Boring Girls

by Sara Taylor

  He looked a bit older than us, and he was dirty. There were leaves in his dark, greasy hair, and he wore a filthy plaid shirt and torn brown pants. He was sitting cross-legged, hands spread in front of him as if under arrest, his eyes huge and unblinking, staring up at Fern.

  I absorbed the situation and saw a fucking big knife in her hand, the kind with a curved blade that folds back neatly into the handle. She brandished it in her right hand, pointing it at the guy. Her eyes were wide and wild.

  “He attacked me,” she said in a high voice.

  “I did not,” the guy said, slurring. He was drunk or wasted on something, and he flicked his eyes to me and then back to her. “I did not. I did not.”

  “He did,” Fern said. She said the words quickly, never taking her eyes off him.

  “Where’d you get the knife?” I asked lamely.

  “I bought it in Florida,” she replied.

  “I did not. I did not,” the guy repeated. “I did not.”

  “Oh god, stop that,” I said.

  Then it was quiet. None of us spoke. It was kind of funny, this weird tableau of the guy holding his hands out in surrender, Fern standing there pointing the knife at him, and me, just sort of there. A light breeze rustled the leaves around us. I felt a giggle coming on.

  “I’m sorry,” the guy said, startling me.

  “I came back here and he grabbed me out of the bushes,” Fern explained.

  “I did not. I did not. I did not. I did —”

  “Shut up,” I said. I knew where this was going, but somehow it was worse. It was like the polar opposite of the night in Florida. It was bright, it didn’t smell like shit, and I could see this guy’s face. I could look into his eyes. He gave me a pleading look, his brown eyes sad and frantic. This horrible rush of pity climbed right up my throat. I threw up all down my front and my hands. Fern was unmoved.

  The guy started to laugh, pointing at me like a little kid. “Fuck, sorry,” I mumbled, wiping my hands on my shorts.

  Then, out of nowhere, the guy lunged at Fern. I leaped at him and she swiped with the knife, connecting with his hand. There was a flash of blood and the guy screamed, pulling his hands to his face. She’d cut his fingers — his pinkie looked pretty bad. I didn’t think she’d severed anything. I was right behind him now, and I grabbed him, putting my arms around his neck in a pathetic chokehold.

  “Don’t do that again,” Fern hissed.

  “I did not! I did not,” he bawled, beginning to cry. I could smell the stink of booze on him.

  “Shut up.” Fern stepped forward and punched him in the stomach. The guy let out a gasping grunt, and when she pulled her fist away from him, I saw the knife dripping. It took me a second to realize she’d stabbed him.

  As I held him, she took a deep breath and punched him again with the blade. The guy coughed and I let him go. He slumped over into the grass, moving his hands to his belly. I watched his fingers turn slick and scarlet. Blood seeped into the grass. He lay there, gasping.

  “There,” she said, as if she’d just finished planting a garden or something, mission accomplished. His breath moved in and out slowly. He held his hands pressed to his stomach, and blood poured over them. Every now and then he would cough, a wet, bubbling sound.

  I didn’t like the feeling. I didn’t like standing here covered in my own vomit, watching him die. It was too sunny for a scene like this, too peaceful, with the wind and the silence of the graves around us. I didn’t like the way it was making me feel about Fern. I squashed that feeling, crushed it, buried it. This was not Fern’s fault.

  I was jarred from my thoughts by the pressure of a hard object on my hand. Fern was giving me the knife, pushing the handle into my palm. “Do it,” she breathed. “I can’t watch him bleed to death.”

  I felt like I was in a trance. Do it. Do what? I knelt down beside him, holding the knife. This was different from smashing a dark blur with a dark brick. Thankfully he was lying on his side, facing away from me, so I didn’t have to see his eyes again. I saw his neck shaking, trembling as he breathed in and out, in and out, faster than he should’ve been breathing.

  “Kill him, do it,” Fern’s voice came from behind me. I turned the knife so that the blade faced downwards. I didn’t know how to kill him.

  “This isn’t our fault,” I said to no one. I began to cry. It was better than laughing. I stabbed the blade down into the side of his neck, yanked it out, then shoved it in again.

  xXx

  It was very rare that I would allow myself to visualize Balthazar Seizure. Since it had happened I barely allowed myself to think of his band’s name, let alone the image of his horrible face, because I was afraid that if I did, something inside me would cave in and all the pain and the tears and the fucking fury would come out and I would collapse in some way, just collapse into something that I couldn’t come back from. But that night, in my bunk, I let that face materialize behind my eyelids. That skinny face, that leering horrible smile . . . Because it was his fault. It was his fault that that guy died. Maybe he had attacked Fern. Maybe he hadn’t. Fern needed to kill him. She needed it to heal. And we both needed it to prepare ourselves for what we now knew we would be absolutely, definitely capable of doing. This shit was his fault. Him, and his horrible friends.

  I could hear laughter coming from the front lounge. Everyone was drunk. Even Fern was drunk. I could hear her laughter mingling with theirs. I just lay in my bunk staring into the darkness. I needed to think.

  I’d killed two people. I mean, I guess it was me. Fern might’ve bashed the one guy’s skull and stabbed the second guy in the stomach, and both of them might have died from that. Who knows? But I was the one responsible for the end result. The finishing touches. It was me: I’d killed those guys.

  I wondered how many people in the world have killed someone and never gotten caught. How many people go on to have families and careers and get elected to important government positions and they’re secretly murderers. I mean, no one on this bus, or on the tour, knew that they were travelling with two girls who’d killed people. Maybe it was a super common thing. I thought of Chris, I thought of my stupid fantasy life with him, and I wondered if it was possible to just take this with me, just compartmentalize it, or whatever melodramatic psychological term could be used to describe keeping this to myself forever and having a nice normal life.

  I wanted to feel sorry for that guy in the cemetery, but the whole thing was so confusing. He was a weirdo and he’d probably tried to hurt Fern and the only person who needed to feel guilty for this was Balthazar fucking Seizure. I listened to her laughing in the front lounge and I thought about how light she’d been lately, how happy and enthusiastic about everything, and I figured she was probably insane. I was probably a little insane too. Maybe she had lied about the guy in the cemetery. But I’d stabbed his throat and ripped all those weird tendons with the knife. I’d dug right in.

  One thing was for sure. I wasn’t going to be able to compart­mentalize shit. A long time ago, I’d promised Fern that we would get revenge. We’d come a long way since then, and Fern had turned it into reality. If I could smash a stranger’s face in, if I could rip out some guy’s throat, I could kill Balthazar Seizure.

  FORTY-NINE

  We carried on. Fern was crazily happy, and I think Edgar and everyone started getting creeped out by her. She was always smiling, always giddy. She was acting weird. I knew why. I kept waiting for another situation, another night, another call from a shadowy alley, another whispered prompt from my friend to do it, finish it. I felt sick when I thought about it. I wondered what my mother would think of me. My little sister. I never called home much anyway.

  One night we were in Ripsawdomy’s dressing room after a show. Everyone was drinking. Socks and Edgar were there, even a few of the guys from Gurgol were hanging out. Fern was there. She was talking animatedly. I was next to Chri
s on the dirty couch. I was desperate to have fun as well. It was hard for me to feel social. All I wanted to do was go lie down in my bunk. But it was nice to be with Chris, despite the fact that we didn’t seem to be going anywhere. We were still taking our walks, but his silence was starting to bother me. I didn’t watch his shows anymore, and if he was watching ours, I wasn’t really noticing.

  Chick came into the dressing room with some girl. He was wearing his show clothes, but he’d changed into flip-flops. They sat down on the couch, the girl beside me, Chick on the other side of her.

  “Hi,” she said to me blearily. She smiled at me, eyes half-lidded.

  “Hi.”

  “You were in the band,” she said. “You were so awesome.”

  “Thanks.”

  Chick put his feet up on the coffee table in front of the couch, and I stared at his toes. The skin was dry and his toenails were long and yellow. I wrinkled my nose in disgust, irritated.

  “His toes are fucking disgusting,” I said to the girl.

  “Huh?”

  “His toenails.” I pointed. “That’s sick.”

  She just looked confused, so I turned back to Chris. He was chatting with one of the Gurgol guys, but when he saw me looking at him, he smiled and put his arm around me.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Chris, what am I doing here?”

  “What do you mean?” He took a swig of beer.

  “What am I doing here?”

  He stared at me blankly, then frowned. “Getting wasted?”

  “Chris, I’m not even drinking.”

  He studied my face. “You mean, ‘what am I doing here,’ like, for your life?”

  “I guess.”

  “I believe we’re here for love. Just to chill out and absorb everything. Like music.”

  “Smoke some weed, play some acoustic?”

  His face lit up. “Yes. Exactly. We should do that sometime.”

  “I was just kidding,” I said.

  He hesitated, then laughed awkwardly. “I know.”

  We stared at each other, and that’s when I realized that his silences and his frowns and his furrowed brow stares, all of which I’d thought hid some level of deep thought, of quiet intelligence, were really just nothing. Chris was kind of an idiot. A nice idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. And we had nothing in common.

  “I have to go to bed,” I said.

  “Okay,” he replied, and I wondered if he’d been hit with a feeling similar to the one I’d just had. We looked at each other for another moment, and I felt myself wishing hard that this was different. Just for a second. I wished I was different or he was. I held my breath, admiring his long hair, his smooth skin, his blue eyes fixed on me, holding each other’s gaze for longer than we ever would again, because you can’t make eye contact for any real length of time with someone you don’t have stupid romantic feelings for. But then we looked away. He resumed his conversation with the other guy, and I got up and went to the bus. I felt a burning in my eyes as I crossed the parking lot. There was a little lump in my throat. When I swallowed, it turned into a quiet ache in my stomach. And that was the end of the closest thing to romance I’ve ever had.

  FIFTY

  I isolated myself as Fern came out of her shell. She’d go out with the other bands, truly making an effort to become the belle of the ball. I’d slump in my jammies, peeking out through the bus’s blinds to watch her cavort in the parking lot, arm-in-arm with Edgar, with Socks; somehow even making that douchebag Chick laugh, and a few times I saw her approach Marie-Lise, with a nice result. It probably sounds creepy or crazy, or like I was jealous or something, doing this, watching her, but you have to understand just how happy she was. She had been so off, so disconnected, so far gone from who she had been for so long. Those two worthless guys were dead, and as a result, she was becoming creative, happy, alive again. It was so jarring, but nobody really seemed eager to question what was behind it.

  Chris basically stayed on his bus as well. With only a few weeks left, a feeling seemed to overtake the tour — that anxiety of being almost done, being close to finished. I’d play the show, go back to my bunk, try to sleep. So did Edgar. A lot of people did — it seemed like a split: you either wanted to party more and make the most of the last weeks, or withdraw early.

  I was afraid of going home. I hadn’t talked to my parents in a long time, and the thought of going back to that little house — with Mom’s paintings on the walls and Dad’s books and Melissa’s sweet face and my little bedroom — scared me. I didn’t feel like I should be there anymore. Like I wasn’t the same person. They wouldn’t know me anymore — but I guess they hadn’t for a long time, anyway.

  I toyed with the idea of asking Fern if she wanted to get a place together, or maybe I could move into Socks’s basement and sleep on the couch or something. I didn’t have a lot of money. I know Socks was looking ahead, into more touring. I just didn’t want to go back to the room where I had slept when I was a little kid after everything that had happened. I didn’t want to go home.

  When you’re growing up, you have this sort of vague idea in your mind of what’s going to happen, right? I’ll go to college, I’ll get married to some handsome dude, we’ll have some kids . . . And then your life starts to take shape a little bit — for me, it was like, Okay, I’ll be in a band with my friends. And I didn’t know what was going to happen past that, other than some sort of half-assed backup, like, when the band stops, I’ll have to get a job. Maybe I’ll go to college or something. It’s a bit of a void, looking ahead to that. And then a weird flash of maybe meeting some guy, maybe having a kid? I don’t know if I ever seriously entertained either of those ideas. So it was all about the band, and then the weird purgatory afterwards when I guessed I’d have to transition into something else. But then I killed two people. That wasn’t one of the milestones I’d envisioned.

  I had definitely anticipated some sort of consequence. That maybe one morning there’d be a knock on the bus door and Fern and I would be dragged, bleary-eyed and pyjama-panted, off to prison. I mean, yeah, we were travelling miles every day and moving along fast, and the dead guys weren’t exactly the beautiful missing persons girls that you’d see on the top news stories, but I expected something.

  And there was nothing.

  And Fern and I never discussed it. Whenever we were alone on the tour, it wasn’t like Oh, hey, how are you feeling about the murders or anything. I knew she’d kept that brick from the alley in Florida, but I wasn’t going to ask her to see it. So thinking about what had happened was something I did alone, at night, in my bunk.

  By now the shows were mechanical. My voice was starting to get tired, I said the same things every night onstage, I did the same moves at the same parts of the same songs. None of us were doing laundry anymore, either, realizing the ultimate redundancy of it. I’m sure the bus reeked, but all of us were beyond noticing. At least Fern’s renewed zest for life kept the focus off how disinterested I’d become in the live performances — let the people focus on her and her wonderful energy. I just wanted to go to bed.

  Sometimes I dreamed about that broken face in the alley, about the screeching, desperate voice, that hideous repetition, I did not, I did not, I did not! until I would have to get out of my bunk and go up to the front lounge and watch the sun come up as Roger drove us along whatever highway in whatever state. I would sit, quiet as a mouse, so he wouldn’t know I was awake and sitting there, because I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wanted the sunshine to burn my eyes, bleach out the fucking disgusting images. I had no regret over who I had removed from this earth. But does killing someone have to be so bloody, so pathetic, so sweaty, so intense? Like you end up having this horrible, way-too-intimate connection with this vile creature in all of its bleeding, whining, whistling death throes. Why does it have to be so gross?

>   FIFTY-ONE

  We had three or four shows left on the tour when I got back from getting dinner with Edgar one evening. We’d just grabbed some burritos from this restaurant down the street from the venue. It was chilly. We’d started moving north — the tour finished in New York State.

  We climbed on the bus. Toad, Socks, and Timmy were listening to music. Fern was still off getting dinner, probably with someone from Gurgol. As I set down the bag of food, I couldn’t put my finger on what was making me feel so nauseated.

  “Big, big news,” Socks said.

  I felt like I was going to faint. My head started spinning. In confusion, I sat down on the couch, unable to figure out why I was shaking. I couldn’t get control of it. Everyone in the lounge was looking at me.

  “What is it, Rach?” Socks leaned in to touch my shoulder. “You okay?”

  “What is this music?” I said, but it came out as a shriek. Horrified, I realized it was fucking DED; it was “I Ignore Your Screams.” I had shut out their music for so long, I had refused to listen to it, I had torn and burned and destroyed their posters and albums, I had never wanted to hear his voice again, and here it was, an old familiar song, one I had loved, and I knew every word, and I was going to throw up.

  “It’s —”

  “Shut it off, shut it off,” I bellowed, interrupting Edgar, waving my arms like a freak. Bewildered, Timmy got up and snapped off the stereo.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Toad asked.

  I closed my eyes, tried to take a deep breath to clear my head. Shut out that song, remove its residue from my brain. I actually entertained the idea, for a split second, to go and wash my ears.

  “I have a headache, the music was just driving me crazy. I don’t know what came over me. Can we leave it off?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Toad agreed, giving me a dirty look. “Sure we can.”