She looked at me again like she wanted to kill me, but more than before. She wanted to spit on me, and tar and feather me, and ride me out on a rail. “You talking about Chastity?”
“God, I hope not.” My cigarette fell out of my fingers onto the bar. I felt very sorry. Sorry was writing itself all over me, but I don’t think Donna saw it. She stepped back slowly. The glass made broken glass noises as she did so.
She leaned back on the counter and looked from me to Jessie. “I’m the one who found that girl’s body. You think it’s a joke, a funny story?”
My alien started screaming.
Jessica watched us, frozen. She eyed me eyeing Donna.
Donna walked over and picked up Chastity’s funeral donation cup like it was a sick baby. She set it between us. “Why’d you move this? Didn’t want to look at it?”
“I had no idea,” came out of my mouth in a croaking whisper. “I didn’t mean to . . .” How the hell was I supposed to know? I was twenty miles away from where it happened. There were only two other people in the bar. What were the fucking chances?
Donna tapped the cup. “I helped raise that girl. She my best friend’s baby. Then she got in with that no-good low-life bum.” She shoved the cup forward. “Feel like making a donation, New York?”
“Wait a minute,” Jessica laid her hands flat on the table. “How do you know she’s even talking about the same person? Let’s calm down. She didn’t know her. She just met this guy who told her—”
“Shhhh,” I hissed at Jessica.
Donna did not like this. “Who told her what?” she demanded, stepping closer. “Where’d she meet this guy? You know where that bum is?”
Everything was like a bad train coming off a bad track right at my head. I started hacking up a storm. I couldn’t breathe suddenly. It sounded like a herd of alien hell-puppies. Without moving from where she stood, Donna grabbed the cayenne pepper next to Jessica’s drink and dumped some in my whiskey. Then she took my cigarette that was burning up her bar and dropped it in my water.
“Drink that,” she told me, referring to the newly cayenned whiskey. “It’ll loosen up your chest.” Was she trying to kill me? “Go ahead. You’re getting a little green around the edges,” she pressed.
What the hell. I picked it up and gulped it down; whiskey and cayenne pepper. It burned everything. I gasped and sputtered. My chest rattled, then settled. My beast did feel freer, but I didn’t know if that was a good thing. I smacked my lips and rubbed my eyes. “Damn!”
“You want some water?” Donna asked. I nodded yes. She nodded yes back. She didn’t get me any water.
“I found her body and those texting messages. I showed them to the cops, ’cause I felt like they were like, her suicide note, you know?” Donna didn’t look like she was going to cry. Her jaw was stiff and square. She was a toughie. My eyes were tearing up, though, bright red, I’m sure, and my throat and mouth burned like hell. I kept swallowing and sputtering. Donna tapped the funeral donation jar. I took out my wallet, produced a twenty and dropped it in. She nodded, turned around, and swiveled back with a glass of water for me. I drank the entire glass in five gulps. “What’d you say your name was, again?” I just shook my head no. She looked to Jessica. “You have any idear where he’s hiding?”
Jessica picked up her purse and took me by the shoulder. Childhood friends can almost always be counted on in a pinch. “I’m sorry. I think we had better get going now.” I felt half alive. Jessica helped me along my way. The old man at the bar was just staring at us trying to figure out what was going on. Donna’s lips quivered, like Not-cousin’s earlier that night. “It ain’t right what happened. They’re gonna find him with or without you,” Donna kept on as we backed out the door. “We just want some answers!” she hollered. The door shut behind us.
I wheezed all the way to the car. “I see what you mean about having a weird night,” Jessica said, propping me against the hood as she unlocked the passenger door. “I’m driving you to where you’re staying. You’re not in good shape.”
My throat felt like an atomic bomb went off in a sandpaper factory. “What are the fucking chances?” I bellowed out. “That was weird. Don’t you think that was weird?”
She nodded and half smiled at how horribly obvious the answer to my question was. I bent over and hacked. Something big moved inside of me. “Yes. That was one of the weirdest nights I’ve ever had. I just want us to get out of here,” she told me, searching for her keys. “That was awful.”
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” I kept on. “What the fuck is happening? It’s like they planted her in there.”
“They?”
I pounded on my chest, then balanced with my hands on my knees, groaning and beginning to convulse. “I don’t know what I mean,” I coughed out. “It just feels like someone is engineering everything.”
“This is a small county, that’s all.”
“No. This is just too much. If I wrote this, no one would believe it.” I let myself go into a coughing fit for a second and regained my breath. “I can’t even believe it. Can you?”
The passenger side door was open. Jessica was standing next to it, staring at me with the most awful look on her face, her keys held tightly in her hands. “You look really bad. You look . . . green.”
“What?” I hung my head over the black tar and coughed again. A little piece of mucus flew out of my mouth, landing on the ground in front of me. Jessica stepped back. Something rattled inside of me. I felt like I was going to explode. The mucus was green and slimy, reflecting the light from the bar sign. My chest heaved. I covered my mouth with my hand and took off running, doubled over, thinking I was going to vomit. That fucking cayenne whiskey bitch did me in.
I made it around to the back of the building. Holding onto the brick wall with one hand, the other on the dumpster, I let myself go with the reverent acquiescence of a drunken vomiter who has no choice but to let the void grab hold of her and show her how to make something out of nothing.
But what was coming out wasn’t coming from my stomach. That thing in my chest, it was shaking itself free. It rumbled and screeched and pushed forward. My mouth wrenched itself open as wide as it could go. I felt a giant ball of slimy gum, slug-like, birthing itself through my facial orifice. It wiggled, elongated, and squeezed. It just kept coming out. I moaned loudly. I pounded the wall and heaved. It finally landed on the ground in front of me with a horrible plop.
I fell back on my ass and stared at it. It did not stare back. It didn’t have eyes. It wiggled up against the wall and it squealed. The thing was green and slimy, like a green miniature version of the Blob. I moaned again. It started having some kind of seizure. Green slime and mucus and I guess my infected snot was flying off of it. As it shook itself free of my infected bronchitis placenta, it became visibly lighter and its glowing grew brighter. It began to become beautiful and it began to ascend.
It was a little wobbly at first, like a baby bird trying out its first feathers, but soon enough, it was going up, above the roof of the bar, my very own green glowing orb floating up there above the trees in that beautiful dark and twinkling country sky. I heard Jessica scream. A few counts later, I heard the sound of her engine revving and the screeching of tires against pavement.
I watched my orb for a good while. It was just hovering there, about forty feet directly above me. Then, over the trees lining the little houses, I saw another green form rising. It was faint at first, but it quickly grew clearer. The green light was a very familiar shape. I squinted. It kept approaching at about the same height as my glowing green orb. I cocked my head. It was that goddamned moldy couch. I heard muffled voices. That goddamned couch was glowing green and flying around above the town. On either side of the couch were two more green glowing orbs. That couch and its two green orbs flew up right next to my green orb and parked itself. The muffled voices revealed their faces, Little-little poked his head over the side of the glowing couch that was hovering above me, his fee
t dangling off the end. “Aw hell,” he shouted. “Lookie there. It’s my sister.”
Not-cousin poked his head over the other side. “Hey there. You got one of those green balls, too!” he hollered, not as a question. “How do we lower this thing?” I heard him ask Little-little.
“Going down,” I heard a voice say. This voice was deep and goofy like a children’s cartoon character.
The couch and the orbs descended. I rose to my feet. Little-little sat on the glowing green couch hovering a few feet above the ground. The three glowing orbs bounced off each other sweetly, as a greeting. Little-little smiled his peachy keen smile at me. He still hadn’t found a shirt he liked, I guess. “Hey, sis. We went into the woods and we found these fucking things. They’re great. I think they were ours already.”
I nodded, understanding.
“You coming?”
I looked around myself. “Where are you going?”
“We’re heading to a non-extradition state,” Not-cousin told me proudly.
“Nah, I’m voting for Mexico,” Little-little came back.
The couch shivered. “All aboard that’s coming aboard,” the couch said.
The green orbs started circling. Not-cousin and Little-little held out their hands. I put my hands in theirs. They pulled me up, sitting me in between them. Little-little looked so happy. “I sure am stoked you’re coming with us, sis. I miss ya, you know?” I put my arm around him. He laid his head on my shoulder, like he always used to do when he was really, really little. The green orbs spun faster around the couch, beginning the ascension once more.
We hit about seventy feet and started flying like condors, the towns streaking past, far below. The clouds were clearing. The stars were coming out, twinkling brighter. There’s nothing like a country sky.
“To your left, notice Central Point, home of the Redhawks. In the nineteen thirties Central Point was a booming mecca for traveling businessmen and tradespeople, as the railroad provided the perfect midpoint for those traveling from Chicago to the southern states. The town to your right is Little Egypt and we will be coming upon Cairo soon, home of the Fighting Pharaohs, and known for being home to the largest manmade lake in the country,” the couch told us in its goofy cartoon voice. That couch had turned out to be a world-class tour guide, after all.
Not-cousin watched the green orbs circling us, with amazement.
“East or west?” Little-little asked.
“I don’t care.”
“We can drop you off in New York first, if you want,” Little-little told me. “Did you hear they got bin Laden? We heard it on the scanner.”
I nodded. “Yep. I heard.”
“Maybe we should go to Ground Zero,” Not-cousin suggested. “There’s a huge fucking party there.”
“In this thing? They’d shoot us down.” I patted Little-little’s head. “Forget about New York. New York doesn’t exist. It doesn’t even have a sky.”
Little-little took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. “I’m glad you said that. Still, I’d like to see it sometime. Big Apple.” He offered me one if his cigarettes.
“Give me the pack,” I said. He gave me the pack. I chucked it over the side and watched it spiral down to the cornfields of Central Point. “I think we’ve had enough.” Little-little nodded and chucked his last smoke over the side, too.
“West it is,” he said.
“West it is,” the couch answered. The three spinning green orbs twisted around, circling west.
ZOMBIE
We always went down there where the dead left us alone. The cemetery was close to both of our houses. We could hop on our bikes and each make it there in ten minutes, tops, and there was no one there to keep us from doing whatever we wanted. Beth only had to travel down a quiet country road for about a mile. From my house, I had to get on the highway, make it past the truck stop and all the semis coming in to weigh or refill or sleep, then take a jog down a hill onto the unmarked back road, past some woods and cornfields, and then, there it was, the old cemetery, which sprawled out from the gated drive, expanding all the way back to the field.
A wooden fence divided the oldest section of the cemetery from the newer burials, although the entire thing wasn’t used much at all anymore. It looked like a puzzle, the way it was divided up. In the old section, tombstones were dated all the way back to the early 1700s, with worn-out granite that looked exhausted from keeping up the memory. Most of the tombstones looked like they wanted to let everyone finally forget and move on. Rainworn, it was difficult to make out the names and the exact dates. You could intuit the information from what was left of the letters: an M, an R, maybe the hint of a Y was obviously Mary, and she died either in 1762 or 1785, or something close to that.
We preferred the cemetery to the park or the school sports grounds. There were no other kids at the cemetery to bug us. At the park, kids were always poking at me, trying to pick a fight with me, saying I was ugly and saying I looked like a dude, or chasing Beth around; the girls calling her a slut and boys trying to get her to kiss them, and we could never get anything fun done at the park. That’s why we ended up playing in the cemetery after school, which didn’t really help either of us where popularity was concerned. On top of everything else, we soon became known as the weird girls who hung out in the cemetery all the time.
Because of our weirdnesses compounded on top of weirdnesses, all we really had was each other, until she came into our lives. Then we had each other and we had her, but it felt like we had so much more than that.
I never knew a person could live like that; well, not really live, but survive like that. It made me feel like anything was possible. There’s something very particular about having a secret that big when you’re twelve years old. You get to live in two different worlds, and whatever is happening in the normal world can’t really touch you, because you have this other world you can go into, where everything is so much more amazing and unbelievable. It’s easy to keep worlds separate at that age, because you’re straddling childhood and adulthood. You’re already living on the edge of reality and fantasy, and just barely growing out of pretending all the time.
But this secret world wasn’t pretend; it was something else that, like a pretend world, would shatter as soon as it was integrated into normal life. At first, like a fantasy, it supplemented, but soon, because it was real, it supplanted our boring reality. The secret world became the most real, and the world we lived in every day with everyone else became something we had to get through to get back to her.
It was nearing the end of September. We’d been back in school long enough to have almost forgotten the freedom of summer. It must have been a weekend, because I was spending the night at Beth’s house, which meant we got to stay out till after dusk.
We went to the cemetery right after school. I put some music on my boom box. I liked to be retro, and listened to actual CDs of Godsmack, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Nine Inch Nails, and other good music that only happened in generations before me, and we played catch, and knocked a softball around with our bats, and had a picnic. We messed around all day. Then night fell, and we decided to play flashlight tag. This might not sound that entertaining with only two people, but in a cemetery at night, it was a lot of fun. Whoever was “it” would close her eyes for a count of twenty, and the other person would run and hide behind one of the many tombstones or trees in the sprawling graveyard. The one hiding would shriek ghostly noises, which, if done right, would echo and throw the seeker onto the wrong track. When Beth was tagged, she would jump out squealing, and hold her hands up like claws and rush at me. We liked to scare ourselves silly.
It was the second round of flashlight tag. We’d been screeching up a storm of fake horror since the sun set. Beth was “it.” I ran far away from her and crouched behind a headstone at the edge of the cemetery grounds near the field. It was very dark, save for the light of the moon, and a streetlamp a nearby farmer had mounted in his yard. The light shone through the
wooded area that lined the south side of the cemetery, the blue light splitting through the leaves like spectral stars. Beth called out, “I’m coming for you,” her flashlight beam bouncing in the distance, pointing nowhere near where I was hiding. I kept silent, peeking over the top of a tombstone. Beth called out again, “I’m coming for you, creep!” I screeched. It echoed. She stopped and circled her light around the graveyard, and then, for some inexplicable reason, she started running in the opposite direction of where I was hiding. She ran away from me, shouting, “I see you! I see you!” I stood to get a better look, wondering how she could be so mistaken. She pointed her light in the very wrong direction in which she was also running, and, to my astonishment, it caught a figure of what seemed to be a person. This person halted momentarily, then quickly dashed through an open area, and hid behind a tree near the Thompson Mausoleum. “Hey, I got you. I tagged you. Come out! You’re it now,” Beth demanded. A chill shot through me. We weren’t alone.
I stood up, waving my arms frantically, “Beth! Beth, I’m over here,” I shouted from far behind her. Beth stopped, frozen in place, turned and shined her light on me, then she shined it back to where the figure she’d tagged was crouching behind a tree. Beth screamed, then took off in a dead run back to where I was standing.
“There’s someone else here! There’s someone else here, Gillian,” she panted when she got to me. I threw my arm around her shoulder, and pulled my flashlight out of my back pocket. We both pointed our lights toward where Beth had been standing. “Who’s there? We’ve got a gun,” I shouted, deepening my voice, trying to sound tough, and older. Beth raised her eyebrows at me.
“Why’d you say that?” she asked.
“I don’t want them to think they can fuck with us,” I told her.
“Maybe it was an animal,” she said, continuing to scan the cemetery with her flashlight. Right then, something moved near her beam. She caught it with her light and followed it. It was definitely a person, dashing toward the mausoleum, and then, miraculously, the person opened the mausoleum door and disappeared inside. We both turned our flashlights off and crouched down. “What do we do?” Beth whispered.
Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country Page 4
