“She’s probably never been a man,” said Bess.
“If she has,” said the Green Girl, “I will literally hang myself.”
They went out on the balcony and watched the cars. It was peaceful out there, like outer space. The next day they escaped Ophelia long enough to take pictures in a photo booth. The thrill of it came from circling around a truth they were discovering at the same time: that they liked each other best.
Rome was also where the cops came to their door, and they had to fade. They rematerialized in Sydney. Ophelia wasn’t there. She texted them later and said she was feeling really hung over and dehydrated. Which, said the Green Girl, was sort of hilarious when you thought about it.
§
4. Bess’s Type
The thin boy dancing with Bess is not her Type. He looks humble and sad, and he backs up politely when another boy crashes into him. When the song ends Bess thanks the thin boy, explains that she has a boyfriend, and heads back to the bar for another drink. She eyes the bartender, who is cute. He doesn’t pay any attention to her; he’s the cold, professional sort, always wiping things down. Boring. It’s too bad, because he has the cruel profile and capable restless hands by which Bess’s Type may be recognized anywhere in the world.
Bess’s Type is well known to the magazines. He appears in advertisements, wearing ragged jeans, wearing beautiful suits. He is often holding a bottle of cologne. In the cologne ads he comes with a folded strip of paper that you can peel up in order to smell him. Bess’s Type smells like grass and rain and leather and freshly split wood. He has notes of citrus. He has Commitment Phobia. He has eleven erogenous zones you don’t know about. If you answered “Yes” to more than six of these questions, he is Verbally Abusive.
Bess’s Type is trouble. He will come to a bad end. His mother loved him too much, or not enough. He is filthy rich, or just filthy. He is in prison, stabbed, shot down like a dog on the highway. He is riding, riding, riding.
Bess often stays up late checking off the boxes in magazine quizzes. Yes. Yes. The scratch of ballpoint pen, the shiver of recognition. The quizzes tell her that he is still here. And if he is still here, then so is she.
The Green Girl says: “My Type is the Type with a pulse.”
§
5. Ten Hours from Now
Ten hours from now, Bess and the Green Girl will meet for breakfast at this place on the beach. The Green Girl will have more cash than Bess, but she will have only one shoe. She has ripped off the bottom third of her t–shirt and fashioned a bandage out of it. She limps, leaning on Bess, gasping with laughter, her blue toenails crusted with sand.
They sit by the big window and order coffee and trade stories. These are all stories you’ve heard, or overheard, or told.
“And then I was like —”
“And then he was like —”
“And then he goes, ‘Why don’t we try —’ ”
“He’s like, ‘Why don’t we go —’ ”
“He’s all, ‘It’s kind of loud in here, why don’t we go somewhere else?’ ”
The Green Girl orders her coffee with whipped cream on top. She dips her tongue in the cream. The Green Girl needs to put some more spray tan on. She’s looking green. She needs a shower. She needs more perfume. She needs, she needs. Bess needs too. She needs a new shirt. She needs a manicure and some lipstick.
After breakfast, they will go shopping and get all the things they need. Yay!
They shop with big handfuls of crumpled bills. They steal as much as they buy. They get the Green Girl a new pair of heels in creamy gray suede. The salesgirl says, “It complements your skin!” Bess and the Green Girl get lots of compliments. They get full makeovers, they get their hair done. Bess loves the smell of salons, sharp and hard as an open pair of scissors. The smell makes her eyes water. She loves the efficient little zip when she gets her eyebrows waxed, although she no longer feels any pain. She loves being surrounded by serious work. The girls at the salon work on themselves and each other with the concentration of embalmers. They are themselves and also not themselves, inside and outside, like ghosts. Bess feels wistful. What’s it like to live like this when you’re still alive?
§
6. Photographs
Bess keeps the photographs from Rome in her purse. A strip of black–and–white images, Bess and the Green Girl smiling, pouting, batting their eyelashes. In one photo they wear big glamorous sunglasses. Bess and the Green Girl are glamorous people who stay at the best hotels and converse in hotel language. When they run out of money, they rob people in parks. You’d be surprised how easy it is to make a person faint. In one of the photographs, the Green Girl points a finger at the camera, thumb cocked: POW! But the Green Girl doesn’t need a gun.
Bess pores over the photographs. She pores over her own face. It’s a pampered face, plump and smoothly powdered, the face of a queen or an heiress. The face of someone who doesn’t know how to suffer. Which, Bess thinks to herself, is sort of hilarious when you think about it.
§
7. The End of the Green Girl’s Story
So I went to check out the window and there was one of those metal fire escapes, right? So I opened the window and climbed out and started going down. I couldn’t hear him anymore, but I knew he was in there somewhere screaming his head off, because I kept passing apartments where lights were going on. One window lit up right in my face, and there was this guy standing there in his shorts with his hand on the light switch, and his face was like, what the fuck? So funny, I swear to God. But when I got to the bottom the windows were all dark, so I guess they couldn’t hear anything down there. Anyway, I jumped down and took off through the parking lot. Barefoot! Carrying my shoe! Like hey, don’t mind me, I’m just another random ghost girl with a shoe. I ran for ages, I don’t even know how long. I ran through all these back yards and a park. And then it was like, you know what? Nobody’s chasing you. Why are you running?
So then I just walked. I walked down the sidewalk under these big old trees and looked at the houses. Everything was dark except one house at the end of the street. I went up close and looked in the window and there was an old lady sitting there at a table sort of laying out strips of yarn. She had all different colors of yarn. She had my favorite color, that dark teal color, and your favorite color, and everybody’s favorite color, and she was just laying them out in rows and then switching them around, and then she’d lean back and put her head on one side, like this. Like hmm, does that look good? And then she’d frown and move them some more. She had on a sweatshirt and this big purple scarf with sequins. The scarf was a little bit rad, actually. She had crooked gnarled–up old lady hands and she moved the pieces of yarn like they might fall apart any minute. She seemed like, you know the Fates? She seemed like the Fates, except there was only one of her instead of three, and all her pieces of thread were cut. They were cut but she didn’t throw them away. She kept moving them around. It seemed like she had something in mind for them.
§
8. The Creed
Bess sits at the bar at Pink Ice and orders another vodka and cranberry. The Green Girl is still dancing in the crowd, her hair and skin spangled with the glitter that falls from the ceiling, her flat little breasts bouncing under her t–shirt. Other girls dance around the Green Girl, a tangle of elbows and hair. Bess closes her eyes and breathes in slowly, smelling salons and mascara and sweat. Delicious smell of girls who dance as if it’s already the end, as if they secretly know that tonight they will die for love.
She opens her eyes. The cute bartender smiles. He strolls over to her, wiping the bar. “Abandoned?” he shouts over the music.
Bess smiles. “I guess.”
He says something like “shade.”
“What?”
“That’s a shame!”
They lean close to talk.
“I’m Evan,” says the cute bartender.
“I’m Bess.”
Somebody calls him; he steps away to pour drinks.
He’ll be back. He’ll say something about the surprise, a girl like her, alone. He’ll ask about the boyfriend. For him, she’ll say there isn’t one. There really isn’t. You don’t get everything back.
You could, of course, if you wanted to. You could do what the songs say. You could keep waiting, you could keep listening for those hoofbeats on the road. You could go on waiting for him and you could kill yourself over and over and maybe there would be a kind of satisfaction.
Bess said this to the Green Girl once, and the Green Girl said: “Please tell me you’re high.”
It was after the photographs, at a restaurant in gold light. Bess said: “But I miss him.” She felt like crying.
The Green Girl smacked the table. “Damn it! Are you going Ophelia on me?”
The Green Girl took out her eyeliner and scribbled on a napkin. She wrote: THE CREED. Bess has the Creed in her purse, she keeps it with the photos. The Creed goes like this:
1. There’s more than one way of haunting.
2. We didn’t get enough and we are back for more.
3. No moaning I am more than a voice.
4. LIVELIVELIVE
The bartender slices lemons with his capable restless hands. Bess doubts she’ll get a shot at the cash register before he takes her home: he’s too professional. Still, there’s the wallet. And there will be warmth. There will be kisses, arms around her. God, she longs for it. She’s freezing.
She won’t let him get past the ruffled blouse, to the black wound underneath. It’s not that the screaming bothers her, when they find out. But some things, thinks Bess, are private. The Green Girl doesn’t agree. She always says the screaming’s her favorite part. Ten hours from now, wearing only one shoe, the Green Girl will gasp with laughter over the screams of the man who will take her home tonight, his retching, his flailing arms, his Get out get out, please go away, oh God, a corpse! It will be pretty much the funniest thing ever. And then the Green Girl will tell the story of the woman with the threads: old Fate. And that story will stay with Bess all day. At the hair salon, at the mall, she’ll keep thinking about it. What do you do with yourself, where do you go, after your thread’s been cut?
There’s more than one way of haunting.
We didn’t get enough and we are back for more.
More what?
Tomorrow night Bess will say: “Let’s go find that old lady.” She’ll walk with the Green Girl, hand in hand beneath the evening trees. The world will seem strangely quiet, the streetlamps veiled in mist. But the old woman’s window will glow through the dusk as vibrant as a heart. The ghosts will hover, then tap gently at the glass. Poor ghost girls, always on the outside, always cold. “Let us in,” they’ll call. “Please let us in. We’re lost.”
Now the bartender’s back. He’s still pretending to wipe the bar, preserving the distant air of Bess’s Type. He raises his eyebrows. “Your friend’s having a good night,” he says, and Bess turns and sees the Green Girl in a cage.
The cage gleams above the dance floor, high on the wall. On some nights, Bess guesses, there’s a professional dancer in it. Tonight, it’s the Green Girl. How did she get in there? Was the cage unlocked? Did she fade and materialize, or did she use the stairs?
“Oh my God,” groans Bess. “She is a total exhibitionist.”
Evan laughs. Bess gazes up at the Green Girl, resigned, disgusted, and happy. The Green Girl grips the bars and swivels her hips. She flings her hair back, throwing off glitter. She looks utterly alive. People on the dance floor are starting to grab their friends’ arms and point up at her: Look at that girl! Now they’re cheering, jumping higher, fists in the air, all the Pink Ice kids with their feathers and fake IDs and borrowed cars, with their devious feral expressions of children raised by alcoholics or wolves.
The Green Girl is their incandescent queen. She melts the snow. They would like to pull down the cage and take out the lovely sparkly goddess inside. They would like to sacrifice her on an altar. They would like to read a poem in which she dies and dies and dies.
The Green Girl snarls. She eats all the death wishes and never gets full. Her body snaps, light and flexible as a whip. Her face is blanched by the lights, distorted with joy. “Yeah!” she screams. “Woo! YEAAAAAH!” Bess can hear her over the music.
Blood and Sequins
Diana Rowland
“PELLINI, SEE ANYTHING?”
I lowered the binoculars, passed them to Boudreaux. “Looks clear so far.” We lurked within a rented van parked on the far edge of the Bayou Skate roller rink lot. A huge banner draped the front of the sprawling building, proclaiming the 60th anniversary of the World Famous Gator Skater’s Mardi Gras Costume Contest. A line of people waiting to get inside stretched around the corner.
My partner did a careful scan of the area. “If there’s anyone in there who might recognize us, they’ll probably be in costume, so we’re fucked as far as that goes,” he said. “But I don’t see any familiar cars either.” He took a long drag off his cigarette, flicked the butt out the open window. “And once we get our masks on, we should be in the clear.”
I gave him a tight, satisfied smile, then opened the side doors of the van. “Let’s roll.”
Boudreaux donned his horned headpiece — an elaborate iridescent white construction of papier–mâché, crystals, and sequins. It was still a little freaky to watch my wiry partner transform into what we’d dubbed the Crystal Incubus. Clawed gloves, shimmering fabric, a couple of thousand crystals, and cleverly constructed leathery white wings that sparkled with every move completed the illusion. No way in hell would anyone recognize him.
Using the van’s rearview mirror, I slipped eerie red contacts into place, then smeared shimmery black stage makeup around my eyes, the only skin that would show through the matte–black mask. Once I had it on, I pulled the hood of my robes further forward, then stepped back to assess what little reflection I had in the dark gloss paint of the van. Meaty. That’s what I usually called myself, but I knew better. I squeaked by the departmental physical only because, at forty–something, I was old enough to be allowed to walk the requisite mile and a half. It’d been a long time since I’d given a crap that my belly hung over my belt and my pecs had long ago morphed into man–boobs.
But none of that showed in the costume. The cut and fall of the long robes, the wide sleeves, the jewel–studded belt, the deep hood, all suited my form nicely. Where Boudreaux was all white sparkle, my getup was shadow and darkness. Sure, I had my share of black sequins, crystals, and even glitter, but the effect was a subtle shimmer rather than gaudy overkill. Huge folded wings constructed of about a billion feathers ended almost two feet above my head, and six–inch platform shoes added to the effect of towering height. Goddamn, I was one bad ass Dark Angel.
And right now, we were about to go into the sneakiest undercover of our lives. But this was no police operation. This wasn’t two Beaulac Police Department homicide detectives trying to nail a suspect.
No, me and Boudreaux were there to enter the most prestigious Mardi Gras costume contest in St. Long Parish. Attendance was limited to three hundred, and tickets were pricey and hard to come by. Costumes were required, but the entry fee for the contest was obscene, so only a small portion of the partygoers actually competed. And once I had the costumes underway for this year, I’d called in a couple of favors to land tickets.
There were hell of a lot of things I really sucked at — cooking, car repair, hell, even police work at times — but I sure kicked ass at making cool–as–shit costumes. Not that anyone else back at the station knew… or would ever know. Any cop caught wearing sequins or spandex would never live it down. I didn’t have much of a reputation anymore, but I intended to hang on to what little I had.
Which was why we were skulking in a parking lot, making damn sure we were in the clear before heading inside.
I locked the van and stuffed the keys into the belt pack under my robes, then we headed toward the entrance. It’d taken more hours tha
n I wanted to admit to perfect the art of walking in the funky shoes, but it resulted in the awesome illusion of me gliding along with my robes skimming the ground.
Doors were tricky with my wings, but I’d practiced that too, and made it through without mishap as old school disco music surrounded us. Boudreaux handed over our tickets and joined the line to get us registered under our usual aliases. No way would we risk getting found out by putting our real names down.
I took a half step back to make room for the wide gold brocade skirts of a domino–masked woman dressed as an eighteenth century French noble, tall wig and all. Her mouth was pressed into an angry frown as she joined the line a couple of people behind Boudreaux. A few seconds later she startled as one of the staff members taking registrations snapped his pencil in half. Frowning, I watched the guy stand and storm off. Huh. Guess he was sick of costumes.
Boudreaux returned from registration as the music changed to a techno beat. “All set. There’s a lineup on the rink in about an hour, but apparently most of the judging takes place before that. The judges are in the crowd. Could be anyone.”
“Got it,” I said. “We’re on as soon as we walk in. Everything look okay on me?”
“Yeah. Bad ass. Let’s go win this thing.”
I pushed down sudden nerves. The Dark Angel and Crystal Incubus were the best thing I’d ever created, but that didn’t mean shit if they didn’t have the same effect on other people. “Come on. And remember not to slouch.”
Boudreaux snorted and straightened his shoulders. “And you remember to keep your fat ass upright and not fall off those platforms.”
We headed into the rink area, both of us itching to get a solid look at the competition. The harsh bass vibrated through us, mingling with the scent of perfume and sweat, with a wisp of pot thrown in. Banks of expensive–looking lights and mirrors dominated the ceiling in the center of the room, and what appeared to be brand new sparkle–flecked red carpeting covered the wide area that surrounded the entire skating floor. Everything looked shiny and in good repair, and I wondered how the hell a roller skating operation could keep up with that sort of budget.
Glitter & Mayhem Page 20