“Okay, enough Oprah. Let’s play.”
I pull out my guitar and start tuning it.
“Can I ask you one question, though?”
“Shoot.”
“Ravenna really messed up her jugs, huh?”
I nod.
“Bad, dude. Way bad.”
He scratches his chin. “So, okay. Given the tragic wrecking of the Tit-tanic, you get a pass.”
“A dispensation from the Pope. Cool.”
“Good for one usage only.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He plucks a few strings, starting to count off “Anarchy Is Panicky.”
I follow with a wash of sheer noise.
And then right before he sings the first line, El Hella leans over and says,
“I’m serious, though, Yoko. You sure as fuck better be at the next practice. Like, not even a single second late.”
So it turns out that Kyle Litotes isn’t going to be paralyzed. In fact, word is he’s up and walking around, miracle this, miracle that. He’s totally alive and functioning, the only downside being that apparently his head’s not quite right. And from what I hear it’s never going to be right again.
I call Lacy.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“I know,” she says. “Don’t even ask.”
“Ask what?”
“I’m not doing any more pranks. Or should I say felonies?”
“I just want to talk.”
“It’s way too late for that, Charlie Rose.”
“Will you stop with the tough-guy routine? I know you’re mad, but we both know you’re not that mad. Let’s pretend a month went by and we had a big fight and said really mean things to each other and then made up and now everything’s cool, if not a little tender around the edges. Because that’s what’s going to happen anyway. We might as well save us both the time.”
At first she doesn’t laugh, but then she does.
“Fine. So what do you want?”
“A truce. An understanding.”
“What happens in Sackville stays in Sackville?”
“Exactly. We’re two adults. We had a consensual moment. It’s no one’s fault.”
“Fault?”
“Okay, okay. We each benefited equally from the charms of the other.”
“That’s slightly better.”
“So we’re cool?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“We’re bandmates?”
“Sure looks like it.”
“Has anyone ever told you, Lacy Duplais, how hip and well adjusted you are?”
“They have now.”
I clear my throat. “The thing is, it’s not—”
“If you say, it’s not you it’s me, I’ll scream.”
“Don’t scream.”
“But since we’re being all honest, Ritchie, why don’t you just admit what’s going on?”
“And I know what you’re talking about because…”
“You’re obsessed with Ravenna! You’d rather live in some fantasy, not just about who you want to be with, but who you are. And the reason I can’t stay mad is it’s been obvious all along. I’m the idiot for thinking you’d ever change.”
HORROR.
“Speaking of change?”
“Yeah?
“The other reason I called is, I was wondering what’s going on with Kyle Litotes.”
“Why?”
“I was just… I dunno. Sort of worried about him.”
“You? Worried about Kyle Litotes?”
“Yes. So will you tell me what’s up, already?”
Lacy is friends with Brittany Lowe, who’s friends with Aubrey Pike, whose cousin is Nia Wayne, who is besties with Tiffany Skip, who is Kyle Litotes’s on-and-off girlfriend.
“Well, Brittany says Aubrey says Nia says that Tiffany says Kyle’s so messed up you wouldn’t believe.”
“Oh, man.”
“Yeah, Brittany’s all on and on about how Tiffany says she goes to the hospital and he’s there—it’s Kyle, but it’s not Kyle. He’s like a little kid now. He talks slow and acts all innocent, except out of nowhere he’ll grab her ass and be like, “Let’s fuck,” right in front of his mom and grandma, and then suddenly he’s playing with a napkin for an hour like it’s the most fascinating thing ever invented.”
“Oh my god.”
“I guess he spits and bites and picks his nose and has screaming tantrums. She says it’s not him anymore, it’s someone else, but what can she do, break up? I mean, that would make her the biggest bitch in Sackville history. But she says she cannot spend one more minute in that room watching his mother watch Wheel of Fortune while Kyle tries to feel her up behind a towel.”
“Wow.”
“I can barely stand retelling it,” Lacy says. “Let alone if it were me.”
“Let alone if you were Kyle.”
“You know what, Ritchie?”
“What?
“I’m so on the verge of saying something supercheesy right now, like, ‘Hey, we have no idea how lucky we are.’ ”
“But it’s true,” I say. “We totally have no idea.”
The question is, do I mean it?
I run a quick internal diagnostic.
Turns out I do.
“Coming from a cynical prick like Ritchie Sudden? That really stands for something.”
And with that, Lacy Duplais hangs up on my ass.
Ravenna Woods leans against my locker. Her sad face seems infinitely sadder than usual, the corner of her mouth turned down instead of up.
“My dad is making me transfer to Killington-Holloway.”
She’s wearing a yellow sweater. You can clearly see the thick square bandages where her nipples should be.
“He didn’t really buy my explanation that I wiped out in field hockey. He’s all, Where’s your sports bra, then? Did you scrape right through it? And then all the way to the hospital he keeps repeating, That’s it. I’m all bawling like, What’s it, Daddy? but he wouldn’t answer. I guess Killington-Holloway is what it is.”
I want to hold her hand. I want to make her tea. I want to kiss behind her ear. I want to ask if her father has any plans to sue me.
“So how are they?”
She stares for maybe five minutes straight.
“They? You mean my freaking tits?”
“Yeah, sorry. I mean, you know, are you okay?”
“Did you not just hear me say that my dad is making me go to private school?”
“But that’s sort of cool, right? Like, don’t the Kennedys go to Killington?”
“Maybe a million years ago. Now it’s all dictators’ daughters and Russian mob kids.”
“That’s crazy. When?”
“I start Thursday. Today’s my last day here.”
I think how weird it will be not to have Ravenna around. What a grim, gray place school will become. And how it’s pretty much entirely my fault. How from now on every guy at Sack High will hate me with a singular passion, the sort of hate usually reserved for ayatollahs and pedophiles and blink-182.
“We should throw you a bash.”
Her face creases along its most sarcastic fault. “Wow. Yeah, thanks. How thoughtful. Hey, can it be a pool party? Or, even better, maybe down by the lake?”
“I’m really sorry.”
Ravenna Woods looks at me from behind the severe blackness of her eyes.
“You know something? You really are.”
That night Mom’s actually home from a shift. She and Loop and I have mac and cheese with extra cheese.
“What’s new at school?” Looper asks.
“You know. Fires. Explosions. A mild smallpox outbreak. Some trench-coat kids with guns and bombs. Also, a friend of mine is transferring to Killington-Holloway.”
“Impressive,” Mom says. “What’s his name?”
“Ravenna.”
“Ravenna?” Loop says, winking at me. “Sounds exotic.”
Mom kicks Loop under the table.
&nb
sp; “So anyway,” I say, “I was just wondering, since she’s going and all, just an idea, nothing set in stone, if maybe there’s enough in the ol’ Sudden bank account so maybe I can transfer to Killington-Holloway, too?”
Mom looks at Looper.
Looper looks at Mom.
Then they both start laughing. They lean back, holding their stomachs, and howl. They’re laughing so hard I have to reach over to keep the platter of macaroni from wiping out onto the carpet.
After ten minutes they finally stop, dabbing at the corners of their eyes with napkins.
“So, I take it that’s a no?”
Which sets them off all over again.
I wait for my turn at the pay phone.
His wife answers. The operator comes on, explains where the call is coming from, tells her it’s collect.
The wife hangs up.
I try again.
It rings and rings and rings.
I try again.
Pick up. Put down. Click.
Dudes behind me start to jostle.
I try again.
This time Dad Sudden answers.
There’s a pause, but he accepts the charges.
“Richard?”
“Father?”
He clears his throat, chuckling a little. “I was going to say ‘Can I help you?’ but I suppose I’ll spare us both that lazy platitude.”
Good old Dad Sudden. Using nineteen words when four will do.
“Actually, you can help me.”
“I see.”
“I’m in trouble.”
“Again?”
“No, not again. In here.”
“The facility.”
“It’s called juvie, Dad. Why pretty it up? At any rate, I’m still working off my sentence.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Well, there’re these two kids. Essentially, they want to kill me.”
“Murder-kill, Richard? Or blacken your eye?”
“This isn’t boarding school, Dad.”
“Yes, well. Which is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
He sighs. “You’ve made your own bed on this one, haven’t you?”
“If you’re going to toss around the helpful clichés, I think I’d prefer ‘Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.’ ”
A child yells in the background behind him.
A delinquent yells in the background behind me.
“Would you really like some advice?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Go to the warden. Ask to get yourself transferred. It’s called protective custody. It may mean a stretch in solitary, but if you can prove you’re in danger, they most likely will be amenable to moving you there.”
I rest my forehead against the cold metal of the phone. Dad Sudden has seen way too many Burt Reynolds movies.
“Yeah, running is one option, I guess, even if we had such a thing as a warden or solitary or anyone who’s used the word stretch since they finished editing the last Dirty Harry movie. But to be honest? I’m starting to feel like it’s the whole reason I’m in here to begin with. When I should have turned around and faced things, I ran.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that means.”
“It means Beth.”
His voice lowers. I can hear inklings of pain down in there, from maybe the only place he can’t pretend is all boarded up.
“What about her?”
“About the night she died. About the party. There’s stuff we’ve never talked about.”
“So why bring it up now?”
“Because I’ve been sitting in here thinking. Which is about all you can do in a cage. Except when it’s too loud to think at all. And so you just sit.”
Some kids in line roll their eyes, sigh, waiting their turns.
“What will going over this again prove?”
“I’m not trying to prove anything, Dad. And we’ve never gone over it at all. That’s the whole point. I’m just saying, the night I got arrested? It wasn’t an accident. In fact, I did it on purpose.”
“So what do you want me to do, Richard? Call a lawyer? Have them reinvestigate the incident based on a sudden burst of guilt from a young man who’s finally taken a little time to consider something besides himself, mainly due to the fact that he’s currently incarcerated?”
Unbelievable.
“No,” I say. “I don’t want you to call a lawyer. I just want you to act, for even one short second, over thousands of miles of fiber-optic wire, like you actually give a shit.”
I can hear Dad Sudden’s new wife in the background, talking. I can hear her bitchy voice, nag nag nag.
A child starts to cry again.
“I’ve got to go. My son is—”
“Yeah,” I say. “You go take care of your son.”
And then the prick hangs up.
We’re halfway through “I Will Bequeath You All My Duplicity and More” when I fully and completely come to terms with the fact that Lacy Duplais is good. Now that she knows all the songs, she’s really, really good. Her voice is hard and raw, a little like Rod Stewart’s, but not abrasive. Eyes closed, playing to the packed bar of her mind, I can almost see a phantom audience sway, hanging on every word. She actually hits notes and holds them, confident. She smirks and winks and shakes her sexy little hips. She works it without too obviously working it, all tight shirt and leather mini.
Wise Young Fool might not be the Stones, but it’s hard to say we’re not at least legit.
After a few tunes, I go out to the Saab and unload Dice’s equipment. The preamp, the speakers, the mixer, the compressor. Elliot doesn’t say anything, just starts hooking the stuff up. Chaos doesn’t say anything, goes out to his Beemer, comes back with a file, and removes all the serial numbers.
We sound even crisper. We sound even tighter.
The PA is booming and clear.
Thanks, Dice!
Meanwhile, I can feel the whoosh of air from my Reverb Deluxe every time I play a bar chord. I’ve just gotten this new ultracool-rhythm thing down tight, no longer cheating on the upstrokes. It adds another layer to the song, chunka chunka chunk-ah. The roar of us is ungodly. I can only imagine what Lawrence is thinking while he chews on his spoon.
Behind me, Chaos is all over the place, his two bongos plus now he’s added big timbales and these other African shaker things while he stomps out delay-chorus poly-rhythms that make us sound like Santana at Woodstock in double-time run through a defectively amplified wood chipper.
It’s awesome.
Also, Elliot, as it turns out, was born to play bass. He’s thumping away on this huge Fender Precision fretless that he pried away from his brother Nico, totally in the pocket, working his neck back and forth like a chicken and making boomp boomp boomp sounds with his lips. And that leaves Lacy, right out front with her flaming red Mohawk. Yeah, her Mohawk. Way out of control. She’s a hotter Annabella from Bow Wow Wow. She’s a hotter Penelope from the Avengers. She’s a hotter Cherie from the Runaways. Elliot’s giving her clues just in the way he pops a note, when to lay low, when to come in roaring. She reads my lyrics sometimes off a piece of paper on the floor, but she’s done her homework, has most of them memorized. Amazingly, my words sound good. They make sense and have a point and don’t just rhyme. Coming from between her lips they seem to have a whole new depth, purpose, sexy subtext.
Lacy looks at Elliot. Elliot looks at Lacy.
The song ends.
We don’t even talk, no jokes, no bullshit, just start the next one.
Elliot looks at Lacy. Lacy looks at Elliot.
Chaos counts off the beat for “Truckasaurus Rex Bites a Chunk Outta Yore Neck,” one, two, three, four, and I come in hard with a wash of distorted madness, like a thousand electrified axes chopping down a thousand cherry trees. I am a buzz saw of cerebellum-reducing cacophony while Lacy Duplais twirls the mic in one hand, pure style, soaking in the love of an imaginary crowd.
Chaos and I
are sitting outside in the grass during break. His eyes are clear and calm. His hair curls behind his ears. He’s wearing a sheepherder’s jacket and huge cargo shorts. He looks like he just stepped out of a catalog for wine racks and thousand-dollar shoes and Cuban cigars and ointments made from endangered rhino horn.
I have decided not to say anything about the fact that, as I walked over to flop down and let the short blades tickle my neck, I saw Elliot pinning Lacy against the wall of the garage, her legs around his waist, their mouths locked. I stood there rooted in place like a total dipshit. She opened one eye, winked at me, then closed it again, going back in for more.
“Intraband romance,” Chaos says, somehow knowing anyway, “can be a tricky thing.”
“It’s a disaster. It’ll never work.”
“Although they appear to fit together quite well. From architecture to temperament.”
I sigh. “Young love is the stuff of a million lousy songs. Maybe we’ll add a few fucking ballads and start doing bar mitzvahs.”
“Fucking ballads, or ballads about fucking?”
“Is there a difference? If they screw, we’re screwed.”
“Are you jealous?”
“Jealous of what?”
Chaos just smiles, then pulls out his pipe, packs a thumb full of buds, and has it lit in one motion. He tries to pass it over.
“Sorry. I’m against anything that clouds my thoughts or purpose or vision.”
“How about something that heightens and augments your vision and purpose and thoughts?”
“You do your thing; I’ll do mine.”
“Yeah,” he says, “but what is your thing?”
It’s a good question. Women? Making music? Writing songs? Hating the world?
“Man, I’m clean by choice. Willing to accept the pain of existence un-numbed. I want to feel everything from good to bad to worse. Unlike you, I am prepared to hold my hand over the candle.”
He grunts. “Have you considered the possibility that masochism is just another high?”
It bears considering. Just not very much.
“Drugs are for losers, hippies, and experimental poets.”
“That’s a hard line, my friend. That’s a dogmatic take.”
“If you mean a dog that protects your yard, plus an automatic that fires hollow points, I agree.”
Wise Young Fool Page 18