by Sara Taylor
The phone would ring, and it would be Socks or Edgar, wanting to know how the show had gone and if we were going to have a rehearsal or anything, and I basically just told them that I was busy with school, which after a few days didn’t cut it, but they didn’t push me on it. I didn’t hear from Fern at all, but that was okay. I knew what was going on.
Basically all I can really say about what was going on in my mind was that I was working very, very hard to keep any flashes of that night from coming into my head. I was doing everything I could to keep my mind busy and moving, because if I stayed in one place for too long, or got lazy, the images would flood in, and my stomach would knot and my teeth would clench and my eyes would sting with tears. It would make me feel very physically sick and I would try to drive it out of me, to the point of actually pinching myself or knocking my head into the wall. It sounds crazy, I know. But I had to do something.
And so I started walking, mostly at night, and I began to find a certain peace coming over me, even though I refused to allow my mind to go back and settle the score with the memories. I felt peace, and I felt an almost gleeful desire to hit and stomp and kick and destroy that was so strong it would make my palms sweat.
xXx
I called Fern, and we met in the woods in the late afternoon after school. I hadn’t spoken to her until earlier that day, and we agreed it was time to meet. She looked tired, her eyes sunken and her hair dull, and she wore dirty jeans.
We hugged each other and she tried to smile at me, and I could see how destroyed she was, how much this was affecting her. I felt tears threaten at seeing her suffering, but, as I was now so used to doing, I steeled myself against them and swallowed them back, shifting the focus onto what I wanted to tell her.
“I have a plan.”
“What’s that?”
“We get our revenge.”
She studied me with those exhausted blue eyes, leaning against the tree at her back. “How do we do that, Rachel?”
“It won’t be anytime soon. But it’s possible.” I could feel myself about to jabber uncontrollably, and I was aware that I was clasping and unclasping my hands spastically, but being around Fern again and being able to articulate what I had been formulating for the last few weeks was overwhelming me. “We have to get close to DED again. We just have to get near them. And then we kill them.”
“Kill them, huh?” A small, amused grin appeared.
“I’m serious,” I said, looking into her eyes, feeling almost ready to plead with her to understand. “Fern, we kill them.”
She stared for a few moments. “How?”
“It doesn’t matter. However. Poison them or light their bus on fire. However we can. But we work hard, Fern.” Tears were streaming from my eyes, pouring down my face, and splattering onto my chest in giant drops. “We work hard at the band and we get famous. We get on a tour with DED. We get close to them again and we fucking kill them.”
She was silent, and I mopped at my eyes with my sweater sleeve. “I know it sounds crazy, but they have to pay for what they’ve done to us.” My breath came in gasps; I was losing control, and I struggled with myself, heaving air into my lungs, grappling for poise. “You know they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again, and no one else is going to stop them. And I don’t give a fuck, I want to stop them. I want to show them. Make them sorry they ever messed with us.”
I sat down in the leaves and covered my face with my hands, rubbing my eyes and breathing deeply to calm down. When I looked at Fern again, she was smoking a cigarette and studying me.
“Do you really think you could do it?” I was pleased to hear a lack of sarcasm in her tone. She was taking the idea seriously.
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”
“Why not just go to another show, get backstage again,” she swallowed hard, “and do it then?”
“Because no one would care if some psychotic faceless slut did it.” Anger built up in me. “I want to show them. I want to be someone, Fern, not just a random groupie in the back room. I want people to listen to us and ask us why we did it. I want everyone to know.”
She puffed on her cigarette, looking off into the distance. “I don’t know if I can kill anyone, Rachel.”
“I know I can,” I said. “I’ll do it. I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me.” Tears threatened once again, and I dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand, pushing them away. “I want them to pay. I don’t care. I just need us to work together on this, Fern. You’re the only one who knows what happened.”
She smiled sadly. “You know we’ll do this together.”
I smiled back and felt wetness in my palm. My fingernails had drawn blood, I had dug them in so hard. I raised my eyes back to Fern, who was still smiling, and saw no joy in her eyes despite that big smile. I don’t think I’ve seen much in her eyes since that whole thing happened, to be honest.
THIRTY-FIVE
I finished school — the three of us did. School had been pretty much irrelevant to me since I’d started the band. I got good grades, but I didn’t care. Every free minute I had I tried to spend working on the band. I applied but I wasn’t going to go to college and I didn’t worry about telling my parents my decision. They stayed away from me, and I gave them nothing to worry about. I kept to myself and finished school, I wasn’t loud, and I wasn’t going out to parties or coming home late. They couldn’t complain, right? Besides, Melissa was starting to enter some annoying rebellious phase, and Mom and Dad had to focus on her messes instead of mine.
The only places I went at all, really, were band practices and to see Edgar, Socks, and Fern. Socks was looking forward to the summer — he wanted to book a tour and just hit the road for a few months. Edgar was balking at that idea, Fern and I were all for it, so we ended up talking about money a lot, which wasn’t what I was interested in at all. Edgar always was pretty sensible, wanting to make sure everything would work out. Socks was maybe too easygoing. I don’t know what was going on in Fern’s mind those days, but all I wanted to do was get on the road and get things going. I had energy and nowhere to channel it except at rehearsals and into my artwork.
Socks and Edgar noticed that something was different with me and Fern, but after asking us once what was wrong, they dropped it. I tried to cover it up with enthusiasm, but I’m pretty sure it was all overwrought and seemed weird. Fern, on the other hand, had become very quiet and more observational, nodding instead of discussing. It disturbed me. I hoped that she would regain more of her old self. In practice, instead of being aggressive and confident, she seemed timid and weak. I had no idea what was going on in her mind, but I could see myself trying to channel everything into my plans, to turn everything into drive and energy. Mad is more productive than sad, right?
I’d lie awake in bed and imagine glorious ways to destroy that band. The concept of lighting the bus on fire was always a good standby; the image of that fat asshole’s swollen, split flesh and the crackle of their hair blazing always calmed me. I entertained myself with images of poisoning them, putting something into their drinks and watching bloody foam stream from their lips. Even something as simple as driving a plain old stick from the backyard into Balthazar’s eye could often do it. When an image of his face would pop into my mind unbidden, I would immediately imagine driving my thumb into his eye, relishing the warmth of the spasm and clench around my thumb, the eye bursting beneath my thumbnail and all that weird congealed jelly stuff squirting out and down his cheek.
I also developed a pretty bad habit of digging my nails into the palm of my left hand, causing cuts that would bleed, as I had that day in the woods with Fern. I’d pull off the scabs when the wounds tried to heal, and after a while my palm was a mess and only got worse. I ended up getting a bunch of blood on my bed sheets because I tore off the scabs before bed or unknowingly in my sleep. The skin around the scabs would harden into dry ridges and I would
tear those off too, stripping them along as far as they could go into the healthy areas of my palm and causing more blood to well up. I would wad up a white sock and clench it in my palm whenever I picked at it during the day. I kept all the bloody socks in a bag under my bed.
xXx
The whole throwing-up thing in Port Claim had definitely worked in our favour. Word had started getting around about the band in the months since that had happened, and there was a small but present demand for our crappy CD. Socks put together a cheap little website to sell them, and mail and money started trickling in. People wanted to know when we were playing in their city, if we wanted to play with their band, all kinds of stuff. We hadn’t played any shows in a long time, and it was pretty awesome that people really, really wanted us to.
And then we got a really amazing-sounding offer. We all knew Goreceps — I’d really gotten into their album Excrement from Birth. They were from the U.K., and we got an email from their manager offering us a tour with them. A week and a half touring across England, and two shows in Ireland and Scotland.
Of course there was the money issue. We’d have to cover our own flights, and four round-trip tickets to the U.K. were pretty expensive. But Goreceps’s manager assured us that the crowds there would be quite large, and they would pay us a small sum for each show. We could also sell our own merchandise and CDs. We had a few hundred dollars from the CDs we’d sold already, and we could put that towards doing a run of T-shirts. So all we had to do was somehow scrounge up enough money for the flights — everything else would be taken care of.
I made the design for the T-shirt. Two blood-spattered women pressed against one another, dresses torn, faces skeletal, and eyes hollow beneath their long ratted hair. One was dark haired, the other pale. They pressed their bony hands together, the fingers entwined, gripping a hank of black hair. Dangling from their grasp was a severed head, several teeth wrenched from its dry gums, dark blood oozing from its scooped-out eye sockets. I pressed my pencil hard into the drawing, adding the best smirks I could to the girls’ exposed bone faces, willing their happiness to reflect in the dark hollows of their eyes. It was Judith and her maidservant and the head of Holofernes, but of course, it was me and Fern and the head of Balthazar. That legend, that myth, was going to be our reality. I pored over the drawing for hours and hours. I dreamed that my teeth had been sharpened down to pointy nubs, and I used them to bite through stomachs, chewing at spongy entrails while my mouth filled with blood over and over again.
Edgar’s parents agreed to loan us money for the flights. My parents agreed I could go. I hadn’t caused any tension in the house since that horrible night, and I think they were worried about me being depressed or something. The T-shirt was printed. We packed our bags for tour. Fern and Edgar would bring their guitars, Socks would share a drum kit with Goreceps. We filled our remaining suitcases with CDs, shirts to sell, and stage clothes, and went to the U.K.
THIRTY-SIX
It was called the Flesh for Lunch Tour and right when we got off the plane things felt very organized. We were met at the airport by Richard, who shook our hands, gave us laminated cards with a picture of Goreceps and our name on the front, and the tour dates on the back, and brought us to a van. We were exhausted and hoping we’d be able to sleep — it was early afternoon in London, but our body clocks were telling us it was 8 a.m. and we hadn’t been to sleep. Sleeping on planes is impossible. It’s such a horrible feeling sitting in the fake night they give you, where they dim the lights and everyone closes their eyes, and it seems like you’re the only one still awake, you’re the only one who didn’t plan ahead and stay up the night before so you’d actually be tired during fake night. You feel lonely and isolated, and you also get to panic because you know you’re going to land in a few hours and be just exhausted, destroyed, and expected to face a whole new day. And that’s what happened to us. Richard said we were going straight to the first venue, as there was a show that night. And so we did.
We’d landed in London but the first show was in Manchester, a few hours’ drive northwest. At least we could try to sleep in the van as Richard drove. I sat next to the window with Fern beside me. She stared out the window and I stared at her. Her cheeks were hollowed, and I realized how much weight she had lost. Socks and Edgar were excited about being in England, chatting with Richard about how the buildings looked different and laughing about different shops’ names. I was dimly aware that we were in another country and it was totally interesting and different and exciting, but for some reason I couldn’t stop staring at the sharp jut of Fern’s cheekbone. My stomach lurched at the thought of how unfair it was, at how she couldn’t enjoy what was happening as much as she should have been able to. So I closed my eyes and tried to calm my racing heart by thinking instead about how every mile that passed, every step forward, was taking us closer to our new goal. We would get a tour with DED. It would happen.
xXx
A few things became clear as the tour began: one was that the guys in Goreceps were pretty nice, which was a relief. Two was that some people in the U.K. knew our music, and the only explanation was that they’d heard it on the internet. This pissed Socks off especially — we hadn’t mailed many CDs over here, and he was frustrated that we’d lost potential sales. It was a weird double-edged sword — people liked our band over here and it was surreal to see people singing along in a foreign country, but they clearly hadn’t bought the CD.
The third thing was that our reputation had preceded us. A lot of people at the shows had the perception that we were “insane.” Certainly most of the people at the shows were impatient for our act to finish so Goreceps could take the stage, which made sense, and a lot of those people were guys who had no interest in our band, especially with two girls onstage. But the story of my vomiting had gotten around, and to my dismay it seemed I was expected to provide some sort of shocking performance.
I was already prepared to steel myself against aggressive metal guys at the front of the stage and was becoming pretty good at ignoring taunts and jeers and bullshit sexual gestures. But over here it seemed to take on a new intensity.
At one of the first shows, there were about four guys pressed against the stage as we played, and they openly tried to intimidate me. “Try puking on me, bitch,” one of them kept jeering. I tried to ignore them, and Edgar positioned himself in front of them in hopes of shutting them up, but between songs they’d spread their arms wide, calling to me, daring me to do something. I hoped they’d get bored, but they seemed determined, and despite the overall positive reaction from the crowd, I was having trouble ignoring them. I could feel their eyes on me and it unsettled me, which in turn made me furious at myself for allowing them to intimidate me.
When we had only two songs left, they finally cut it out. I was relieved, but then I saw that they had turned their attention to Fern. She was focused entirely on her guitar and her fingers moved quickly, gliding up and down its neck. Sweat dripped from her face, and her mascara had melted into dark circles under her eyes. Above her, a red spotlight glowed, bathing her in scarlet light, making her white hair appear pink. She looked so beautiful in that moment.
And I saw one of the guys had pushed his way to position himself in front of her, and his arm reached up towards her. It reminded me of the video I had seen of Marie-Lise so long ago, where the asshole in the crowd reaches up and is thrown back by her violent kick. I watched this guy’s hand grab the hem of her skirt and tug her forward. She stumbled, catching herself before she fell, but raising her hands from the guitar.
I froze as I watched the panic strike her face, her hands immediately flying to clutch her skirt protectively. I dropped the microphone as the guy continued to yank on her, his lips drawn back from his teeth as he laughed. His gums looked purple and diseased in the red light.
Socks and Edgar continued to play and the microphone began squealing, feeding back, cutting through my stupor and causing t
he people in the crowd to recoil with its piercing shriek. I grabbed the microphone back up, stopping the noise, and leaped towards the guy, raising it above my head like a baseball bat.
There was a loud, intense thump as I brought the microphone down on the guy’s head. Immediately it began to feed back again, but I ignored the grating sound. I don’t know if Socks and Edgar stopped playing. I was unaware of any noise except the shriek of the microphone and the booming as I brought it down against this creep’s head again and again. It sounded like a giant, overwhelming heartbeat, thudding and soul shaking, and I was dimly aware that the guy’s yells of pain were also amplified by the microphone.
I felt hands on my shoulders and snapped my head up to see Edgar had come to stop me. I realized my eyes were burning and I wondered when I had last blinked. All I had been aware of was the pounding heartbeat of the microphone, the squealing as it fed back.
“Cut it out,” Edgar yelled at the guy in the crowd in front of us, and I felt an electric thrill run through me as I realized that I was right, my friend was siding with me.
I pulled myself together and looked at the crowd. All was quiet, and every face I could see was looking at us, aghast. I could tell they were waiting for direction, unsure what to think about what I had done. I realized I was in control here. They would listen to what I said.
The prick stood there, rubbing his sore head like a little kid would have, a mix of fury and confusion on his face.
“Say you’re sorry,” I ordered him in my most patronizing tone, chastising him like the child he looked like. My voice echoed in the silence. The crowd seemed to hold its breath.
“No way, you stupid whore,” the guy said, but he was far away enough from the mike that he sounded hollow, thin and pathetic. His voice broke on the word whore, making him sound even more idiotic and weak.
I brought the microphone down again, hard, onto his head, and the sound boomed hollowly through the room. The crowd began to cheer.