The Key to the Golden Firebird

by Maureen Johnson

  “Our car is nasty,” May said, closing her eyes.

  “I know.”

  Her mom switched on the radio, and they soft-rocked out for a few minutes. Neither of them really liked that kind of music, but it seemed soothing, numbing. One of the other things about May’s mom was that she had once been a hardcore punk girl. The spikes in her hair had been harder, stiff with gel, formed into sharp points. Gone forever (but not forgotten—her father had taken a picture to use as blackmail) were the ripped fishnet stockings, the shock-white face makeup, the black eyeliner that stretched all the way out to the hairline, and the combat boots. Now she was a gentle, soccer-mom kind of punk. But the soft rock was still unacceptable.

  “I’m working tonight,” her mom finally said. “I asked Brooks if she could take you to work if—”

  “If I failed. Which I did.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t had more time to teach you.”

  “It’s not your fault,” May replied. “We’re just on opposite schedules.”

  “Could you make sure Palmer eats some dinner before you go?”

  May wanted to say, “She’s fourteen. She can feed herself.” But that would be ridiculous. Palmer would survive solely on Doritos and doughnut holes if she could get away with it. May’s father, the security systems salesman, had been the great negotiator of the family, coaxing each bite of roast beef or tuna fish into Palmer with offers of softball catches and water ice. But Palmer was too old for that now, and her mom didn’t have the time or energy to think about how things should be—she only knew how they were. She knew that Palmer needed to have an actual dinner put in front of her and needed to be watched to make sure she ate it. And that kind of job always fell to May. In fact, May didn’t have to say anything at all to her mother’s request because her mother knew her answer would always be yes. There was no room to say no anymore.

  “I don’t want to pressure you, May.” Her mom sighed as she turned down the shady entrance of their street. “I’m sorry. You know how much I count on you. Brooks should be more responsible, but we both know she isn’t. I need your help. And when you can drive…”

  “It’s no pressure,” May lied. “It’ll be fine. I just need a little more practice.”

  “Right. You’ll have no problems the next time.”

  She gave May’s ponytail a light tug. May forced a smile.

  Inside, Palmer was sprawled all over the sofa, her long limbs draped in every direction. She tipped her head up on their arrival, took one look at May’s face, and lowered herself back down and focused on the television again.

  “You failed,” she said. “Great. Now I still have to ride with Brooks.”

  May trudged upstairs, threw herself onto her bed, crawled under the quilt, and fell asleep.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time that May woke up. Her room was dark and cold. She rolled out from the warm spot under her quilt, slid into her slippers and pulled on a sweatshirt, and made her bleary-eyed way downstairs. The television was blasting from the living room, and her sore head began to pound slightly.

  A glance at the clock told her that her mother had already left for the hospital and that she had less than an hour to get ready for work. She headed to the kitchen to get some dinner together. Along the way, she picked up a cup and a coffee mug from the hall table. There were even more dishes scattered around the kitchen. May gathered them up and loaded the dishwasher. She wiped down the counter. She had to scrub hard to get rid of all the sticky juice and soda and coffee rings. The washcloth had a sour, fishy smell.

  Dinner prospects were grim. The edible contents of the refrigerator consisted of one bottle of Brooks’s spooky blue post-practice Gatorade (strictly off-limits to anyone else), year-old pickles, some tuna fish salad (age unknown), half a piece of fried chicken, and some brown iceberg lettuce. The pantry wasn’t much better. There were some boxes of cereal that contained only dry, dusty evidence of their former contents. Some soups that had been around so long, they had become heirlooms. Crisco. Rejected packets of plain instant oatmeal.

  May finally settled on a box of macaroni and cheese. She found some freezer-burned ground beef and decided to warm it and cook the two together. This “casserole” was one of the few foods that Palmer was sure to eat. Not the most nutritious meal, but probably better than a handful of chips. At least it was the good kind of macaroni and cheese—the kind that came with the pouch of cheese goo.

  After starting the hot water for the macaroni, May sat at the table and pulled over the stack of textbooks she had piled in the corner. She had just enough time to finish up the set of trig problems for class on Monday. Grabbing a mechanical pencil from the fruit bowl, she set to work.

  The phone rang immediately.

  She stared at the cordless that sat just two feet in front of her, then smothered it with the quilted toaster cover.

  “Get that?” May yelled in to Palmer.

  No reply. It rang again.

  “Palmer! Get that!” May repeated.

  “You get it.”

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone!”

  “That’s your mental problem,” Palmer replied.

  Why did the toaster cover have so many burn marks on it? That couldn’t be good.

  “What if it’s Mom?” May called back.

  “What if it is?”

  One last ring and the caller was shuttled off to voice mail land.

  “Thanks!” May added.

  “No problem.”

  May heard the television volume increase. The kitchen wall began to vibrate. She got up and marched into the living room. Palmer was huddled close to the television, basking in its glow. She wore her sweats, her fleece jacket, and nasty fuzzy slippers. Additionally, she had draped the old crocheted living room blanket over her head like a hood and was wearing May’s chenille gloves. If she’d had a marshmallow on a stick pressed up against the screen, May wouldn’t have been completely surprised.

  “You know that you’re not outdoors, right?” May asked.

  A cold stare.

  “Could you turn that down a little?”

  Palmer turned the volume up another notch.

  “Where’s Brooks?”

  Palmer shrugged.

  “She’s supposed to be taking me to work in an hour,” May said. “Do you know what time her team meeting is over?”

  “There’s no meeting today.”

  “Then where did she go?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Did she tell you?”

  “No. She just left with Dave when you and Mom were asleep.”

  “Dave?” May repeated. “Oh, great.”

  Dave had recently come into Brooks’s life. He had wide brown eyes, high cheekbones, thick eyebrows, and a fringe of long hair all around his face. He was always smiling a slow, mysterious smile, and he had to lean against something whenever he wasn’t sitting down. May begrudgingly admitted to herself that he was handsome—in a lethargic, werewolfy sort of way. She couldn’t tell if the two of them were dating, since Brooks never discussed it. And Dave certainly wasn’t shedding any light on the subject. May had exchanged exactly two sentences with him in the three or four months he had been coming by. One was, “I’ll go get her.” The other was, “She’s coming down.”

  If they were dating, Dave stood in stark contrast to Brooks’s last (and only) boyfriend, Brian. Brian was the brother of someone on Brooks’s softball team—a pleasant, extremely dull guy, who Palmer had blessed with the nickname “Nipplehead.” (There was nothing specifically nipplelike about his head, but the name just seemed to fit. Even their mom, who liked Brian, said, “You know, he really is a Nipplehead.”) He’d disappeared sometime during the events of the previous summer, and no one had asked about him since. Dave seemed nothing like Brian. When Brooks went out with Dave, she came back late and usually drunk. This was a new thing for Brooks. May was still getting used to the sound of hearing her come in and stumble around, doing everything too l
oudly and dropping stuff in the bathroom.

  But only one part of this interested May at the moment: Brooks definitely wouldn’t be back in time to take her to work.

  “Put my gloves back where you found them when you’re done.” May sighed. “Those are my good ones, from Christmas.”

  Palmer plunged her gloved hand into the remains of a bag of barbecued potato chips that lay by her side.

  “Don’t eat those,” May said. “I’m making you dinner.”

  Palmer shoved the chips into her mouth and turned back to the television.

  Sighing again, May went back to the kitchen and headed straight to the refrigerator. She pulled out Brooks’s bottle of Gatorade, poured herself a small glass, and dumped the rest down the drain. The empty bottle she placed in the middle of the counter. She looked out the kitchen window at the pounding spring shower that had come out of nowhere. This would prohibit her from getting to work on her bike—the trusty Brown Hornet, her dad’s twenty-five-year-old brown three speed, complete with “guy bar.”

  She could call her mom on her cell and tell her what Brooks had done, but there was no point. Her mom would be halfway to downtown Philadelphia by now, weaving her way through Saturday night traffic to get to the hospital. She would sigh and swear in Dutch and say something about having to talk to Brooks, but she wouldn’t. Lecturing Brooks was as useful as lecturing a cat.

  So May sipped the Gatorade and looked out at the rain.

  “Thanks a lot, Brooks,” she said to herself.

  Brooks had no idea where she was going. She had just gotten in the car when Dave pulled up.

  At the moment there were five of them in his Volkswagen, even though it really only held two people comfortably since the front seats were always pushed back to the maximum. Brooks sat in the back with her face pressed up against the window. The rest of her was pressed deeply into Jamie. Jamie was giving off a powerful orangey-jasmine odor, almost candy sweet. Someone else reeked of patchouli incense, cigarette smoke, and fast food. Brooks considered trying to crack open the window a bit for some unfragranced air, but she would be guaranteed a wet head if she did so. The rain was practically coming down sideways.

  “Come on!” Jamie yelled over the music pounding from the stereo. “It’s pouring. So let’s forget it. I want to go to that tattoo place instead, the one off of South, on Fifth.”

  Dave looked at Jamie in the rearview mirror with a bemused expression.

  “For what?” he asked. “So you can stand there in front of the place for an hour again?”

  “I’m going to get it this time,” Jamie said. “And Brooks wants to go. Right?”

  “Sure,” Brooks said, barely listening.

  Dave smiled at Brooks in the rearview mirror. It was his let’s-humor-her smile. Brooks returned the grin.

  “We’ll go afterward,” he said. “Relax.”

  Small exchanges like this one told Brooks that she was in Dave’s inner circle now—the one whose only consistent members were Jamie and Fred. Jamie was an extremely tiny and pale girl with catlike features and black hair cut into a sharp bob. She always wore tight, clubby clothes and three or four necklaces. She waxed her black eyebrows into high, dramatic arches and wore stark red lipstick that never seemed to wear off. She was so strikingly feminine that Brooks occasionally felt like a lumbering guy sitting next to her. Fred always rode in the front seat since he was about six-foot five. He had white-blond hair cut into a little boy’s page cut and a tattoo of Snoopy on his forearm.

  Along with Jamie and Fred, Dave always had a bunch of guys around him. Different ones every time. Henchmen. Tonight’s random henchman was sitting on the other side of Jamie. He was a weedy guy in a hooded sweatshirt who was interchangeably called “Damage” or “Bob,” but Brooks thought she heard that his actual name was Rick. Damage/Bob/Rick didn’t speak. He spent the entire ride trying to remove a thread from the back of the driver’s seat upholstery.

  Fred passed a plastic soda bottle full of orange liquid into the backseat.

  “Who wants it?” he asked.

  “I’ll take it,” Brooks said, grabbing the bottle. “Jamie’s wasted.”

  She uncapped the bottle and took a long swig. She shook her head from the force of the strange elixir—it was like gasoline with a little orange added for flavor.

  “What is it?” Brooks said, trying to place the sweetness and the hard, burning sensation that came with it. “Rum?”

  “King of Pain,” Fred said. “It’s got 151.”

  “One fifty-one…”

  “A hundred-and-fifty-one-proof rum. It makes really good fires. You like it?”

  “It hurts.” She groaned as the burning in her throat stopped. “But I like it.” This stuff was fast. Faster than anything she’d had before, even grain. She was laughing, and her head was thrumming within seconds.

  “Hey, Dave,” Fred said. “Can I light it?”

  “Not in the car,” Dave replied.

  “I’ll hold it out the window.”

  “Dude…,” Dave sighed. “Relax.”

  “This one time,” Fred went on, “I flamed it, right? I was down the shore and I flamed some 151 on the beach. And I was looking at it. And I totally burned off my eyebrows. Check it out.”

  He pushed back his hair and tilted his big forehead in Brooks’s direction. She saw that his blond eyebrows were very sparse. The skin underneath was all scar tissue, thicker and whiter than the rest of his face.

  “That was hilarious,” Dave said. Even Damaged Bobrick stopped thread picking for a moment to smile.

  Jamie was whispering into Brooks’s ear.

  “I’m going to get it,” she said.

  Brooks nodded her approval, even though she couldn’t care less if Jamie got a tattoo. She looked out the window at the flag-lined road they were driving down. They were downtown, on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In front of them, high above the road and looking like some Greek antiquity, was the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  “The art museum?” Brooks asked. “Is that where we’re going?”

  Dave smiled into the rearview mirror again. He turned off the parkway onto a smaller road that wound its way up to the art museum. They drove around its base to a small service entrance for emergency vehicles and maintenance crews, cordoned off by a single chain drawn across two poles. Dave stopped the car, and Fred got out and moved the chain so that he could drive through. The path was narrow, just wide enough for the car. The bushes rubbed at its sides as Dave slunk along, lights off.

  “Should we be here?” Brooks smiled nervously.

  She could see high windows through the greenery—bits of sculptures, walls of shadowy squares that had to be paintings. To Brooks’s amazement, Dave pulled the Volkswagen right up onto the grand plaza in front of the colonnaded central building and the grand fountain. The building’s two wings spread out on either side of them, embracing the entire area. The fountains and buildings were lit up with golden spotlights. In front of them was a huge, steep set of stairs that led down to the boulevard. It was intensely bright, but it was so high up that it was also amazingly private.

  “Rocky!” Fred screamed.

  “Rocky!” everyone else but Brooks yelled back.

  There was a scrambling all around Brooks. Doors flew open, and Fred, Jamie, and Bobrick tumbled out onto the brick plaza. They didn’t seem to care at all that there was a deluge going on. Fred and Damaged Bobrick were now screaming out the Rocky theme and running haphazardly toward the huge steps. Jamie delicately followed them in her little boots.

  Brooks noticed that Dave was lingering behind. Something told her to do the same.

  “You going?” she said casually.

  “No,” Dave said. “Come on up.”

  She slid out of the back and joined him in the front seat, getting fairly drenched in the process. She brought the King of Pain with her.

  “Ever see Rocky?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, he’s this boxer, and
he lives in Philly. There’s a really huge scene where he runs up these steps….”

  Dave pointed to the huge slope of steps directly in front of them, which everyone else was now stumbling down.

  “And that song plays.”

  Everyone else had passed out of sight by this point, but Brooks could still hear them screaming out the song. It grew fainter as they got lower. She took a long swig of the punch.

  “We used to come here a lot last year,” he said. “They do this every time.”

  “You don’t do it?” She smiled.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen the movie.”

  Brooks laughed. Dave grinned back at her. He had a small scar above his upper lip that stretched when he smiled. Maybe they all had scars on their faces. She would check Jamie’s face later.

  “So,” Dave said, “they don’t make you practice softball on Saturdays?”

  “During the day they do.”

  “How many afternoons a week?”

  “All of them.”

  “Harsh.”

  “It takes up a lot of time,” Brooks said, passing him the punch. Her hand brushed against his jacket. It was a heavy, soft corduroy, lined with a knobby wool that peeked out at the collar and the cuffs.

  “You’ve been playing for a long time, right?”

  “Since I was four.”

  “Aren’t you sick of it?”

  “Sometimes,” Brooks said. She leaned against the dashboard and looked down at the view. The dark was dropping lightly, she noticed, like a falling blanket. It caught on the spires of the Liberty Towers first, and they lit up. The yellow clock on top of City Hall was illuminated. The punch had gummed up all the vessels in Brooks’s brain that juiced her nervous reactions. Of course she should be here, in this most illegal of spots.

  “I used to dive,” Dave said, taking a sip. “That took a lot of time too. I liked it, but—”