by Ania Ahlborn
Michael blinked at the seemingly abandoned store. He twisted around to look at the posters on the walls, the ones closest to the front windows discolored by the sun. He recognized the music coming through the speakers as Van Halen; Reb played them in the Delta every now and again. David Lee Roth ooh baby baby’d his way into the open room, accompanied by the constant groan of an air conditioner battling the West Virginia heat.
He nearly jumped at the sound of the tiny bell above the door and glanced back at the Dervish’s new patron. A woman wearing a floor-length skirt in loud oranges and greens stepped inside. Her stick-straight hair was so long it hid her entire back. Henna tattoos spiraled down her bare arms and decorated her hands in intricate paisley patterns. She gave Michael a lazy smile and murmured “Hey, man” while drifting down an aisle of crates.
Pulling records from the stacks with little to no thought, she created a pile of vinyl that would make Misty Dawn quiver with jealousy. Michael watched her from behind his hair for a while. His eyes occasionally darted to the storage room door, and he wondered if Lucy was going to come back out in time to ring the woman up. With an armload of records, the long-haired lady gave Michael a questioning look. She then moved across the store and dropped the stack onto the checkout counter.
“Is nobody working this place today or what?” she asked. “Where’s Lucy?”
Michael opened his mouth, not sure how to reply. Explaining that Lucy was in the back room doing God only knew what with Rebel didn’t seem right. Michael didn’t want to get her in trouble, but before he could stumble through an awkward sentence and explain that someone was there, that they were just . . . busy . . . a sweet voice saved him the embarrassment.
“Lucy’s at lunch.”
Snow White appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Michael imagined her hiding behind a stack of crates, appearing in a puff of glittery smoke like Glinda the Good Witch.
“Hi, Barb,” Snow White said, giving the woman a wide smile.
“Seems a bit early for lunch,” Barb said, glancing over her shoulder at Michael. Snow White began to sort through the records on the counter. “Maybe you should hire Robert Plant to help you run the place.” Barb hooked a thumb over her shoulder.
“Yeah, maybe I should,” Snow said with a half-smile. She cast a glance in Michael’s direction before punching a series of buttons on the register.
The attention made him feel self-conscious. He stepped away from the bank of windows and moved down one of the aisles, his back to the girls. Wade had taught him to avoid conversation. People were unpredictable. They asked a lot of questions, and sometimes finding appropriate answers was hard. Reb had agreed on that point up until now, and that left Michael in a vulnerable position. He could talk to Snow White and risk her asking about things he couldn’t talk about, or he could ignore her completely and have his brother engage her instead.
“Or maybe Lucy ran off because you’re playing this stuff,” Barb said, pointing to one of the speakers. “A store full of music and you pick this?”
“We try not to discriminate.” He couldn’t see her, but Michael could hear the amusement in Snow’s voice.
“Yeah, well, maybe it would suit you to be a bit more choosy. Discrimination is one thing, but free love isn’t unconditional, man.”
Snow chuckled. “Is that new ink?” she asked.
“Yeah. Got it done when I drove up to Charleston. Picked up some new sound equipment for the station. Though I gotta say, we’re probably switching to cassettes soon.”
“Aw, what? Tapes?”
“Hey, they’re starting to sound better these days. Get your boss to stock ’em, huh? Anyway, say hi to Lucy for me when she gets back,” Barb said. Michael listened to the crinkle of a paper bag. “And put on another record for me. Please.”
“Will do,” Snow singsonged. “See you later, Barb.”
“Back in a few weeks. Later days, babe.”
Michael chewed his bottom lip as Barb walked his way. She slowed her steps, as if to get a better look at him, then shot a glance over her shoulder, flashing a grin back at Snow.
“He’s decent,” she announced. “A possible fox.” The chime of the bell marked her exit.
Michael looked down to the records in front of him. One of the tabs was marked FLEETWOOD. Misty Dawn loved that Stevie Nicks chick.
“That’s Barb Callahan.”
Goose bumps.
Snow White had, for a second time, pulled a magic trick. Instead of being behind the register, she was now at Michael’s right elbow.
“You know,” she said, responding to Michael’s silence, “Barb Callahan from J104?”
Michael shook his head. His heart thudded so hard it felt as though it was ready to punch its way straight out of his chest.
“Don’t you listen to the radio?” She gave him a smile.
“Not really.” That was a lie. The name Barb Callahan sounded familiar. So did the station’s call sign. More than likely, it was one of Misty Dawn’s regular spots on the dial, but Michael was way too nervous to say any of that. His throat felt dry. His words sounded gravelly. He could smell that spearmint scent coming off Snow White in waves. She canted her head to the side, her cropped black hair exposing a long slope of neck. Grinning toward a crate of records, she filed one away into its rightful spot and shrugged.
“Yeah, me neither,” she said, her words colored with easy amusement. “But I tell Barb I do. Too much hippie-dippy crap for my taste. I’m pretty sure she still plays Simon and Garfunkel, which is just . . .” She pulled a face, like she’d tasted something bad. “But if I told Barb that, I’d never get her to leave.”
Michael was afraid to look at her, partly because if he did, he’d be committing himself to the conversation. But he was also terrified that she’d look into his eyes and see him for what he really was. But he couldn’t not look at her. She was less than two feet away, so close that he wanted to reach out and touch her, if only to feel the warmth of her skin. He watched her from his peripheral vision. Her fingers walked along the spines of record sleeves. The way she rolled her neck, trying to loosen a sleep-strained muscle—it was tempting. Sexy.
“You, on the other hand.” She filed another record, then turned to face him fully. “You sure know how to make a girl feel interesting with all that talking you do.”
Michael forced an unsure smile and pushed himself to meet her head-on. When he finally managed it, he truly saw her for the first time, and what he saw made his heart ache. She wasn’t pretty like Lucy. Lucy was more of a generic, everyday pretty rather than genuinely beautiful. Michael had seen that kind of pretty more times than he could count. Snow White was ethereal, as though she’d been plucked from the pages of a storybook. She was all eyes, and despite her black attire, he imagined her living in a tiny cottage tucked into the hills where she’d feed fawns and bluebirds by hand. Her face was framed by her short hair, the fringe of her wispy bangs cutting across a pale forehead. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, the heavy combat boots on her feet looking too heavy for her petite frame.
“See?” she asked. “I look a little freaky, but I’m not that bad. Probably why your Romeo of a brother likes Lucy a lot more than me.” She cast a glance at the storage room door with a smirk. “Isn’t that weird?” She looked back at Michael, eyebrows raised. Michael mimicked her, arching his own eyebrows in a questioning glance.
“Weird?”
“That they’d just go back there like that,” she clarified. “I mean, would you do that?”
Yes, he’d do that. If Snow White caught him by the hand and led him to that back room the way Lucy had led Rebel, he’d do it because he wouldn’t know how to say no. He’d do it because when he looked into her eyes, he saw magic. Maybe facing his fear and allowing their limbs to tangle together would cause some of that magic to rub off on him. Maybe drawing his hands across her bare skin would make him a better person. Perhaps it would erase all his wrongs, would let him start over, be someone new.
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“No,” he said softly, looking away from her. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Okay,” she said, shaking her head, this time with a bit of a laugh. “Just making sure it, like, doesn’t run in the family or something. Because that would be, I don’t know . . .”
“Weird,” he finished for her.
“Exactly. Really weird. Almost creepy.”
Michael thought creepy was a good word for it, but it wasn’t quite right.
“I’m Alice.”
She offered him her hand.
Another beat of hesitation.
If he took it, would she suddenly pull back? Would she be able to sense the blood that had washed over his fingers for so many years; would she hear the screams he’d never done a thing about?
He cautiously took her hand in his and gave it a delicate squeeze, not sure how long he was supposed to hold it. He only let go when she gave the floor an antsy smile and slowly pulled away from his touch.
“This is the part where you’re supposed to introduce yourself,” she said, looking almost embarrassed. “Unless you don’t want to, I guess.”
Memories of Rebel giving girls false names came flooding back. One time he was Ted. Another time he introduced himself as John Wayne. When the girl had laughed and asked “Like the cowboy?” he had said, “No, like the killer,” and hit her in the temple with a tire iron before she could run.
“I’m Michael,” he told her. “Michael Morrow.” An electric thrill shot up his spine. Revealing his first name was a no-no, but revealing both his first and last names was a cardinal sin. He’d never told anyone his full name before, had never revealed his identity, because that was one of the rules you simply didn’t break. But Rebel said today they were breaking rules.
“That sounds like a name you’d see in lights,” she mused. “Michael Morrow.” Alice smiled again, but this one was more thoughtful. Her gaze drifted across his face, paused on his mouth for a beat before she turned away with a blush. Michael wanted to tell her that her name sounded like one you’d read in a fairy tale—Alice was one of the most famous princesses of all. Lauralynn never did own the Alice book, but she’d told them the story as best she could. And from her telling, Michael knew that Alice wasn’t the kind of princess to sit around waiting for Prince Charming. She was a girl of action, one that fought a monster that Lauralynn had called the Jibberjabber—a giant beast that she somehow defeated because she was pure of heart.
“Are you in a band or something?” Alice asked.
“Me?” He shook his head, caught off guard, as though the mere idea of it was impossible.
“You never know,” she said. “Lots of famous musicians come from the sticks. Dahlia, West Virginia, could be next.”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that, only that there was no chance of him being the next big thing. If Michael’s name ever appeared in lights, it would be alongside Rebel’s on the nightly news.
“I haven’t seen you around before.” She grabbed the small stack of unfiled records off of one of the crates and moved to his opposite side. The sweet scent of spearmint surrounded her like an aura. “Other than seeing you yesterday, I mean. You are from Dahlia, aren’t you?”
“The outskirts,” he told her.
“So, the boonies of the boonies.” Alice chuckled. “Sounds fun. Kind of like Deliverance.”
Michael didn’t know what Deliverance was—he guessed some kind of a movie—but he didn’t ask. He didn’t want to sound as stupid as he felt, so he tucked his chin against his chest and acted interested in the artwork on a Foreigner record sleeve. Michael watched the muscles of Alice’s forearms flex as her fingers worked the records into place. Two small numbers were tattooed on the inside of her left biceps: 10:15. She caught him looking and glanced down at it as if having forgotten it was there.
“It’s a song,” she said. “You like the Cure?”
“I don’t know.” The memory of the 10/6 printed on the Mad Hatter’s giant green top hat was distracting. He’d seen it in one of Lauralynn’s picture books. Alice. The Hatter. It was enough to convince him that she really was from Wonderland.
“You don’t know, as in you have no opinion, or you don’t know because you haven’t heard them?”
“I haven’t heard ’em.”
Another round of silence.
Another exchange of awkward smiles.
“Well, what do you like?”
“Whatever my sister has,” he said, not stopping to think about how strange that must have sounded.
Alice raised an eyebrow at his response. “And what does your sister listen to?”
“Just old stuff. She actually likes Simon and Garfunkel,” he said. “And the Beach Boys.”
Alice stared at him as though he’d just told her his deepest, darkest secret. She wrinkled her nose in disbelief. “I was right, weird does run in your family. Romeo is promiscuous and you . . .” She narrowed her eyes and pursed her mouth, trying to find the right words. “Freaky deaky.”
Well, at least it wasn’t hippie-dippy.
She pivoted on the soles of her combat boots and turned toward the front of the store, motioning for Michael to come along. Stopping in front of a bank of crates, she plucked a record from the center of the bunch and held it out for Michael to see. The cover was a reverse black-and-white exposure of leafless trees. The sky was pitch-black above trunks colored neon-white. THE CURE, A FOREST was printed across the middle.
“The Beach Boys are for shark bait,” she told him. “This is super rare. It’ll change your life.”
“I ain’t got no money,” he said, afraid to reach for it without any cash in his pocket. But rather than rolling her eyes at him, which he fully expected her to do, she exhaled a quiet laugh instead.
“I’m not surprised, spaceman,” she teased. “Just take it. Consider it a loan. We’ll dig you out of that nineteen-sixties grave yet.”
Michael looked down at the record, his fingers drifting across its glossy surface. “Do you like this?” he asked.
“No,” she said, sliding a finger across her tattoo. Michael gave her a curious look, and when she chuckled beneath her breath, he laughed too.
“Wow,” she said. “Finally a genuine smile.”
He diverted his gaze once more, looked down at the album cover in his hands. She made him feel awkward, vulnerable, scrambling his thoughts with the curve of her lips. His heart palpitated with the way she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, as though dancing to a beat only she could hear.
“If you don’t like it, just bring it back,” she said. “We’ve got a store full of records at our disposal.”
Michael took a breath, on the verge of asking why she was being so nice. What made him so special for her to treat him so well? But before he could figure out how to string together the words, the click of a lock disrupted their silence. Both he and Alice shot looks toward the back of the store. The storage door swung open. Rebel stepped out first, followed by Lucy, who looked a bit more disheveled than she had when they had first disappeared inside.
Alice and Michael exchanged a look—one that made him want to laugh in spite of himself. Alice mouthed a silent Oookay before turning away from him completely, focusing her attention on her friend.
“Barb stopped by,” she announced. “She asked for you, so I told her you were doing it in the back room with some dude.”
Lucy gave her friend a bug-eyed stare, as if refusing to believe what had just come out of Alice’s mouth.
“What?” Alice asked, flashing Lucy an innocent look. “That’s what you two were doing, right? Or are Michael and I mistaken?”
Rebel walked across the store and met Michael next to a crate marked IMPORTS. Glancing down at the record in Michael’s hands, he was like a parent eyeing a kid who had already spent his weekly allowance. “You gonna gyp that or what?”
“I’m borrowin’ it,” Michael said, avoiding eye contact by staring at the cover. That dark forest reminded him of
the woods behind the farmhouse.
“Borrowin’ it,” Reb echoed. When Michael finally looked up, Rebel was wearing a strange sort of smile—one that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Guess that means we’re comin’ back later, don’t it?”
When Michael failed to reply, Reb swept a pair of fingers up and away from his forehead in a casual salute, giving the girls a wink. “Catch ya on the flip side,” he told them, then pulled open the door and stepped out of the store.
Michael glanced across the shop to the register. Lucy was watching him with a vague sense of curiosity. Alice stood beside her, a ghost of a smile touching her lips. He raised a hand in a silent good-bye. Alice mimicked his action. She mouthed See you, looking even more beautiful than she had during their few minutes alone. Even more stunning than she had the first time he had laid eyes on her. His heart twisted up on itself, and suddenly the last thing he wanted to do was leave. He didn’t want to go back home, didn’t want to go back to his old life, didn’t want to see Momma or Wade or even Misty Dawn ever again. He wanted to start over, forget who he was and become the person he knew Alice could make him. He wanted to stay in that very spot, right where he stood, for the rest of his life.
But instead, the sound of the Oldsmobile’s engine drew his attention away from the girls. He slowly turned away and stepped out into the summer heat.
9
* * *
MICHAEL RUSHED OUT of the Olds, hopped up the back porch stairs, and stepped into a kitchen heady with the scent of garlic and onions. Momma was standing over a pot at the stove, stirring something with a long aluminum camping spoon. She glanced over to Michael, but didn’t speak until Rebel followed him inside. “Dinner’s at six,” she told them, then turned back to her cooking. Michael darted out of the room and all but leapt up the stairs to get to Misty Dawn’s room, with Alice’s record beneath his arm.
He stopped short, just inside Misty’s door. She was sitting on her bed, a fresh bruise swelling up her cheek. Her eyes were red-rimmed and raw, and when she tried to smile at him, it only made her look worse.
