by J. C. Lillis
“You ready, Babs?”
“Ready!” I say.
“One, two—”
“Three.”
Abel and I open the doors.
He is wearing a resolute smile, furry paws, a wolf mask that cuts off above the mouth, and a black t-shirt that says BIG BAD. When he sees my outfit, he geeks out.
“Bran, look at her! Baby Tera.”
“She looks great.” Brandon’s on the couch, reading Abel’s battered Ray Bradbury anthology. I glide into the living room and do a pirouette.
“What about mine?” says Abel. “Yes or no?”
Brandon glances up. “What are you?”
“Um, hi?” He points to the mask. “Big? Bad?”
“…Hipster werewolf?”
“No-o!”
“I’ll have a kale smoothie and a vegan cupcake, please.”
“Oh my God.”
“Can I borrow your mustache wax?”
“FINE. This one’s out.”
“It’s not so bad!” I giggle.
“No, no, I have a backup.” He ducks back in his room.
“What’re you wearing tonight?” I ask Brandon.
“Oh, I don’t dress up for Halloween.”
“He was traumatized one year when he dressed up like Hamlet and people thought he was an emo pirate,” Abel calls. “Now he just wears cat ears.”
“Seriously?” I fold my arms at Brandon. “You’re wearing cat ears to LA’s hottest Halloween party?”
“Hm? Ah, maybe.”
I fix him with a laser gaze.
“Brandon.” I’m quiet, so Abel doesn’t hear.
“Hmm.”
“Are you not going tonight?”
He turns a page. “I…might sit it out, yeah.”
“No! Why?”
“I’m not big on dancing.”
“But—”
Abel bursts out of the bedroom in a blue leisure suit with Dracula fangs and a stick-on ’70s pornstache. He props his hands on his hips.
“Better? Yes?” he says.
“No!” We thumbs-down him.
“Sheesh, you guys are brutal.” He zips back in the bedroom.
“He really wants you to come,” I say.
“I know. That’s part of it too.” Brandon blinks at his book. “I have a plan. I made my decision. I don’t want any messy things happening now.”
“Barrie, help. I’m running out of options!” Abel yells.
I stare at the side of Brandon’s face. The urge to make things messy overwhelms my good sense, probably because I’ve made things messy for myself and could really use the company.
“Why don’t you wear that suit?” I say.
“What?” Abel pokes his head out.
I go to the hall closet and dig out the white suit, the one he wore at the Castaway Ball when he was Sim the Hot Android. “This,” I say softly.
“I—no. Not a good idea.”
“Just try it on. Please?” I whisper. I glance back at Brandon, but he’s not paying attention. “See what happens.”
He roves his eyes over the suit; if you got close, you could probably see memories flickering in his irises like a film in rewind. Then he grabs it from me and whap he’s behind a closed door again.
“So, ah, thanks for the car loan,” I tell Brandon, cracking my knuckles. I’m intensely nervous about everything all of a sudden: the suit business, seeing Ava face-to-face again, driving Brandon’s immaculate Honda to pick her up.
“No problem.” He glances up at me. “You doing okay?”
“Anxious, a little.”
“Don’t be. Keep things professional. Remind yourself how much you could lose if things go too far.” He grabs his car keys from the side table and tosses them to me. “The wipers stick sometimes, and the brakes are super-sensitive. Oh, and watch out for—”
His face freezes. I turn around. Abel stands in the hallway in his Sim pants and jacket, his hands behind his back as if he’s holding a surprise. The jacket strains a bit at the buttons, a sweet and sad reminder of the years that passed since he wore it last. He takes a big breath that makes his chest expand attractively. I cheer on the inside.
“What are you doing?” Brandon says.
“Trying this on.” Abel stares at him hard. “I wanted to see if it fit, and what do you know? It still does.”
The Smaller Boy closes his eyes. “Oh…”
The rocket clock ticks.
“Brandon,” says Abel.
“Yeah,” says Brandon.
“May I speak to you in the bedroom, please?”
My better self tells me not to eavesdrop, but my meddling ways are responsible for this latest development, and I have a duty to see how it turns out. I stand in the corner by the Space Odyssey pinball machine, where the thin wall lets conversation bleed through.
“Bleed” is the right word.
Abel slits his heart open and the truth floods out.
“I want you back,” he says. “Shit. Oh shit. I don’t have a speech ready. Okay. Ahh—I want you back because…I like being with you more than anyone else. And because when I make you laugh I feel like the coolest person on the planet. And because we get each other in like, every possible way, and you don’t know that’s a huge deal until you grow up and meet a fuckload of people and you realize how rare that is. And like…the sex was always awesome? Once we figured it out? And you iron your t-shirts but I still think it’s cute? And you can sing really nice and fix a leaky faucet and do the best Cadmus impression, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t even think of right now because I’m super-nervous and I didn’t plan this, but there it is.” He stops for a breath. “We won’t mess things up this time; I won’t let us. I love you. I need you. GODDAMMIT. Please. Stay.”
I grasp the sides of the pinball machine, stare at the sunburst under SPACE ODYSSEY. There’s no way, right? There’s no way he won’t say yes after that.
“I’m—I need to—” Something clunks, as if Brandon’s tripped over it. “Oh God. I—have to go. I’m sorry.”
He books it out of the room, out of the house. The screen door shuts with a final thwack.
Abel comes out a minute later, looking dazed and drained. I can’t look at his face. I am such an ass. Why did I have to push things? This was their story to tell, not mine.
“I didn’t mean to make things worse,” I say.
“Eh, you didn’t.” Abel shudders his head like he’s trying to wake up. “You know what, Barb?”
“What?”
He holds his head high and tugs the hem of his jacket. “I think I look quite dashing in this suit, and I still love Castaway Planet, and I’m totally wearing this tonight. Even if he bails.”
“I think you should.”
He marches off to the kitchen. I follow him in case that was bravado and he needs to cry on someone. He opens a box of rotini, dumps the spirals into Tupperware, and starts cutting a shape from the empty blue cardboard box.
“What’s that?”
“Finishing touch. Sim’s supposed to have this like, blinking blue mechanical heart. We had a replica once, but this’ll have to do.” He goes to the hall mirror, holds the cardboard heart to his chest, and sighs. “Anyone asks, I’ll tell them android hearts change over time. Right?”
I hug him from behind and rest my chin on his shoulder.
***
As evening falls, on my drive to the Pop U campus thirty-eight miles outside LA, I think about Abel’s sad face and the Specter of Love. “The Specter of Love” is a song by Transitive Properties which I have listened to twenty-eight times since Tuesday. It contains all sorts of tangly imagery about mansions and curses and ghosts and evil nurses, but really it is about how love sucks your soul out and renders you useless, which is a message I need to remember tonight. I’d play it in the car, but Brandon’s USB cord is missing.
When I turn down the narrow wooded road that runs parallel to th
e campus, I get goosebumps in places I didn’t think possible. It’s thrilling to be this close to Tera’s domain—I’ve pulled it up on Google Earth so many times that it’s strange to see the road un-pixelated. I pull over and park where Ava said to, by the giant droopy pine with the orange X spray-painted on it.
I tap my sweaty thumbs on the wheel to the “Specter of Love” dance remix I’m spinning in my head. Why did I do this, really? Because I want to kiss her? Because I want to help her? It was both of those things, but also greed, pure greed. I wanted an in-person repeat of our incredible Day of Creative Communion, when everyone knows days like that don’t usually have reruns. They have cheap awkward sequels where the magic is gone and the chemistry’s off and you can feel the other person slowly deflating because you’re not who they hoped you were. All of tonight will be a lead-up to the moment when I say or do something intolerably weird, and Ava realizes I’m not a proper McCartney to her Lennon after all.
If my personal code of ethics didn’t strictly forbid standing people up, I would turn the car around this minute. Instead I get out and wait in the darkness, gazing into the trees.
Then Ava emerges from the earth.
To be accurate, she emerges from a trap door that, two seconds earlier, had been a regular heap of branches and pine needles. It takes me a moment to realize it’s her, because she is wearing an ankle-length black dress, sensible boots, and a solid black veil that swallows the entirety of her hair.
She is Tera in the first forty seconds of the “Called Me by Name” video, before she rips off the old-fashioned nun dress and HELLO black sequined romper.
Sister Ava tromps up to me. Her guitar’s in a black case, slung on her back like a weapon of the Lord. Her eyes are puffy but carefully made up, like she’s done a lot of crying but plans to forget that for the evening. I’m so disarmed by her costume and her sweet smirk and the fact of her body being two feet from my body that I forget to be nervous about seeing her again.
“Don’t say a word,” she says.
“’Evening, Sister.”
“This costume’s slightly traumatic for a recovering Catholic.”
I giggle. “So why are you wearing it?”
“For you.”
“Who told you about my nun fetish?”
“Seriously?”
“Ew! No.”
“My options were limited to Tera’s costume closet. I picked the one least likely to get you all…worked up.”
“That’s so considerate.”
“You could’ve done the same.”
“You like gold jumpsuits?”
“When they’re on hot giant dork goddesses.”
“You think I’m hot?”
She crosses her arms. “This night’s getting off to a dangerous start.”
“Oops.”
“Let’s make some rules.”
“Okay.”
“No touching each other, no sexual innuendos, and NO talking about what happened on Pop U. Sound good?”
“Yes.” As soon as we say it, I want to dissect every minute of Thursday’s show, make a string of that’s what she said jokes, and hug her fine polyester-clad body. Co-workers hug, right? Even nuns hug, probably. But I have vows to keep, so I busy my hands with my lopsided crown.
“What’s with that?” she says. “Is that supposed to be the crown from ‘Queen of the World’?”
“I’m impressed.”
“Tera puts her old videos on when we have Game Night.” Ava studies the crown. “I have a proposition. Before we leave.”
“What is it?”
“Sh. C’mon.”
She beckons me into the woods. I creep after her, twigs snapping under my golden boots. It is a perilously poetic thing to do with someone, tiptoeing between trees in a still night forest. This is just like the scene from that “Pitching a Tent” story where teen Brandon and Abel are Eagle Scouts and get lost in the woods together…Ugh, why did I skim that fanfic last night, and why am I applying it to us? We don’t even have a good portmanteau. No one would ship Avrie, or Barva.
“What are we doing?” I whisper.
“Brace yourself. You’ll die.” She stops us at the spot where she rose from the earth. “We can borrow the actual crown from the video. Right now.”
“How?”
She points at the trap door under our feet. My whole body tenses. Trap doors lead to dark narrow passageways, and dark narrow passageways and I are not friends.
“Guess where this goes,” says Ava.
“I give up.”
“It’s a tunnel,” she announces, “to the Golden Underground.”
“It is not!”
“Shh.”
“Sorry.”
“When we toured the Underground, Tera showed us this secret hidden passageway she used to duck the paparazzi, back when they’d camp outside her gates.” She crouches down, sweeps a branch away. “Johnny and I snuck down one night to see where it let out. She hasn’t used it in years.”
I dip down beside her and touch the broken lock on the door, which strikes me as a dire security concern.
“Relax. There’s a huge iron door before you get to the Underground,” Ava says. “Though Tera’s password is 112233. She’s not the brightest sometimes.”
I don’t have the strength to challenge this blasphemy, because Ava is lifting the trap door with a horror-movie creaaaaaaaak. She shines her phone’s weak light into the darkness, illuminating cobwebbed wooden steps that lead to the mouth of a tunnel. I say “mouth” as if it had footlong fangs and the breath of a thousand open graves, because it might as well.
“You first.” Ava tips her chin at me. “You’re the one all hot to see this place.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. This. Kills. Me. All that’s separating me from the Golden Underground and a chance to brush my fingers over twenty years of Tera’s personal memorabilia is one tiny terrifying tunnel. I will kick myself forever if I don’t power through, seize this chance.
But what if I lose it in front of Ava?
What if I panic, and she’s like what the hell?, and I have to tell her about the time I got trapped in the underground prairie-dog maze on our third-grade field trip to the zoo, and she cackles at me for having a phobia with the silliest origin story ever, and the smidgen of cool I’ve managed to accumulate in her eyes completely evaporates?
“You know what? I think I’ll stick with my own crown,” I say, hoping it comes across as a moment of great personal integrity. “I worked really hard on it.”
“You don’t even want to see the Underground? I thought it was your dream.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “It’ll never live up to the picture in my head.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Plus I’m scared of tunnels.” Dammit, Barrie!
“Yeah?” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
Go ahead. Be jerky about it. I’m not supposed to like you anyway.
“I’m scared of goats.” She shrugs, applying red lipstick. “Like, seriously scared.”
I let out a breath. “They’re terrible animals.”
“I don’t trust anything with rectangular pupils.”
“They’re oddly reptilian.”
“Yeah! They’re like if snakes mated with sheep.” She blots her lipstick on a tissue.
“Ava.”
“Huh.”
“Is that color Vatican-approved?”
She checks the tube. “Probably not. It’s called DEVIL’S PET.”
“Also a good goat descriptor.”
“There are no good goats, FARG. Trust me.”
We head for Brandon’s car, maintaining careful distance between us. I sneak a glance at her. We’ve been together for ten minutes and already we’ve spilled secrets and indulged in cute goat banter. Keeping things businesslike might be harder than I thought.
Plus, those eyes.
“Your face is still pretty recog
nizable,” I say. “You sure you don’t want a mask or something?”
She takes some oversized shades from her pocket.
“Sunglasses,” she says.
“Nunglasses,” I say.
“I really hate you,” she says.
“Likewise, Sister.”
And with that, the giant golden dork goddess and the world’s coolest nun slip into the Honda hybrid, toward whatever the evening has planned for us.
Chapter Twenty-Two
On the ride to St. C’s, we keep ourselves admirably busy. I have brought along my in-depth analysis of the assets and shortcomings of Ava’s remaining competitors, plus a three-page fold-out sketch depicting various trajectories she could follow to win the Pop U crown. We analyze this in great detail, spinning alternate scenarios and debating what-ifs, until we turn into the small St. Castaways parking lot.
I ease into a space near the back-door overhang, away from the single street light that illuminates the lot. Ava fixes her eyes on me. With her hair hidden, her face is somehow more beautiful: a plain glowing thing, like the night light I had in my bedroom as a kid.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
Ask me for the moon and I’ll bring it in a teacup. That’s what my brain says, but my brain is absurd. My sensible mouth says “Sure.”
“Can I put on your crown for a second?”
“My crown? Really?”
“I want to see how it feels.”
“Okay. Weirdo.”
Ava reaches into the back seat, where I’ve placed the crown in a nest of Brandon’s plaid shirts. She rests it on her head, right over the nun veil, and sighs in ecstasy. I mold my hand over the gearshift so it won’t be tempted to reach for hers.
“You, uh, might not want to let that show,” I say.
“Let what show?”
“Your lust for winning.” I grin.
“Yeah. Strategically, I get that.”
“But?”
Ava makes a fist and knocks my hand with hers. “Nahh. I don’t want to pick a fight.”
“Aw, but you love fights.”
She giggles. “I do, yeah.” She takes the crown off and holds it in her lap, tracing the whorls I made by winding the wire around pencils. “What I want to say is, it’s okay to crave success and recognition. To want to win because winning feels good. It doesn’t have to be all about something noble, like helping people.”
