by Sarah Gerard
He’s standing twenty feet away and staring at us. He’s a freshman at the school, but as a zoned student, a “zonie,” I rarely see him around campus—if we happen to cross paths, we don’t interact. Maybe we smile. I wait for him to say something and wonder what I should do. He turns and walks away. I know I’m screwed.
Jerod and I have been dating for five months. We’re not in love, but we say we are because, at a certain point, it seemed like the right thing to do. We like each other, but mostly we’re comfortable. Lately, that translates as bored, at least on my end. We do the same things over and over again: smoke weed, watch Groove, have sex, go to parties. We’ve exhausted any topics we have to talk about. Calling him after school has begun to feel like an obligation.
“Justin told me he’s not even hot,” says Jerod that night. We’re on the phone. I’m lying on my bed, which I’ve pushed halfway into my closet after removing the folding doors. To my right is a shelf on which I’ve installed an old desktop computer. It doesn’t have the Internet, but sometimes I use it to type up poems and song lyrics. “He’s got cystic acne or some shit.”
“He doesn’t have cystic acne,” I say. “Besides, it’s not about that.”
“What, do you love him?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you love me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” There is a long pause. “You don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
We’re quiet. I’m aware that this is the last time we’ll talk, possibly forever, and I wonder if I’ve really messed up. I don’t want to date Eric Steeler—not really. Jerod has always been nice to me. We’ve never argued. I like Jerod. So I’m bored—that’s no reason to cheat on him. I should have been honest. On the other hand, deep down, I kind of don’t care.
“Bye, then,” he says, and hangs up the phone.
Lily parks at the far edge of the student parking lot each morning in case there’s a need for a midday clambake. We roll up the windows of her black Volkswagen Jetta and set the air-conditioning to recirculate. She retrieves a glass pipe and a plastic sandwich bag of hydro from the glove compartment and motions for me to select a CD from the case at my feet.
“Pick something good.”
It’s lunchtime. We’ve escaped the social pressures of our home table for the privacy of getting stoned in public. Lately, our friends group is antsy: I’ve been dating Eric Steeler for six weeks and the shine has worn off, but I haven’t yet figured this out—I just kiss him less. To add to the tension, after three years of worshipping Lily, our friend Oz finally dated her for a luxurious nine months, only to be dumped for a guy she dated in ninth grade. Now Oz has taken to showing up at her bedroom window in the middle of the night. The more Lily tells him to stay away, the more persistent he becomes.
The first thing people notice about Lily is that she’s beautiful. She’s a goth porcelain doll: enormous brown eyes, heavily lined; blood-red eye shadow; burgundy hair; petite pinup figure. She wears platform, patent leather, knee-high, steel-toed boots every day. Her resting face is as aloof as a supermodel’s, but when you talk to her, you know she’s listening. She’s loyal. She has a code of conduct that she expects others to abide by: She doesn’t share secrets. She expects her privacy to be respected. She’s above gossip. She’s classy.
I unzip her CD case and flip past Korn, System of a Down, Tool, Slipknot. I make a mental note to come back to Sublime, Cypress Hill, Primus, and Deftones. I’m feeling the shoe-gazey, minor-key drone of the Deftones. I put in White Pony.
It’s impossible not to sing along with White Pony. Chino Moreno uses his voice as an instrument: he’s ornamental, but he also screams. His melodic runs wiggle downward, then slide way up to unexpected highs. He racks down to a whisper, then wails. I listen closely to the vocal distortion in “Elite,” and I think about the vocoder Jerod bought just before we broke up. Lily passes me the bowl. She’s given me greens.
“I miss Jerod,” I say.
“No, you don’t,” she says. “You just don’t like Eric.”
I light the bowl. The white-green top layer curls into brown. The chamber fills with milky smoke. I cough and it comes out my nose.
“This is good shit,” she says, proud.
When we walk into AP English class thirty minutes later, Mr. Lovejoy knows we’re high. Lovejoy is everyone’s favorite teacher: he’s mellow, but also an intellectual, and he challenges people who he thinks are being lazy, but in a way that’s nonjudgmental, even funny. The bonus questions on his quizzes always come from The Matrix. He wears a short-sleeved plaid shirt every day, tucked into a pair of khaki pants, and he’s never seen without a mug of coffee, resulting in at least one successful parody costume from a student every Halloween.
He holds the door for us and follows us with his eyes as we come into the room. Lily’s desk is behind mine, and from the moment we sit down, we can’t stop giggling. Lovejoy has seen this before and I know he doesn’t like it, but I’m not ready to feel bad about it yet—I feel I have an understanding with Lovejoy. We’ve just completed a creative writing unit for which I wrote my first short story, “The Fall.” It follows two punk teenagers, a boy and a girl, living on the streets of St. Petersburg, who one night decide to sleep on the roof of the State Theatre, where kids go to see punk shows. They score vodka and get drunk, and at the end of the story, the boy falls onto a Dumpster and breaks his spine. I read it aloud to the class, and when I looked up at the end, the expression on Lovejoy’s face was unmistakable: he was impressed.
He closes the door when the last student arrives and steps, smirking, to the front of the room. We’ve been reading Waiting for Godot and I’m eager to demonstrate my superior understanding of this text when he says, “How many of you guys smoke weed?”
Lily snorts behind me. Others snicker. A hand goes up, then a few more, and a few more. Lily and I raise our hands. Lovejoy looks from person to person.
“How may of you have done other drugs?”
We all look at one another. Some hands stay up; some go down. I notice some liars.
Lovejoy nods to himself. He looks somber. I turn around to glance at Lily, amused by the line of inquiry. Lovejoy leans back against his desk, contemplating, and before he can ask the next question, Billy says, “What about you, Lovejoy?”
“Me? Do I do drugs?”
“Yeah,” Billy says.
Lovejoy smiles. “Drugs are for the weak.”
Though he doesn’t look at me, I feel he’s speaking to me directly. My weed-induced amusement drops down a notch as we begin the day’s discussion, and continues to dissipate as our conversation goes on. By the end of the class, I’m sober.
Senior recitals take place at the Palladium Theater, a historical landmark in downtown St. Petersburg. From the wood-and-tile lobby, guests ascend a flight of stairs to the main performance hall and then another set of stairs to the mezzanine. The theater accommodates roughly eight hundred and fifty people. The seats are original leather. Fourteen white marble columns line either side of the room, and a pipe organ fills the wall behind the stage. All of our winter and spring concerts have been here. It’s tradition for Gisele, Lily, and me to sneak away from rehearsals and go poking around in the forbidden recesses of the building: our favorite is the narrow room behind the pipe organ, where we can peer at the audience from between the brass pipes. Tonight will be the culmination of every concert, private lesson, jury, theory class, choir rehearsal, All-State competition, and music history lecture of the last four years.
I arrive after Gisele and find her drinking a glass of Riesling in the dressing room, styling her hair. She’s wearing a black satin spaghetti-strap evening gown with silver drop earrings, a black choker with an opal charm, and a silver dragon necklace. Lily’s gone to a salon and arrives already dressed in a floor-length, spaghetti-strap, white satin gown with her hair styled into an elaborate updo co
mplete with a tiara. I’ve come in plain clothes and begin to change into my formal attire: a black vintage knee-length cocktail dress with an inverted V-shaped waist, black Mary Janes, elbow gloves, and my mother’s gold multistrand necklace. I pull my hair into a bun at the back of my head. I touch up the makeup I’m already wearing: black liquid eyeliner, gray shimmery eye shadow, heavy mascara, and mauve lipstick.
Teachers from the music department are grading tonight’s performance. Our grade, worth one whole class, will then be averaged into our overall GPA, and is used to determine our eligibility for graduation from the arts program. I know my teachers don’t expect me to sing loudly tonight. Each of them has spoken to me about this privately. I sing beautifully, they say, but nobody can hear me. My performance of “Er, der Herrlichste von Allen” did not impress. We’re not singing with microphones tonight, and most of the department, and our friends from school, not to mention our families and our friends outside of school, are coming. I’m at a loss for what to do. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s like something’s stuck in my throat whenever I open my mouth to sing. I can’t suck in front of all these people.
We’re the only three musicians performing tonight. We’ve alternated the program by language: each of us will sing an Italian aria, then German, then French, then English—then repeat. Our ace in the hole is a song cycle by Gabriel Fauré called Poème d’un Jour, during which we plan to pass a red rose from person to person: Gisele will pass it to Lily, and then Lily will pass it to me. My aria is called “Adieu.” At the end, I’m to toss the rose into the audience to symbolize the end of the cycle. We’ll then finish with our English songs of choice: Gisele’s “Jack’s Lament”; Lily’s “The Black Swan,” from Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1947 opera The Medium; and my “Sally’s Song,” the last song of the evening.
We wait in the wings. Mrs. Ausubel is at the piano: she’s pushing a hundred, but she accompanies like a pro. The curtain pulls back, and we scan the audience without making ourselves visible. The place is packed. Gisele is on first, singing “Il Sogno di Volare,” a song from the Cirque du Soleil show Saltimbanco, with a lot of high range and feeling: a real crowd-pleaser. Gisele’s power, her clarity, her flawless control, all are perfect for this song. With enough luck, Gisele could be the next Anna Netrebko.
She exits stage right and Lily enters. She sings “O del mio dolce ardor” from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1770 opera Paride ed Elena, an aria of love and longing, with lines that slide one into another like brooks into a stream.
Finally, it’s my turn. I’m singing “Voi che sapete” from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which is fun and lets me show off my high range. I like “Voi che sapete” and I sing it well.
But in my imagined version of this story—the one I still fantasize about, as though doing so will change history—I’m not singing it; I’m singing “Lascia ch’io pianga.” I’ve known “Lascia ch’io pianga” so long I can sing it backward. Before my senior recital, I had disregarded it for years, thinking it represented an earlier stage of my development as a soprano—something I’d evolved past, that was too easy for me now.
In this imagined story, before choosing “Voi che sapete,” a song I’ve learned more recently, I rediscover “Lascia ch’io pianga” in a notebook storing sheet music from my private lessons with Ms. Loup. The notebook still holds my old practice tape—I slip it into my boom box and begin singing along with Ms. Loup’s accompaniment. I still know the libretto. Something dormant stirs awake in me that I haven’t known was sleeping. It’s steady and somber. It builds slowly to a heart-wrenching climax. It speaks of suffering and yearning for freedom. Lascia ch’io pianga, it begs. Let me weep over my cruel fate. Il duolo infranga queste ritorte. Let my sadness shatter these chains.
Lily exits stage right and I emerge from the left. I cross to the center and look out over the audience. I see hundreds of faces but none of them clearly. I search in the middle, hoping to see my parents, but I can’t make them out, so I nod to Mrs. Ausubel and she plays the slow opening chords of “Lascia ch’io pianga.” I find the farthest corners of the theater’s high ceiling and calculate how much breath I will need to fill them. I drop my jaw, turn off my brain, and let my voice slide out at the right moment. It comes back to me, and I know I’ve set it free.
After much prodding and many assurances that nothing catastrophic will happen, my parents agree to stay in a hotel for one night so that I can have a graduation party. I invite Jerod without thinking much about it: we’ve been broken up for five months, so I figure we’re cool by now. Ashley comes over early to help me prepare. She wears a red spandex spaghetti-strap tank top and flared jeans; I wear a teal button-down shirt that I’ve taken in on the sides, fooling around on my sewing machine. We bought food as well as booze because we’re trying to be grown-up, and we set up the food on the island counter and pack Smirnoff Ice and Budweiser into coolers on my parents’ back porch, where we also deposit several ashtrays. We turn the pool light on so it glows green-blue. We’ve invited everyone we know. By nine o’clock, the house is full.
I’m on the back porch with Jerod and Sean. Several of my friends from school are here, and Jamie, whom I dated for two months last summer when he was still a virgin. I’m noticing how good Jerod is at mixing with people. I’m also noticing how handsome he is, and how mature he looks with his new light beard and moustache. I take a picture of him as he’s talking, and a few minutes later, he picks up the disposable camera and takes a picture of me. We see what it’s like to make eye contact while remaining casually far. Later on, we sit next to each other on the floor of my room and listen while Jamie plays Dashboard Confessional songs on my guitar.
Later, we leave out the front door to have a smoke and see three guys I don’t know coming up the driveway. The leader is a kid with shaggy hair and a baggy white T-shirt carrying two cases of Natural Ice, one on top of the other.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“I’m friends with Patrick,” he says.
“He told you to come?”
“Yeah.”
Patrick is a zonie—I barely know him. He has a lazy eye and has a reputation as kind of a thug. Sometimes we say hi when we pass each other in the halls. Once or twice he’s sat with us at lunch, but nobody seems to know whose friend he really is. I only invited him to the party because I invited everyone else. I’m surprised he’s here.
I look at the cases of beer in this guy’s arms.
“What’s your name?”
“Kyle.”
“Thanks for bringing beer, Kyle.”
“All right,” he says, and goes inside the house.
Lily and Trent have smoked out Trent’s SUV and now are sleeping on each other on the living room couch. Jenna’s taken ecstasy she’s bought from Patrick; she’s outside on the concrete bench by the pool with her head on Jason’s thighs as he strokes her hair. Yosi’s thrown Rita into the pool, and she’s dripping on my parents’ upholstered deck furniture. She throws him into the pool in return and now they’re both in the pool playing a private game with each other. There’s a cluster of drunk sophomores in the sitting room playing strip poker and a group of people in my parents’ bedroom testing out the exercise equipment. Kyle is alone in the kitchen, eating broccoli. Someone turns on a Vagrant Records compilation, and the first song is by Alkaline Trio. Everyone on the back porch sings along. We’re grabbing beers from the cooler. We’re passing a joint.
Jenna’s locked herself in the bathroom with Patrick and two of his friends. When she lets us in, the lights are off and they’re sitting on the floor with their arms around each other: we snap a picture. Ashley’s flirting with my hot neighbor who goes to Catholic school and whom we both want to fuck. My coworker from the Pizza Shack has had too many Smirnoff Ices, and now he’s vomiting in the bathroom where Jenna was just rolling with Patrick and his friends—nobody knows where Jenna is now. Gisele’s fallen asleep on the couch with Lily and Trent. My coworker’s asleep in the guest b
edroom with a trash can beside the bed.
A rumor circulates that Jenna is fucking Jason on the grass at the side of the house. Another circulates that the earlier rumor was just a rumor, but nobody wants to believe it. Kyle has projectile vomited down the hallway: the contents of his stomach are four feet long, settling into the carpet and splattered up the walls. Kyle’s since disappeared along with Patrick and his friends. There’s broccoli in the puke and it’s thick like Kyle’s been eating crackers, and nobody knows how to get it out of the carpet. Brandi suggests using a vacuum cleaner and I run to the laundry room to get one. On the way, I see Jerod leaving and stop him. He kisses me on the cheek and tells me to call him. Brandi is waiting by the puke when I return. Everyone else has vanished from the hallway. By now, it’s after three in the morning—half the party is sleeping or gone, while the other half nurses the last beers on the other side of the house.
We vacuum the puke and the puke gets stuck in the vacuum. The vacuum cleaner is ancient; my parents must have had it since they married in 1984. It’s orange and has a particular smell when it’s running, like something’s burning inside. The more we run it, the more chunks tumble out. Finally, we decide to pick up the puke with paper towels and toss them into plastic shopping bags. Brandi delivers the vacuum cleaner to the porch and the next morning, we sit outside before my parents come home and pick vomit out of the vacuum cleaner with screwdrivers.
It’s Friday the Thirteenth, a few weeks after my party. Part six of the Blood on the Turntables DJ series is tonight at the Amphitheatre in Ybor. Jackal & Hyde, Jerod’s favorite duo, are headlining. They’re hardcore electro: dance music with a hard edge and a dark side. They pull sounds and samples from all corners of the musical landscape and blend them together into grinding beats and complex keys and robotic vocals. I like them more than most of what Jerod listens to—they appeal to my artistic sensibilities. I ride with Jerod in Sean’s car, and the sun sets as we cross the Howard Frankland Bridge over Tampa Bay, into Ybor City. Jerod and Sean are discussing freebasing.