Hurricane Days

by Renée J. Lukas

  My excitement only grew with the revelation of every new detail, like seeing Adrienne in different light or shadows, revealing each new expression as a dramatic close-up, as in a movie. Even the thrill of how a different color shirt could contrast with her face—it was another thing to look forward to each day.

  Inside the dormitory, Adrienne stopped at the sight of a chubby girl with cropped hair, walking in the opposite direction down the hall. “Oh God,” she whispered, gripping my arm. “That’s her.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl who…” she said, hesitating before pushing the elevator button. She spoke in hushed tones and waited until we were the only ones in the elevator. “She’s a queer. She cornered this other girl in the bathroom and tried to kiss her. She’s a total freak.”

  “How do you know she did that?”

  “The other girl told everyone. She was pretty freaked out.” Adrienne watched the floor numbers light slowly as the elevator rose. “I don’t blame her.”

  My stomach sank to my feet, and I wasn’t sure why. After all, I had nothing in common with that girl in the hallway. A heavy sensation spread over my body, as if Adrienne’s contempt had been injected into my heart. Did a minute pass? Maybe two minutes? When we got to the seventh floor, I followed her slowly down the hall and into the room.

  Adrienne slung her keys on her desk, at least I thought so. I heard the sound of them clanking against wood. When I looked up, she had the phone pressed to her ear.

  “You want pepperoni?” she asked.

  “That’s fine.” I unzipped my backpack and distractedly pulled out books. I wasn’t very hungry.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the wee hours of the morning, when the whole house was quiet and peaceful…this was Robin’s favorite time. She could be alone with her thoughts, away from cameras and her increasingly annoying staff.

  She climbed out of bed, careful to avoid a well-known creak in the floor. She couldn’t wake Tom anyway. His breathing rumbled on, low and steady, like an idling motorcycle. She envied his ability to sleep.

  Making it safely out of the bedroom, she slipped down to the library in her bathrobe and slippers, clicked on the light and turned on the computer at her favorite cherrywood desk. In the shadows were bookshelves stacked with Southern authors, a popular feature of the mansion library. Carson McCullers was her favorite of these authors, though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d relaxed with a good book.

  Robin had looked at the clock before she came down but couldn’t remember now if it was three o’clock or four. It didn’t matter; she knew she’d never be able to fall back to sleep. The curiosity was too much. She had to know. She had to see. Internet search history be damned. Planning to delete the evidence of her search afterward, she navigated to YouTube, where she typed “Eye of the Storm.”

  Adrienne’s band appeared on the screen, performing to a large crowd at Boston’s House of Blues. The video had been recorded by someone in the audience. The quality wasn’t half bad, except for the occasional jerk down to the floor then back up to the stage. Adrienne was wearing a black leather body suit with a jacket that she eventually took off. Her voice was full and deep, even soulful. She owned the stage and the crowd, just as she had at their college parties, when everyone had gathered around her like magnets drawn to steel. Sometimes Robin would watch in awe, as she did now, captured by the idea of Adrienne, an otherworldly songstress singing a haunting rock ballad.

  In this moment, Robin forgot her own iconic status. Now she was a vulnerable, ordinary woman…or a lovesick college girl. She caught herself smiling as Adrienne stopped dramatically, head down, while the drums did a solo. Then she turned, sweat from the hot lights glistening on her neck, her lips turned upward in a teasing smile. The smile Robin knew.

  Robin sat back, watching, with her hand over her mouth.

  There was a close-up of Adrienne’s slender fingers working the strings of an electric guitar with such abandon; she had definitely mastered the instrument she couldn’t play years ago.

  As a woman in her late forties, Adrienne was more fully realized and more self-possessed, if that was possible, than she had been at eighteen. Her eyes, always sparkling and brilliant, were now filled with more experience, more genuine passion. Robin imagined the things she’d experienced since their time together. No doubt she’d had her heart broken. She’d lived life. There was something so undeniably sexy about the woman Adrienne, crooking her finger at someone in the audience, smiling and enjoying when people, male or female, reached out to grab her leather pants. Her ambiguous sexuality on stage made her accessible to everyone. It all made sense, Adrienne the rock star. It was inevitable. Her magnetic presence on stage, her attitude, was already like that of a rock icon. It was only a matter of time.

  Robin admired her for staying on course toward this career path, especially at an age when so many women were either more settled in their careers or home life. And by this time, it was all too common to give up on the wild dreams of youth. Then again, Adrienne never seemed to lose her wild side. It was part of her.

  A sense of regret, of loss, surged through Robin. She closed her eyes a long moment and waited for it to pass.

  * * *

  The sprawling backyard terrace was Jimmy Sanders’ favorite spot at the governor’s mansion. There he could have the illusion of privacy and kick back with his favorite cigar and a scotch.

  Abigail, her hair freshly bleached, sat by his side. She was a nervous, wafer-thin woman, always nibbling at platters of raw carrots or crackers and never gaining any weight.

  “Politics ain’t what it used to be,” Jimmy growled.

  “I know.” Robin smiled tiredly at him.

  “You need nerves of steel, the way they spread all that garbage about you. I don’t think my old ticker could take it.” He patted his chest.

  “I can handle it, Daddy.” Robin crossed her legs and held her head high, the most dignified posture she could muster. Honestly, she could withstand anyone’s judgment but his. He’d always called her “Daddy’s little girl,” whatever that meant exactly, and she tried to live up to that.

  “I have no doubt you can.” He winked at her and swirled the ice in his glass. “You know, I was no fan of John Kennedy, but even he got a private life without everything havin’ to be out in the open. That’s the problem now. Everything’s in the open. I saw a talk show with this doctor, I guess he was a doctor, askin’ a lady in the audience about her bowel movements. On national television! Doesn’t that beat all hell?”

  “What for?” Abigail squeaked, reaching for her martini.

  “Somethin’ about the color,” he replied. “If it was the wrong color, you had cancer. I don’t know.”

  Abigail turned in her seat, now desperately worried. She munched a whole cracker. “Well, what color was it?”

  “I don’t remember!” he exclaimed. “That’s not the point.”

  “Daddy,” Robin said, “I’m not letting some nobody destroy my career.”

  “Course you won’t,” he said. “Especially not some queer. They do these unnatural things and expect everyone to applaud when they do one of them parades. If Jesus came down today, he’d put a stop to them parades!”

  Robin lowered her eyes; her face remained hard.

  “I wish you remembered what color,” Abigail persisted. “My cousin had colon cancer.”

  “Good Lord, woman,” Jimmy said. “You can Google it. Everything’s on the damn Google.”

  Abigail glanced away, clearly dissatisfied. Then her eyes fixed on Robin. It was obvious she’d been dying to ask her something since the scandal broke.

  “Who is she anyway?” Abigail asked. She could hardly contain her curiosity now, as she nervously picked at the plate of cheese and crackers.

  “Someone I knew at Florida State.”

  Jimmy perked up. “I do recall you goin’ through a wild period down there. You came home hatin’ Reagan.”

  “I never said I hat
ed him.”

  “You were goin’ through your teenage rebellion,” he chuckled.

  Robin’s porcelain face flushed crimson. “I never had a rebellion,” she corrected. “Maybe I should have.”

  He laughed. “I know it’s not true, sweetie.” He touched her knee.

  Robin took a sip of white wine and gazed out at the endless, rolling countryside. “The truth is, she was not the sort of person I’d associate with today.” She chose her words carefully, too aware of Abigail’s eyes on her. They felt more intrusive than reporters’ questions. “I never thought it was important to mention her. All I can do is wonder why she’d say such an outrageous thing.”

  “Oh, you know why,” Abigail sighed. “She wants money from you.”

  “They say she’s in some band,” Jimmy said. “So unless she’s on that American Idol show, I don’t think she’s makin’ much.”

  “American Idol is for solo singers,” Abigail corrected.

  “Then she’s definitely not makin’ money.” Jimmy didn’t keep up with pop culture, and the only bands he knew were either country or groups from the fifties. If he hadn’t heard of it, he was convinced it couldn’t be very successful.

  “Apparently Kendrick is familiar with her band,” Robin said. “It’s called Eye of the Storm.”

  “What’s that again?” Jimmy squinted.

  “The band.”

  “Such a silly name,” Abigail said, sipping her drink.

  “Well,” Robin sighed. “No one can ever have too much money.”

  Amidst the turmoil, Robin felt peaceful sitting under the hanging Spanish moss, the grand oaks watching protectively over her just like the trees on the farm had when she was a child. It was a living Monet painting, where there was no unrest, no judgment, only quiet for miles. Here she could take comfort in the sound of distant crickets—as long as they stayed in the distance, of course—and the pink lemonade sun in the afternoon. No matter where she traveled, there was no place quite as pretty as the South.

  Jimmy smiled at her. “My darlin’, you’ve got the truth on your side. And the truth will always set you free.”

  Robin smiled faintly. She wondered if the disgrace and pain she was feeling would eventually spread through her body like a disease and eat her alive. The morbid thoughts always found their way in…

  When Jimmy went inside to refill his glass, Abigail bubbled with anticipation. She leaned closer, aching to tell Robin something.

  “You know,” Abigail said so quietly, almost in a whisper, “there was a girl in school who used to hold my hand.” She sat back, her mouth wide with the expectation of Robin’s reaction.

  Robin smiled politely.

  “Not like how girls sometimes hold hands, you know,” Abigail continued. Obviously, she thought she wasn’t making herself clear. “It was at times when you just didn’t hold hands. And I felt, you know, sort of funny. She was a very cute girl, if I recall.” She giggled and gestured in her nervous hummingbird sort of way. When she didn’t get much of a response, she cleared her throat defensively. “Some girls kind of experiment in college, you know.”

  “Oh, well,” Robin replied. “I’m sure some do.”

  She stared out at the majestic oaks, thinking about Peter’s urgent message the day before. She would give him her answer today. There was no way she was going to meet with Adrienne. Absolutely no way. Of course it didn’t matter to the press. Minnie Douglas’s gossip column would talk about no other subject besides “Did she or didn’t she?” It was getting unbearable. No, she decided. That was final. Besides, talking with her would only dignify the rumors that were swirling around. No, she had to keep a distance, for political reasons. The more she rationalized, the better she felt.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I couldn’t understand Adrienne’s attraction to heavy metal music. The singers were always angry and snarling, the drums boomed, and the guitars… If a million bee stings could be heard, they would sound like those guitars. Sharp and insistent, sometimes dragging out the sting. The more I thought about it, the Scorpions and their Love at First Sting album kind of made sense. It scared me that it made sense to me. Without a doubt, something in the songs felt very dark and aggressive. When I heard heavy metal for the first time, I almost liked it, maybe because it was the opposite of everything I knew.

  “How can you not have heard this before?” Adrienne asked in her usually judgmental way. “Does your family live in a cave?”

  “Yes, yes, they do,” I said sarcastically. “There’s no music or TV, so we have to read by candlelight and carve things on the walls for fun.”

  “I believe it,” she said.

  Back at home, my dad preferred country music, while Mom enjoyed Bach and Beethoven. I’d grown up taking piano lessons not because I had talent, but because my parents thought I should have some kind of lessons. I had no natural gift for music, but I learned to appreciate the classical pieces I was playing. I was a rare high school girl who could detect the differences between Chopin and Mozart, Haydn and Brahms. Skid Row and Megadeth just hadn’t been on my radar. Until now.

  Watching as Adrienne turned up the stereo, relishing her heavy metal world, I saw a wild party girl, the kind of person who was up for anything. And that scared me. I didn’t take any of my own actions lightly. They were always seriously thought out, right down to the map I’d made of rest stops from Atlanta to Tallahassee. This girl, on the other hand, might do something on a whim. This girl could hurt me. I knew it instinctively the first night we met.

  As soon as Adrienne discovered that we got cable TV in our room, she immediately switched on “Headbangers Ball” on MTV. I was studying for my Western Civilization class and made the mistake of looking up at the screen. I’d never paid much attention to music videos, but this one was hard to ignore. Scantily clad women were being rounded up and thrown into a cage by the men of a rock band.

  “What is that?” I asked, a definite edge to my voice.

  “It’s Mötley Crüe,” Adrienne answered matter-of-factly, strumming an air guitar at her desk in front of an open textbook she wasn’t reading. The girl never studied.

  “I mean, what is that?” I pointed to the screen.

  “Oh, you don’t like that kinda thing, do you?”

  “Do you?” I replied.

  Adrienne smiled. “I don’t have a problem with it,” she said.

  I slammed my book shut. “If that doesn’t bother you, then you do have a problem.”

  “Hey, why should it bother me? It’s not me up there.”

  “It’s not you up there,” I repeated, shaking my head in disbelief.

  Adrienne squirmed. I could see that I made her defensive. “If these women wanna be in this video, it’s their right. Who the hell are you to judge?”

  “I’m a woman!” I gathered my things and left for the library. The atmosphere in the room had started to suffocate me.

  * * *

  Apparently there was some rule that film teachers had to have beards. Kyle Perkins, who taught film production, had a ragged, fuzzy gray beard that hadn’t been trimmed for decades. His eyelids sagged worse than his pants. He also had that film teacher scowl—the one that meant he’d been doing this for years, had gotten nowhere and was generally kind of disappointed with his life.

  On our first day, he’d given us a speech he must’ve given to every class that had come before: “It’s not too late to withdraw from this class! You can still get out and get a real major! Something with a future!” He looked out at the wide eyes and gaping mouths in the small, predominantly male, class of hopeful film students. “LA is nothing but a cesspool of politics and plastic surgery.” He smirked beneath his fuzzy beard. “Don’t go there. If you do, you’ll die penniless and alone. For those of you without the common sense to leave, let’s begin.”

  I’d been taking meticulous notes. As I wrote down “penniless,” I heard the weirdest noise—a distinctive laugh that could have been a type of horn used in some exotic countr
y. It was emanating from deep inside the nasal cavities of a boy, seated in the back, who was dressed in spandex shorts and a blazing pink tank top. “Ahh!” He laughed for what seemed like a whole minute. I thought it would never stop.

  “What’s your name, in the back?” Perkins asked.

  “Andrew,” the boy managed, catching his breath. “Andrew Bennington.” He announced his name like we should all remember it because he was going to be famous. I admired his confidence.

  “Andrew.” Perkins raised an eyebrow. “You might wanna see someone about that, son.”

  Some students laughed, while I scowled at the teacher. A man in his position shouldn’t be making cracks like that.

  A couple of students dropped out after the first day, but for the following weeks, our number stayed the same. We only had this class once a week, so it took longer to get to know the material, not to mention the other students. I’d never had a class where our first assignment wasn’t due for weeks, and the final film wasn’t due until the end of the second semester. But I soon understood why. Before we could make our first short student film, Perkins had to teach us all the features of a camera, how to get a particular shot, even how to set up a tripod. Today he had run in and without a word to us scribbled “F-stop” on the chalkboard. Then he looked over his shoulder.

  “I’ll admit I’m disappointed,” he said. “Usually I weed out more of you starry-eyed types as it gets more technical.” He shook his head. “You guys…” He held his fingers on each side of the bridge of his nose. Did he have a headache? “I wish I could give you the benefit of my experience. But you have to make the same stupid mistakes. No one can tell you.” He looked up at the lights, half-smiling, as if he were talking to God. He was having some sort of epiphany. I, on the other hand, was thinking about dinner tonight.