“I think they hate me.”
“No way. Their faces are all just frozen like that. Come on, let’s find something to drink.”
Cass drags her into the house. It’s even more crowded inside, a mass of white kids in black clothes, drinking beer out of red plastic cups. Cass lets go of her hand and Maia shrinks back against a wall. The house is almost devoid of furniture. There’s a wretched couch pushed against a wall, a collapsing shelf filled with dog-eared copies of On the Road and Siddhartha. “You wait here,” Cass says. “I’m going to find the keg, okay? I’ll be right back.” Cass shoulders her way through the crowd. Maia bites her lip, hoping she doesn’t look as terrified as she feels.
“You don’t look like you’re having a good time,” someone says next to her. Okay, then. She does look as terrified as she feels. The speaker’s a boy, tall and lanky, with dirty brown hair that falls in tangles down his back. He’s wearing leather and spikes like the rest of them, but his eyes are kind.
“I’m not really—uh, I’m fine,” she says.
“I’m Todd. You want a drink?”
“My friend went to get me one.” He raises an eyebrow. “Oh. Sorry. Maia.” He shakes her hand gravely, as if they’re at a tea party, and takes a silver flask out of his pocket.
“You sure?”
“Oh, what the hell,” Maia says, and takes the flask from him. She unscrews the top and takes a gulp of whatever’s inside. It burns going down and she coughs, laughing. “Holy shit!”
“Not a whisky drinker?”
“Not until now.” A warm, buffering glow is already spreading through her. “I could get used to it, I bet.”
“That’s my kind of girl,” he says, winking, and Maia realizes in astonishment that he is flirting with her. A punk boy is flirting. With her. What a day this is turning out to be.
“You ever hear these guys play before?”
“What?”
“The band,” he says patiently. “Elephant Feticide?”
“Oh,” she says. “No. Cass didn’t tell me their name.”
“You’re here with Cass?”
“You know her?”
“Everybody knows Cass.” He holds out his hand, and she realizes she is still clutching his flask.
“Sorry,” she says, handing it back to him. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Elephant Feticide? That’s not, like—” She falters. “I mean, that’s sort of a terrible name. No offense.”
“It’s not my band. My band is called Necronomicon.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
“Part of the whole metal aesthetic,” he says, and she can’t tell if he’s teasing her.
“Heavy,” she agrees. “Heavy metal.” He laughs, and she is delighted with herself.
“Ah, shit, girl,” Cass says behind her, “I leave you alone for three minutes and you find yourself the biggest trouble in the room.”
“Cass, Cass, Cass,” Todd says, and scoops her up in a bear hug.
“My beer!” Cass cries, one hand aloft, holding two plastic cups.
“Sorry,” Todd says, releasing her. Cass hands one cup to Maia, who takes a cautious sip.
“She’s never had a whole beer of her own,” Cass explains.
“Hey,” Maia protests.
“It’s okay, he’s good people.”
Suddenly, a terrible noise like a trash compactor crushing a car full of cats screeches through the room. Maia jumps. “That’s the band,” Todd explains. She and Cass follow him into another room, where a sweat-covered, shirtless boy is banging furiously on a drumset and another shirtless boy is on his knees, howling passionately and extracting repetitive, dissonant chords from an electric guitar with vigorous enthusiasm. Maia winces and covers her ears with her hands. Around her, black-clad teenagers in various states of undress reel and crash into one another in a frenzied, violent dance that does not seem to correspond in any way to the music. An inebriated dancer slams into her and careens away, sending her beer slopping over the edge of her cup.
“Is it all like this?” Maia asks Cass.
“WHAT?” Cass shouts.
“IS IT ALL LIKE THIS?” Maia shouts back.
“IS ALL WHAT LIKE THIS?”
“ROCK MUSIC?”
Cass laughs so hard she doubles over, and Todd looks over at Maia, amused. Wheezing, Cass shakes her head. “COME ON, PRINCESS,” she yells. “LET’S GO OUTSIDE.”
In the yard, the din is considerably less, although the crowd is no smaller. They hunker under the eaves, unnoticed. Maia leans against the house and takes another delicate sip of her beer. Todd, she is pleased to note, has followed them outside. “You don’t have to come out here,” Maia says to them. “If you liked it.”
Cass is still laughing. “Are you kidding? They’re fucking terrible.” She pulls her tobacco out of her pocket and rolls a cigarette.
“They are?”
“Pretty bad,” Todd agrees.
Maia eyeballs Cass’s cigarette and Cass catches her looking, passes it to her without comment. Maia takes the tiniest of drags and manages not to cough, though she hopes Todd can’t see her eyes water in the dark as she gives it back to Cass. He offers Maia the flask again and she hands him her beer while she unscrews the stopper and takes a swig. The burn is no less but she expects it this time, and the warmth that follows it feels even better.
“I like whisky,” she says.
“I like your hair,” Todd says.
“Cass did it. Just today.”
“It looks good. Really good.”
“You know what,” Cass says, “I’m going to go see if Felony is here, I need to ask her something.” She leans in to kiss Maia on the cheek. “He thinks you’re cute, you should kiss him,” she hisses in Maia’s ear. “I’ll find you again in a bit, okay? Don’t leave without me,” she adds in a normal voice.
“What do I do?” Maia says, panicked.
Cass looks at her and grins. “Don’t drive away until I’m in the car,” she says, and then she’s scampering off into the house. The noise has abated for the moment; perhaps the shirtless boys grew tired of their efforts and are resting.
“Well,” Todd says.
“Well,” she agrees.
“You go to school?”
“No, home-schooled. You?”
“Oh, school,” he says. “We didn’t really get along, me and school. I went to the community college for a bit, but it seemed better to just work. Travel a little.”
“Where?”
“I went to Spain for a while. Met some people. I stayed in a squat in Amsterdam for a year.” He tells her about the beaches in Spain while she drinks more of his whisky. The sun. Swimming naked in the sea.
“Why’d you ever come home?”
“Got my heart plumb broke,” he says wistfully.
“I went to Barcelona,” Maia says. “For a piano competition.”
“Piano, huh? You must be good.”
“I won.”
He laughs. “You don’t look like a pianist.”
“I did until this afternoon. I’m trying out being a different person.”
“Is that so,” he says, looking down at her. He is much taller than she is. He reaches forward and tucks a piece of her hair behind one ear, his thumb gently stroking her cheek. “What kind of different person?”
“A braver one,” she says, and kisses him. He smiles against her mouth and then kisses her back. He tastes like whisky and cigarettes and smells like sweat and leather and something else underneath, wild and musky. Kissing him is nothing like kissing Nicholas Bernière, mediocre pianist and practiced jerk, who’d jammed his tongue down her throat and covered the entire lower half of her face with his mouth. Todd’s stubbled chin is scratchy but his mouth is soft, and there is a warmth spreading through her now that has nothing to do with the whisky. He puts both his hands in her hair and takes her earlobe gently between his teeth, and she shivers in delight.
“You’re beauti
ful, braver girl,” he says softly into the whorl of her ear, and a thrill goes through her all the way to her toes. No one’s ever said it to her like that. She rests her forehead on his chest, drinking in the smell of him, and he kisses the top of her head. The band has started up again, with an even more awful noise; Maia would’ve thought such a feat impossible. “Not the classiest place for a first date,” he says into her hair.
“I should find Cass,” she says.
“It’s early,” he protests.
“I have parents,” she says. “I mean, the kind that pay attention.”
He takes her by the shoulders, holds her away from him, studying her face, and then he kisses her again. “I could throw you over my shoulder and carry you off,” he offers.
She giggles. “You just met me.”
“Some things do not require a long acquaintance, braver girl.” He rummages around in his pocket and finds a pen, takes her hand. “Here,” he says, writing on the back of her hand, “is my phone number. Do you make use of it.” He gives her hand a little squeeze.
“Okay,” she says, grinning like an idiot. It takes a force of will to make herself let go of his hand. She turns around as she goes back into the house; he’s still watching her. He gives her a little wave and she returns it, nearly walking into the doorframe.
Cass is inside, talking animatedly to a girl with green and purple dreadlocks wearing a halter top made out of an old shirt. Maia catches her eye and makes a driving motion with her hands, and Cass comes over. “So soon?” she asks.
“At some point even my dad will notice I’m gone. But stay here, if you want.”
“Nah,” Cass says. “I see these people all the time.”
“You want to sleep over?” Maia asks.
“Like a slumber party?”
Maia blushes. “Sorry, I guess that’s sort of little kid-ish.”
“No, it sounds fun. I’d love to.”
Maia is quiet on the drive home. She can feel her tiny, claustrophobic world blowing wide open, all the possibility rushing in like a rising tide. The world is so much bigger than she had ever guessed; all these people in it, like Cass, like Todd, making their own decisions for themselves. She cannot imagine Cass ever doing anything she does not want to do, ever being told where to go or what to believe. Maia has been trapped for so long, surrounded by people who are as bound as she is—her father, Oscar. Who knows, maybe even her mother, stuck in a marriage she does not want, a house she cannot ever clean into a place she actually wants to be, a defective daughter she paid for and cannot return. Maia thought piano was her only path out; she’d never even imagined so many other roads existed.
“What are you thinking?” Cass asks, breaking the long silence.
“About today.”
“Your first show,” Cass says. “Sorry it was so terrible.”
“It wasn’t! I mean, the music was. But I—” Maia blushes so violently Cass can probably tell even in the dark car.
Cass chuckles. “He’s cute.”
“Yes.”
“But trouble,” Cass says. “Heartbreaker. All the girls love Todd. And Todd loves all the girls.”
“Oh,” Maia says. “I don’t think I can see him again, anyway. My parents.”
“It’s not natural, caging a teenage girl like that.”
“They’ll never let me go out.”
“Just tell them you’re going anyway.”
“I wish it was that easy,” Maia says. “I don’t even want to think about what will happen when my mom sees my hair.”
“What are your parents going to do? They can’t actually stop you from anything.”
“I don’t know,” Maia says. How can she explain to Cass, a girl with no family, the power her mother has? It’s a force that’s almost physical. And if Maia went, where would she go? To Cass’s? To Oscar’s? Not likely. “It’s complicated,” she says.
“Fair enough.”
“I’m going to audition. For this school. This music college in New York. If I get in, my parents will pay for it, for my life there. And they love me, and I guess I sort of owe it to them not to fuck up.”
“You want to go?”
“It’s the best school,” Maia says.
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“I know.” Maia bites her lip. “It’s what I’m supposed to do.”
“But do you want to do it?”
“I don’t know if I know what I want.”
“Hmmm,” Cass says. “I guess that is complicated.”
Maia makes a nest of blankets on the floor of her room, and Cass burrows in like a rabbit tunneling. “So clean,” she says happily. “Everything smells good.”
Maia gets under the covers and is about to turn out the light when there’s a soft rap on her door. She freezes. “Maia? Can I come in?”
“Shit,” she hisses. There’s no hiding Cass, or her own new hair. Even if her father didn’t notice how long she was gone, or that she went out at all. “Okay,” she calls. In for a penny, in for a pound. He opens the door and looks down at Cass. “Oh,” he says. “Hello.”
“This is Cass,” Maia says.
“I didn’t know you had a little friend over. Hello, Cass.”
“Hello,” Cass says. “Sir.”
“I just wanted to say goodnight,” her father says. “I haven’t seen you all day.”
“Goodnight, Dad.” He crosses the room and Maia wants to pull the covers over her head. He bends over her, kisses her forehead. She can smell the whisky on his breath.
“Goodnight, sweetheart.” Pause. “Is there something different about your hair?”
“Um, a little.”
“Oh. It looks nice. Sleep tight.”
“Sleep tight, Dad.”
When the door is safely shut behind him Cass explodes into giggles. “Is there something different about your hair,” she gasps. “Fucking unreal.”
“Says my little friend.”
“Oh, princess. I would not trade my life for yours for anything.”
“I don’t blame you,” Maia says. “Goodnight. Sir.”
“Goodnight. Dream about Todd.”
Maia throws a pillow at her and is rewarded by the satisfying sound of it thwacking into Cass’s head.
NOW: BARRA DE NAVIDAD
Cass thinks sometimes about getting sober, but then she always thinks twice. She knows the story other people would tell about her: sad girl with a sad habit, sad vices to sidestep sad memories. If her life were a made-for-TV movie she’d repent at the end, yield up teary confessions on a couch in the office of a therapist who at last has made her see the error of her ways and cracked through her bitter shell to the caramel-soft girl beneath. Wrap with a softly-lit shot of her shining face, a weepy monologue detailing the arc of her redemption, maybe a final scene of her walking slowly, bravely toward an anonymous group meeting for other girls like her, laying aside their differences to heal as an ensemble.
But there’s no room in that sob story for the truth of Cass’s own life. There are some things you don’t get better from, some harms too deep to heal. There’s the man in the black coat, the legions of the dead that follow him, more than enough for any ordinary person to live with; but the ghosts that haunt Cass are some of them as real as daylight. First the stepfathers, and then the street, which is not a kind place for anyone, let alone a girl. And even if Cass did wake up one day with her past a tidy package, a boxed-off set of old memories banned from seeping over into her daily life, there’s more to it than that. More to it than forgetting, or giving back to herself what was taken from her in the moments when she’s high enough to reclaim her own skin. What Cass loves is the freedom of speed jackhammering through her, the fractured seconds when anything is possible. What Cass loves even more than letting go is saying yes. Yes to every bad idea, to every drug, to every possible thing; yes to wide horizons, yes to euphoria, yes to the wants of the animal body. Yes to running wild in the night, yes to being monster more than girl, bare te
eth and nails like claws and muscles like a wolf’s. Nothing has ever made her feel as good as drugs, as good as drunk, not the magic Raven taught her, not her dreams of the dead, not even the promise of the man in the black coat lurking at the edges of the world she lives in, beckoning her over to the other side. She could get sober but to get sober she’d have to give up what makes her live.
And now Cass is too high to think about anything except the vibration of the stars and the feel of the ocean breeze on her skin and the realization that she is never ever going to sleep again because there are too many things to do and it feels so good to be this alive and this awake and this young and they can go anywhere they want now and they can think anything they want and here they are in the world, little animals, little animals.
With every day that passes on the beach, Cass hates Jason more. He’s fickle, tyrannical, prone to nightmares. He will only eat soft corn tortillas and cheese, turns his nose up at shrimp and shellfish pulled fresh out of the sea and sold in the village. He talks about himself incessantly. The more obnoxious he gets, the more Maia moons after him, asking anxiously if he is okay, what he needs, what she can get him, nursemaiding him through his days as if she’s his nanny instead of his lover. Exasperated, Cass takes to swimming, or running on the beach, or going for long walks by herself; when she comes back, he’s always drunk the lukewarm Coke she left in the car, looked through her and Maia’s things in search of something to do or read or munch. If she leaves her alcohol anywhere he can find it, he drinks it; if she doesn’t hide her drugs, he does them. It goes without saying that he doesn’t have any money.
“Jesus,” Cass yells, one afternoon, when she catches him paging through her journal. He drops it like it’s a scorpion. Maia’s a ways down the beach, dozing.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. His usual bravado is gone; he’s almost sheepish.
“You are a shit,” Cass says. “A fucking shit. And just because my best friend has lost her mind don’t think I have, too. I see right the fuck through you. Don’t ever touch my shit again or I’ll cut your dick off and feed it to you.” His eyes widen in real fear, and Cass has to make a terrible face to keep from laughing.
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