Levitating Las Vegas

by Jennifer Echols

  “I wish.” How delicious it would be to get this upset about a hot guy who cared about me instead of any of the hot guys I’d hung with that year, who would throw me to the piranhas rather than get their feet wet.

  “I don’t know about that,” Ms. Lottie said, feathering mascara through my lashes to replace the thick mascara I’d just taken off. “Be careful what you wish for.”

  After all the drama of Elvis Tuesday, Willie Nelson Wednesday was laid-back. Ms. Lottie costumed me in a tight tank top and a denim miniskirt with a frayed hem. I passed for a member of Willie’s bedraggled 1970s entourage, I guessed. Either that or a girl from the boonies dressed in her finest for a tourist trip to Nashville.

  Our quartet moseyed down the loading ramp to pile into a van, which drove us to the state capitol building. After the governor signed a tax bill into law on the marble steps, we entertained the lawmakers and lobbyists sipping punch with “Always on My Mind,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” each song in the key of D. I’d never noticed that everything was in the same key.

  Yeah, maybe Willie Wednesday was a little too laid-back. I should have loved this field trip because it got us away from the mall, outside in the sunshine. The huge capitol building was a fake Greek temple set on a grassy hill at the edge of downtown, with skyscrapers in front of us, and hints of country music wafting to us on the breeze from the tourist district on Broadway. But whenever I got close to Willie to confer about the next few tunes, he reeked of pot. So did the guitarist and the mandolin player in similar hippie garb. I thought about asking them for a toke, joking that it went with the outfit. But if I could smell it on them, my granddad would be able to smell it on me when I returned to his house that night. Which meant no toking up behind the bushes on the grounds of the state capitol.

  On Thursday, because God did not love me anymore, I played in a band with Hank Williams at a ribbon cutting for the city’s new sewage treatment plant. At least it didn’t smell yet. And to their credit, unlike Willie’s band, these guys hadn’t imbibed Hank’s poison of choice. The bass guitarist was a talented musician who looked—and smelled—sober. Hank played guitar reasonably well and sounded fine when he sang in his normal range, but the yodeling. Oh, the yodeling. For a musician like me burdened with perfect pitch, being deposited in a band with a pitchy Hank Williams singing “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” was torture, pure and simple. I’d thought I needed to concentrate to play in D-sharp when Elvis was playing in D, but that was nothing compared with the Zen-like place I retreated to in my mind and the deep, measured breaths I took to keep the look of distaste off my face while Hank yodeled.

  Friday I thought I was prepared for anything, but Ms. Lottie threw me a curveball and announced I was playing at the tenth anniversary of a steak house out near the airport with Dolly Parton. Dolly was the version of Ms. Parton from her most popular, glitzy 1970s era. That meant cleavage, and not just for Dolly. For all four of us in her band.

  I’d dressed up in costume from age seven to age seventeen, looking more like a pageant toddler than a bluegrass musician. Julie and I had worn matching “country” outfits that nobody out in the country could ever pick beans or herd cows in: custom-made dresses with knee-length skirts standing almost straight out like we were square dancers. When enough sequins sparkled around our necks and our blond curls were sprayed stiff underneath our cowgirl hats, people noticed only how alike we looked, not how different we were. They feigned astonishment that we weren’t twins even though I was two years older. I found this fun at seven, nauseating at seventeen.

  But no country costume could have prepared me for dressing up like Dolly Parton’s right-hand girl a few weeks after I’d turned eighteen. I’d been wearing sexy clothes in the past year—provocative clothes, my mom had said with distaste—but to me that had meant choosing a body-hugging minidress for the homecoming dance, or slicing a deeper V in my threadbare White Stripes T-shirt. I’d never shown this much boob in public.

  Ms. Lottie acted like it was nothing. Costumes were part of showbiz, after all, even the steak house version of showbiz. She pinned my bouffant brunette wig in place—only Dolly got to wear a platinum wig. Ms. Lottie had already taken in my spangled maxidress a few inches before I arrived. All she had to do was pull it, shift it, give up, and make me add some padding to my bra, then pull and shift the gown again and shove my precocious fake cleavage into place. She stood back with her hands on her hips to survey her work, then reached out to coax one of my baby boobs a little higher. “Sorry, hon. That’s the best I can do with what you’ve got. Just stay behind the others.” She gave me an encouraging pat on my sequined ass as I staggered on high heels into the bombed-out Borders to find Dolly.

  Ms. Parton was a tolerable musician. So were the other two ladies on guitar and mandolin. Best of all, Ms. Parton had the Dolly act down, with lots of self-deprecating humor about breasts and plastic surgery. She made some jokes so off-color that even I thought they might be inappropriate for the families from the sticks enjoying a long lunch before they visited Junior at the state prison. I almost enjoyed the afternoon.

  But I couldn’t shake the idea that my dress of the day had been designed as some sick parody of my life, a combination of the costume I used to wear with Julie and the costume I’d donned for my wild senior year of high school. I hadn’t wanted to expose my boobs to this crowd going back for seconds and thirds at the chocolate fountain, but that’s what I’d acted like I’d wanted all year. I’d acted like my goal was to get drunk with Hank Williams, or get stoned with Willie Nelson, or have an older man like Elvis imply he wanted to screw me. This job was a catalog of everything my parents had screamed at me about over the past year. Is that what you want? Because that’s what you’re acting like! It was a mythical series of tasks I had to perform to prove myself before I claimed my prize—except there was no prize. Unlike Hercules, I was not worthy.

  And on Saturday, I was assigned to wander the mall again, this time in a band with Johnny Cash.

  “Plus his son,” Ms. Lottie said. “Such a cutie-pie.”

  I’d noticed Mr. Cash sitting on the couch on my way in. I hadn’t noticed his son. Maybe at the time he’d been bent over, fishing something from his instrument case. Maybe he wasn’t much to look at, or he was way older than me, so my brain hadn’t even registered him, and Ms. Lottie was putting me on.

  “You will liiiiiiiiiike him,” she insisted, looking at me pointedly in the mirror and raising one carefully penciled eyebrow above her reading glasses. “I hear he’s a heartbreaker, though, so watch out.”

  I scowled at my reflection. Like the first day, she was making me up in the style of the 1950s, all traces erased of the blond, angelic version of me from a year ago, and the current evil version, too. I needed my usual heavy mascara and black hair and black T-shirt to make this heartbreaker take me seriously when I scowled at him and told him where to go. He sounded like a replay of Elvis.

  “This is ridiculous,” I told Ms. Lottie. “Johnny Cash’s wife didn’t even play fiddle. She played everything but. What kind of authentic Nashville experience is this?”

  “You don’t have to be June Carter Cash. You could be a session musician from Studio B. Trust me, you want to be with the Cashes today.” Ms. Lottie nodded toward the lounge area, where Johnny Cash and his heartbreaker son were tuning their guitars. “A couple of mornings ago, weren’t you wishing for boy trouble? You just found it.”

  Keep reading for an excerpt from another romantic drama by Jennifer Echols

  SUCH A RUSH

  available now from MTV Books!

  1

  SEPTEMBER

  In each South Carolina town where I’d lived—and I’d lived in a lot of them—the trailer park was next to the airport. After one more move when I was fourteen, I made a decision. If I was doomed to live in a trailer park my whole life, I could complain about the smell of jet fuel like my mom, I could drink myself to de
ath over the noise like everybody else who lived here, or I could learn to fly.

  Easier said than done. My first step was to cross the trailer park, duck through the fence around the airport, and ask for a job. For once I lucked out. The town of Heaven Beach was hiring someone to do office work and pump aviation gas, a hard combination to find. Men who were willing to work on the tarmac couldn’t type. Women who could type refused to get avgas on their hands. A hungry-looking fourteen-year-old girl would do fine.

  I answered the phone, put chocks under the wheels of visiting airplanes, topped off the tanks for small corporate jets—anything that needed doing and required no skill. In other words, I ran the airport. There wasn’t more to a small-town airport than this. No round-the-clock staff. No tower. No air traffic controller—what a joke. Nothing to keep planes from crashing into each other but the pilots themselves.

  My reception counter faced the glass-walled lobby with a view of the runway. Lots of days I sat on the office porch instead, taking the airport cell phone with me in case someone actually called, and watched the planes take off and land. Behind the office were small hangars for private pilots. In front of the office, some pilots parked their planes out in the open, since nothing but a hurricane or a tornado would hurt them when they were tied down. To my left, between me and the trailer park, stretched the large corporate hangars. To my right were the flagpole and the windsock, the gas pumps, and more of the corrugated metal hangars. The closest hangar was covered in red and white lettering, peeling and faded from years of storms blowing in from the ocean:

  HALL AVIATION

  BANNER TOWING: ADVERTISE YOUR BUSINESS TO BEACHGOERS!

  AIRPLANE RIDES WITH BEAUTIFUL OCEAN VIEWS

  ASH SCATTERING OVER THE ATLANTIC

  FLIGHT SCHOOL

  In August I had watched the tiny Hall Aviation planes skim low over the grass beside the runway and snag banners that unfurled behind them in the air, many times longer than the planes themselves. By listening to the men who drank coffee and shot the shit with Mr. Hall on the office porch, I’d gathered that Mr. Hall’s oldest son was one of the banner-towing pilots. Mr. Hall’s twin sons my age were there to help too some Saturdays, piecing together the movable letters to make the banners. Alec was smiling and blond and looked like the nice, wholesome guy Mr. Hall seemed to think he was, whereas Grayson was always in trouble. He was slightly taller, with his hair covered by a straw cowboy hat and his eyes hidden behind mirrored aviator shades. I couldn’t tell whether he was gazing at me across the tarmac when I sat on the porch by myself to smoke a cigarette, but I imagined he was. My whole body suddenly felt sunburned even though I was in the shade.

  They were gone now—the twins an hour and a half up the road to Wilmington, where they lived with their mom, and the oldest son back to college. The tourists had left the beach. The banner-towing business had shut down for the season. It was the perfect time to approach Mr. Hall about a lesson. Hall Aviation brochures were stuffed into plastic holders throughout the office for visitors to take. I knew the high price for a lesson without having to mortify myself by asking Mr. Hall in person.

  But saving the money, and screwing up the courage to go with it, had taken me a whole month. I’d finally marched over to Hall Aviation and banged on the small door in the side of the hangar with the oo of SCHOOL painted across it. When Mr. Hall hollered from inside, I’d wandered among the airplanes and tools to a tiny office carved out of the corner. I’d sat in the chair in front of his desk and asked him to take me up. He’d given me the worst possible answer by handing me a permission form for my mother to sign.

  She hadn’t been home when I’d walked back from the airport that night. I had lain awake in bed, trying to figure out the right way to present the form to her. She still hadn’t come home when I’d left for school that morning. All school day, I’d worried about what I would say to her. I could point out that flying was a possible career someday. She talked like that sometimes, told me I would make something of myself. I was afraid her support would disappear when she found out I’d been saving money for an extravagant lesson instead of giving it to her.

  The scraggly coastal forest out the school bus window still seemed strange now that I’d spent a month in Heaven Beach. As the bus approached the trailer park, I hoped against hope my mom would be home and I could get this over with. Even if she said no, at least my torture would end.

  I slid one hand down to touch the folded permission form through the pocket of my jeans. My cash for the flying lesson was wadded beneath that. Losing the money at school would have screwed me, but I’d been afraid to leave the money or the form in my room, where my mom might find them if she got desperate for funds, like she did sometimes, and started searching.

  As I moved my hand, I felt Mark Simon watching me from across the aisle. He knew about my money somehow. He could tell that’s what I had in my pocket from the way I fingered it, and he would take it from me. That was always my first thought. I’d had a lot of things stolen from me on a lot of school buses.

  But I forced myself to take a deep breath and relax, letting go of my gut reaction. Mark wasn’t that poor. He was riding this bus because he worked for his uncle at the airport after school, not because he lived in the trailer park. And as I glanced over at him, his look seemed less like larceny and more like lechery. He thought he’d caught me touching myself.

  I was getting this kind of attention lately, and it was still new. Back inland near the Air Force base, the last place my mom and I had lived, I’d flown under the radar. I wore whatever clothes she found for me. I’d always hated my curly hair, so dark brown it might as well have been black except in the brightest sunlight. It tended to mat. I had broken a comb in it before. Then one glorious day last summer, I’d seen a makeover show on TV that said curly girls needed to make peace with their hair, get a good cut, use some product, and let it dry naturally. I did what I could with a cheap salon on my side of town and discount store product. The result was much better, and I’d made myself over completely in the weeks before we’d moved.

  At my new school, my makeover had the desired effect. Nobody felt sorry for me anymore because my mom wasn’t taking care of me and I didn’t know how to take care of myself. I took care of myself and I looked it. The downside was that I’d gotten stares like these from boys like Mark, which prompted girls to label me a slut and stay away from me. But I knew what I was. I held my head high. Exchanging sympathy for pride was a fair trade-off.

  Until I actually found myself entangled in a boy’s come-on, and then I wasn’t so sure. Supporting himself against the back of the seat as the bus rounded a bend, Mark crossed the aisle and bumped his hip against mine, making me scoot over to give him room to sit down. He glanced at my hand on my pocket and asked, “Can I help you with that?”

  If he’d asked me a few months ago, I might have said yes. He didn’t have that solid, handsome look of older boys at school who’d gained muscle to go with their height. But for a gawky fifteen-year-old, he was good looking, with sleepy, stoned eyes that moved over me without embarrassment, and dark hair that separated into clumps like he wasn’t showering every day because he stayed out late drinking and nearly missed the bus in the morning. He was the type of guy I always found myself with, the adrenaline junkie who talked me into doing things for a rush that I wouldn’t have done on my own.

  He reminded me of my boyfriend from the trailer park near the Air Force base, who apparently hadn’t minded that my hair was matted as long as he got in my pants. He’d convinced me to do it with him in the woods at the edge of the airstrip, with airplanes taking off low over us, exactly where they would crash if something went wrong. Through the sex and the rush and the sight of the streamlined underbellies of the planes, something had happened to me. And I had wanted more of it.

  But when I told him I was moving to Heaven Beach, he took up with my best friend the same day. I was through with boys “helping me with that,” at least for a while. I glared
at Mark as I stood up in the narrow space between the seats. “Move. I have to get off.”

  He grinned. “Like I said, I can help you with that.”

  Now I got angry. A nice boy from a good family, or even a not-so-nice boy like Mr. Hall’s hot and troubled son Grayson, wouldn’t make a comment loaded with innuendo to a nice girl from a good family. If I were stepping down from the bus at the rich end of town instead of the trailer park, I wouldn’t have to watch every word I said to make sure it wasn’t slang for an orgasm. God. I tried to slide past him.

  “Come on, Leah. Why are you stopping here? Why aren’t you staying on the bus with me until the airport?” His words were a challenge, but underneath the bravado, I could hear the hurt. I shouldn’t push him too far and let him know I was avoiding him. For hurting his pride, he would make things worse for me at school if he was able.

  “My mom likes to see me between school and work,” I flat-out lied. No way would I tell him the truth. He would mess things up just to get a rise out of me. The days I’d made the mistake of getting off the bus at the airport with him, he’d followed me into the office and lingered there, asking for brochures, asking for maps, threatening to set the break room on fire with his lighter if I didn’t pay him some attention, until he finally had to mosey over to the crop-duster hangar or get in trouble with his uncle.

  The bus squeaked to a stop on the two-lane highway and opened its door to the gravel road into the trailer park. Ben Reynolds and Aaron Traynor stomped down the hollow stairs. If I didn’t make it to the front in the next few seconds, I’d miss this stop. I’d have to walk through the airport with Mark and backtrack to my trailer. I would die if I found out when I finally made it home that I’d missed my mom.

  I banged into Mark again and said as forcefully as I could without the five people left on the bus turning around to stare, “Move.”