The Key to the Golden Firebird

by Maureen Johnson

  She used some of the makeup she’d purchased for the prom. Brooks never wore makeup, so the sensation of having stuff on her face was a little distracting. She could smell the foundation (it reminded her of glue) as she rubbed it into her skin with her fingers. She applied a bit of the blush, then stood back to check the effect. It wasn’t even noticeable. She tried again, streaking the brush along her cheekbones up past her eyes.

  She took the condoms from her prom purse and considered them, unsure of where they should go. In the end she put two of them in the front pocket of her backpack. The third one went in the pocket of her jeans, in case she couldn’t get to her things when she needed them.

  As she came down the stairs, Palmer glanced over and grinned.

  “Hey, Ronald,” she said. “Blush much?”

  Brooks ran back up and practically sanded down her cheeks. The force of her rubbing only made them redder, until she couldn’t tell what was natural and what was cosmetic. After a minute, though, the redness faded, and Brooks was satisfied with the result. Her eyes stood out more. Her lips were pink and slightly wet looking, which was exactly the effect in the ad that had prompted her to buy this lipstick in the first place.

  Brooks stayed in her room until Fred arrived at seven to get her. He was on his way back from a beer run. It was a strange sensation, riding along with Fred, making idle conversation over his stereo, knowing what was about to happen to her tonight. This was it. She would walk in a virgin and out—not so much.

  Dave lived in a massive new house in a development by the mall. A dozen or so speakers shook the thin, new walls. The noise echoed down the newly paved street of mostly vacant houses. The ground actually had a pulse. There were cars in every available space along the entire length of the road.

  “I guess people are here,” Fred observed.

  He parked on the next street and didn’t seem to worry about being caught carrying two cases of beer to the house. It was crowded already. Some of the people Brooks recognized; many, she didn’t. Fred squeezed through a crowd by the door, hoisting the cases over his head. He continued on through the living room, straight out to a back porch. Brooks was on her own. There was nothing for her to do but go in and wander around until she found Dave or Jamie.

  She’d been to Dave’s a few times before, but it was a big enough place that there were many parts of it she hadn’t really seen. There was something strangely impersonal about the inside of the house. Brooks felt as though if it were destroyed during the course of the night, Dave could just pick up the Pottery Barn catalog and have it back in order within a day.

  Every room had its own wonders. The tarp from the swimming pool was stretched over the living room floor, and a keg sat in the middle. There were flaming Dr. Pepper shots on the enclosed porch. The blender was going in the kitchen. A bit of towel stuck out from under one of the bedroom doors where the potheads had barricaded themselves. There was a girl in a vintage eighties prom dress standing on the back deck and shouted the name Gary into a cell phone.

  Brooks wound her way down to the furnished basement. It was very dark, and the music was mellow and guitary. There were a few candles burning. This was a more refined group. People sat in all corners of the room, close together, talking. Jamie was there, sprawled out on a piano bench, sipping from an enormous round glass of blue liquid. She was perched above a group of what looked like college guys in retro-chic nerd gear—sweaters, T-shirts, thick glasses—and they were all talking in very deep and sober tones about some band that Brooks had never heard of.

  Jamie had taken the opportunity to pull out all the stops. Her black hair was chiseled sleekly behind her ears, she had long drags of black eyeliner carefully smudged around her eyes, and she wore tight black pants made of some leather-pleather-vinyl-plastic-wrap amalgam.

  Brooks looked down at herself. So tall, so plainly dressed. Her muscles, though still well developed, had melted a bit since she’d given up her daily workouts. She did have some glitter on her T-shirt, and she was wearing makeup…but it wasn’t the same. Jamie had a perfect, barely tinted glaze on her lips; Brooks’s were a childish pinkish red. And she still had a backpack on her back.

  “You look great!” Jamie said. “Sit down! Drink.” She pressed her glass into Brooks’s hands. Brooks studied the glass. Jamie didn’t even drink unfashionably.

  “I found that in a cabinet in the dining room,” Jamie explained.

  Brooks nodded, taking a sip of the blue liquid. It was a harsh combination. All raw alcohol.

  “I’ve been here since five. Dave’s here somewhere,” Jamie said, waving her hand and indicating the entire house. “He’s making the rounds.”

  As if on cue, Dave strode in with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red in his hand. He had kept his tuxedo from the night before and was wearing the jacket and shirt with a pair of jeans. He hadn’t shaved, so his face had a shadowy cast. Seeing Brooks and Jamie, he gathered them up, one under each arm.

  “My ladies!” he said. “Come with me.”

  Brooks and Jamie headed off on the parade route with Dave, and it soon became apparent to both of them that he had started early. He leaned on them heavily, and he kept accidentally knocking the bottle into Brooks, where it made contact with her clavicle with a hollow thump. Jamie was too small to offer any support, so Brooks ended up doing the lion’s share of the work.

  He dragged them from group to group, all people Brooks had never really met before. He did most of the talking, since these people regarded Brooks and Jamie as bits of human architecture. They exchanged amused glances across his chest and passed the bottle back and forth. They wound up their tour by kicking a few people out of the master bedroom and dropping onto the bed. It was covered in a thick, obviously expensive, and very ugly comforter. Brooks put her backpack down to the side and threw her legs up on the bed somewhat gracelessly. Try as she might, she still moved like a jock. Jamie stretched out as well. Dave reclined between them.

  Brooks tried to meet Jamie’s eye to signal her to leave. Jamie leaned heavily against Dave and wrapped her arms around his chest. Brooks leaned on his other side and crossed her legs in his lap.

  “What do you say?” he asked, drawing them both in to his shoulders. “We’re all here….”

  “You have to be kidding,” Jamie said with a laugh.

  “Worth a try.” He shrugged amiably.

  Brooks smiled at both of them but was a bit confused as to what was going on. Jamie was clearly out of it—she had buried her face in Dave’s neck and seemed to be going to sleep. Dave rummaged around in his pocket.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s play a game.”

  “I like games,” Jamie said, her muffled voice taking on an affected little-girl tone.

  “Me too,” Brooks said, surreptitiously grabbing one of Jamie’s fingers and tugging on it, trying to get her attention.

  Dave held up a quarter.

  “Jamie is heads….” He balanced it on his thumb. “Brooks is tails. Here we go….”

  He flicked the quarter into the air, then slapped it down on his wrist.

  “Heads!” he said.

  And with that, he passed the Johnny Walker to Brooks and rolled over on top of Jamie. Within seconds they were fully engaged.

  Brooks sat there for a moment, holding the bottle, trying to process what she was seeing. She had just been lost in a quarter toss. She stared at her reflection in the television, took a sip of the Scotch, and then quietly slid off the bed. She watched the two of them for just a moment before leaving, waiting to see if this was some kind of joke or if they would try to stop her. But they were both too busy.

  She set the bottle down on one of the dressers and left the room. Outside, everything still pulsed. Brooks walked back downstairs. A large guy with a goatee was sitting on the sofa with a bug sprayer at his feet. He regarded it proudly, like it was his pet. As Brooks passed, he held up the nozzle invitingly.

  “Close your eyes and open your mouth,” he said.

 
Brooks eyed the sprayer doubtfully.

  “It’s okay,” said a girl who was now suddenly standing beside Brooks. “I did it. It’s good.”

  The girl seemed like a bit of a Gap victim, a walking, talking display of khakis and white cotton shirt. But she seemed somewhat sober and certainly sincere. It was enough of an endorsement for Brooks. She leaned down and closed her eyes, and a fast shot of grain and juice washed down her throat.

  “Good?” he asked.

  She nodded. He looked pleased.

  “More?”

  She nodded again and received another spray. Thanking him in a thick voice, Brooks continued across the room and out the French doors onto the patio. She pulled a beer from the outside cooler and sat down at the empty wrought-iron umbrella table to collect her thoughts. Somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, she knew that she was devastated by what she’d just seen. It should have torn her apart that he was lying on top of Jamie right now, and that Jamie had been so willing, and that this had all happened right in front of her.

  But she was just drunk enough to momentarily accept this as part of the reality of the party. Instinct told her that if she drank more, it would become less and less of a problem.

  Brooks drained her beer and began peeling off the label.

  Suddenly the girl in the prom dress who had earlier been making her repetitive appeal to Gary threw herself down in the chair next to Brooks, put her head down into her hands, and started sobbing uncontrollably. She looked up for a moment and saw Brooks staring at her.

  “I hate him!” she screamed. “He said he would call!”

  Presumably this was Gary she was talking about. Not that Brooks really cared. Her brain was too busy making mental movies of what was going on in the bedroom.

  “I waited,” the girl continued, dribbling rivulets of eye makeup soup all over her dress. “But he didn’t call, and he wasn’t picking up, and he was on the phone with her the whole time, and—”

  “Shut up,” came an annoyed male voice from somewhere on the opposite side of the patio.

  “You want me to shut up?” the girl asked.

  A chorus of affirmative noises. The girl threw a knowing glance at Brooks. Brooks held up her hands to the group, indicating that she had no connection to the matter.

  “Okay.” The girl sniffed angrily. “Okay. I’ll shut up. I won’t say another word. I’ll just…”

  With that, she started slamming her cell phone into the wrought-iron table. Everyone else on the patio backed away from their corner.

  “Fountainhead’s doing it again,” Brooks heard one guy mumble as he retreated behind the grill.

  The girl made a low, animal-like grumble. She started banging other bits of the table to try to make more noise. She beat the phone on the chairs and on the hollow umbrella pole. Then she started a little chant to her own rhythm.

  “This…is…me…shutting…up…this…is…me…shutting…up….”

  “I have to go,” Brooks explained to her, quickly getting up. The girl was too absorbed now to care whether Brooks was there or not, and she said nothing as Brooks headed for the patio doors.

  Sprayer Guy was happy to have a repeat customer.

  “It’s good, huh?” he said as Brooks took another hit of the punch. She nodded, swallowing hard. The alcohol burned her throat this time.

  “Tell your friends!” he called to her as she walked away.

  Brooks made her way through the people on the basement floor, the people on the stairs, the people in the upstairs hall waiting for the bathroom, down to the bedroom door. She had made a decision. She would see what was going on.

  The bedroom door was closed. She put her hand on the knob and leaned her head against it, trying to hear what was going on inside. Everyone else in the hall was being too loud—laughing too much. She couldn’t hear anything. She gently tried the knob.

  It was locked.

  She was surprised to feel her eyes filling with warm tears.

  Brooks backed up and leaned against the opposite wall. She looked down at herself again—the jeans, the stupid T-shirt. Her hair smelled like smoke and her lipstick had eroded. She suddenly wanted out of this place, to get away from all of these people.

  “Hey…” A girl had grabbed Brooks by the arm and was pointing to the bathroom. “Where’s the puking sink?”

  “What?”

  “The puking…sink?”

  The girl kept falling forward, almost hitting her head against the wall.

  “It’s in there,” Brooks said, pointing at the bedroom door and walking away. “Just keep knocking.”

  While this was going on, May was at the wheel of Pete’s precious Cutlass Ciera, headed right for the center of Philadelphia, which loomed on the horizon, like Oz. She wasn’t happy about this, nor did she mean to be here.

  It had probably been a mistake to leave her house in the first place, as she was intently studying for her finals. She had taken over the kitchen completely over the course of the last week, writing papers, making flash cards, shifting from subject to subject. But she did have a lesson scheduled with Pete for that night, and she felt like she needed a short study break. He’d shown up and made the observation that highway driving was easier than driving on little roads—that the lines of traffic were neat and well divided and all you had to do was go straight. That had sounded good to May, so she’d agreed to turn onto I-95 and try to go a few minutes up the road.

  What Pete apparently hadn’t taken into account was that it was eight o’clock on a glorious Saturday night in June. The sun was just setting over the skyline, the air was balmy, and thousands of people were racing toward the downtown area. May found herself surrounded by tailgaters and weave-arounders who trapped her on the road, forcing her to drive all the way downtown. Or at least, that was how it seemed to her.

  “Okay,” Pete said. “This turns into an exit lane. We’ll loop through the city and turn around.”

  “Loop through the city?” May cried. “Are you nuts?”

  “It’s either that or keep driving forever,” he replied. “Besides, you just got off.”

  May looked up and found, to her horror, that he was right. She was on a ramp now, about to merge with fast-moving traffic on the Vine Street Expressway.

  She screamed.

  “Just keep right,” Pete said firmly. “You’re fine.”

  May turned the wheel hard to the right, and an angry honking came from behind her.

  “Uh…that’s okay,” Pete said, glancing from back to front quickly. “Maybe use the mirror next time. Good. Now. Merge.”

  “What?” she said, stepping on the brake. More honking.

  “No!” Pete yelled. “Go! Go! Now!”

  May stepped on the gas and the Cutlass narrowly slipped in front of a truck and into the right-hand lane of the expressway.

  “Okay,” he said, wiping his brow and pointing straight ahead. “First exit. Right up there. Turn.”

  This resulted in a near-death experience on a hairpin turn that wound 270 degrees and landed them on a tightly congested road near City Hall.

  “Okay.” Pete sighed. “We can stop. I’ll look for a parking space.”

  “No, we can’t!”

  “Why?

  “There are too many cars coming for me to stop!”

  “Just find an empty space—”

  “Shut up! I’ll figure something out,” May mumbled.

  They drove deeper into the city, into historic downtown Philadelphia, where the streets were as wide as twin beds. Cars were parked all along the side of the road, making it difficult for her to pass through. She gripped the wheel with such force, she felt as though she might snap it to pieces, like a pretzel.

  May looked at the lunchbox-size spaces between the cars on the side of the road. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw the endless stream of cars behind her. All she could do was drive on and on, deeper into urban traffic hell, onto streets that she imagined only got smaller and bumpier and had even more
trolley tracks to catch the wheels on and more drunken bystanders wandering into them.

  And this had all been Pete’s idea. He sat there, in his bright red T-shirt, his hair wild in the intense humidity, the fringe around his face almost covering his eyes—like some overgrown talking rag doll that spouted nonsense about driving when you pulled its string.

  “Come on,” he said. “There are two spaces right there. Just pull over and I’ll do the rest.”

  “I won’t fit.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “No, I won’t. Have you seen this car? It’s about fifty feet long. Just shut up for a second, okay?”

  Cars were now crowding her out on her left. Why were people trying to make these streets into two lanes? She screeched in anguish.

  “All right,” Pete said, speaking slowly, “at the next red light, put the car in park and I’ll slide over and drive.”

  “The light’s not long enough for that!”

  He leaned back against his seat and put his hands over his eyes.

  At the height of her despair, May had a burst of inspiration. She knew, from the occasional trips she took into the city with her parents, that there were parking garages where attendants parked for you. It would be expensive, but it was better than crashing the car or running someone over.

  “Look in my purse,” she gasped. “In my wallet. Open it up. See how much money I have.”

  He gingerly picked up May’s straw purse and poked around inside.

  “Three bucks,” he said.

  On her right May saw a sign with a big P on it and an arrow pointing left. She made an abrupt turn onto one of the narrow, cobblestone streets that she feared so much. There, in the bottom of some kind of warehouse, was the opening of a garage. She pulled the car up to the attendant and came to a jerky stop. She laboriously rolled down the window with a shaking hand.