Ferocity Summer

by Alissa Grosso

  “Let’s get closer to the stage,” Willow said. “The show’s going to start soon.”

  I’d come to the concert because of Willow and her extra ticket. Despite the fact that everyone else my age seemed to think these guys were the greatest thing since fuel injection, I hadn’t yet become an undying Davies Pauliny fanatic. Don’t get me wrong—they had some catchy tunes. That one about America’s obsession with fast food was forever getting stuck in my head. All the same, my heart wasn’t pounding with anticipation while I waited for the band of the summer to take the stage.

  Still, I followed Willow as she led us into the sweaty mob.

  Sometime after the opening act left the stage and before Davies Pauliny had made their appearance, while the crowd shifted and twisted around us, I felt someone grab my shoulder. I figured it was either a not-quite-sober person or Bill, but it was neither. I turned around to find Andrea, the only person I know who would come to a concert in a field wearing high-heeled sandals and a face plastered with makeup. God, though, she was gorgeous in that phony starlet way of hers.

  “I didn’t know you guys were going to be here!” she shrieked.

  “For the love of Christ,” muttered Willow.

  “Isn’t this just the coolest thing in the whole world!” Andrea said, still shrieking. “I can’t believe we’re going to see Davies Pauliny!”

  “Where exactly do you get your clothes?” Willow asked.

  Andrea was dressed in a black lace top, its V-neck plunging nearly to her bellybutton, and a pair of stretchy jeans. She couldn’t have revealed more curves if she were naked, but she would have felt a whole lot cooler.

  “Oh, just had it lying around,” Andrea said. “I’ve got to introduce you to Angelo.” She yanked on a young man’s arm and practically shoved him into us. He had that nondescript thing going on, like he was trying very hard to be just your average high school guy. “Angelo, these are my friends Scilla and Willow.”

  A round of awkward hi’s were swapped. Awkward for Angelo, who probably was hoping to have sex with Andrea then get the hell out of her life—meeting her friends was a complication he hadn’t counted on. Awkward for me, because I saw him as a rival who I could never trump. Then there was Willow, for whom any social exchange had become an exercise in awkwardness lately.

  “C’mon, Angelo,” Andrea said, yanking him in the other direction. “I’m dying of thirst. See you guys later,” she called over her shoulder.

  “What a pathetic creature she is,” Willow said. “Exactly what do you see in her, anyway?”

  “It’s not something that I could put into words,” I said. “Besides, I’ve pretty much given up on her.”

  “Hallelujah.”

  In the dark, in the crowd, with Davies Pauliny on the stage and the music pulsing through my body, I felt good. For the first time in a very long time, I didn’t have to think about anything. I couldn’t think about anything, not with the music that loud, the air charged with excitement, the lights on stage flashing in mesmerizing patterns. No one can think in such an environment. I guess that’s the lure of rock

  concerts. They’re pure escape. For a few minutes, we can leave this word entirely, get carried away by the rhythm. I wanted to tell Willow how good I felt, but I couldn’t even do this with the music so loud.

  I shrieked at the top of my lungs, a happy noise that was lost in the sounds of the crowd and the music. Willow shrieked too. I wanted to feel this way forever.

  The storm began during Davies Pauliny’s fifth song. Without warning, the moisture in the air changed to pelting rain and thunder boomed around us, competing with the bass drum on stage. A good half of the crowd freaked out, dashing for some sort of cover in the open field, screaming as if they’d never seen water before. Willow threw back her head and let the rain wash down her face. I stuck out my tongue and let the cold water spill down my throat. The band, under minimal cover, kept playing.

  If it had just been rain, we would have been fine, a little muddy but otherwise okay. But lightning was flashing yellow-violet around us, lighting up everything. In a glance I took in half a dozen faces that had previously been obscured in the darkness, their every pore suddenly illuminated in the strange light. Then it happened. We saw it before we heard it. The lightning hit one of the metal rafters on the stage and all the rafters suddenly glowed like a cartoon character x-ray, the geometric pattern seared into our eyes as we watched in horror and disbelief. The noise, not unlike amplified feedback, screeched around us. Then everything went completely black. For three seconds everything and everyone went silent. There was no sound at all save the endless drumming of the rain.

  Someone hit the play button and hysteria erupted. There was screaming and shouting. I was pushed and pulled by the crowd. I turned around so many times I lost my sense of direction, like a blindfolded pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey player. At one point—I think I was looking at the stage—I could see flames. The hysteria hit me. I panicked. I felt the pull of the crowd and allowed it to move me along while I searched around frantically for Willow. She’d been right next to me. Where could she be?

  “Willow!” I screamed. “Willow!”

  There was no reply, or there were thousands of replies, thousands of people screaming and no way for me to unearth her voice in that pileup of voices. I felt my heart pounding. Sweat pored out of me despite the cooling rain. Things were moving much too fast and I couldn’t figure out how to make them get back to normal.

  The Porta-Potties. The third Porta-Potty. Oh, God, was it the third from the right or the third from the left? From the right, I think. No, maybe it was the left. I’d met her there before, but now I couldn’t remember if it had been from the right or the left. I didn’t even know if I was moving in the direction of the Porta-Potties, but I had to hope that I was. I just had to get there, and then I would be able to find her. And to think she’d laughed at my amazing foresight!

  The next few minutes were a blur. I lost all free will, becoming a part of the crowd, pushed along toward

  some unknown goal. The rain kept coming down and occasionally the lightning flashed, but the gap between lightning and thunder was growing, the storm moving away. The grass beneath my feet had grown slick with the rain, and I knew that the key was to remain on my feet at all times. It would be too easy to slip and then be trampled by the unstoppable mob. I held myself steady despite the shoves. I pushed out my arms to keep the crowd from crushing me.

  Then it happened. Someone grabbed my arm and yanked me so hard I thought I would fall flat on my face. I let out a scream, unheard in the scream-filled air. Then I felt myself hauled out of the river of people by an arm wrapped around my waist. My heart reached a frenzied pace.

  Optimism burst forth inside my head as I thought it must be Willow. Willow was saving me, was pulling me free. Everything was going to be fine.

  “Priscilla!”

  I screamed.

  “Priscilla, it’s me, Christian.”

  I knew that. I began to cry, not just a few tears but great racking sobs.

  “Are you all right?” asked a different voice. Bill. I spun around to see him standing at my side.

  The three of us formed a strange triangle in a part of the field just beyond the flow of people.

  “Look,” Christian said, “it would be a good idea to get out of here before things get uglier.”

  I nodded, getting control of my crying. Tears still spilled helplessly down my face but the rain washed them right off.

  “Okay,” I said. “I just need to find Willow.”

  “What?” Christian asked.

  “That’s her friend,” Bill explained.

  “I know that,” Christian said. “Priscilla, I don’t think you understand that this is a dangerous situation we are in. We need to get the hell out of here, now.”

  “I can’t just leave her here,” I said.

  “She’ll be okay,” Bill said. “It’s not like you’re going to be able to find her in this mess anyway.
”

  “We have a meeting place,” I explained, sniffling. “We were right next to each other. We couldn’t have gotten that separated.”

  “We’re getting out of here now,” Christian said.

  “I’m not going without Willow!”

  “I don’t see her waiting around for you,” Christian said. “Wake up, Priscilla. She’s split.”

  In a panicked state, one can become very impressionable.

  Bill said, “It’s not as if she’s a child. She can take care of herself.”

  I said one last time, with little conviction, “I shouldn’t leave without her.”

  Then Christian led me by my arm, and Bill walked beside us, as we walked away from the crowd toward some distant escape route.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Are you a big fan?”

  “I had a tip,” he said.

  I felt like a mistress who has just found out that her married lover has a second girlfriend. I wasn’t his only informant. But I was the only one he was saving from rock and roll induced mayhem. Didn’t that count for something?

  “So, you two know each other?” I asked.

  “We met at my college,” Bill said. Randy’s college. That’s right. The whole Ferocity thing. Shit, Bill had probably been the one who’d directed Christian to me. I was the third wheel that came in in the fourth act. It made me feel about the size of a blob of gum on the bottom of someone’s sneaker. I’d never needed Willow so badly in my life.

  For a minute I considered breaking free of Christian’s grasp, running back to the crowd, making my way to the meeting spot, and waiting until Willow showed. But I was scared. What if Willow wasn’t there? What if she’d truly taken off without me? That was a horror I couldn’t face. It was one thing to feel betrayed by a shady cop or by some conspiracy-theory nut who fantasized about my naked body, but Willow meant something to me.

  “We need to go to the Porta-Potties,” I said. “That’s where Willow is.”

  “We were just there,” Christian said. “Did you see her?”

  “What?”

  “I told him that’s where you would be,” Bill said. “So we waited for you. That’s how we found you.”

  “No,” I protested.

  “Willow is not everything you think she is,” Christian said. “She’s not waiting for you, and you can believe that when she gets up on that witness stand she’s going to be saying whatever she has to to save her neck. She’s the one with the high-priced attorney, and he isn’t going to fall for some Three Musketeers solidarity bullshit.”

  “Shut up!” I screamed. “Shut up!”

  I hated him. I hated everyone. Why the hell did everything have to be so fucked up?

  Later that Night

  It took only a few minutes to drive from Waterloo back to Christian’s place. The traffic, despite the hysteria, wasn’t bad. It seemed that we’d gotten out of there early and beat the crowds. I sat on his sofa, a gold 1970s sort of thing made out of the most uncomfortable fabric on earth. He’d given me some dry clothes that belonged to his girlfriend to change into: a baby-sized T-shirt and a pair of ridiculously short terry-cloth shorts. He’d given Bill a T-shirt and sweatpants from his own wardrobe. I was incredibly jealous.

  Bill was in the kitchen, sitting next to a radio tuned to the Hackettstown station where the breaking news of the storm, the ensuing flash floods, and the events at the concert were slowly being delivered to us.

  “Two people dead,” Bill said, repeating the radio. “One got hit by lightning and the other was in a car accident.”

  Route 80 had been closed in both directions before the concert began, due to an unrelated tractor-trailer accident, and the thousands of fleeing people were diverted onto a variety of smaller local highways.

  I hadn’t said much to Bill or Christian since we’d arrived at the apartment. I knew I’d made the wrong decision. I knew I’d abandoned Willow, and I kept waiting for Bill to repeat the news that the body of a girl found in the field had been tentatively identified as Willow Jenkins.

  “I’ve got to go pick up Merry at work,” Christian said. “You two will be all right here?”

  “Sure,” Bill said.

  “It’s just up the road,” Christian said. “I shouldn’t be that long.”

  When we were alone in the apartment, Bill left his post at the radio to come sit next to me on the couch. I was acutely aware of the fact that I was showing an excessive amount of skin, and all of it crawled at the thought of Bill trying to make a pass at me.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “That was pretty freaky back there. I guess we’re lucky. It could have been a lot worse. At least we got out all right.”

  “I left Willow,” I said.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Bill said, but it didn’t convince me. “So, you’ve been talking to Christian.”

  “It’s not like what you think,” I said. “I would never do anything to hurt anyone I know. I’m not a—” The word “rat” caught in my throat, and all I could manage was, “backstabber.”

  “I have issues with law enforcement, but Christian’s okay. He’s a little more free-spirited than most cops.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Look, he’s a decent guy. Would we be sitting here in his apartment if he wasn’t? He didn’t have to rescue us tonight.”

  “Maybe I didn’t really want to be rescued.”

  Bill sighed and got up. He went back to the kitchen to listen to the radio. I heard him pull the chair out from the table, but I don’t think he ever sat down because two seconds later he was standing back in front of me. His face was the color of a ripe tomato.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he demanded. “Why do you get upset when someone is nice to you? Why do you surround yourself with such lowlife losers?”

  “I’m sorry my friends aren’t good enough for you,” I said. “But you don’t know them, and you have no right to judge them. Maybe if you didn’t have such high standards you would have some friends of your own, someone besides some washed-up undercover cop.”

  I expected him to swear at me or call me a name, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. He just went back into the kitchen, and this time I did hear him sit down. He said nothing for ten minutes or more. He didn’t even bother to repeat the news to me. I caught something about a record number of convenience store robberies this summer. I wondered if there had been more.

  Maybe it was that same guy. A vague image of that sketchy guy who’d walked into Johnny’s Quik Mart popped into my head. I couldn’t quite remember what his face looked like. In my mind he looked like Joe Bullock, which was just my memory playing tricks on me. Memory is a strange thing. It distorts reality. We take things to be the absolute truth when we can see them with crystal clarity in our memory, but we’re idiots to do so. Sherman was an old man when he finally got around to writing his memoirs; we shouldn’t take them as a recording of fact so much as a recording of a faulty memory. His memoirs are his version of events distorted by time and subjectivity.

  “There must be quite a lot of money to be made in robbing convenience stores,” I said loudly. I was trying for a jocular tone to lighten the mood. Bill didn’t bite. I imagined him sitting in the kitchen like the little boy he was, a pout on his pudgy face. Maybe I’d been too mean to him. I felt a little bad for him, but mostly I was still absorbed with worry for Willow.

  Besides, I hadn’t wanted any of this. Bill wanted to change the world, but I didn’t care. The world could go to hell. I only wanted to save myself and maybe Willow too. Fuck everyone else. They weren’t my problem.

  Christian had conveniently forgotten to tell us that Merry (though the name should have tipped us off) worked at the go-go bar up the road. When she walked in, she was wearing even less than I was. Her sparkling bikini top revealed more than it concealed and the matching hot pants looked like they were painted on. Her fake-orange hair had been tease
d out to form an unnatural halo around her head, and her face was painted with a grotesque mask of glitter and excessively colorful makeup. Bill came to the kitchen doorway, and we both stared.

  “Oh, God,” Merry said with a roll of her eyes. “More strays.” She marched into the bedroom and slammed the door.

  “Uh, maybe we should go,” Bill said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Christian said. “She’s always moody when she comes home from work. Besides, there’s no place for you to go. Half the roads are closed, and the rest are so packed with traffic you can’t move. Looks like you’ll be spending the night.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to will myself back in time a couple of hours. I wanted to be anywhere else but trapped in that apartment.

  When Merry came out of the bedroom her hair and makeup remained unchanged, but she’d changed into a silk kimono that covered more yet was infinitely more sexy. She threw herself down on the couch, carelessly laying a leg right across my lap. She eyed me with piercing eyes and I stared back at her.

  “Is he fucking you?” she asked. The apartment was small and her voice was loud enough to carry into the kitchen, where Christian and Bill were.

  “Who?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes, “Uh huh, okay, I can take a hint.”

  “What?”

  “He’s just so fucking predictable. You want to know a secret? He’s a garbage picker. He just loves rescuing things from the great refuse pit of life. Even if he doesn’t need it. He just can’t help himself. He loves trash.”

  As she spoke, I caught on to the fact that she was talking about Christian and that she was completely drunk. Christian came out of the kitchen and told her to go to bed. She stuck out her tongue at him, but she obeyed, or at least got up off the couch and went back to the bedroom and slammed the door.

  “Sorry,” Christian said. “She’s not always pleasant when she’s had a few drinks, but she can be a really nice person when she’s sober.”