A blonde with femme fatale lipstick and a librarian blouse tapped me on the shoulder. “Can I have your seat?” she asked, holding up a picture of KitKat on her iPhone. “My best friend just died and I really need to sit down.”
I glared up at her. If there are vampires anywhere in the world, they’re in this end of Brooklyn, sympathy-sucking leeches living every day like it’s their own private reality show, latching on to anything that might get them a moment of attention, a warm body, a subway seat on a ten-minute ride. “This is my seat,” I growled. “Because I’m the one who found her body.”
The train screeched into the station. Everyone stared at me as I stood and parted like the Red Sea to let me off. Fuck them all. I’d walk the rest of the way.
Chapter 3
HEAVEN KNOWS I’M MISERABLE NOW
Sid was already waiting in a booth when I arrived, still wearing his gray vest from work, his tie slightly loosened, tobacco-colored hair soft on his widow’s peak. Like the southern gentleman he was, he stood when I came in.
“You’re shaking,” he said, holding my shoulders in a way that made my knees go weak. “Darlin’, what’s wrong?”
Darlin’. Finally, someone who felt sorry for me instead of just for themselves. I didn’t get to wallow in public angst, hoping strangers would pat my shoulder, follow me on Twitter, or fuck me all better. The regret I carried was something deeper, like a bullet lodged in bone. I fell apart in his arms, sobbing in a way that made the other patrons look up from their cheeseburgers and crossword puzzles to stare at me. I just didn’t give a fuck anymore.
“Jett, Jett, easy, sweetheart, easy,” he cooed, easing me into the booth. “What happened?”
I blubbered everything—KitKat and Baldrick, the cops, the hipsters on the subway—while I wiped my tears and blew my nose on napkins that disintegrated at my touch. I even told him about getting sick. He held my hands between his, blowing warm breaths onto my frigid fingers until two coffees I hadn’t heard him order arrived. He shook his head when I took a deep shaking breath and a sip that burned my tongue. “That’s awful,” he murmured. “Just awful.”
All I could do was agree. And just as suddenly as it had all come on, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Change the subject,” I said. “Talk about something else. I’m sick of thinking about it.”
“Let’s order first,” he said. “Sounds like you could do with something solid in your stomach.”
I cringed. Work at MetroReaders had been slow these last few weeks, and my paycheck was about as skinny as a teenage fashion model. A cup of coffee and a Danish at Egg School on Sunday was the only splurge I could afford, and having dinner with him today meant that I’d have to make an excuse not to brunch this week.
“Get surf and turf if you want,” he said, not looking at me as he glanced at the menu. “It’s my turn to buy and my rent’s already paid.”
My stomach grumbled. Much as I wanted to take him up on the offer, my body was not equipped to handle that much grease and fat and protein. When the waitress came back around, I got a refill on my coffee and ordered a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Sid, tantalized by his own suggestion, got a T-bone. He winked. “Your turn next time.”
He always said that but Sid only let me pay if we were going out for something cheap: hard cider and frites, bubble tea, candy on movie night. He made a lot more than I did and had quick hands to seize a check. I don’t have a girlfriend, he once told me. So I might as well spoil you. It wasn’t like he didn’t have offers—girls adored Sid; I don’t know whether it was his electric white smile or his bouncy little ass or his peach-pie accent, but no matter where we were, I caught them staring, sneaking pictures, and whispering. If he noticed, he never took them up on the implied offers. He hadn’t dated anyone since he moved here.
In the five months I’d known Sid, he’d become my favorite person in the world. We met at one of Natalie’s art parties; his roommate, Terry, had dragged him along by way of introducing him to the neighborhood, and we’d talked in the corner for most of the night. When everyone else was loud, sloppy, and drunk in that inevitable aftermath of privileged boozing, we slipped off the scene like criminals and holed up at a twenty-four-hour diner that closed about two weeks later. We had pie and coffee at eleven thirty P.M., and I sopped up every trace of his accent. He had a passion for New Wave unrivaled by any hipster in a Wang Chung T-shirt from Rags-A-Gogo, and it was almost hysterical to hear him talk about Devo in a drawl usually reserved for singing off-key to Toby Keith.
Like me, he was a transplant trying to make his way among natives, and it bonded us as fast friends. He traveled light, arriving with a tablet and a new phone, a few vests and ties for work, a pair of weekend jeans, and an electric razor. I reintroduced him to the physical pleasures of vinyl one night over Trader Joe’s brie in puff pastry, and as he began to build his collection of XTC and Duran Duran, I let him keep his platters at my place. It assured us at least one date a week, like visitation rights to records I had primary custody of. For the first month we were friends, I hoarded those nights like pirate treasure, living in this constant fear that he would find someone cooler to hang out with. What was a bottle of wine and some old vinyl compared to the city’s vast array of nightclubs and wild, willing girls? I’d already lost the last guy I loved, Catch, to such a world, and I kept waiting for it to seduce Sid into its neon arms. But he kept coming by, week after week, with a new record in hand and that same Christmas-light smile, and my fears began to settle.
“Maybe this will make you feel better,” he said, unwinding his earbuds and handing me the right one. “Tenpole Tudor, ‘What You Doing in Bombay.’ I just discovered them and I’m kind of obsessed with this song. The bass line is almost identical to REM’s ‘Can’t Get There from Here,’ but don’t let that deter you.”
He queued up a cheerful post-punk track, just under three minutes of solitude, away from the other diners, away from the death I could still feel on my back. I could think of a lot of things I could do in Bombay—Mumbai now, if I remembered anything from high school geography—chief among them not being here in Brooklyn.
I handed him back his headphones when our meal arrived and felt a little better with a new tune in my head. “So I guess that means you probably don’t want to continue with our scheduled viewing of Homicide,” he said. “We’re about to get to the Vince D’Onofrio episode and it’s pretty rough.”
In addition to eighties music, Sid was obsessed with old cop shows. “The Shield is great, don’t get me wrong,” he’d told me once, “but it completely changed the genre, and now everything’s trying to be gritty. You can’t just have a detective solving a crime anymore—he has to be a morally ambiguous antihero with a violent streak, and it just bores me. Vic Mackey bored me. I was always Team Dutch, myself.”
“Maybe not Homicide,” I agreed, blowing on a spoonful of soup too hot to swallow. “Is there any Stephen J. Cannell ground we haven’t covered? I liked The Rockford Files.”
He gave it some serious thought and two bites of steak before he answered. “It’s not my man Stephen, but Cagney and Lacey might not be a bad call,” he said. “Or CHiPs. There’s no problem so terrible that Pocherello can’t fix it.”
“As long as it’s not Miami Vice and as long as you don’t show up wearing an unstructured jacket and sockless loafers,” I joked, my sense of humor coming back with my appetite. “What about this weekend?”
He rolled his eyes. “This weekend’s no good.” He groaned. “I told Terry I’d go out with him. He’s been bugging me for weeks, keeps saying he has the perfect place to take a ‘southern gentleman’ like me. It will probably be boring as hell and possibly suicidal, given what his idea of southern is, but the only way to get him to stop bugging me to go out with him is to actually go out with him. I figure this should buy me at least a month of ignoring him.”
“What, like duck hunting? Cooking meth?” I joked. “I did pretty well in chemistry, can I come along too? Heaven knows
I could use the cash.”
“Darlin’, I could not live with myself if I forced you to spend an evening with him, especially after what you’ve been through.” He reached across the table for my hand and kissed it. “But I’ll probably be texting you throughout the whole ordeal, so it will be like you’re right there with me.”
I got a giddy feeling in my stomach that was normally reserved for waking up from a dream about Stephen Colbert. “And when you do come over, you can cook me a delicious barbecued squirrel,” I said, trying to mask my sudden bliss.
Sid took a bite of his T-bone and chewed for a moment. “I’m pretty sure that’s what this steak is,” he said.
For one perfect moment, I forgot about KitKat. For a moment, everything was normal again, just dinner with my best friend, talking about music, mocking his idiot roommate. I thought about suggesting we slumber-party in a motel for the night, watch pay-per-view with bags of microwave popcorn and minibar booze, but I didn’t have the money for dinner, let alone a night in a Manhattan high-rise.
We finished our dinners. Sid dropped me off at my subway station with a long hug and a kiss on the cheek and left me with nowhere to go but home to my crime scene.
Chapter 4
THE BATTLE OF WHO COULD CARE LESS
Within a week, KitKat’s crime scene was cleaned up and the papers had a new headline, a new corpse, a new scandal. Her body had been shipped home to New Hampshire to be buried. All that was left to do was pack up her stuff so the landlord could rent out her apartment. The super swore us all to secrecy about what had happened there.
Hillary was charged with cleaning the place out and put an invite on Facebook saying that everyone was welcome to come take what they wanted on Friday night, bring booze, bring food. Her family had held a private memorial service, so this was the time for all of us to say the good-byes we couldn’t post on Twitter.
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to go down there alone. It was going to take everything I had to walk through that door again, to get a drink from that same kitchen where, just a week ago, her blood had been spilled. Sid agreed to go with me in lieu of our planned CHiPs marathon, and even as we stood at her doorway, my hand shook in his. He’d only met KitKat once or twice; he’d told her that her red velvet cake was better than his grandmother’s, and she’d posted it as her favorite review on her website. By the time we got there someone with a blue sticker had already claimed her recipe binder.
Crying tattooed girls leafed through her record collection, and boys in oversized glasses and sweater vests hung around her decoupage kitchen table, where the liquor and chips were stocked. I didn’t know most of her friends, but I recognized Natalie and Mac over by the bookcase, who gestured to me with the traditional hipster greeting of a chin toss and a glance away, pretending to be in the middle of something so important that it couldn’t be disturbed for a proper hello. KitKat had introduced me to Natalie at one of her Stitch ’n’ Bitch nights, and Natalie, in turn, introduced me to Mac, whom she had, at the time, been dating. In addition to managing the Brenner Gallery, Natalie also maintained a blog about her dating adventures titled The Village Bicycle. Although she and Mac had broken up, if Natalie stopped hanging out with all the people she’d slept with, she’d probably have to leave Brooklyn.
“This is the weirdest memorial I have ever been to,” Sid said under his breath.
Weird, twee, and oddly appropriate. KitKat would have been totally into this scene if it had been for anyone else. Even in death, she embodied the heart of Barter Street. For a moment, I forgot my part in her passing and just enjoyed the high of interconnectivity we were all sharing.
That all vanished when I saw Hillary, perched on the kitchen windowsill, smoking, ignoring everyone. She looked twice as old as when I’d last seen her, at KitKat’s thirtieth birthday party: the blue streaks faded out of her blond hair, left-arm tattoo sleeve covered by a chunky gray sweater, no jewelry but the twisted-rope metal of the wedding ring her ska-band-trombonist husband had given her. She was the first person I’d felt genuine sorrow for other than myself, but I couldn’t find the words to express any of it.
“H-hey, Hillary,” I stammered. “How’re you holding up?”
She flicked her cigarette butt out the window and shrugged. “I just want this all over with.” She sighed. “God, all these people are so fucking annoying. Frauds, all of them. I should have just dumped this shit off at the Salvation Army.”
Two shrieks erupted from the bedroom, and Hillary huffed herself off the windowsill to investigate. I followed, taking the glass of red wine Sid held out to me like he was in the water line at a marathon. Jylle, with her blond bangs and cowboy boots, was crumpled in a heap on the bed, clutching the sleeve of a red vintage dress, while Brandi, with sob-streaked mascara, held the rest.
“This . . . is . . . my . . . favorite,” Jylle sobbed in staccato. “KitKat would want me to have it!”
“You’re too fat for it!” Brandi said with a snarl through her own black tears.
“For fuck’s sake.” Hillary rolled her eyes. She snatched the pieces of the dress out of both their hands and shoved it onto me. “It’s yours, Jett. Enjoy. You two, get out.”
They stared at her. Hillary threw shade that would have made a drag queen shiver. I looked at the whole scene and then at the dress in my hands. The girls gathered themselves up and left without another outburst. I shoved the sleeve into my pocket and tossed the dress over my shoulder, following Hillary until I got back to Sid.
“What was that all about?” he whispered.
I shook my head. Hillary returned with a Whole Foods bag and a sheet of green garage-sale labels with two already missing. “Just stick these on whatever you want,” she said. “And you can keep Baldrick. I went ahead and claimed his food and water bowls for you. Our aunt Jenny made them; they should stay with him. I’ve got his cat carrier too, if you want it.”
“Sure,” I said, holding up my labels. “I’ll . . . uh . . . go claim it.”
Sid refilled the bourbon in his glass and dropped two octopus ice cubes in with a barely audible clink. I put a sticker on the ice cube trays. I didn’t need or want them, but I felt like I had to take something, like accepting a homemade cookie even though you couldn’t stand raisins.
I took my wine and my date over to where Mac was thumbing through KitKat’s DVDs. “I always wondered where she got the name Baldrick from,” he said, holding up Blackadder Goes Forth.
“She always said that Monty Python got overquoted,” said Natalie, taking a seat on the ottoman and adjusting one of the lion-mane scarves she wore effortlessly draped around her neck. “She said once you heard a douchebag in a fedora recite ‘Dead Parrot’ for the hundredth time, you had to start exploring other areas of British comedy.”
“He’s just sleeping!” yelled some drunk, fedora-sporting douchebag from the other room.
Natalie rolled her eyes. “And that one’s with me,” she muttered.
“Here,” Mac said, passing the DVDs to me. “You got the cat, you should get the source of his name too.”
That was when I teared up. I felt like a thief. Everyone in this room had adored her, and here I was, sharing their same grief. Was I no better than the girl who’d tried to take my seat on the subway? I hadn’t even told anyone but Sid about finding her body.
“We’ll all miss her,” Mac said, giving me a side-hug. “She was a real bright spot on this block.”
I let him hug me. It made me feel less like an outsider. I took a deep breath and Natalie squeezed my hand. I took a drink and looked around. It was okay to mourn. It was okay to be sad in this place. No one was taking a survey of who was really her friend and who was a faker. Well, no one except Hillary, but she seemed to like me. And for the first time since I had arrived on Barter Street, I felt like I belonged to the neighborhood.
“Oh man, remember that time she and Bronco hosted the Nick Arcade party when his annual Fourth of July Calvinball game got rained out?” Natalie a
sked.
“I still have the T-shirt where she wrote our high scores on the back!” Mac exclaimed. “I haven’t gotten that far in Golden Axe since, and I have it on my fucking phone.”
Bronco. All of her other friends were present, but her boyfriend was nowhere to be seen. “Why isn’t Bronco here?” I asked.
“No one’s heard from him since we all found out,” Natalie said. “I bet he’s pretty beat-up about it.”
“Hillary said he was at the funeral,” Mac said. “But he isn’t answering his phone, hasn’t posted to Facebook, nothing.”
“I’m worried about him,” Natalie said. “I’m going to drop by tomorrow and bring my vegan lasagna.”
Group visits were a huge part of Barter Street life, complete with cookies and semi-ironic casseroles. When I first moved in, I joined a Facebook group dedicated to posting photos of ugly casserole dishes in an ongoing game of who could find the most hideous. I wondered who had gotten KitKat’s yellow and white paisley dish, which had taken prizes for both ugliness outside and delicious chicken-and-bacon goodness inside. Whoever had the pink tag had already laid claim to it.
Natalie pulled a panda alarm clock out of her bag and checked the time. “Which means I’d better get to the store now if I’m going to get some soy cheese.” She pointed to me, then withdrew her hand. “I was going to ask if you were up for going to Axis for Homework on Saturday, but I guess it doesn’t seem right to go without KitKit.”
Homework was a weekly dark-eighties dance party that Natalie, KitKat, and I had dropped by occasionally. I thought about the tape still sitting on my dining room table and briefly toyed with the idea of contacting DJ MissTaken and asking her to play it in tribute to KitKat. But I didn’t even know what was on it, and chances were, MissTaken wasn’t lugging a boombox around with her mixing board.
The Big Rewind Page 2
