A&b

by J. C. Lillis

  “That’s genuinely a huge part of it, though. For me.”

  “Yeah, I’m not doubting that, but—”

  “I want to put good in the world. Every time I go out onstage, I want to make sure every single person goes home feeling better than when they sat down.”

  “That’s a tall order.”

  “Most missions are, if they’re worth anything.”

  She curls her hand around the gearshift. The warmth of her hand reaches mine. It feels as intimate as a touch.

  “All I’m saying is, it’s fine to be ambitious too.” Her eyes glitter in the dark. “Just because we’re women, it doesn’t mean we have to hide our ambitions in something soft.”

  “But isn’t it all about choice?” I swallow hard, edge my hand down so my pinkie grazes her index finger. “We can choose what motivates us, what we want our music to accomplish. Just because some people think it’s ‘feminine’ to devote your life to helping, that doesn’t make it worth less.”

  She shoots me a smile and shakes her head. “You’re the real deal, aren’t you?”

  “I try to be.”

  “You should be wearing this outfit, not me.” She waggles her skirt. “You’re like a servant of the Lord except the Lord is pop music.”

  “The Lord is my audience.”

  “Shit, yeah. Sorry, Sister FARG.”

  “You curse a lot for a Catholic girl.”

  “Are you kidding? We’re the worst.” She laughs. “Especially like, ex-Catholic agnostic lesbian guitarists. We know no shame.”

  Our eyes stay tractor-beamed for two seconds. Three. Four.

  Then she tilts her head at St. C’s. “Shall we?”

  I want to say: Stay here. Stay with me in the car and let’s comfortably challenge each other all night. Let’s argue about the purpose of music and the obligations of fame. Let’s dissect what we hate and exchange what we love, one pair of earbuds split between us so we have to sit close. Let’s sing each other our favorite words and steal kisses in the dark and let’s not leave until the night sky pales and the first morning birds chirp, even though we’ll have to subsist on half a bottle of water, a can of Whoosh, and the Altoids in Brandon’s glove compartment.

  “We shall,” I make myself say.

  ***

  Do not ogle the hot nun.

  I repeat tonight’s mantra all the way into St. C’s, stopping when we reach the steps to the Church of Abandon. My favorite carpe-diem sex-themed dance song of the late 1970s is teeing up its final chorus, its chaotic synth riff pinballing through me with pure hot joy.

  “This is ‘Voulez-Vous’ by ABBA,” I say, because Dance Music 101 will be an excellent distraction. “1979, Atlantic Records. They made a disco album when disco was dying and the production’s super-dated but like, listen to that melody and try to tell me dance songs are dull and repetitive.”

  “Uh-huh.” She gazes up the steps, a flicker of fear in her eyes, and flexes and unflexes her long slim fingers. I want to catch her hands in mine and bring them to my lips, like she is my lady and I am a knight who has crossed oceans and hacked through briars and slain a dragon named Dani for her.

  “You all right?” I say.

  “Sure. Uh-huh. Never been to a dance before.”

  I nod solemnly. “You’re afraid you dance like a goon.”

  “Nah. We had a trained modern dancer at the Hollow. I took lessons for two years.”

  “Of course you did.” I can’t resist a mini eyeroll.

  “But I’ve never danced…with anyone.”

  “Oh.”

  “What if someone wants to dance with me?’

  If it’s me, say yes.

  “Remind them of your holy vow of celibacy,” I suggest. “And then do the Bow and Block.”

  “What’s that?”

  I demonstrate how to bow to a would-be dance partner and gracefully spin out of reach. “It says, ‘you seem charming, but tonight I prefer my own company.’”

  “And that works?”

  “I’ve used it at several dances, with great success.”

  “You’re a useful person to know.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and she slides on her nunglasses, and it’s up the stairs and through the spiderweb curtain and into Halloween paradise.

  Last night’s handiwork has thrillingly transformed the Church of Abandon. My cabaret lights and set are cleared away, replaced with twinkling bat lanterns, flickering pumpkins, the fluttering ghosts Kira made from shredded cheesecloth. The mannequins are all dressed up: Augie and Bob and Zara menace the busy dance floor in their goth gear and sparkly black wings. And Evan the Floating Swamp Ghost hovers overhead beside the new disco ball, watching over the demons and vampires and superheroes dancing to “She Bop” in a haze of dry ice.

  “Some alien guy just waved at you.”

  Ava points at the dance floor and oh my, Abel’s made a full-on hot-droid transformation. Pale blue skin, slicked blue hair, the white suit a beacon in a sea of gore and glitter. I wave back. He’s pogo-ing with his redhead friend Flann.

  “That’s Abel?” Ava says.

  “The one and only.” He high-fives Flann and then makes his way to us, his sad blue cardboard heart flapping against his chest.

  “Where’s the other one you told me about?”

  “Brandon?” I scan the dance floor, the bar, the sidelines. Damn. “He’s not here.”

  “They’re the only two who know I’m coming?”

  “Yes. Our secret’s safe, I swear.”

  “HEY HO, IT’S AV—!” We give Abel a death glare and he shifts mid-sentence: “—A VERY CUTE GIRL IN A NUN COSTUME!”

  “This is Abel, and I promise he knows what discretion is.”

  “Enchanté.” He kisses Ava’s hand.

  “Et moi aussi.”

  “You guys being good?”

  “Yes.” I pat his blue hair. He is halfway to drunk and will definitely be cabbing it home tonight. “We are firmly committed to behaving.”

  “Good, ’cause let me—can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  He thunks his hands on my shoulders and puts his lips against my ear. “Love? It’s like…ornamental. I’ve decided. It’s like that curly chocolate garnish stuff Don does. Like it’s nice but do you need it? Hell. No. You’ve got a whole goddamn glorious cake to eat and in this big beautiful world, garnish is strictly fucking optional.”

  Oh boy. “I, ah…”

  “This guy bothering you, ladies?” says Don.

  “Speak of the devil!” Abel slings an arm around her and tweaks her red glitter-horns. Don’s with her cute gawky blond husband Grant. They’re both angel/devil hybrids: Don has horns and a pitchfork but also a white robe and wings, and Grant has on a tight red pleather suit accessorized with a halo and harp.

  Grant adjusts his halo and grins from me to Ava. “This your date, Barrie?”

  “She’s…an associate of mine.”

  “Mirielle Cochon,” Ava says in a perfect French accent, without missing a beat. “Je suis une—how do you say it, business consultant?”

  “Ah, oui?” Grant laughs. “Sorry, that’s all the French I know!”

  “Neat sunglasses,” Don says.

  “Merci.”

  I poke Ava. “We should go over my business plan, right?”

  “Barrie never stops working,” Don says to Grant. “It’s kind of terrifying.”

  “Whoooooo.” I make scary workaholic fingers at them and spirit Ava away, leading us around the edges of the dance floor.

  “Vos amis sont gentils,” she says.

  “Um,” I say.

  “What?”

  “You speak French, too?”

  “Dani’s aunt does. I picked up a little.”

  “Any other secret talents?”

  “I can basket-weave like a boss. And I once taught a pig to roll over.” She watches Abel bow to Bob the mannequin. “Is he okay?�
��

  “Yes, he’s just lovelorn. See, he’s trying not to—”

  “Sh.”

  She holds a finger to her red lips and lifts her face to the speaker. “Umbrella” is on, its hi-hats thumping my childhood back, rising a bittersweet lump in my throat.

  “I used to love this song,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “We weren’t allowed to listen to pop music as kids, but they’d play this one in gym class.” She looks up at me. “Did you pick it?”

  I nod. “This whole hour’s mine. Abel and I alternated hours.”

  Ava breathes in deep and I can see her doing what I do: taking the music into her, letting the synths whoosh through her veins and the drums replace her heartbeat.

  “So, ah, about the song structure,” I say, leaning close but not too close. “You’ll notice how it incorporates a strong central image and elements of—”

  “FARG.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s not how I want to learn.”

  She bolts for the dance floor and plunges into the whirl of bodies, and for one second I brace myself for a wave of envy at Ava’s mad modern-dance skills.

  And then I relax.

  Because she is bad.

  Ava’s dancing is uniquely terrible. She does this thumbs-up thing and then undulates her fists, like she’s trying to milk a goat very fast but also be sexy a little. I should probably jump in there, try to offset the horror with goofball moves of my own, but it is so utterly charming and relieving to see Ava Alvarez be awful at something that I watch for a minute, a tender smile on my face. She’s so cute and confident in her nunglasses that she’s kind of pulling this off. Then the two mummies next to her start mimicking her moves and I figure it’s time to intervene.

  I leap to her rescue, grab both her hands in mine and twirl us around.

  “What?” She’s laughing. “Am I showing off too much?”

  “This crowd’s not ready for your thumbs,” I say, and then I release her and we sing along loud with the ella ellas and I’m glad I put Rihanna’s least sexy song on this playlist, because love doesn’t have to be romantic to be real.

  My brain knows that.

  But tonight, my body doesn’t.

  ***

  You know how some songs imprint themselves with certain memories, until a better memory comes along and colors over the old one? That’s what happens for the next forty minutes. Ava plays paint-by-numbers with my playlist, inking over my nostalgia with bold new lovely pictures.

  “Black and Gold” is no longer about me staring up at my bedroom ceiling on an autumn night with the window open, wondering if God exists. It is about the way Ava’s body grazes mine when she ventures a spin, and the shine of my golden jumpsuit against her black dress.

  “Wings” is no longer about grocery shopping at Save-A-Lot with my earbuds in, letting Little Mix tell me all the sweet things my own mama should have. It is about Ava making bird-flaps with her high-stretched hands, shooting for graceful but landing on dorky and making my heart soar straight for the moon.

  “Hang with Me” is no longer about Chelsie’s hair bouncing on her freckled shoulders as we practiced our Robyn dance routine in her pink bedroom. It is about Ava’s shoeless abandon, and how she twirls her nun frock like a kid in an Easter dress, and the way she throws her arms out and spins each time Robyn says recklessly.

  I could dance like this forever near Ava, partnered but unpartnered, skimming danger but still safe. Then, damn everything, “Head Over Heels” fades into the tinkly piano of my slow-song contribution.

  We stop. All around us, everyone shuffles close and couples up.

  Ava squints at the speaker. “What the hell is this?”

  I shrug. Abel insisted on slow songs; he says adults who come to dances like these are aching for the fun prom nights they never had. So I picked the most bombastic retro prom-night number I could think of—“Making Love Out of Nothing At All” by Air Supply—and of course he freaking loved it.

  The awkward descends on us like graveyard fog. I am intimately familiar with this moment: when banger turns to ballad and you pause on the dance floor with someone you’d love to hold onto and sway with for three and a half minutes, but you know they won’t say yes if you ask.

  Ava shoves her hands in her nun pockets. She rocks back and forth on her feet.

  “So…is this whole song basically the guy listing stuff he can do?”

  “No. He lists stuff he can’t do, too.” I cup a hand to my ear. “See?”

  Ava listens. “Ah, okay. He can’t leave you. Such brave self-disclosure.”

  “I think it’s romantic.”

  She bumps my shoe with her foot. “You would.”

  The song shifts into that skin-tingling part about the fading night and flying time and how you need to try telling your secret love everything you have to say, even if you know your words will fail. Curse you, Jim Steinman, for sneaking sharp truths into four minutes and twenty-nine seconds of glorious cheese.

  “Shwego downstairs?” My mouth feels Novocained.

  “Huh?”

  “Downstairs. Ah…” I point downward. “I need a drink.”

  “Can’t we get one up here?” She tilts her head at the BOOOO BAR Abel’s set up in the corner.

  “Yes, but—” I need light. I need air. I need the good old unromantic St. C’s dining room. “I thought maybe we should get to work. Start on the chorus.”

  She nods slowly. “Yeah. Okay.”

  Abel watches us go. He’s near the edge of the floor doing a polite sixth-grade-sway with Kira, who’s an undead Gelfling tonight. He lifts a hand from her lopsided Dark Crystal wings to throw me a WTF gesture. I blow it off with a light it’s-under-control wave.

  “So—can you raid the bar?” Ava says, as we creep down to the empty restaurant.

  “Technically, yes.”

  “’Cause I want one of those famous Haterades.”

  “It’ll have to be a Virgin Haterade.” I give her my hand, help her down the last step. “I can’t risk Abel’s liquor license.”

  “That’s cool.” She removes her hand from mine, delicately. “Virgin is fine.”

  “It’s worked for me for eighteen years.” OH LORD YOU DID NOT, Barrie. Ava’s winding up a smartass reply, you can tell, but then she saves me by tripping over the robot statue’s plaster foot. I catch her arm right in time.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Wow. He was—there, all of a sudden.”

  “Tobor’s sneaky like that.”

  “I didn’t even see him.”

  “Maybe you should take these off.”

  Before I can stop myself, I reach out and remove her nunglasses. We stare at each other, unblinking. Electricity crackles from her lips to mine and I’m stunned it’s not visible. The air smells of popcorn and frou-frou cocktails and you can still hear the muffled song from upstairs, that part where the final chorus says making love about eighty seven thousand times in a row. My resolve drains away. I invent new mantras: I will not do this. I will not kiss my collaborator. I will not kiss her in front of a case of vintage Pez dispensers.

  The front door swings open and poof, the moment’s gone in a jingle of bells. I peek around the corner.

  It’s Brandon.

  I think.

  It’s hard to tell at first, because his face is ghost-white with Halloween makeup and he’s trimmed his beard down to sexy stubble. He’s wearing red aviator shades, a brown leather bomber jacket, dark jeans, and brown boots.

  I cross my hands over my heart. “You came.”

  “Don’t make a big deal.” He turns the corner and when he sees Sister Ava, he jumps like he’s just seen a bog reaper.

  “Not a real nun,” I assure him.

  “Yeah, never.” She shakes his hand. “Ava.”

  “Hey. I’m Brandon.”

  “Nice boots.” She grins at his costume, and all of a sudd
en it clicks and my heart cannot handle this:

  “You’re Captain Cadmus.”

  “I’m Ghost Cadmus.”

  “Oh.”

  “He dies in the last episode.”

  “Oh!”

  “Sorry. Spoiler alert.”

  “Who’s Captain Cadmus?” Ava whispers.

  “He’s like this super-hot space captain who’s secretly in love with an android. Right, Brandon?”

  He’s peering down at a small silver box in his hand, rubbing its corner with his thumb.

  “Hey.” I tap him.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s in there?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s really nerdy. Abel got me this ten years ago at a CastieCon—I mean, you won’t even get it, but…”

  He opens the box and there it is: a circle of translucent white plastic, its inner workings faintly visible through the shell. He taps its side and it blinks on and off, this beautiful cool blue light, and a giant smile creeps across my face.

  “Sim’s mechanical heart,” I say.

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “Abel told me. But he talked like it was lost.” I bring a hand to my mouth. “You had it with you?”

  “Yeah, I mean…” He’s blushing so hard I can see it through the makeup. “I, ah, kind of bring it everywhere.”

  This is a firehose of bliss to the face and oh man, I can’t help it, my eyes fill up. “Ohh, I’m so glad you came, you guys are gonna be so happy!” I crush him in a hug. “Can I please be in the wedding? I’ll do a reading. Or I can plan the whole thing if you want, I’m really good at details—”

  Brandon pulls away with a freaked-out look. “Whoa. Barrie. Jesus. I’m not there yet.”

  “Why not? You know that’s where he is.”

  “Is he?”

  “Oh—I don’t know! I’m—”

  “Did he say that to you?”

  “No. I swear.”

  “Maybe this is a mistake.” He pulls off his shades and digs something out of his jacket pocket.

  The cat ears.

  “Brandon. Come on.”

  “I shouldn’t have—Why did I buy this jacket?” He rips it off, puts the cat ears on. “Oh God. I can’t do this. He’s in the suit, isn’t he?”