Marissa had one hand off the wheel now, conducting and accenting in sharp little right angles the bass drum and snare, seeing Keifer in her mind as if he were in his twenties, black spandex and flash, all that lovely sweaty hair sticking to his face on one side, that Gibson Les Paul slung low and kicking up gleam from the new offstage spot they installed behind the bar over the entranceway. It smelled like sweat and perfume, cheap beer and sex, and back by the girl’s bathroom Jon Bon Jovi politely told a girl with big blond hair and a huge rack to move a bit to the left so he could see what he thought he was seeing, a rising star about to shine all over the place.
Keifer liked the Empire Rock Club as much as the Galaxy over in Jersey, and they were lucky to be headlining both most weekends on all ages metal nights. Eric and Jeff had agreed to tune down half a step tonight even though that meant they’d have to sacrifice the keys, and it was all good. They were kicking out “Somebody Save Me,” and while Tommy knew how warm and full he looked in the spotlight, he could never get over how cold and alone you really were up here, trying to master the space with practiced moves that had to come off like casual improvisation, as if it were some brotherhood telepathy that made them all move the guitars back and forth across their crotches simultaneously.
Jeff took the lead tonight, and he was coming up on the finale. It was time for the new move, the choreography that they hoped would become their signature, the big waazoo, on three . . . flip the guitars around the back and catch them on the upbeat. No one had ever done it before, not three in a line like rifle girls in the color guard, and they’d actually placed a couple of friends like bodyguards outside their practice space at 1020 Studios the last three weeks (paying them with weed, of course), because lately everyone on Delaware Avenue wanted to watch them jam and this was a surprise meant for the stage and for the lawyers and the producers and the assistants, and assistants to the assistants who’d kept keeping them on hold because they sounded a bit too much like AC/DC. There was also a rumor going around that Motley’s management had their eye on Tommy to temporarily replace Vince and . . .
On three.
Marissa was out of the flashback suddenly, and Tommy’s current song “Solid Ground” droned on sounding thin, coming off vague, no salt, something missing, and Tommy’s solo career was a no-go, a true blimp made of lead, and it was heartbreaking. He was the very definition of situational irony, from the early days singing in a way that made you think he was going to hurt himself doing so, screeching sweetly thus, and it had plagued and destroyed him pretty much right after the Moscow Music Festival he grew so famous for. First it was nodules, then dead vocal cords, and so on and so on. If only he would take a back seat the way Jeff did for him, rest his pipes and use his songwriting and rehearsal smarts to back up someone else, someone like, oh, I don’t know, Punky Meadows.
She almost had to pull over, it hit her so hard. Glorious Technicolor, booms and explosions. She saw a small recording studio in Malibu, and sitting there with their instruments and headphones the boys from Angel were back together minus Gregg Giuffria. To fill in, they brought in Tommy Keifer to play rhythm, hardening their chops, supplying the edge they’d left in the background to play nursemaid to a litter of poorly disguised pop synth solos that had rendered them less than relevant by their third album back in the day. It would be a trick getting Dimino to back out of the Vinyl Tattoo project, and even more difficult to convince them that their first hit had to be a cover of “Walk in the Shadows” by Queensryche. They would run Volbeat, Halestorm, and Five Finger Death Punch straight off the hard-rock pop charts and have the biggest all-star combo project since Velvet Revolver.
Sadly, Marissa hit the button on her belt and drove on. The music industry was a rabbit hole, fickle and filled with egos and addictions, making any sort of business venture a minefield. By this day and age the whole record deal/stadium show concept should have been charted into a simplified roadmap with clear avenues up the hierarchy, but it wasn’t. It was madness, and she’d learned her lesson with Jerome Anthony Franklin.
Suddenly her bottom lip started trembling, her breath hitched, and she shut off the tunes. Dialed home. The “patchwork” didn’t do much for love, wrong skill in a foreign arena, and it was utterly snowblind in terms of self-healing.
“Where are you?” her mother’s voice said after barely a ring. Her voice had a hearty echo to it, and Marissa usually had a good laugh at what she called the “Bluetooth Effect,” especially since her mother was more about being witty than sounding all deep and godlike. Presently, however, it held no interest for her. She needed to reboot the computer and leave behind all the precious spotlights and power speakers she had promised Jerome, the ads for KFC and Budweiser flashing across the light panels up in the nosebleed sections, the hollow sound of the house PA droning on in its endless loop of hip-hop greats dating back even to the mid-nineties, the glow sticks doing their flip and boomeranging through the air and the occasional beach ball dancing across the upraised and outstretched fingers of the mob on the dance floor. It was all gone now, erased the moment she had tried to seduce him.
“Halfway to the mall,” she said to her mother. Her eyes had moistened up and she was almost to the point that she was seeing prisms. “I miss him.”
“You can’t miss a ghost.”
“He’s not dead, Mother.”
“You are to him.”
Marissa reached inside her bag for a tissue.
“You made me spill,” she muttered.
“Then pull into a gas station and fix your face, honey.”
They both laughed, and in a moment of empathy that had more to do with common sense than telepathy, Marissa reminded herself of how difficult it must have been for her parents to raise a girl like her. Of course they must have been so proud when their eleven-year-old took over the fifth-grade tubular bell choir, and pleased as punch the very next year as she modernized the elementary school’s roster and filing system. Heck, by the time their dear sweet Marissa was in eighth grade it was an adventure just taking her to the store! She couldn’t roam around the bicycle shop without suggesting to the manager the specific purchasing maneuvers it would take to make the place into a boss Harley-Davidson franchise, and she had trouble walking the open-air market at Linvilla Orchards without describing to the lady with the weird braids and grandmother stockings the specific warehousing methods needed to up production and gain distribution contracts with the Giant and ShopRite chains for those yummy-looking cookies made for kids with odd food allergies. By the time Marissa Madison hit high school she had created so much area business expansion that Internet location finders like Mapquest had bolded up the town of Broomall to a font size twice its original thickness.
Then in ninth grade came the tutoring scandal.
It was innocent enough in theory. Marissa set up her volunteer after-school program in the cafeteria, helping students overcome test-taking anxiety by tapping into their natural gifts, like spatial prowess or interpersonal ability, and using those base talents to create more logical and advantageous thinking strategies. At first it was laughed off and ignored by administration, but when 98 percent of the students taking their PSSA tests that year scored in the 90th percentile including the special ed. kids, it was rumored that there was to be an investigation by the state.
It blew over. Publically, there wasn’t anyone in the Pennsylvania Department of Education willing to lay their reputation on the line by actually acknowledging in writing that someone with a strange sort of telepathy had popped up on the grid, but Marissa Madison was never offered the opportunity to tutor anyone again, at least not on high school property. And Mother had no intentions of running some sort of side business through the house. It was already a full-time job keeping all this as low-key as possible, answering the constant barrage of phone calls, playing it down, and shutting out the media—Lord, she must have been tired! But no rest for the weary, ladies and gentlemen, at least not in the Madison household. For Marissa’s hung
er to connect with people grew exponentially with age, and by the first days of tenth grade she had already moved on to the next big obsession.
Love.
And it wasn’t good. Not even a little bit.
It was Sunday morning, and even though she had had more than a few romantic fantasies by the age of fifteen, everything had always been in the abstract somehow. Perhaps this was a result of those liberal yet sterile explanations from her parents in the living room, or more probably some fail-safe built into her telepathic wavelength to protect her until she was old enough to understand the big picture. Regardless, the whole “love and intimacy” paradigm had kept itself pretty much at the edges like border design, playing on her imagination and tender idealism, suggestive and haunting, lovely yet indistinguishable.
And it was Sunday morning, and there were noises coming from her parents’ bedroom down the hall, and it was an argument that had a strange ring to it, a lack of abandon. They lived in a split-level that offered a fair amount of privacy, as Marissa’s room had its own bathroom and shower, positioned at the far west corner facing the back yard. On the weekends she kept to her space, rarely venturing out to more public areas, even downstairs, until eleven or so in the instinctive adjustment everyone naturally made to set boundaries and territory depending on available square footage. In return, her parents usually kept things to murmurs.
Usually.
It was Sunday and it was November, and she had woken with a start, sun streaming in through the window. For a second she lay there looking at the ceiling, eyes widened. She had dreamt that there was a fire out behind the house and the trees between properties were ablaze, flames licking across the gray branches, knots under the bark popping and sparking.
Popping.
Tones of frustration. Through her door it was indistinct in terms of specific wording, but a strange patchwork had come up in her mind, one that contained vivid illustrations of the mechanics of passion she hadn’t been able to picture before, not really, not like this. It was animalistic role-play, ritualistic and savage even in its most gentle and loving form, more about dominance and entry than sentiment and myth. And it seemed to go against every social construct we trained ourselves for in every other human interaction on earth. It was all about tension and pressure-points, angles and friction, working itself to a psycho-emotive level that was almost religious.
She stumbled out of bed and walked clumsily across the carpeted floor, the Ladies of Elegance figurines on her bookshelves staring back blindly as she pushed through the door. Usually she wore her flannel robe out of the bedroom, but here in the cold hallway she had on nothing but her Sophie “Pink” short-shorts and a cut-off black T-shirt. Her palm was pressed to her flushed cheek and she had goosebumps coming up on her arms.
“I’m not doing it,” her father was saying. “I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Well, the fact that you bought them again says volumes.” “It’s just a pill,” her mother said.
“But they don’t work. It’s false advertising as bad as it can get, and I won’t fall prey to the bogus psychology. They make me a cliché and I think about it too much.”
“Then don’t think.”
“I don’t want to discuss it.”
“Well, I do.”
“Well, that’s the problem. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to worry about a drop in blood pressure and an erection lasting four hours—”
“One could only hope . . .”
“Please don’t make jokes.”
“It isn’t that serious.”
“No?” her father said, then mumbling something under his breath.
“What?”
“I said it makes me feel like less of a man. Please, Katie, don’t make me repeat it.”
Marissa pushed the door open. It was messier than she was used to, with Daddy’s dry-cleaning stuff strewn across the easy chair and the clothes in the hamper overflowing and piled against the wall where Mother had taped one of her comic notes with three lines stating the Olympic levels and the load an inch from silver-medal height. The jewelry box was open on the bureau, and there were necklaces strewn around because the two of them had rushed last night in order to make their weekly reservation at Fellini’s. There was a bottle of Chloe with the top off, a gray bra hanging off the back of the chair in front of the dressing mirror where Mother brushed her short perky hair, and in the middle of it all was the massive king-sized bed with her parents drawing up the covers protectively.
“Baby? What’s wrong?” Mother said, giving her head that little shake that was supposed to make her look together and nonchalant.
“I can help you with this,” Marissa returned tonelessly.
“With what, honey?”
Marissa looked at her father.
“His issue. Your problem. I can advise. I can . . . assist.”
Then she fainted.
That one put them in therapy, and all of it was detailed and rationalized with more of those long, clinical explanations. There were also crystal-clear borders now. Square footage. Her first no-fly zone.
But that didn’t lessen her curiosity in terms of her own inner landscape, and she was the first to admit here and now that her attraction to Jerome Anthony Franklin always had less to do with his poetic ability than the way the very tone of his voice made her knees weak.
“I’m OK,” she said to her mother. “Nothing a new skirt, a leather belt, or an anklet won’t cure.”
“Oh, stick to the sale items today, sweetie, materials only, no metal or stones.”
Marissa frowned.
“All right,” she said.
“And use the Discover card. We’re a bit short in checking this week. Speaking of which . . .”
Marissa hit the gas too hard, and the rear-wheel drive almost swayed her fanny out across the double yellow. And on an uphill! God, this car had nice torque!
“I’m strapped at the moment, Mother,” she said, adjusting the sun visor and shaking hair out of her face. “Dead broke.”
“Honey!”
“It’s not my fault! I had fifty for spending, and there was a booth in the student center where you could sponsor someone for the breast cancer walk. Then Professor Pratt added these nursing ethics manuals to the syllabus that cost a fortune and I have Comp 101 at eight a.m., which is absolute torture. And to make matters worse, there’s this girl named Brittany Kirk with a big nose and heavy eyeliner that keeps interrupting the lecture with these rudimentary comprehension questions that I could help her with, but I can’t because we agreed I should keep a low profile. And that takes energy, and there’s the cutest little coffee shop on the first floor of Kapelski where I get these awesome caramel mocha lattes, but they’re expensive!”
“And you’ve done no tutoring,” her mother said.
“I haven’t, I swear.”
“No assisting the poor sweet football players writing their first real research papers? No telling the assistant professors the quickest path straight to department chair?”
“Mother!”
“I’m just saying . . . you could always move back home.”
Marissa rolled her eyes.
“Really? Commuting? That’s so high school.”
“That apartment must get lonely.”
Marissa swallowed hard. Her off-campus efficiency was quaint. Snug. Filled with stuff. And horribly empty. She fanned her face, blinked rapidly for a second, and then put both hands firm on the wheel.
“Mother, we both know the dorms would be a disaster, and I have to learn to live on my own. I’m a big girl now and I overspent my allowance. No big deal.”
There was a pause, and Marissa could just picture her mother with the phone on speaker, sitting at the kitchen table in her plaid jammies with all her coupons and spiral notebooks, glasses at the edge of her nose because she wouldn’t admit she needed bifocals, legs crossed almost double so the right arch was tucked behind the left calf. She w
as pretty once, but had gotten too skinny. She was trusting, but she worried so.
“Have you called him?” her mother said finally.
Marissa stuck out her chin defiantly.
“No.”
“Not even a text filled with sweet little acronyms?”
“No Mother, God!”
“There’s no need to swear, dear.”
“I didn’t!”
“Well, it felt like you did.” Marissa sped up the hill and cock-blocked a white van trying to merge in from the Gulph Mills High Speed Station at Gypsy Road.
“I’m over him.”
“Are you?”
“Not even a little bit.”
They both laughed half-heartedly.
“I’m gonna go,” Marissa said. “Love you.”
“Same. And material only, no metal or stones.”
“Oh, all right.”
“And apply for a job, maybe Nordstrom’s or Macy’s or something like that.”
“As if!”
“Hmm.”
Yes, Mother knew better. Retail and middle management were things to steer clear of. Too much frustration. Too many opportunities to fill in the patchwork. Low profile, right?
She hung up and drove on, trying to focus on the scenery— the sprawling farmland to the left, the Kingswood Apartments buried in forest cover to the right, the Valley Forge Memorial Gardens with the humongous ducks plodding all over the access road, and oh my, she was thinking about ducks for God’s sake, anything to keep her mind off the wounds left by Jerome Anthony Franklin and the nagging idea that there was no one in the end that could tolerate her “assistance” long term. And given that there wasn’t anyone else like her to begin with, she was destined to be alone for all intents and purposes.
Marissa Madison passed Anderson, watching the trees back off to the rise and spread of the business district, and after a few lights she finally made the busy turn at Dekalb Pike, or 202, or whichever it really was, the signs always confused her. The traffic out here was thick, and she got all the way over after a tough merge to make the left turn onto Mall Boulevard. A car passed her going the opposite way, and she sensed the shadow in its window, something dark and malignant and perfectly cold. For a long moment she felt his eyes boring into the side of her face, studying every ridge and contour, and she was one with him as his breath thickened. Suddenly she exploded with the hardest orgasm she had even experienced in her nineteen years on this earth and almost crashed the car into a FedEx truck that stopped suddenly to allow for an old Buick that cut in front to make an illegal U-turn in between medians. Marissa’s knuckles were white on the wheel, and she was gasping.
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