I have come out to Charles, and I tried to tell a boyfriend once, right after college, because I wanted him to spray me and then let me spray him. I knew it would get me hot. I liked him too much, I learned. He thought that living in Glitter was the same as Glitter Boobs, those chicks that go topless to festivals and glue on nipple tassels and then use body spray. That’s just half-naked: we’re a secret, underneath. Now I don’t say his name anymore, that would be bad juju.
These days, if I’m out drinking and I’m in Glitter, I won’t have sex with anyone. In the chat room, some people say that living in Glitter is like taking the pledge, but that’s not how I roll. If I’m going to have sex with someone, I only do my nails in Glitter, and some eye shadow, and maybe on my neck and the top of my boobs. So it only looks like makeup. That way, no one knows about me, except for other people who live in Glitter.
But there’s another big push inside the movement, which began in the chat room about a year ago, to come out, and to live in Glitter in public. People want people to know. I mean, there are Furries. We’re harmless too: we’re a fetish dedicated to innocence. If I could be in Glitter at work, full time, underneath my new Mike and Suz blue linen pantsuit, that would rock.
Hence, the First Annual GlitterFest. I am throwing myself an enormous coming out party, with six bands playing on two facing stages at an all-day, substance-free festival in my hometown, for a $50 cover charge, cheap for a music palooza, the proceeds going to the Boys and Girls Club of Saxon Hills. Online, I invited everyone in Glitter to attend. There will be the first ever in-person GlitterMart, with vendors selling everything imaginable in Glitter. Only those in Glitter know that the day will be for us. Otherwise, GlitterFest has been billed as a family fun party for charity. Of course, no one else has to come out.
GlitterFest attendees will be sprayed with glitter at the gate. We’re using a PABA-free spray with great stick-on factor that’s water-soluble and will last four hours, provided gratis by Glitter Gems, a company started by Joan Glitter, [email protected]. She knows what she’s doing, that Joan Glitter. She’s a baller. Festivalgoers can be resprayed at any time—we’re thinking they’ll want to, once they see. At the beginning of the Chicksburgh set, for the finale, we’re going to light up the whole crowd with black lights.
I haven’t written my speech, but I did invite my parents.
I stayed in the park for a long time, fielding the increasingly irritating inquiries, ones I couldn’t ignore or could give a quick no to, my phone on vibrate. After a while, I just closed my eyes and tried, tried, tried to take notes in my head, to think of something to say in my speech. I have always been an awful public speaker: I get shaky nervous, and for some reason, in those situations, I become convinced my hair looks terrible. All I can think is that it’s totally flyaway, so I keep tucking my hair behind my ears, and then I start mumbling, and that’s it, I’m a shit show. Although the hair thing’s better than flop sweat—that would be the worst!—it’s still a thing. In the Public Speaking portion of Advanced Marketing Tools in college, the prof made me wear mittens.
The title of my speech would be “What Glitter Means to Me.” Or not. I had the title, so far. But maybe a different title.
There were a lot of messages from the Wagawagawaga manager: he could go wagawaga himself. Priorities. Mine were two: a speech and a ghost.
After a while, I had to give up, the weather too sweaty even to sit by the cool fountain. I could smell me, and that’s not good. Luckily, the forecast for Saturday was great. My condo, only four blocks south in one of the new Riverview Towers, might be a better place to think. I decided to go home, hit the treadmill in the fitness center, juice up a very-merry-berry recovery drink, take a bath upstairs, redo my Glitter, and see who would be around tonight. I said goodbye to the fountain, then caught myself making a little hand gesture, a finger how-di-do wave to the concrete fish, and thought that was weird, I don’t do that, Evie, what the hell.
That made me do a little swish turn, like my ghost had, going away. I don’t do that either. See what a ghost does to a girl?
I had another idea. I texted Charles: “mojito.”
He texted back: “work.”
Here’s what an event planner extraordinaire does: she uses her networking talents, her party skills, her social media obsessions, her bossiness, and her improvisational ballsiness to make sure other people live their lives joyfully. That’s what I adore about my job, and how it’s just so perfect for who I am—although a lot of people don’t want fun, and they get in the way of fun progress. That’s what I call it, fun progress.
What throws me, though, is that I try to treat myself the same way, with the same kind of mad skills I apply to my job, and other people’s fun progress, and I can’t. Why can’t I live my life how I decide, how I treat everyone else? It’s the worst. I’m like a doctor who’s always sick.
The walk home was fine, but a sign in the lobby said the fitness center was closed due to an air conditioning problem. Someone had graffitied HOT POCKET! on the sign. People who aren’t funny shouldn’t try.
There was no point to a recovery drink. Upstairs in my condo, I found some fresh-enough salad in the refrigerator—possibly belonging to my roommate, Candace, who has a little bit of a big weight problem and hates when I eat her food, she gets so precious. Like, come on, it’s a salad. I squirted the greens with lemon juice. The sink was full. I would do the dishes tonight, if I came home early.
I checked my phone. There were four messages from the same manager guy—Señor Wagawagawaga, I had taken to calling him in my head. He was not my favorite person on my thinking list.
Fine, I would listen to the last one: “Hey, Evie, it’s Carson again. I know it’s bad, but the band’s just not feeling it. I wish you’d call me back. Sorry. Good luck on Saturday. Next time. Ciao.”
O-M-God. Here’s what an event coordinator extraordinaire does when one of her bands flakes: she throws a glass salad bowl against the wall of her condo, and she explodes like the bowl. There are a lot of little shards to her, and she can shatter into everything she feels. No one can pick up all of those pieces of glass. She screams. What she screams probably doesn’t make any sense, because the sounds are glass too.
Girl needed to change her feels. I racked a shot of vodka, took an Iced Mint Lemonade bubble bath, thank you, Sephora, got in Glitter, put on my backup sweats and a Reds baseball hat with the sticker still on the brim, and called no one back. Then I took the bottle of vodka and went downstairs to the River Walk, to drink and cry and hope to see the prep school crew team have their practice on the river, trailed by their cute coach in a motorboat. The coach sometimes waved to me with his free hand, the other on his megaphone. I took my phone, too, because that’s who I am, but I put it on Airplane Mode. It was like going to the movies.
My spiritual life was on Airplane Mode, I thought. I’m not sure why I was crying, although it could be crying in advance, future nerves, because I do that too. I can tell some of the time what I’m worried will happen later, based on what kind of crying I’m doing.
When the sun went down at last, maybe forty-five minutes later, I was hammered. I was sitting with my feet dangling over the wall, kicking, my self-pity and I in the reflection of the water, poor Evie, the current passing me by, just like my life. I saw that two nearby streetlights on the River Walk were out, and it occurred to me to move to a brighter area for safety purposes. I was pretty sure I had my pepper spray, but I didn’t want anyone to see me look.
My ghost sat next to me.
“You’re not real,” I said to the ghost. “Fuck you.”
The ghost didn’t answer. In the darkness, she was hunter green, a different color from in the sunlight. She stared straight ahead. She had on those sneakers that don’t need laces, they looked like Damn Daniel knockoffs, but otherwise, I couldn’t call her outfit an outfit, even though she wasn’t naked. Up close, she was sort of transparent.
“Why are you here?”
&nb
sp; The ghost didn’t answer.
“You’re my ghost,” I said. “I love you.”
The ghost didn’t answer.
“Don’t fuck with me. I need GlitterFest,” I said. I was crying. “I need another band. Fuck you. If this is your fault, fuck you.”
I pulled up the hem of my sweatshirt to wipe my face, and dry my tears, and it took no more time than that, and the ghost disappeared.
“Come back!” I yelled. “Fuck you! Fix this!”
After that, I went out. I was home late—and I was sick in the Uber. Candace had been staying at her boyfriend Robby’s a lot, so I’m not sure what time I crashed. I didn’t black out: I would have known if I had blacked out.
Lately, I was a little done with what I was doing. Too much of it. In case of ghost, break glass.
Wednesday, I didn’t feel bad, so I worked my phone and spent two hours in the office, mad texting to try to find a band, hung out in front of the post office trolling for my ghost, went to the river the same time of day, when the sun went down, but no Asti Spumoni, no fashion disaster from the spirit world. Wednesday night, I partied with Binky and Rose, but I didn’t really drink. Late, late, we went for a swim in the Cross twins’ pool, even though they were out of town, and I wore my monokini. I hoped the twins would be back for GlitterFest.
Thursday, I spent a bit of the morning crying in my bed. I couldn’t say why. Not too long, maybe a half hour. I texted Charles to come over, but he had a meeting. Future nerves, maybe.
Thursday afternoon, I felt better. I did an hour on the elliptical, showered, sprayed, and went out in Glitter to meet with one of the board members of the Boys and Girls Club, someone who wanted to talk through the GlitterFest schedule. She was just high-strung, I could handle her.
Thursday night, my luck changed, and I got a text from a promoter for a band called the Sad Huns, out of DC. They had a single, and they had just uploaded a preview video of an unplugged performance onto their site. They had a zillion hits. I texted back, the guy called me, sent me the link and password, asked that I watch the video and then call him back. I don’t know how he got my text, or who had told him about GlitterFest, but he was totally doing it, the Sad Huns were available.
The song was called “You Make Me Old,” and I loved it, and I never say that. Two guitars, a drummer in motorcycle goggles banging on a single snare, two singers in beehive hairdos, one of the girls on tambourine like it was the eighties and the tambourine was just invented. It was a ballad about a dumped chick wanting revenge, and one of the singers sounded a little like Bebe Rexha—I had seen the Black Cards in college—but you could tell they had their own sound, the bass was thunder, even unplugged, and the rhythms were tight. I loved that they weren’t Auto-Tuned. “I never wanted to rescue your ass, but to be in the middle of the champagne glass.” They passed the audition. I downloaded the song to share on the Glitter site, called the guy back, talked through what they needed. Turns out he was the drummer.
I ordered in on Thursday night. I had a gross mini-pizza I shouldn’t have had, and I worked on my speech. At least I had the self-control to throw out the last slice. If my ghost had something to say to me, she could ring the bell downstairs, and I would buzz her in, yo. Or not. If my ghost had future nerves, that was just too bad for her.
Friday, I was up early, on site. The Parks and Rec hipster dude was there with a couple of trays of coffees for everyone and some disgusting Bavarian cream donuts, like how I would die someday. I signed for the T-shirts, the dude dealt with the bandstand guys, we took delivery of the HO Portable Toilets, the FedEx boxes of gate passes on their strings arrived (so cool), and he began to register the vendors, although I would assign who went where. The morning wasn’t too hot, the humidity lower than my cat’s IQ for a change. Perfect. Glitter likes low humidity.
Have you ever hung out in college with the girls on your hall after a really brutal Valentine’s Day? You go on a date with that guy from Sig Ep, but he’s a disaster, he was for sure on steroids, and you come home early and then you have to drink peach schnapps alone until your roomies return, and they are just as bad, and Sam’s dress is torn, she can’t even talk, but she says she wasn’t assaulted. Down the hall, Olive from Alabama cranks a Kelly Clarkson song, “Already Gone,” and you hate that song, but you find yourself with your best roomies belting out the lyrics together, swaying together, something like ten women on your hall: “I want you to know that it doesn’t matter where we take this road, someone’s gotta go.” Those BFFs include Binky, for whom you will always be grateful, and who insists on meeting for lunch after your 1 p.m. hairdresser appointment today, the day before GlitterFest, because she is a true BFF and she knows otherwise you won’t eat. Feeding a BFF is a BFF’s job.
But college was pretty much before you lived your life in Glitter. The “before” of the before/after experiences, even those party days, seems so blank now, the life of someone else. Pictures in your head aren’t real, they’re just a funeral for what you’ve done already. Pictures with no pizzazz, no glitter, dead pictures.
In Glitter, I was going to live free.
Friday was the worst day because it wasn’t Saturday yet, but the organizing and prep went okay. Deliveries were made, stages were built, the endless sound checks were stupid and went fine, the talent was occasionally nice. The managers were assholes, all except for Brat, the drummer from the Sad Huns, a cutie pie. Swooping sideways across his forehead was a lock of dyed black hair, a little emo curl (the rest of his flat top was blond), and I wanted to touch it. When I was sitting under the tent we were using as an office, he came up to me from behind and put his hand on my shoulder, to ask me a question, and I knew it was him just by his touch. I wanted to trip him and roll on top of him and squish him good. Yum, I said to Evie in my head, a boy.
On Friday night, for security, we left on a couple of the portable banks of lights—not the full field towers, but some smaller racks of arc lights, running off a generator—and dimmed the power. Around midnight, the ball field looked underwater, the rented tent like a town that drowned. Do ghosts drown? Ghosts don’t breathe, so probably not. But maybe a ghost is made out of stuff like clothing, and their skin feels like silk, only human too, and their bodies get soggy and heavy enough to sink when they’re really wet. I was thinking a lot, walking around in the world on Friday. I was trying to determine what a ghost could be.
I still had to finish my speech—well, I still had to write it. There were only some notes on a couple of scraps of paper in my purse, not a speech. Just like me, all of those scraps, nothing together.
I thought I might get some inspiration from staying in the park once everyone left. I had taken a break by going to Jingo Juice for a Jingo Mango Smoothie, and that had been a good idea, I could go for hours on a smoothie.
My ghost apparently likes when I hydrate—I think it’s cute, she gets concerned, and she wants to make sure I’m not skipping meals—because when I sat in Row 2 of the portable chairs facing Stage 1, slurping my most excellent Jingo Mango Smoothie, my ghost sat next to me. Finally.
I tried to pretend it was all normal. I stared at the stage—that was where I would give my speech, up there, facing this way. I would stand at the microphone, looking out at my parents and all of the festivalgoers, and everyone I cared about in Saxon Hills. After three years of living in Glitter—no, wait, it was four years, my math was wrong—I would come out. My hair looked good, and I was determined to be ready.
I kind of peeked at my ghost, to check her hair, but she was too transparent for me to get a good take.
“I know why you’re here,” I said to the ghost.
She said nothing.
“You’re my old life, before Glitter.”
She was not a talking ghost, I decided.
“Sip?” I turned to and offered her my smoothie. “Jingo Mango.”
This ghost wanted nothing.
“Okay, don’t answer. But here’s my theory. You’re here because I brought you her
e, to put my old life down…to like bury it, or leave it behind. You’re here because I invented you, and I need you to rest in peace. So I can come out, right?”
The ghost didn’t answer.
“Do you exist?”
The ghost didn’t answer.
“I want you to say something!”
She didn’t flinch.
“Is this all there is?” I don’t know why I asked that.
No answer.
“Nuts to you, girl,” I said. “You’re not helping. I don’t understand what you’re here to show me.”
The ghost said nothing.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m going to post your picture.” I had my phone out and I clicked and swiped. Of course not, I knew that wouldn’t work, ghosts don’t show in pictures, but what the hell.
She was the same as any ghost: aim a camera at her, and presto, gone goes the ghost.
I’m the same as any ghost, too, I thought, an idea I knew was right but I didn’t really understand.
Sitting in Row 2, picturing myself up there tomorrow, I wrote my speech. Who knows what time it was when I finally fell asleep in the chair, and then I woke up on the cold ground, stretched out and curled up, my hoodie a half pillow. It was like being on an airplane going nowhere, just flying back to where it started, returning to the hangar. That’s what living in my hometown is like—it’s like sleeping on the ground. But no one came to haunt me, or to kill me with a horrible cronut, or to ask me for something I couldn’t do. No bad ghost made me sit up, grabbing at my heart attack, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, showing me all of the horrible mutilations happening to my body every day I got older, only more intense, all at once.
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