Shut up, we said, but she ignored us.
Please, our friend begged her. Please, stop. I can’t think. Please.
But she wouldn’t. She kept talking, saying things about him, about us, about everything that had happened. Even as he’d been talking about her to us, he’d been talking about us to her; and now she knew everything, including the things we were too ashamed to talk about even with each other. We’d thought we’d exposed every part of him, and yet he’d been lying to us, hiding this from us, all this time, and in the end, we were the ones who were exposed.
Make her stop, we screamed, feeling a kind of panic rise up; make her stop saying that, shut her up, shut her up now. We clenched our fists and stared him down, and he trembled, his eyes watery, and then the anger that had consumed us burned itself out, and something clicked into place.
Make her stop, we said again—
And he did.
He fell on her with the full weight of his body, and they wrestled, flailing and scratching, until the bed shook and the bedside lamp wobbled on its table, and then they steadied and reached an equilibrium, his chest against her back, his arm wrenched across her neck, her face buried in the mattress.
Good, we said. Now, go on. Keep doing what you were doing. Don’t let us interrupt you. You want this, right? You know you want this. So go on. Finish it. Finish what you started.
He swallowed, looking down at the terrible girl beneath him, who had stopped struggling and gone still, her hair a tangled nest of matted gold.
Please don’t make me, he said.
At last: that small nub of resistance. But it was anticlimactic, in the end, because he was so abject, lying there, so small, and we, we filled the whole world. We could have walked away then, having found it, knowing we could break it, break him—but we didn’t. We stayed, and he did what we told him. Soon, the terrible girl’s skin was parchment-white except for a stamp of mottled bruising that spread across her thighs, and she didn’t move except as he moved her, and the tight knot of her hand came loose and her pale fingers unfurled. Yet he kept going; as the room darkened and the light came in again and the air thickened with smells, we kept him there, and he did what we told him to do. By the time we told him to stop, her eyes were blue marbles, and her dried lips had pulled high up over her teeth. He rolled off her and moaned and tried to burrow away from her, away from us, but we rested our hands on his shoulders and smoothed his sweaty hair, stroked the tears off his cheeks. We kissed him, and we wrapped his arms around her and we pressed his face to her face. Bad boy, we said softly as we left him.
Look at what you’ve done.
Look at Your Game, Girl
Jessica was twelve years old in September 1993—twenty-four years after the Manson murders, five years after Hillel Slovak died of a heroin overdose, seven months before Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head, and three weeks before a man with a knife kidnapped Polly Klaas at a sleepover in Petaluma, California.
Jessica’s family had moved from San Jose, where she had been the most popular girl in her sixth-grade class, out to Santa Rosa, where she orbited uneasily around several groups of friends: her popular friends, who neglected her; her band friends, who were nice but boring; and the ones she secretly thought of as her bad friends, who were the most fascinating but also the nastiest, their jokes digging like little nails into her skin. She could spend time with the mean friends only in short, thrilling bursts before she’d start feeling exhausted and sore, and then she’d have to retreat into the comfort of her band friends to recover.
Jessica’s family lived in a bright yellow Victorian in Lomita Heights, and every day she would come home from field hockey practice, empty her homework onto her bed, and refill her backpack with her Discman, her black folder of CDs, the books she’d checked out from the library, and an apple and three slices of cheese for a snack. Then she would run the three blocks from her house to the park where the skateboarders hung out. When she got to the park, she sat at the bottom of the twisting slide and selected the music she wanted to listen to and the book she wanted to read. She owned seventeen CDs but she only listened to three: Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Use Your Illusion I, and Nevermind. The books were mostly broken-spined paperbacks from the science fiction and fantasy shelf, about boys coming into their powers.
The skateboarders at the park were older than she was, thirteen or fourteen maybe, and they shouted at each other and rode their skateboards down the concrete railing, making a terrible scraping sound. Sometimes they pulled their shirts up to wipe the sweat off their faces, revealing flashes of flat brown stomach, and every once in a while, one of them caught his skateboard on the rail and went flying forward on his hands and knees, leaving a quartet of bright red streaks on the pavement. None of them ever spoke to her. She would watch them for an hour, listen to her music, pretend to read her book, and go home.
* * *
The first time she saw him, she was in the middle of opening a new Guns N’ Roses CD. She had finished sliding her fingernail along the cellophane wrapper and was about to tear through the plastic with her teeth when she caught him staring at her from the other side of the playground. She thought he was one of the skateboarders. He was about their height, with the same thin, slippery build, but his hair was longer, down past his shoulders, and as he moved to the side, so that he was no longer silhouetted against the late-afternoon sun, she realized that he was in his twenties at least—a young but full-grown man. When he saw her looking at him, he winked, pointed his thumb and finger at her like a gun, and fired.
Three days later, she was listening to her new album when the man came out of nowhere and sat down, cross-legged, on the gravel in front of her slide. “Hey, girl,” he said. “What are you listening to?”
She was too surprised to talk, so she popped her CD player open and showed him the disc.
“Oh, right on. You like him?”
He should have said, You like them, because Guns N’ Roses was a band, not just one singer, but she nodded.
The man’s eyes were flat and blue and they disappeared into the folds of his face when he laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I bet you do.”
The way he said this made her think maybe he did know—not how she felt about the band, but how she felt about Axl: about the way his ripped T-shirts clung to his shoulders, and his silky sheet of reddish-gold hair.
“He has a nice voice,” she said.
The man frowned, thinking this over. “That he does,” he said. Then he asked, “How’s the album?”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s mostly covers of songs by other people.”
“Is that a bad thing, do you think?”
She shrugged. He looked as though he were waiting for more, but she didn’t have anything to add. She opened her mouth to say something like, Aren’t you too old to be talking to me, or, Don’t you know this place is for kids? but instead she heard herself say, “There’s a secret track on it.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Oh really?”
“Yeah.”
She waited for him to ask if he could hear it, or even what a secret track was, but he didn’t. He just kept sitting there in a way that made her feel foolish. She put her headphones back on, skipped to the last song, and fast-forwarded through the silence until the sound began again. She offered the headphones to him, and he nodded. As she passed them over, his fingertips brushed against hers. She jerked her hand away, as though from an electric shock, and he gave her a sad half-smile. He pulled the headphones tightly over his ears and they disappeared into his messy hair.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“Hit me.”
She pressed play. He closed his eyes, cupped his hands against the headphones, and started to sway. He licked his lips and half-mouthed the words, moving his fingers in the air as though he were pressing chords onto the neck of a guitar. It was embarrassing, how intensely he got into the music, and after a while, she found she couldn’t look at his face, so she looked at his fee
t. He was barefoot, and the soft spaces between his toes were crusted with dirt. His toenails were yellow and long.
When the song was over, he handed the headphones back to her, tapped her Discman twice, and said, “I like the original better.”
He was watching her as he said this, and when she didn’t answer right away, he pounced. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”
“It’s not in the liner notes,” she admitted.
“So you’ve never heard it? The original version of that song?”
She shook her head.
“Oh, girl,” he said, drawing out the word. “Oh, girl, you’re missing out.”
She started putting her things away.
“Don’t be mad,” he said.
“I’m not mad.”
“I think you are. I think you’re mad at me.”
“I’m not. I have to go.”
“Go, go.” He waved his hands at her. “I’m sorry I made you angry. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Next time I see you, I’ll bring you a present.”
“I don’t want a present.”
“You’ll want this one,” he said.
* * *
She didn’t see him for the rest of that week. Over the weekend, she went to her mean friend Courtney’s house and drank for the first time, three stinging gulps of vodka and orange juice that made her limbs feel unbearably heavy. The next Wednesday, he reappeared, holding something in his hand.
“I have that present for you,” he said.
“I don’t want it.”
He bobbed his head, as though her rudeness pleased him. He turned his palm outward to show her that he was carrying a cassette tape. Through its clear plastic case, she could see a handwritten playlist done in dense, dark ink.
“I can’t listen to that,” she said. “I don’t have a tape player.”
“Not here you don’t,” he said. “But maybe at home?”
“Not at home, either.”
“I’ll bring you one, then.”
His shirt was dirtier than it had been the last time she’d seen him, and he’d drawn his hair back into a sloppy ponytail tied up with a tattered brown shoelace. She wondered where he’d gotten the shoelace, since he wasn’t wearing shoes. Maybe he was homeless.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t bring me anything.”
He laughed. His eyes were very, very blue. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow,” he said.
* * *
She thought about staying home, but then she thought, why should I, it’s my park, too. Besides, the park was crowded during the daytime; if he tried anything, she would yell for help and all the skateboarders would come to her rescue. She didn’t think he would try anything, not really. So she went, but although she stayed on the slide until nearly six thirty, he didn’t show up.
* * *
Another week went by before he came to her again. “Sorry,” he said. “I told you I would find you a tape player, but it took me longer than I thought.” He was holding a battered yellow Walkman that looked as though it had been fished out of the garbage. Most of the rubber buttons were missing, and the bottom corner had been dipped in something sticky and red.
“I don’t want to listen to anything on that,” she said. “It’s disgusting.”
He sat down again in front of her slide. “I’ll need to borrow your headphones,” he said. “I couldn’t find any.”
“Who are you?” she asked. “Why are you talking to me?”
He grinned. His teeth were straight and white. “Who are you?” he asked. “Why are you talking to me?”
She rolled her eyes. Her headphones were in her lap and he took them and plugged them into the Walkman. He dug into his pocket for the cassette tape Jessica had refused to take from him the week before, then opened the case and slid it into the tray.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I told you, I don’t want to listen to your stupid tape.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “You just don’t know it yet.” He reached up and slid the headphones over her ears. She could smell his body odor, a mix of cigarette smoke and sweat and sour breath. She was about to snatch the headphones off when she heard a dusty crackling, like the static at the start of a record, and then a man singing, accompanied by rough strokes of acoustic guitar. His voice was high and melancholy and just a little off-key. It reminded her of the way she’d felt after she’d drunk the vodka, as though an entire planet were pressing on top of her, holding her down.
When the song finished, she yanked the headphones off, leaving them dangling around her neck.
“Was that you?” she asked. “Was that you singing?”
The man looked delighted. “Girl, that’s not me. That’s Charlie.”
“Who?”
“Charlie. Charles Manson. Don’t you know Charlie?”
“He’s a singer?”
“He was. Right up until he killed a whole lot of people, out in Benedict Canyon.”
She glared at him. “Are you trying to scare me?”
“Never,” he said. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Charlie was a singer and he could have been a star. All the girls worshipped him. They loved him even more than you love Axl, and he loved them back the same. They followed him everywhere, Mary and Susan and Linda and the rest. But then they killed that woman and her baby and a lot of other people and now he’s locked up and they’re locked up too and the whole family is scattered but they never stopped loving each other, not for one single minute, not for one single day, and that’s what all those songs are about.”
“That is really messed up,” she said, twisting away from him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about but I think you should get out of here.”
“But you liked that song,” he said. His voice had become boyish, almost pleading. “I knew you would. That’s why I brought it to you.”
“I didn’t know it was by a murderer!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have told you about Charlie. I didn’t mean to scare you, I promise.”
She looked at him, confused. She could see that his arms were tanned and strong, with thick black hair curling on them, but his eyelashes were a different color—reddish gold, like Axl’s.
“You can borrow the tape if you want,” he said, as he stood up to go. “Listen to all the songs. I think ‘Look at Your Game, Girl’ is the best, but I like ‘Cease to Exist,’ too, and ‘Sick City.’ Maybe you’ll agree with me. Or maybe you won’t. That’s okay. All the songs are great, really.” He popped open the player and put the cassette back in its case, then handed it to her, staring at the ground as though he were too embarrassed to look at her face.
She took the tape and put it in her bag. “Thanks,” she said.
“You’ll listen to it?”
“Sure.”
“That’s great! Maybe you’ll be able to find a tape player somewhere. I’d give you this one if I could, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’ll figure it out.”
She thought he was about to leave, but then he crouched over her and cupped her face with his hands. His hands were huge and warm and they made her face feel tiny, like a doll’s face. She thought he was going to kiss her, but he stroked his thumb across her mouth. She opened her lips and his thumb slid between them. She felt the rough ridges of his fingerprint pushing down on her tongue, and she tasted the acrid dirt under his nail. He said, “Of course, you’ll have to give it back to me. The tape, I mean. You’ll give it back to me, won’t you? You promise?”
Her answer was muffled by his hand.
“When?” he asked. “Tonight?”
She shook her head. He slid his thumb free, and she could see her spit shining on it. “I can’t!” she said breathlessly. “I can’t tonight.”
“Why not?”
“My friend—my friend is having a sleepover. I have to go.”
He laughed as though this were the funniest th
ing he’d ever heard. “I don’t give a fuck about your friend,” he said. “Meet me here, after you’ve listened to the tape, and tell me which one is your favorite.”
“I told you, I can’t!”
“Oh, girl,” he said. He ruffled her hair. “Of course you can. Should we say ten o’clock? Or no, how about midnight?”
“I’m not coming here at midnight. I’m twelve! Are you crazy?”
“Midnight it is, then,” he said, chucking her under the chin. “See you soon.”
* * *
Of course she wasn’t going to go out and meet some dirty stranger in the park at midnight. The whole idea was stupid; it was stupid to even let it cross her mind. She couldn’t stop thinking of him as Charlie, even though she knew that wasn’t his name, and she kept thinking about Charlie’s thumb, about how bony and filthy it had been, and how his nail had scratched at the spongy bit of skin where her throat met the roof of her mouth. She kept running into the bathroom to open wide and make sure she wasn’t bleeding. She should have bitten him. She should have bitten his horrible thumb right off his hand, so he’d have shrieked and yanked his hand out of her mouth and been left with nothing but a torn, bloody stump gushing all over the playground.
Of course she wasn’t going to meet awful creepy Charlie at the park at midnight, and yet when her band friends called her to ask her to bring her copy of Dirty Dancing to the sleepover, she said she couldn’t come over after all, because she had a stomachache. The thought of listening to her band friends giggle and hug their teddy bears and play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board made her want to kick someone, but also her stomach did sort of hurt. Afterward, though, she thought maybe she should have gone to the sleepover, because watching her mom and dad and little brother sitting around the kitchen table, eating lasagna, made her even angrier.
“Mom. Dad,” she said. “I’m just wondering. Have either of you heard of Charles Manson?”
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