I’m watching her and laughing. “Don’t be embarrassed,” I say. “My mom totally loves this song too. Like, totally.”
“Shut up,” she says, and I check the music player again.
“Wow,” I say, shaking my head in mock mourning. “Over three hundred plays. That’s like two hundred fifty more than the next highest.”
“I swear,” she says. “I am going to punch your face.”
So I crank up the volume.
“Oh my gosh!” she says. “Stop!”
And then we both laugh, because she said “Stop!” at the exact time Tennille did. And I wasn’t kidding. My mom really does love this song, and has probably played it three hundred times on her music player too, so I know every word, and I’m feeling a little odd—maybe a little drunk on the scent of cucumbers and strawberries, and the physical memory of her thigh against mine, and the mental image of Svetlana with her head back and chest out, with waves of the Björk Ocean crashing over her.
So I finish from there. I pick it up at her “Stop!” and I sing, “’Cause I really love you!” and on and on. And it works, because she uncovers her face, and now she’s smiling, and she pushes herself into sitting position, and I reach for her and she takes my hand. Now she’s singing too, and we’re holding hands face-to-face, both hands up and our fingers laced together, full-on disco.
When “Stop!” comes around again, we’re laughing and dancing and singing, and Svetlana’s braid is bouncing, and by the time “Da da da da” comes around I can hardly breathe and my face hurts from smiling. Svetlana is flushed, and I’m warm all over, and then she pulls me back onto the bed as the next song starts. It’s Björk again, but I can hardly hear it, because I’m lying on top of her, and her arms are around me, and my hands are on her face, though I don’t remember putting them there, but I don’t pull them away. She’s looking up at me, her lips just a little bit open. She says hey.
“Hi,” I say. “You’re the most beautiful girl in the world.”
She rolls her eyes, but she smiles too, and if her face weren’t already flushed from the Captain and Tennille, I think she would’ve blushed, too. But she doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t kick me out of her house and prowl a parking lot puffing madly at a cigarette. Instead her hands on my back are moving slowly up and down. I don’t want to take my hands off her face. They’re like a plain pine frame on a perfect Renaissance painting. So still holding her, still with her amazing being in my hands, I let my head move closer, just a little, and she raises her head, just a little, and my breaths are short and coming from somewhere other than my lungs. And my lips are already tingling, and hers have the slightest hint of a smile, and I just hope it’s happiness and not laughter.
“What are you doing?”
Svetlana’s eyes go wide. For an instant I think it was her voice, but her lips—her lips that are shining with strawberry-scented (and I wonder now if flavored, and will I ever know?) lip gloss—didn’t move, except for the bottom one to tuck in and under her front teeth an instant later. So I look to the left, and there, standing just inside the doorway from the stairs, is a tiny Svetlana.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hello,” she says.
“You should probably get off me now,” says Svetlana, so I do, and it’s as awkward and difficult as you’d imagine. I push off the mattress, because I can’t push off Svetlana’s body, because I would crush her, probably, and would molest her in the process. But the bed, being supersoft as we already covered, has a tremendous amount of give, and so for an instant my body presses more firmly against her, and my cheek grazes hers, and she turns her face to the side, and my lips brush her ear. She gasps, and by now I’ve gotten some leverage and am able to get onto all fours and off the bed.
“Hen,” says Svetlana as she gets up onto her elbows and then palms on stiff arms, “when did you get home?”
“One minute ago,” says the girl, who I guess is a chicken? “Mom sent me up to tell you to turn down the music.”
“Of course she did,” says Svetlana. She looks at me. “This is my sister, Henrietta.”
“Hi,” I say, and the little girl—I swear, a spitting image of Svetlana, only much tinier—says, “You said that already.” She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t even blink. I’m beginning to wonder if she’s actually some kind of bionic clone of Svetlana, missing her emotional chip.
Svetlana, meanwhile, has gotten up and is leaning over her laptop. Björk’s shrieking is suddenly much quieter. It sounds even sillier at lower volumes, oddly enough. “There,” says Svetlana, standing upright again and next to me. “It’s turned down.”
“Don’t get mad at me,” says Henrietta. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Get,” says Svetlana. “Out.”
The little Allegheny shrugs and departs.
“She’s … ,” I start.
Svetlana puts up her hands at me and shakes her head.
“I was going to say ‘creepy,’” I say. “Maybe ‘stoic.’”
Svetlana laughs and drops her head. She covers her eyes with one hand. “I’m sorry,” she says. “She’s totally telling on me right now, by the way.”
“Oh.” I grab my coat and start pulling it on. “I should go, I guess.”
She nods as I turn for the door. “Look, sorry I got you in trouble,” I say, and she grabs my wrist from behind me and half turns me and I half turn around myself. She rushes me, grabs my face—now the frame is alabaster and the art is rough and primitive—and is up on her toes. My arms move of their own volition and are around her, pulling her against me. Her mouth is on mine, her lips still parted, just a little, and I’m at once afraid and excited and thinking about where my hands should be and where I want hers to be, and before I can process any of this it’s over, and I’m out of breath and my mouth is open and her lips are shining and red, like ripe fruit, and she’s grinning at my stupid face.
“Wow,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” she says. “Bye.” And she nearly shoves me down the steps, into the cold and sterile air of her family and the rest of her house. Though I couldn’t before, I now see just why she hates it. It is too big, and it is too clean and too calm and too full of itself. I make a mental note to ask her about that, if that’s what she hates, and then run into Mr. Allegheny at the bottom of the steps.
“Hello,” he says, taken aback. His wife zips past me, barely taking the time to shoot me a disapproving and loathing glance. I try to smile at her and nod at Svetlana’s dad, sort of at the same time. With the remnants of that kiss still on my lips and probably the rest of my face as well, it’s quite a stunt to try to manipulate my expression in such a way. It doesn’t work. He adds, “Nice shirt,” because my coat is still open—Svetlana attacked before I got a chance to zip it up—and Eddie (the Iron Maiden skeletal mascot) is waving the British flag in his face, the undead trooper.
“Oh, thanks,” I say. Her dad, then, is not mad—or he’s very crafty. I’m trying not to strain to listen what Mom and Svetlana are discussing two flights up. It’s getting difficult as their voices get louder. “You like Maiden?”
He shrugs and puts aside the short stack of mail he’d been flipping through. “I was never a big fan,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a cool shirt from the era of music when music was at its best.”
Don’t feed the troll. Look, I love 1970s metal as much as the next guy, and these guys clearly laid the groundwork for the whole thrash scene, but to suggest that Maiden was doing anything that remotely compares to what’s been done in the last five years? It’s ridiculous. But I wasn’t about to argue with Svetlana’s dad on the subject.
Svetlana’s voice fires down the steps like two cannonballs: “Nothing! Happened!”
“Well, that’s not what your sister said,” her mom shoots back.
“Frogging lace, Mom!”
“Lana!”
This is awkward. Mr. Allegheny’s face falls and bounces back, and he says, “Hey,” in a very slow drawl
, like it is the 1970s, to distract me, I guess, from the goings-on two stories up. Now I can smell wine on his breath. “You’ll like this. Come here.” He gives me a pat on the upper arm, just below my shoulder, and heads out of the entryway into the next room, through a set of double doors that stand open. Inside, it’s a living room, but it’s a living room bigger not only than our living room, but probably bigger than our entire house. I wish I were exaggerating. The rug that covers the center of the wood floor is big enough to carpet our first story. The couches that sit face-to-face on either side of the rug and the antique-looking coffee table on its middle are rich brown leather. There are two big windows in the far wall, and along the wall to our right is a deep bookcase full of hundreds—maybe thousands—of books. I don’t think my parents have read a book between them in the last fifteen years.
“I guess that explains Svetlana’s love of English class,” I say, nodding at the shelves.
He glances and chuckles. “Maybe,” he says. “I sure haven’t read any of them.” He walks toward the bookshelves, though, and squats. The bottom shelf, it turns out, is full not of books, but of vinyl records. He flips through them for a few long seconds, and then says, “Ah! Here it is.” And he pulls one out and hands it to me. “How about that?”
It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t mean the vinylness of it. I’m a big fan of vinyl art. It’s big and worn on the edges and I have, as I explained, raided my dad’s vinyl collection on more than one occasion. But this vinyl art in particular: it’s got a beach, and in the foreground there’s a woman in a red dress standing on an iceberg out in the water. She’s wearing a fox mask. I squint at the band’s name in its weird font.
“Genesis!” says Mr. Allegheny. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Genesis.”
I shrug. “Sure,” I say, and I have, but I’m not sure I’d know them if I heard them or anything.
“This album is a classic,” he says, taking the jacket back from me. “It’s got their masterpiece, in my opinion. ‘Supper’s Ready.’”
“That’s what it’s called?”
He nods as he slips out the vinyl and carefully drops it onto the player. “It’s the last track, and it’s, like, twenty minutes long,” he says, gingerly picking up the needle and even more gingerly putting it down. He finds the sweet spot on the second try, after a click and hiss, a blast of music for a split second, and another click. The track starts with a simple metal-ballady acoustic riff. It’s not bad. The lyrics are kind of simple, the music is dark and ominous enough.
“This goes on for twenty minutes?” I ask.
“No, no,” he says. “It’s not like that. It’s like, you know, a symphony. It has all these different sections and movements.”
Mr. Allegheny drops into one of the leather couches and slouches with one elbow on the big armrest. He just sits there grinning, kind of waving his hands around, like Svetlana had done for Berlioz, but mellower and with his eyes closed. He hasn’t invited me to sit, though, and I don’t want to sit here for the next twenty minutes anyway, listening to seventies prog.
I clear my throat and shuffle my feet. His attitude doesn’t seem to be affected. “It could use a guitar solo,” I try.
“Mmhm,” he says without opening his eyes. “Ten-minute mark. Steve Hackett tears it up.”
I nod, faking enthusiasm, but with his eyes closed anyway, I don’t know why I bother. “Well,” I say, “I guess I’ll head out now.”
He sits up and leans forward and gives me a little fingers-splayed wave, so I wave back and turn for the front door.
“Hey, by the way,” he says, hurrying toward me. “Don’t worry about that.” He rolls his eyes toward the ceiling, like I shouldn’t worry about the fight between Svetlana and her mom, which is still about me, as far as I can tell. (“I don’t even know who that boy was!” “So? You know who Fry is, and he’s a moronic jerk!” “Lana!”)
“Yeah?” I say. “It doesn’t sound good.”
Her dad shrugs and offers a lazy smile. “You know how daughters and mothers are when they get to be this age,” he says, but I don’t. How the hell would I? “Something like fathers and sons, I’d bet.”
“Ah.” Yes, I know what that’s like, for sure.
He gives my not-quite-shoulder another firm double pat. “Anyway, good to meet you,” he says. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Um, Lesh,” I say.
His eyes go wide. “Like Phil?” he says. Now he’s a five-year-old boy who just heard Barney would be at his birthday party, so he’s an overgrown child, into drinking and the music he loved at sixteen—just like my dad. I guess millionaire corporate-heads aren’t playing role model either.
“My mom was a pretty serious Deadhead back in the day. She named me after him.”
“Wow,” he says, nodding in his groovy chin-thrust way. “Not really a chip off the old block then, are you?”
“My dad’s into metal,” I say. “I mean, not much of the new stuff. But he saw Maiden five times in the eighties.”
Footsteps tumble down the stairs. They’re Svetlana’s; I know instinctively. When she hits the bottom—and nearly collides with me and her father—I smile before I even look up.
She looks at me, quizzical, and then at her dad, and then back at me, her eyes going wide. “Here,” she says in a feminine bark, and she’s holding out a book.
“Um,” I say, taking it.
“It’s why you came over, right?” she says, her eyes wide.
“Oh, right,” I say, finally looking at the cover: poetry and other writings by Longfellow. “Thanks.”
She’d made up a story to appease her mother, apparently. “To borrow a book,” she’d probably said. “For school,” she might have added.
“I’ll see you in school,” she says. “Um, on Monday.”
“Right,” I say. I glance at her dad. “Bye.” He smiles at me, and I give Svetlana a quick look, and the wink I get in response is enough that I nearly trip as I cross the threshold and head out into the world, thinking about that wink and her crooked smile when she shot it at me. Then I’m thinking about the kiss, and her body under me on her bed beneath the canopy.
The moon is high and small. I fumble with my phone, find my playlist, and start it, then turn it right off. It’s not the right feeling now. On the way down here, it got me fired up. Now, with strawberry lip gloss on my tongue and “Supper’s Ready” in my head, it’s completely wrong, so I pull down my headphones and let them hang around my neck, and instead listen to the traffic and music and Saturday-night conversation rolling toward me from Grand Avenue.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
…………………………………………………………
CHAPTER 46
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
“Lana!”
We’ve been over this. There is an activity wheel at the bottom of the steps. It is in plain sight. My father is as capable of referring to this activity wheel as anyone else in the house. I can say with the utmost certainty that upon coming in from my Sunday morning shift at the juice shop, I scrubbed the stench of old yogurt and bananas off my body and hair, and then set the activity wheel to “Naptime! .” There should be no confusion. So why, as I am drifting toward sleep on a gentle lioness with the wings of an eagle and a melodic voice as deep and rich as gold made of chocolate, can I also hear my father’s most irritating, pseudo-joyful bellowing of my name?
“Svetlana!”
And again, I can hear, and it’s followed quickly by Tiny Henrietta Thunderfeet, my darling sister.
“Lana.”
“Go away,” I say, and I still haven’t moved, because if I do, I’m sure I will fall off this golden-voiced lion and never find her again.
“Can’t,” she says. “We’re leaving in two minutes. Mom says she told you, like, five times, including when you got home from work.”
“We’r
e not going anywhere,” I say into my pillow. The lion is losing patience with me now. “I don’t know where you’re going, but I’m staying right here. Tired.”
“Yes, you do,” Henny says. “Play-offs. Remember?”
The lion is gone. She vanished in a puff of Fry’s hair and the fluttering belch of his tiniest trumpet. “I forgot.”
“We know,” she says. I peek out from under my duvet to see her kneeling in the middle of my sun rug.
“I don’t want to go.”
“We know.” She lowers her head, then her body, until she is curled over on herself like a potato bug. “Mom and Dad will be mad.”
I swing my legs off and scan the room for something to put on.
“I have other plans, though,” I say, though it’s not one hundred percent true. I plan to have plans, though. I plan to text Lesh and pick him up and drive him out to Elm Creek Park. He doesn’t know it yet, though, because I just decided it this very minute.
Henny jumps to her feet, pulls open my jeans drawer, and tosses a pair at me. “Here,” she says. It’s the brightest she gets. Maybe the sun energy from the middle of my rug seeped up through her knees and butt into her heart.
“Thanks,” I say, and when I’m dressed, I let her lead me downstairs. She still thinks I’m going with them, and I feel kind of bad about it, but she’ll forgive me and I cannot bear the Dannons, maybe not ever again.
Henny takes the main steps in two big jumps: from the top to the landing, and from the landing to the entryway. I used to do that. I can’t remember when I stopped. Today, though, I get as far as the landing and stand there and face my parents. They’ve both got their coats on already—official Thunder merchandise, I’d point out—and a cooler of various meat and beer is strategically placed by the door. There will be much parking-lot grilling and drinking this afternoon before the game officially begins at seven.
“All right, we’re all here,” says Dad. He claps three times as he tells me to put on my coat.
“I’m not going,” I say, and I do my best to keep my voice even, mature, and most of all not belligerent. It’s wasted effort, though, because of course it doesn’t end there. It doesn’t end with, “Oh, all right. We’re disappointed, but you’re almost eighteen, and if you want to stay home instead of going to a soccer game, we understand. Have a nice evening!”
Guy in Real Life Page 23
