Ferocity Summer

by Alissa Grosso

  “Thank you for the diagnosis, but unless you have anything truly revelational to tell me about Randy, I think I’ll be on my way.”

  Bill silently fiddled with his bomb. So I turned around and started back up the stairs.

  “Did you know the government created Ferocity?”

  I stopped on the fourth step and turned around to look at Bill. His attention remained fixed on his instruction sheet and his more-or-less bomb.

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “Randy Jenkins is a drug dealer,” he said.

  “I know that.”

  “Earth to Miss Observant. Randy Jenkins sells Ferocity.”

  “There’s no way. That stuff’s not around here.”

  “Right. You see it on the TV news, so it must be someone else’s problem. Davies Pauliny sing songs about it and they’re from Chicago so there’s no way it could be out here. I mean, what, we only live an hour away from the biggest city on the Eastern Seaboard. Wake up. Ferocity is here and it’s not going away.”

  “So there’s a cop following me around because Randy sold some drugs.”

  “Not some drugs. Ferocity. You don’t know shit about Ferocity.”

  “It’s the latest fad,” I said. “The latest way for everyone to look down on the youth for being a bunch of drug-addicted slackers.”

  “No one gets addicted to Ferocity.” Bill shuffled his pile of papers and glanced over at me. “They never get a chance. One hit and that’s it. You’re salad fodder.”

  “That’s only if you overdose,” I said.

  “There is no ‘overdosing’ with Ferocity. Either your brain can handle the drug or it crashes. Most people crash. It’s so new even the media hasn’t caught on to what a nightmare it is.”

  “If it’s so new, how can it be spread across the country?”

  Bill moved his arm to wipe the sweat off his forehead and his elbow grazed his pile of papers, sending them to the ground. The whole disorganized mess tumbled around his feet. He gave up on it and turned to face me.

  “It starts on the college campuses. Students go home over the summer and bring it with them. Very interesting distribution model—the government knows what it’s doing.”

  “But the FBI is after Randy because he sold Ferocity?”

  “No one gives a shit about Randy Jenkins. They want to know who’s supplying him, and who’s supplying his supplier. They want the big, big fish.”

  “Okay, but if the government is behind this whole plot, as you say, then wouldn’t they already know who the big fish is?”

  “The FBI is a mere government agency. They are not in the know.”

  “So I’m on intimate terms with a cog in the machine.”

  “We’re all cogs in the machine, but you should probably disassociate yourself from that particular cog. He’s no good.”

  “This from a guy who’s building a bomb in his basement.”

  Bill shrugged, then began to retrieve the mess of papers from the ground.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Bye.”

  “Keep your chin up.”

  My head was spinning. I didn’t know how much of what Bill told me was true. He was obviously insane, but I felt that there had to be at least a few grains of truth in there. For all I knew it was Bill who was the sane one and the rest of us that were crazy.

  It wasn’t until I got back to the car that I realized I’d completely forgotten to ask Bill if he knew who Danielle and Brandon were. I thought about going back inside, but I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to find out.

  July

  Andrea’s private sanctuary looked nothing like I would have expected it to look. It was straight out of some Sears catalog. The abundance of pink frills was absolutely astounding. A canopy bed, a menagerie of stuffed animals, pictures of teddy bears on the wall—it all stood in such contrast to the person Andrea was that it made me dizzy. Did Andrea lay boys in this bedroom, and if so, what did they think of curtains that looked like the offspring of a little girl’s Easter dress and a ballerina’s tutu?

  Only slightly more dizzying than the picture of perfect innocence painted by this sugary sweet room was the fact that I was actually sitting in it. Sitting, in fact, on Andrea’s bed, where she slept, beat off, and maybe had fucked half a dozen boys or more. The goddess of good luck was smiling down on me. I pushed a strand of hair out of my face and watched attentively as Andrea admired herself in her full-length mirror.

  Willow and I used to do this, just hang out in her room. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d hung out with Willow when she hadn’t locked herself in a bathroom for way too long while she not-so-secretly ingested her special poisons. Was that what I was doing here? Did I think Andrea was somehow going to take the place of my best friend? The way my heart sped up when I looked at Andrea seemed to insist that it was more than friendship I was after.

  “Do you think I’m attractive?” I asked. It was a bold question, but I figured Andrea would interpret it as two girls talking beauty shit.

  “Of course you are, Scilla,” she said, turning away from the mirror and looking toward me. I smiled. “You have beautiful hair and wonderful eyes. A little makeup would help bring out your eyes; some lipstick to highlight your lips. You could really knock their socks off.”

  Andrea scooped up a handful of cosmetic products from her dresser and carried them over to the bed. She spread them out on the fluffy comforter, then proceeded to pick up different mediums in various shades and held them up to my face, tilting her head and pouting her lips as if we were attempting some difficult feat of engineering and not beautification of teenage girl à la Andrea. She leaned toward me and began to apply eyeliner, eye shadow, mascara, foundation, lipstick, the works. I sat there frozen as she hovered over me, her cotton-encased and plentifully padded chest brushing against my arm, her hair caressing my cheek, her bare legs touching my bare legs. It may very well be the closest I’ve ever come to paradise on earth.

  Andrea finished with me after a couple of minutes. She stepped away to admire her handiwork, then grabbed a hand mirror so that I could have a look for myself. I looked like something between a little girl playing dress-up and a prostitute. I giggled, and Andrea giggled with me, throwing herself down on the bed in a mound of frilly pillows.

  “I might have gone a bit overboard with the makeup,” Andrea said.

  “No, no,” I insisted. “I feel like an absolute debutante.” I struck a pose.

  I’d almost forgotten how good it felt to be goofy. It felt great. It’s how it used to be with me and Willow, all the time. I missed that.

  “Hey, I heard Macy Lundquist wigged out on Ferocity last week or something like that,” Andrea said.

  “Shit, are you serious?”

  Macy was a total high school socialite. What the hell was she doing messing around with Ferocity? Maybe it was just another fruitless rumor full of false hopes and unrealized dreams.

  “Yeah, I heard it from a good source,” Andrea said. “Is that messed up or what?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  There was a lull in the conversation and I found myself looking at Andrea’s body, now sprawled out on the bed. I looked away guiltily.

  “It’s true, everything they say about me,” I said.

  I didn’t know why the hell I said it. It just felt like I had to. I knew I’d just killed the mood and perhaps my new friendship.

  Andrea didn’t say anything at first and I knew she was upset, or worse, disgusted.

  “Everything they say about me is true too,” she said.

  I looked up, and we were both smiling. Andrea grabbed hold of my hand and dragged me across the bed so that we were lying next to each other like … lovers after a delightful romp? Okay, maybe more like best friends sharing deep secrets.

  On the wall in front of us, between two ridiculous teddy bear pictures, was a Davies Pauliny Poster. The band’s members posed for the camera wearing leather, torn jeans, and rock star sneers
.

  “I think they’re so hot,” Andrea said almost dreamily.

  “Me too,” I agreed. Andrea shot me a look of surprise. “Well, I like cock too, you know,” I said.

  Andrea let out a ridiculously girlish laugh, then buried her face in my hair.

  I couldn’t move; I forgot how to breathe. Two tastes of heaven in one day. I must have been doing something right.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Willow asked.

  “Andrea,” I said, grinning.

  “What?”

  “Not what you’re thinking. I was just hanging out at her house. She gave me a makeover.”

  “Oh,” Willow said. “You were at Andrea’s?”

  “Yeah. It was fabulous. We were just talking and shit. It was like this total womanly bonding experience.”

  “Oh.” I heard the hurt and the jealousy in Willow’s voice. It wasn’t like there was some rule that I could only hang out with her, but it wasn’t like I’d ever hung out with anyone else before. I’d never wanted to hang out with anyone else before.

  We stood in Willow’s backyard, the summer sun beating down on us and melting the mounds of makeup on my face.

  “Hey, did you hear? 7-Eleven got robbed the other day, a real live hold-up. Looks like you picked the right time to quit your craptacular job.”

  “Well, if I was gonna rob a convenience store, I’d start a little higher on the food chain than Johnny’s Quik Mart.” I tried to sound casual, but I was thinking of the other day, that twitchy guy who beat a hasty retreat when Joe Bullock and his entourage stepped in. The way the girl behind the wheel of the car had peeled out of the parking lot. I wanted to ask what day, what time 7-Eleven was held up, but knew it would come out sounding weird. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Probably it was. How many folks had walked through the door of Johnny’s Quik Mart that I had mistaken for would-be armed robbers? Too many too count. Not too long ago, I’d mistaken Christian Calambeaux for a gun-brandishing thief, and he was a cop.

  Christian Calambeaux was like a nasty, half-healed cut. I’d pushed all thought of him to the back of my mind, and the wound had nearly healed up. Thinking about him, though, tore the scab right off that cut and fresh blood rushed forth. My attempt to shove him back into the dark corners of my head was like trying to seal up an ugly wound with a too-small Band-Aid.

  I thought about what he said, about Randy. I thought of what Bill had said, about Ferocity. There was so much I needed to tell Willow. There was very little I could tell her.

  I looked over at her, ready to say something, but the words didn’t want to come out.

  “Wanna come with me?” Willow asked. “I have to go pick up some necessities.”

  Well, it was either that or go back home where my mom would bitch me out for not having a job and throwing away my life and whatnot.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “First though, you have to wash that shit off your face. You look like a fucking transvestite for chrissakes.”

  I was still riding my Andrea high and didn’t notice the familiar Lincoln Town Car parked outside Pointless Pursuits until Willow parked her car. She was about to get out when I grabbed her arm.

  “What the hell?” she asked.

  “You can’t go in there,” I said.

  “Is this your idea of an intervention?”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Neither is red meat or MSG, but everyone eats the stuff.”

  “I mean—” I began, but stopped myself. I couldn’t tell her that I recognized that car as belonging to Christian Calambeaux, the worst-dressed FBI agent in all of human history, because I’d never bothered to share my meeting with him and his interest in her brother. I’d deliberately withheld this very important information from the girl who was supposedly my best friend, and now was not the time to tell her. Worse still, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share it with her.

  “You mean, what?” Willow asked, annoyed. She pulled her arm from mine and had her car door open.

  “Don’t get out!” I said. This time she rolled her eyes and looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “That car,” I said, pointing at the Lincoln. “It looks like a cop car.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Willow, think. You ever seen a car like that parked here before?”

  She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t move either. She studied the black vehicle as it shone in the summer sun.

  “It doesn’t look right,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to say.”

  She looked longingly at Pointless Pursuits, then back at the car.

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Is that a chance you want to take?”

  “I’ll say I’m just here to look into getting a tattoo.” She opened the door all the way and stepped out.

  “Willow, come on. This isn’t a good idea.”

  I was desperate. All I had to do was play my trump card. All I had to do was tell her everything. But I couldn’t do it. Willow stood there, hesitating. I willed myself to tell her the whole story—why I knew the car, what Christian wanted me to do, Randy’s dresser drawer, and everything Bill had told me—but my lips wouldn’t move. My tongue was frozen.

  “The trial,” I finally managed to say, and it was enough. Willow sank back down to her seat and slowly pulled the door closed after her. There were tears streaming down her face.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Willow said.

  “We need to leave.”

  She complied, starting the car, pulling trancelike back onto the road, heading back home. The tears kept falling.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said again.

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not fine. I’m not fine at all.” I knew she was right, but I didn’t agree with her. “I would understand if you hated me and didn’t want to be my friend anymore,” she said. “I’m such a fuck-up.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You come from a fucked-up family, maybe, but you’re still my friend, you idiot.”

  Willow giggled, and it almost felt like everything was going to be just fine.

  July

  On a languid afternoon, Willow and I lay on her heavily fertilized back lawn absorbing mutagenic chemicals through our pores and wallowing in our angst.

  Happiness had begun to feel like an impossible goal. I felt sick of everything. I wanted a new life. It was impossible to not dwell on all of my mistakes, to live my bad decisions over and over again in my head while trying unsuccessfully to undo them.

  “Why the hell are you so mopey?” Willow asked.

  “Why? Because the girl I have a crush on is only interested in guys,” I said.

  “I’m flattered.”

  “I’m talking about Andrea.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. Didn’t I warn you you’d get nowhere with her?”

  “I’m a dreamer, all right?”

  “Sure. Hell, we’re all dreamers. How can you not be when you’re stuck here in some shitty podunk town in the middle of summer with absolutely nothing to do? We should be out there in the world having fun. Instead, we’re sitting here in my backyard counting blades of grass.”

  “All I was counting were my sorrows, and the number of guys Andrea has chosen to mess around with instead of directing some of that attention in my direction.”

  “Fuck, girl, you’ll spend the whole summer counting,” Willow said. “I think you better let it go now.”

  “Life sucks.”

  “Life is a magnificent adventure and we’re wasting it.” Willow sat up. “You know what I think? I think it’s time we took a little journey.”

  “To where? The mall? Shop our blues away like the products of consumerism that we are?”

  “Easy there, Miss Cynic. No, I was just thinking it’s time we paid a visit to Pablo the Perpetually Stoned.”

  “Pablo the Perpetually Stoned? He doesn’t exist. He’s just a myth.”

  Willow was on her feet in a flash. “Shows wh
at little you know, my little lesbian friend.”

  “I prefer ‘bi.’ ”

  “Pablo the Perpetually Stoned is completely and totally real. He’s one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to this miserable world of ours.” She danced around the lush green lawn like a child on a Kool-Aid high.

  It was so pointless. The water wasted on this grass could have supplied an entire African village. The Jenkinses didn’t even use their backyard. The summer drought meant that people in towns with city water were not allowed to water their lawns or wash their cars, but we had wells, and the Jenkinses used their well water to water the grass they paid someone else to mow.

  “Do you know that Pablo can read your fortune in his palms?” she said.

  “In his palms? You mean, in your palms?”

  “No, silly, in his palms. He’s the great Pablo. He can see everything in his palms, everything that ever was and ever will be. He is a god.”

  “He’s a drug addict.”

  “He’s the king of drug addicts. Come on, we’re going. He’s going to tell us about life. He’s going to tell us everything we’ll ever need to know.”

  It was not a long journey to the legendary Pablo’s but a circuitous one, winding about many a country road, a meandering path that itself seemed like a long, lazy afternoon drug trip. Or Willow was lost and she was just driving around now, around little ponds full of algae and swampy creatures, down roads kept dark in the midst of a midsummer afternoon by the looming evergreens, up and down sparsely populated hills and mountains.

  Despite Willow’s insistence, I was sure that Pablo was nothing but a myth, a fable that had been passed down from one generation of high school students to the next. Maybe there’d even been a real Pablo at one time, and who knows what he’d been like. Maybe he was just some kid who smoked a lot of pot and dropped out of school and went to go live in the woods for a while. That seemed believable. Maybe he’d eventually grown up, gotten married, something like that. Surely he couldn’t have been around as long as people said he’d been—fifteen, twenty years—and stoned the whole time. That could be nothing but an out-of-control rumor.