Pink Smog

by Francesca Lia Block

On the walls of the building around the quad where we ate our lunch someone had scrawled graffiti—huge black letters, about twelve feet high.

  The graffiti said:

  BOBBY C. SUCKS DICK

  LILY CHIN BLOWS CHUNKS

  And last but not least (you guessed it):

  LOUISE B. JUST BLOWS

  I stepped backward and felt someone steady me with warm, delicate hands. It was Bobby.

  “You okay?” he asked. The dark curls bounced merrily around his face but he wasn’t smiling his usual mischievous grin.

  “Are you?”

  He nodded. “I’m thinking of mine as free advertising.”

  I socked him lightly in the shoulder. The janitors were already setting up their ladders to paint over the graffiti. But not before Lily had seen.

  She was sitting by herself and we went over to her. She was crying.

  Bobby threw himself down on the cement bench and put his head in her lap. She looked startled, then pleased, then confused. The tears kept streaming down behind her glasses and she dabbed them with her sweatshirt sleeve.

  “Once they heard me. In the bathroom. And the next day they made this, this mess. It was all this disgusting cafeteria food mixed together.” She shuddered. “They would leave globs of it around where I was. Once they put some on my notebook.”

  I had planned on telling Bobby and Lily about what had happened to me the day before, about the picture of my dad in Winter’s apartment, but I decided I had to give all my attention to helping Lily then. I put my arm around her.

  “I’d like to shove some of that stuff down Staci’s throat,” Bobby said.

  I watched the janitors working on the graffiti. “How’d those girls get up there?” I said. “It would wreck their nails.”

  We looked across the yard at where Staci, Marci, and Kelli were holding court before three tall ninth-grade boys with broad biceps. Jeff Heller, Rick Rankin, and Staci’s superhot stoner boyfriend, Casey Cassidy. They were all laughing hysterically. Oh.

  “They won’t mess with you again,” I told Lily, although I had no idea how I was going to stop them. I wasn’t thinking about impressing Charlie’s nonexistent crystal ball or the fact that he wasn’t who I’d thought he was—I just needed to find some way to help my friends.

  I looked at Bobby. He pulled a square of Bubble Yum out of his Levi’s pocket and handed it to me.

  I had been practicing ever since the gum-in-hair incident, planning to someday challenge Staci Nettles to a duel. I unwrapped the gum. It had a thick, chalky texture and smelled of pink and sugar. I stuck it in my mouth and blew and blew—the biggest bubble I had ever made. It got bigger even than my face.

  “I blow,” I said.

  After school I went to find Winter. I knew I had to talk to him about it all. I thought of being alone in his room, breathing his air. I thought of his eyes like blue mood-ring stones. Happiness. I thought of how he knew my father and now Charlie’s picture was in his apartment. I thought about the mysterious notes I had received. Fee Fi Fo Fum.

  My nerves had been jangled by that message. Now they were worse from the graffiti and seeing the picture of my dad. Something needed to start making sense.

  I knocked on Winter’s door and held my breath. What if the girl, Annabelle, or her mother, Hypatia, answered? If the mother did, I’d be face-to-face with the truth about my dad and I wasn’t ready for that yet. What if the dogs answered? But there was no barking and all I saw when the door opened was Winter wearing khaki green army pants, which were a little too big so they hung low on his narrow hips, and a white T-shirt. The dogs growled behind him in the dim room. The incense smell hit me with its sensory memory of naked ladies on fabric bins.

  “Hey,” he said, smiling. When I saw that slow smile showing the white chewing-gum teeth I had to remind myself to be mad.

  “You still mad?” he asked, reading my mind.

  “I don’t know who you are or why you are following me or how you know my dad,” I said. “And why your crazy sister is attacking me and…”

  I almost said something about the photo on his mother’s bedside table but my heart banged a surge of blood to my head in warning and I stopped.

  “How do you know she’s my sister?” He squinted at me from under the lock of hair. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He could have been suspicious or just curious. I could have been paranoid from all my snooping.

  “Isn’t she?”

  “Pretty much.” He reached behind his back for his skateboard and stepped outside. “Want to go somewhere? I got to get out of here.”

  I nodded a little reluctantly, trying to see into the condo before he closed the door (was there really that photograph of my father on his mother’s bedside table?), and followed him like a helpless puppy down the stairs and out the front gate.

  I put my skates back on and then he zipped off, so I went after him. (Remember: he was the cutest boy who had ever paid any attention to me in my entire life.) We went east a ways, then north toward the hills, sloping gray under the afternoon haze. The apartment buildings and houses were older there, many in Spanish styles with red-tiled roofs and thick adobe walls. We turned onto a small side street. There was a little deserted park with a swing set and climbing equipment. The patch of sand and green was surrounded by a wall of bamboo overgrown with morning glories, bougainvillea, and oleander, all intertwined to create a new plant of purple bells, red leafy blossoms, and hot-pink-and-white flowers. A white angel’s trumpet with its poisonous, upside-down lily cups grew nearby. Winter jumped onto one of the swings and gestured for me to join him. His long legs looked like they could touch the sky.

  I scowled at him for a while but it didn’t seem to be working so I went over and sat on the swing, dragging my skates in circles in the sand.

  “It’s better if you actually swing,” Winter said, smiling at me sideways. “That’s why they call it a swing?”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  He slowed down and twisted the chain swing so that he was facing me.

  “Are you sending me those notes?” I asked.

  “What notes?” He blinked innocently, fluttering his eyelashes the way an actor would do in a movie, but it felt genuine.

  “Fairest of them all? Fee Fi Fo Fum?”

  “Nursery rhymes?”

  “Yes. Did you send them?”

  He shook his head. “It’s been a long time since I heard any nursery rhymes. Why?”

  I decided to let that one go. I had a more important question. “How do you know Charlie?”

  “He was my mom’s director. I guess they were friends.”

  “Friends? Yeah right.”

  “Believe me, Weetzie, whatever the situation is, you’re the one he cares about the most.”

  “Cares? He left me! He hasn’t even called.”

  “He thinks about you all the time.”

  “How do you know?” I got up and moved away from him. My heart was doing its slamming thing. I saw red. You know how they say you see red when you’re angry? That was really what it was like. The world looked red for a second like when you press your hands over your eyelids and tilt your face up toward the sun.

  Winter looked down at his hands and bit nervously at one cuticle. “He’s tried to call you,” he said. “But she always answers. Or the machine.”

  I slumped on the bench and put my head down. “Why is this happening?”

  Winter untwisted the chain of his swing and spun away from me, rubbing his eyes with a fist. “My dad left, too,” he said.

  When he stopped spinning I saw that his eyes were red. “I never really got to know him at all. He was always doing his own thing and working so hard. All I got from him is this fucked-up last name.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was the first time I had stopped thinking about myself that afternoon.

  “But then I realized that the whole thing is bullshit—this parent-child thing. Some people are lucky to have it but a lot of them don’t. You just ha
ve to make your own family, your own life. Whatever. Even when you’re a kid and it feels too hard. That’s the only way. You have to figure out how to take care of yourself before anything else will work out.”

  I nodded and watched him squinting into the tangle of foliage around us.

  “This is beautiful,” he said. “Here. That’s another thing you’ve got to do. You’ve got to see the beauty whenever you can and take what you can get. Otherwise you just get old.”

  “Like Charlie,” I said. “He got old. And my mom, too.”

  Winter tossed his hair out of his eyes and leaned back in the swing, stretching his arms up behind him and cracking his knuckles. “They all do. But not me. I’ll never get old.” There wasn’t teenage invincible, live-forever bravado in his voice—he sounded a little melancholy, almost.

  The day seemed to get darker and cooler all at once. A blackbird cawed ominously in a tree overhead and I wanted to leave. I had seen the beauty in things before, when I was a kid, but I wasn’t so sure about it anymore. Even the prettiest flowers were toxic. I wondered if thinking like that would make me old at thirteen.

  Winter stood up and reached for my hand. My skates were unsteady in the sand.

  “He’ll call,” Winter said. “Just make sure you answer the phone.”

  We got back to our building and he looked at me for a moment before we said good-bye. The sadness on his face was back, like the real Winter revealed under a warrior’s metal mask. I wanted to hug him but I didn’t. It would have been impossible for me to let go.

  “Get that phone, Weetzie Bat,” he said.

  When it rang that night while we were watching TV, I pounced on it. My mom was dozing in her chair and didn’t notice.

  “Daddy?” I almost screamed it before he had even said hello. There was a long silence. Then the sound of a man clearing his throat.

  “Hi, baby.”

  My mom stirred in the chair and moved her hands around as if she were swatting at an imaginary fly. “Who is it?” she slurred, but her eyes were half closed.

  “Just a friend from school.” I whispered into the phone, “I’m going to pick it up in my room. Don’t hang up. Don’t hang up, okay?”

  He made a soft sound.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay, Weetz.”

  I placed the phone down and ran into my room. He was still there.

  “What are you doing?” I saw that my hands were shaking with adrenaline but they didn’t even feel like mine. “Why did you leave without telling me? Where are you? You didn’t call!”

  “I tried,” he said softly. His voice was hoarse. “I’m sorry, Weetzie.”

  It was the sound of him saying my name that broke me into little pieces. Tears burned in my sinuses.

  “Sweetie?” He waited while I took a breath, rough as if my throat were corrugated. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I said. “I miss you. I want to go with you.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. You can’t go with me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in New York. You need to stay and take care of your mother.”

  I picked up the Empire State Building paperweight he had left behind. I had known he was there all along. Where else would he be? I squinted my eyes and saw a tiny Charlie and a tiny Weetzie waltzing inside of the glass ball. She was gazing up at him like he was a shining monument.

  “Take care of her?” I said. “She’s supposed to take care of me. So are you.”

  “I will, honey. I’ll send money. I have to straighten some things out.”

  “Like what?” I wanted to scream at him but I kept my voice soft so my mother wouldn’t hear. “Like how to bring your new girlfriend and her kids with you? Your buddy Winter and his crazy sister? Is that it?”

  “Weetzie? What are you talking about?”

  “Do you think I’m stupid? I’m not a little kid. I know what it looks like.”

  “What things look like is not necessarily what they are.” He sounded so sad. I imagined him resting his head in his hand, stroking his stubbled chin with his palm. He cleared his throat. “Weetzie, I’m not with anyone right now, all right? I had to get away from everything and get my head straight.”

  I heard a click and my mom’s voice. “Hello? Are you still on the phone, Louise? Who is it?”

  And then, with that, Charlie was gone.

  The first thing I wanted to do was run over to number 13 and knock on the door, wake that woman, shake her, and scream at her for ruining my life. But what I really wanted was for her son to answer and hold me in his arms and give me the comfort my father no longer could.

  Instead, I lay in bed and thought about being in the yellow VW Bug with Winter. We would have the stereo on and the sun was shining in and sometimes as we drove through the tangled, green canyons and along the shore pulsing with blue ocean light he would look over, smile, and put his hand on my thigh in its jeans.

  “I’ll take care of you,” he would say.

  That didn’t happen. The touching part or the thing he said. But Winter did take me for a drive in his VW one day.

  It was Saturday and there was a knock on the door. I answered without thinking. I was wearing cutoffs and my pajama shirt and my hair was a nest for rats.

  Winter was standing with his skateboard tipped up by one foot. He shook his hair out of his eyes but it fell back immediately.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I gulped. I could feel my face turning the color of my pink flannel pajama shirt.

  “What’s up?”

  “Uh. Not much. Just waking up.” I looked down at my outfit.

  “Sorry. I was just wondering if you wanted to go for a drive or something. Where we could talk.” He peered behind me, toward the living room, and I knew he was thinking about my mom, wanting to avoid her.

  “Uh. Sure. Yeah. Hang on.”

  “I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said, grabbed his skateboard, and disappeared so fast that it made me wonder if I had imagined the whole thing.

  I washed and dressed quickly, to the rhythm of my pounding heart, praying it was real and that if it were he wouldn’t leave. Shower. Secret. Jeans. T-shirt. Lip gloss. Bye, Mom. Gone.

  He was waiting for me, leaning against the Bug like a boy in a movie. At that moment it was as if nothing sad had ever happened to me. It is so strange the way the chemicals in our brain can work like that—erasing all the sorrow with one rush of joy, even if it isn’t really real.

  We drove east, not talking, just listening to the cassette he played, a woman’s raspy voice singing over raucous chords. She was whispering something about horses again and again. I’d never heard anything like it.

  Finally, I asked who she was.

  “Patti Smith. Isn’t she cool?” He handed me the cassette. It had a picture of a gaunt, androgynous person in a white shirt, a string of black tie hanging loose around her neck. I wondered if I should try wearing one of Charlie’s ties.

  “Your dad likes her,” he said.

  My dad? A little drumbeat of jealousy shook me from inside. Why was my dad talking about music with this boy? He had never even mentioned Patti Smith to me. I scratched at the denim encasing my thigh. How stupid was I for getting excited about going out with Winter? He’d never be interested in me. This was all arranged by my father.

  Winter turned north up Beachwood. The houses spilled down the hillsides with their gardens of avocados, plum and lemon trees that you could live off of if you had to, their high walls and windows overlooking the city beneath the Hollywood sign.

  The sign used to read Hollywoodland my dad had told me. Hollywoodland. Holly Woodlawn, the famous transsexual who was part of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Holly Golightly, Truman Capote’s character from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, played by Audrey Hepburn in the movie, standing in the rain kissing George Peppard and squishing Cat between their wet trench coats. Holly and Ivy, plants and names of two of my dolls who had burned in the cottage fire. Hollyberries for which the land w
as named. I let the words run through my head so I wouldn’t have to think about what was happening. Why was Winter taking me out with him on a Saturday? If this beautiful boy wasn’t interested in me, what did he plan to do? In a beat, the music sounded ominous, even sinister. I imagined the headline: Teen Girl’s Body Found at Base of Hollywood Sign: Skateboard Killer At Large. I thought about Peggy Entwistle, the blonde actress who had jumped to her death from the sign in 1932. She had died of multiple fractures to her pelvis. I wondered how long it took her to die and if the coyotes got to her. The day she’d died she had received a letter informing her that she had gotten the lead part in a play, playing a woman who kills herself in the first act. I wondered if the news would have made her reconsider.

  We wound higher and stopped where the road ended at a fire road gate. Winter got out. I followed him like a puppet with a wooden stick for a spine and strings attached to my arms and legs. I realized that I didn’t care that much what happened to me. I suddenly just felt really tired.

  He sat on the hillside under the sign and I sat, too. The grasses were parched, yellow, and scratchy around us and the city spread out below under that blue-gray layer of haze. Winter didn’t look like a murderer. He didn’t even have his skateboard to hit me over the head with. We stared out at the city. My dad always said that the best parts of L.A. were the high places, like the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Observatory and Mulholland Drive, where you could look down at it and pretend the city was just a pretty expanse of lights and not a cultural wasteland full of broken dreams.

  “Did you hear from him?” Winter asked as if he had read my mind again. It wasn’t hard to figure out what I was thinking about, but still. I wondered if Winter had brought me all the way there just to ask me that.

  I nodded. That was all I was going to give him.

  “That’s good. Right?” He looked over at me.

  “Why are you doing this?” I turned on him. The woman’s voice was still in my head. Horses horses horses.

  “Doing what?”

  “Why do you care about what happens with me and my dad?”

  He was quiet for a little while. Then he said, “I’m trying to help.”