by Lori Lansens
I keep hearing noises outside the shed. I tell myself, It’s just the wind, girl, nut up. But my heart won’t stop racing. I have to say, it would be tragically lame to die in a Holy War when I don’t even believe in God.
Fee’s breathing is shallow. When I shook her just now, she coughed a little and asked for water. She’s so dehydrated. I thought about going to Javier’s cabin to ask for more, but he told us not to leave the shed and I don’t wanna make him mad. I also thought about going outside to look around, but I’m scared of the eyes in the sky.
“Maybe there’s something in Javier’s truck. Water bottle. Juice box,” I say.
“Go see,” Fee croaks.
“The winds are supposed to start up around midnight. The air traffic’ll be grounded, so I’ll go out then. Okay? I’ll go out and look around then.”
“Ror?”
“Yeah.”
“Are we gonna die?”
“We’re not gonna die.”
“Smells so bad in here,” Fee said.
It does. The shed reeks of gasoline, and rodents, and me. The floor is dirt, so bugs. I go back to the laptop.
“What are they saying online, Ror?”
She’s too sick to hear the gory details right now, so I just say, “‘Thank God for American Girls’ is number one on the pop charts. Not the Christian chart—the actual chart.”
She doesn’t respond. She’s out again. I have to find a way to get her some fluids.
I cannot believe that Jagger Jonze’s rancid American Virtue Ball theme song has climbed from number 429 on iTunes to number 1 since this whole thing went viral. Oh my God, those lyrics…She is proud, she is strong, and she knows right from wrong. Temptation will not find her ‘cause she’s just where she belongs. Thank God for American Girls. Before Jinny Hutsall moved in, we’d all mocked that sexist dreck. If you never heard the song before, you’ve heard it by now, and you’ve seen clips of the Reverend from his Higher Power Hour Sunday TV show, belting out more lame Christian jams in his designer T-shirt and thousand-dollar sneakers. Lucifer in Louboutins. How ‘bout that?
I just checked MSNBC, which has been showing a portrait of the whole gang of us—the five families from our cul-de-sac gathered together for a backyard barbecue at the Leons’ house—with the tag “Portrait of Perfection?” In the background of the shot is Miles, Brooky’s older brother, with his band, Lark’s Head, led by my not-so-secret crush, Chase Mason. He of the long hair, tragic eyes, shredded bod—twin of Jesus Christ Himself. My mother recently wondered out loud, like she does, if my crush on Chase means my Freudian slip is showing and that I still have some unresolved feelings about religion. Nope. I used to believe. Now I don’t.
Chase works part-time at the Calabasas Library, where I’ve done volunteer hours Mondays and Fridays since eighth grade. I’m in his friend zone, which is grave. At Leons’ BBQ, I remember I caught him watching me from behind his microphone, so I tossed my blowout around, then grabbed Dee’s little sister’s hula hoop and started gyrating with all this, like, fake innocence. Thinking of it now, I might’ve looked more seizure-y than sexy.
My mother, a hermit since my dad left, had pulled herself away from her computer and come for a while that day. Shelley seemed like herself, laughing with the other moms, arguing with Zara’s dad about climate change, and that gave me hope. But it didn’t last. I saw her wiping tears from her cheeks as she slipped out the side gate before dinner.
Mrs. Leon had piled so much food on the buffet table she worried the legs were gonna buckle—Kobe steaks and fat shrimps on skewers, salads and artisan breads and one of those edible fruit bouquets, any kind of dessert you could imagine. But we hardly ate any of the food because thin. Chase and Miles were crushing it with the band, but we girls didn’t actually dance because parents. And when Delaney’s dad, Tom Sharpe, of Sharpe Mercedes Calabasas—local celeb because of the commercials where he waves at a customer driving off in a convertible and goes, “Lookin’ Sharp!”—well, when he said it was time to get jiggy with it, we bolted to Bee’s room to post the pics we’d been taking all afternoon. That was three short months ago. Labor Day. The week before Jinny Hutsall slithered into Oakwood Circle.
Just realized I’m still wearing my pearl ring from the Virtue Ball. I want it off my finger, but I don’t know what to do with it—don’t wanna leave it here in the shed. Evidence. Fuck. I wish I’d tossed it into the creek with our smashed phones when we ran tonight.
Fee never got to put on her pearl ring. Delaney’s dad, Tom Sharpe, was Fee’s daddy stand-in tonight. He’s basically been her daddy stand-in her whole life because she doesn’t have a dad, and because Fee and her mom, Morena, Sharpe’s housekeeper, live in the guest house behind their pool. I’m no fan of Tom Sharpe, but at this point I’d say he’s been more of a father to Fee than mine has been to me. Anyway, during the pledge tonight, Mr. Sharpe tried to jam the ring on Fee’s finger, but it wouldn’t go over the knuckle. He thought he might’ve gotten her ring mixed up with Delaney’s and they switched, but no. So Fee put the stupid too-small ring in her Gucci metal clutch, which she left on the counter in the school bathroom. No doubt it was blown to bits along with the porcelain toilets and speckled tile floor. Not that she should give a shit about the stupid pearl ring.
Poor Fee. She just barfed again. I’m really starting to wonder if she was poisoned. Is that crazy to even think? But she seemed fine today, until we got to the ball and she ate those little chocolate ganache thingies Jinny pushed on us. The ones I didn’t eat. Did Jinny Hutsall actually poison her? Did she mean to poison me too? Or to poison me instead of Fee? Did Jinny and Jagger Jonze wanna make sure I’d be stuck in that bathroom back behind the gym, where she’d specifically told me to meet her, shitting and puking my guts out, when the bomb went off?
A breeze sweeps tumbleweeds against the patchwork walls of the metal shed. Not the Santa Anas yet, but twigs snap. Branches crack. My heart stops at each sound, wondering if we’ve been discovered. If what I’m hearing is the wind, or the stealth boots of some rude dude from the homicide squad, or a redneck with a rifle, or some white-collar with a pistol out to collect the bounty.
I’m also on edge over every crackle of noise because it’s fire season. Well, I guess it’s always fire season now. The drought is all the local news talks about between pauses to discuss White House tweets and the war in the Middle East. We’ve had only a few inches of rain in over two years. There was a huge fire in the canyon behind Hidden Oaks when we were in middle school. Shelley and I watched the twisting flames rise up over the hills, blazing the black skeletons of oaks and sycamores left for dead after a smaller fire years before. There was a mandatory evacuation so we grabbed the boxes and suitcases we keep in the closet by the door and hurried out to the car. Our friends on Oakwood Circle stayed—they always do—but I was glad my mother didn’t think of a mandatory order as just a suggestion. I was scared.
If a fire started here in the hills, or someone tried to smoke us out, we’d be doomed. I wonder how much it hurts to die of smoke inhalation. Like drowning, only in smoke? And what about that? Whoever planted that bomb is lucky that the whole hillside behind the school didn’t go up in flames.
Fee’s passed out again. She looks corpse-y. This is bad. It’s really fucking bad. But she’ll feel better in the morning. Right? And we’ll figure a way out. Hope. It’s all I have, so I have to hold on to it. I have hope—no—I have faith that the truth will prevail. And it will. Right?
Been looking out the window. The lights in Javier’s little log cabin at the front of the property just went out. I don’t know how he can sleep with two of America’s Most Wanted hiding out in his toolshed. The TV is still on in the Airstream trailer next door, but no lights, and no car or truck in the driveway. No dogs barking. No coyotes howling. Just wind whistling through the slits in the shed.
I guess it’s time to fill you in on Javier. He’s the cousin of our gardener, who’s also called Javier, and that’s why I remembered h
is name. Not-our-gardener Javier lives in this cluster of half a dozen cabins and trailers on this weedy plateau in the hills a few miles from the coast. He was once a client of my parents and I was here before, a few years ago, a tagalong when my parents delivered Christmas baskets.
My parents used to be immigration lawyers, and they did a lot of charity work with procits, and helped newcomers settle into the area with food and clothing and electronics donations, all that. There used to be foreigners with dusty suitcases and peppery odors in our guest room for weeks at a time, back when my parents were soul mates and did good deeds together.
I remember that while I waited in the car for Miller Law to bring tidings of comfort and joy here, I noticed that the place seemed familiar. Then I realized the cabin was on the other side of a rickety bridge over a deep crevasse at the middle point of the seven-mile loop we run for cross-country; my school is on the other side of the hills. When the bomb exploded, Fee and I started running, and as we got deeper and deeper into the bush, the cabin was the only place I could think to go.
Once, about a year ago, while I was out on a solo run, I stopped to pee behind this shed we’re in now. I checked the little cabin, and the old Airstream trailer next door, and couldn’t see anyone around. No vehicles in the gravel patch driveway. No kids playing in the scruffy yard. I pulled my shorts down and squatted, then out of nowhere this huge black pit bull comes steaming straight for me, snarling and snapping and growling and barking like he was gonna murder me while I peed. He made it to spitting distance before the rusty chain attached to the frame of the Airstream yanked him back.
On the rocky path through the hills heading back to the school, I thought about that poor dog and the fucked things that must’ve happened to make him so vicious. I thought about that pit bull tonight too, as we got closer to the cabin. I looked for him as I dragged Fee across the rickety bridge, and listened for him as we pushed through the brush toward the clearing. But we heard nothing.
Fee and I didn’t love the idea of waking up our gardener’s cousin, basically a stranger, to ask him to help us, so you can imagine we were relieved when we saw the light from a television glowing in his little living room.
Moving closer to the cabin, I caught this horrible stench and at first I thought oh no the pit bull, then realized what I was smelling was me—wicked BO mingling with the copper-pot smell of my blood. It was like I was bleeding out, so much blood was running down my legs and pooling into my sneakers under my gown. My period arrived at some point tonight between the welcome mocktails and the explosion, maybe proving the existence of God after all, and that She has a gnarly sense of humor.
As we inched toward the cabin, I worried about the shifts in the wind and the satanic dog catching scent of my moon. If that beast started barking, the neighbors might come out and see us, or the police on our trail might hear.
The screen door to Javier’s cabin was open, but we couldn’t see anyone moving around inside. As we got closer, we could hear voices coming from the television. When you’re a regular person, you don’t expect to see yourself on TV, and even as I write this it still feels unreal.
It took a sec to grasp that the voices Fee and I could hear were our own. We stood on the porch of the cabin, peering in the screen door, watching ourselves in a montage of pics from tonight of our daddies in their white tuxes holding us close in our pretty white gowns, posed against a waterfall backdrop. Romantic, and twisted because Daddy. Then they cut to me in full-freckled close-up, footage from the interviews they’d done with us weeks ago at the orientation session for the ball. I was talking about the growing popularity of chastity events in America and what a great opportunity the ceremony was for father/daughter bonding. Just gonna say that listening to myself in that clip, I totally get why the Hive stings me about affecting a British accent when I’m trying to sound smart. “I think the American Virtue Ball experience is going to change my life,” I said.
Not a lie. Yet, what a fraud.
We kept watching as Jinny Hutsall’s face filled the screen, long fingers brushing satin hair away from her doll-blue eyes, explaining how Reverend Jagger Jonze and the AVB have changed the way she sees herself as a woman. I have reason to believe that. She’s all, like, “The American Virtue Ball has armed me with the courage to be brave at a time when our country needs heroes most.” Then she licks her lips like a porn star and goes, “My father thinks I’m worth waiting for. Yours does too.”
The anchor on the TV interrupted the video with breaking news. An eyewitness claimed to have seen us get into a blue Honda in the parking lot of a Starbucks in West Hills. Another saw us in a black Escalade on the 405 south, heading toward the airport. The screen cut to an image of the bomb damage at Sacred Heart High—fire trucks everywhere, with men in black uniforms leading snarling German shepherds around the perimeter of the smoldering ruins of the blown-up bathroom. Then there was a shot of the shallow creek where we buried our smashed cell phones. Fee and I were just looking at each other, going, This is not real, it’s not real. But it is. We are news. We are the biggest news around.
I reached out to rap on the door, hoping one of Javier’s kids wouldn’t answer, because we looked like brides of freaking Frankenstein, me especially, but I prayed—well—I wished that the man’s wife was awake, because in addition to asking these strangers to hide a couple of teen girls accused of bombing a school and being runners for the Red Market, I needed a menstrual pad stat.
Then we heard a twig snapping behind us. Slowly we turned. There was a man, holding a rifle, looking nervous as shit. Our conversation went like this:
“Do you know who we are?”
He just stared.
“Es tu Javier? El primo de Javier the gardener?” I asked.
“Si.”
He soon saw we weren’t armed, like the media reports were saying, and we couldn’t have looked very dangerous, since he lowered his rifle. “They say you detonada una bomba.”
We spoke Spanglish to each other. “We did not detonada any bomb, sir. Believe me, por favor.”
He had a dead-thick accent. “Villains in Versace.”
I played my only card, and said, “Sherman and Shelley Miller son mis padres.”
“Rory. Te conozco.” Javier looked around, checking the woods for bounty hunters, the mountain road for vehicles. “Por qué vienes aqui?”
“We didn’t know where else to go.”
“We didn’t do any of what they’re saying, sir,” Fee said. Fee doesn’t speak Spanish. Her form of rebellion. “You have to believe us.”
He believed us. I could see it in his face. He gestured for us to step inside the door, out of sight from sky surveillance.
“I came here a few years ago when mi mami y papi were delivering navideños a su familia,” I said as he came in behind us and shut the screen door. “Thank you. Muchas gracias.”
“No.” He wagged his head back and forth. “You shouldn’t have come here. Muy peligroso. For me. For you. Ustedes deben entregarse a las autoridades.”
Fee shook my arm. “What’s he saying? What’s he saying?”
“He’s saying we should turn ourselves in.”
Still shaking his head, he said, “La recompensa.”
“We know about the bounty. We saw on our phones before we ditched them.”
“One million dollars.”
There was a crashing sound from the direction of the trailer next door. A metal bucket taken down by the wind, or a raccoon? Maybe it was that vicious pit bull. Or worse—the human who owned it. Javier waited a long beat, watching the Airstream from the doorway until he was satisfied there was no immediate danger, then he turned back toward us and said, “You cannot stay here.”
“We can’t turn ourselves in, Mr. Javier. I mean—with the bounty and everything…? We have to wait until it all dies down and people come to their senses, right? All the bounty hunters, and the Crusaders?”
He nodded.
“Who can we trust? The police? Hay u
na razón por la que los llaman Triggerheads.”
He nodded.
“Please. Please let us stay? Just for tonight, until we figure out our next move. My friend here? Feliza esta muy enferma. We’ve been corriendo a través de las colinas para siempre. Just, if you had a little agua? And maybe I could use your phone to call my mother?”
“Your mamá was detenido,” Javier said. “Detained.”
Wait. What?
“Her mother too,” he said, pointing at Fee. “Morena Lopez. The Guatemalan.”
“Why would they detain my mother? What have our mothers got to do with anything?” Fee was shocked.
“Los documentos de immigracíon fueron expirados.” Javier shrugged. Nothing more to say.
“Oh my God,” Fee said. “She’s gonna kill me.”
“What about my mother?”
Javier paused to study my face, then said, “Your mamá is being held on suspicion.”
“Suspicion of what?”
“They say she helped you plant the bomb. They say she’s involved with the Mercado Roja. Red Market.”
“Okay, well, that is insane. Actually insane. I don’t even believe in the Red Market. There’s no proof there IS a Red Market.”
“I don’t believe this of her either,” Javier said.
Obviously. I mean, Jesus, Shelley’s barely been out of the house in three years! Is it because she went to a rally with Aunt Lilly one time and shouted, “Get your laws off my body”? Because she did consulting for an organization trying to secure safe abortions for victims of rape and incest? Now she’s being accused of trading in fetal tissue and selling babies for the Red Market mafia? Sincerely?