me laugh, Hendrix. I’m bleeding over here.”
“Yeah. About that. You okay?”
“I will be.”
She’d taken a quick and nasty hit, though. I wasn’t much of an athlete, I sucked at kickball, for God’s sake, but I was sure there were plenty of people who’d have called it quits after getting smashed in the face like that. Maybe it was the adrenaline that had kept her moving—or maybe it was something more.
“He’s the one who’s nobody now.”
“Hendrix, no offense, but you have no clue.”
She ignored me and kept her eyes shut, so I didn’t bother her. I had no idea what she was thinking about, but if this evening had been any indication of what Corrina’s life was like on a daily basis, I figured she needed at least twelve hours of sleep each night just to recover. My life was as exciting as mud drying in the grooves of your shoes, and in three hours with Corrina I’d had more fun than I’d had all year.
But her insistence that she was a “nobody” formed a dry lump in my throat, because it made me think of Gpa. She kept calling herself that, nobody, nobody, as if she thought she was disappearing from the world, but it was Gpa who was the real nobody, because it was the opposite—he was more and more alone in a world quickly disappearing around him.
When Corrina’s nose stopped bleeding, she pocketed the tissues and turned away from me, looking toward the trees and the specks of distant city glitter spotted among the thick pine branches like Christmas lights. “Hendrix,” she eventually said. “You don’t mind the silence, huh?”
“I’m used to it,” I said. “It’s kind of an everyday part of my life. I don’t know if you remember, but there was this poem I read in class about what I called the Great Empty Blue?”
“I remember it,” she said. She still had her back to me, one shoulder snuggled into the car seat, the other slowly rising and falling with her breath. She hesitated, then turned back, and looked at me with her sidelong glance that sucked all the breath out of me. “It was sad, and beautiful, but you totally stole the idea from Miles Davis.”
I was stunned. I didn’t even know she’d been listening to me in class. It made me feel like I was actually flesh and blood, not just a collection of thoughts, lost in the wind.
“Who?” I said, trying to hide my smile.
She laughed. “Hendrix, one good thing about you is that you are a terrible liar.”
And she was right. About both things. I didn’t know much about music at all, but Gpa had told me a story about Miles Davis that had stuck with me. He told me Davis was a genius not only because he knew how to play and anticipate the perfect note, but because he also knew how to play silence, he knew how to let a silence ride and ride, making a tune rich and layered with the tension between sound and silence, and I’d thought that was something I should use when I was writing a poem about life at home, where I moved so often through the empty rooms, wondering what it would be like to have another person’s voice with me. How warm a voice can sound when it rises out of silence after you’ve waited and waited for it, I’d written.
“Hendrix,” Corrina said. “I liked it. I’m sorry I didn’t say so at the time.”
“That’s okay,” I said. No one had. Most of the kids in class made veiled, or not-so-veiled, hints about doing drugs or having sex, or at least boasted like they knew all about drugs or sex.
“You want to see something really beautiful, though?” she asked.
There was something I wanted to say but was too afraid to, and then I was more afraid that I looked afraid, since if I couldn’t tell a lie, my face probably gave it all away.
So I said the first other thing I could think of. “Could you wipe the rest of the blood off your chin first? You look like a vampire.”
She laughed and the whole car shook, or maybe just my stomach did, that ball of nerves exploding.
“Let’s go,” she said, opening the car door. “Don’t be scared.” But then she turned around, flashed her finger-claws, and growled. “I’ll only tear your throat out!” She slammed the door behind her and jogged across the street into the shadows by the iron fence. I took a deep breath and followed her.
The gate was locked, but we snuck down along the fence to a point where it dipped low and it was easy to climb over, and then crossed the dark parking lot to a short wooden staircase. There were already a few kids there, and although it didn’t seem like any of them were people we knew or people who’d seen us at the party, we walked up the stairs, and then Corrina pulled me onto a dirt path and we snuck around some shrubs, away from everyone else, and soon we were sitting on the edge of a bluff, the wind in our faces, all alone and looking out over the valley. LA’s lake of light stretched out below us and the spray of scattered stars above was its blue-white reflection. A river of taillights leaked from the city to the base of the hills, and I wanted it to go out because it seemed like it was all that was keeping us tied to the city—I wanted to believe we could drift off somewhere else entirely.
“Corrina,” I said.
“Listen, Hendrix. Can we just sit in silence again for a while? I need that.”
I nodded and gazed back out over the valley, trying to locate home, or Venice, or even the ocean, but it was all too far away. It wasn’t like I’d never been out of LA—it had only been the year before when Gpa and I had spent plenty of weekends hiking up in the San Gabriel Mountains or even as far north as Sequoia National Park—but not really. My whole life I’d spent walking around beneath the haze of that valley, and now on the bluff with Corrina, that city of five hundred square miles seemed so small.
The Last True Love Story Page 3