Last Things

by Jacqueline West

  Dedication

  For Ryan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

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  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Jacqueline West

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Thea

  I like the edges.

  Places where things end. Fade out. Disappear. Where two things eat away at each other until neither of them really exists anymore. Sharp edges. Frayed edges. Places that are more than one thing, or nothing. It’s more comfortable at the edge. No one really pays attention to you if that’s where you live, or stand, or eat your lunch.

  Most people don’t even notice that you’re watching them.

  On Friday nights I go to the Crow’s Nest. Everyone goes to the Crow’s Nest. All the kids from high school, all the bored twentysomethings, all the coffee drinkers and scruffy artists and metal fans within a fifty-mile radius. Last Things plays on Friday nights. There’s not much else to do in Greenwood, even on a Friday night. And Last Things is special. They’d be special anywhere.

  In a town like Greenwood, they’re legendary.

  The Crow’s Nest Coffeehouse is out of town, down a twisty road that leads back to the river, if you’re not in a hurry to get there. The woods lean in around it. They lean farther and farther. They drop acorns and send out reaching suckers. They’ll get this spot back eventually. They’ll take everything.

  The Crow’s Nest is an old farmhouse with the innards ripped out. The interior is just one huge room, with a stage at the back and a coffee bar at the front. The walls are so coated with stickers and posters and ragged-edged artwork that there’s no telling what they’re made of, or what color they used to be. Part of one outer wall has been replaced by a row of glass doors, so the room leads straight out onto a weathered porch, and from there to an overgrown patio full of mismatched tables and junkyard statues and climbing vines and chipped bathtub planters full of dirt and whatever kinds of flowers survive on a decade of tough love.

  On nights when Last Things plays, the place is packed.

  Guys in T-shirts and leather, girls in black. A blur of tattoos on exposed skin. Piercings. Heavy boots. Thick makeup. Clumps of soft-faced freshmen, out past their usual curfews, whispering about music. Every table taken. The floor in front of the stage already occupied by rows of the most hard-core fans.

  Sometimes I take a table at the edge of the patio. There’s one behind a potted juniper that has a clear view of the stage. If that spot’s taken, I pick a seat in back, at the very end of the coffee bar, where Ike and Janos are busy at the espresso grinder or drizzling sickly caramel syrup into the lattes the other girls order.

  I order café au lait. Not sweet, but not bitter. Just on the edge.

  And it’s cheap.

  Last fall, after I’d ordered café au lait for three weeks in a row, Janos started charging me for a regular coffee, which makes it even cheaper. Sometimes he hands the cup over with a friendly wink.

  I come alone. I’m no trouble.

  Not to him.

  Then I take my spot, on the edge of the patio or at the end of the coffee bar, and I watch the half-ready stage, and I watch the crowd waiting, talking, shoving, texting, posting photos of their eyeliner or their perfect pouting lips, and I sip my coffee.

  And, of course, I watch the woods. They’re always closer than you think.

  Someone lets out a whoop. Patrick, the drummer, and Jezz, the bassist, have stepped unobtrusively onto the stage. Jezz is lanky, with long sun-blond hair; Patrick has a buzz cut and burly shoulders and arms. Jezz looks like a surfer who got lost here in northern Minnesota. Patrick looks like he could rip a car apart with his bare hands and then put it correctly back together again.

  They arrange mic stands, check amps. It takes ages. They’re particular.

  It’s actually Anders who’s particular. But he doesn’t help with the setup. He doesn’t appear until the very end. Because the moment he steps onto the stage, everything changes. The taste of the coffee. The lights. The air. It’s an energy that can’t be sustained, not while the band futzes around with plugs and strings and cords. It starts to feel dangerous. The simmer before an overflowing boil.

  So Anders waits until everything is set.

  Then he steps through a back door onto the little stage, holding his black electric guitar—I’ve heard he calls it “Yvonne”—and there’s a shift in the air. People scream, as though half of them haven’t sat across the aisle from him in math class.

  And they haven’t, really. Classroom Anders blends in. He’s medium height, with choppy brown hair and the kind of features you only start to notice the second or third time you look: well-shaped face, nice edges, sleepy-lidded eyes. You could pass him in a crowded school hallway and not look up.

  But seeing him on stage is different. You wonder how you didn’t see it all along. You wonder how you ever looked at anything else.

  He seems taller, looming over the packed room. His face is harder. His hands, sliding into place on the black guitar, are long-fingered and rough. But the way they move isn’t.

  There’s a beat. A blast of feedback.

  The first song starts.

  It’s “Dead Girl.” I recognize it immediately. I know all the songs by heart. Even the new ones, the ones they’ve only played in public once or twice. The ones they’ve never played in public at all.

  Patrick hunches behind the drums, his arms a muscular blur. Jezz leans back like the bass in his hands is a counterweight.

  And Anders. At the front of the stage. At the microphone. The black guitar in his hands. Anders.

  Anders.

  My hands are always cold

  she says, she says

  I forgot my coat

  she says, she says

  Would you walk me home

  Walk me home and I’ll be warm

  I’m not the only one who knows all the words. Half the crowd is screaming along.

  Just a little more

  she says, she says

  It’s lonely underground

  she says, she says

  But we always leave the door—

  We always leave the door open

  By the second song there’s a pit forming in front of the stage. Bodies are jumping, writhing, smashing into one another. The music gets faster. Harder. The floor trembles. Energy crashes off the raggedy walls. It shoves back at the woods. It pushes out the emptiness.

  I stay at the edge, sipping my coffee. But the music has gotten into my blood, too. My heart thumps in rhythm.

  Finally, when the energy can’t rise any higher, everything stops.

  There’s a hush. That floating feeling, after the ground disappears beneath you but before the fall.

  Anders plans all of this. The order and number of songs, the moment when the hunger will peak. The pause.

  He trades Yvonne for the acoustic guitar.


  The roaring, thrashing crowd goes still. Patrick rubs a thick forearm over his face and rests his sticks in his lap. Takes a long drink of water. Jezz backs toward the wall, where the shadows erase him.

  The song starts with a few instrumental lines. A melody moves up and down the lower strings.

  The room has been sealed in glass. No one moves, or everything will shatter.

  Anders starts to sing.

  For most songs, he uses a growl, a mix of low tones and monster rasp. But this is his real voice. It’s smooth and warm and softer than you’d expect.

  The song is called “Deep Water.”

  I’ve heard it four times, because that’s how many times he’s played it. I’m at every show. At the edge. Keeping watch.

  Nothing you can do

  She’s got secrets, depths where you can’t go

  She’s been here before

  One day she’ll carry you away

  Everyone keeps still. No whispers. No click of cups on tabletops.

  The woods are listening, too. A soft, cold wind, a wind that has passed through the palms of ten thousand rustling leaves, moves across my ear like a breath. The woods are getting hungry. But they’ll wait. For now.

  The song holds us all. Metalheads. High school cliques. The things that wait in the woods.

  Anders’s fingers move over the strings. Slowly and softly enough that the strangeness is hidden now, wrapped up in the perfection of the song like one knot in a silver tapestry, one tiny bug in a dewy spiderweb. Most people are too caught up in the music to notice. But if you watch as closely as I watch, you see.

  A final note soars and soars, holding everything still, until Anders silences it with the press of his fingers.

  The end.

  Before anyone can applaud, scream, clap, anything, Patrick and Jezz jump into the next song. It’s “Breakdown.” Driving and hard and deafening. The audience, set free, loses its mind.

  I finally pull my eyes from the stage.

  It doesn’t take long to find Frankie in the crowd.

  It’s only because Anders is onstage that everyone in the room isn’t staring at her. Frankie has a force like gravity. Wherever she stands becomes the center of everything else. Elements arrange themselves around her. She’s the opposite of everything I am.

  Frankie has dark brown hair and full lips. She doesn’t wear makeup. She looks like the heroine of a romantic French movie. I watch her watch Anders, which she only does part of the time. Now she’s whispering to a friend. Getting another drink. Doodling something on a napkin, which she passes to someone else. Not what you would expect from the lead singer’s girlfriend. Or maybe you would.

  The band plays three more songs. The air in the room gets thicker. The woods creep closer. The sky is blackening like something scorched.

  They end with “Superhero.” Everybody—everybody—knows the words to this one.

  They came down from another world

  bigger than ours, stronger than ours

  Beautiful strangers

  under a sun where there’s nothing new at all

  Look around at the mess we’ve made

  bigger than us, better than us

  Opportunities we waste

  in a place that starts to seem too small

  We need a caped crusader

  We need a savior

  It comes down to this

  Red leather gloves and a long black list

  We know we asked for this

  X-ray vision and an iron fist

  Someone to rescue us

  bigger than us, smarter than us

  Decide and think for us

  when all we build is doomed to fall

  Someone who’ll protect us

  bigger than us, stronger than us

  Close and lock the doors on us

  keep us safe behind the walls

  Now bow down

  I said GET DOWN

  It comes down to this

  Red leather gloves and a long black list

  You know we asked for this

  X-ray vision and an iron fist

  Anders breaks into a guitar solo.

  Watching the show, no one would have thought he was holding back. But it’s suddenly clear that he was.

  His fingers on the neck of the guitar are a blur. The other hand, like a claw, tears at its strings. Fast. Fast. Impossibly fast.

  No one should be able to play this fast.

  Not so flawlessly. Not so young.

  Outside, just beyond the wall of sound, the woods roar.

  The crowd is too deep in the frenzy to notice.

  Sometimes I think Ike catches it, leaning one big elbow on the counter, behind his gleaming espresso machine. He owns the place. He’s got thick skin and sharp gray eyes. There’s not much that slips past him. But his face never gives anything away.

  The solo tears to an end. The chorus blasts back one last time.

  You know we asked for this

  X-ray vision and an iron fist

  X-RAY VISION AND AN IRON FIST

  With the last line, the noise in the room is so loud—the screaming guitar, Anders’s amplified voice, the voices of the crowd singing along—that it actually has weight. It presses down on me.

  But then the song ends, and everything collapses into the hailstorm of applause.

  Anders takes one quick little bow. He turns and walks off the stage.

  Jezz and Patrick wave, hold up their sticks and their bass, soaking up a few more moments. Then they walk off, too.

  The applause and screaming slowly, finally, die out. The crowd turns back into people. They look at one another. Laugh. Fracture into small groups to smoke a cigarette, make out, climb into cars. Frankie and her friends glimmer away.

  I don’t move.

  Once the room is mostly clear, and Ike and Janos are wiping tables and putting up chairs, the band finally comes back out onstage. They wind cords, collapse stands. A few fans, headbanger guys and some giggling girls, press up to the stage. Some of the girls ask Anders for autographs. One of them asks him to sign the skin of her arm. Then she darts off, blushing, laughing, and floats out the door with her friends.

  Another journalist is here tonight. He’s recording on his cell phone, jotting notes in a tiny book now and then. He stands at the edge of the stage, leaning back in his peeling screen-printed concert T-shirt and battered black jacket. The room is quiet enough now that I can hear their conversation.

  They’re talking about Mastodon. Trivium. Alaya. The journalist scatters metal band names like confetti. Jezz and Patrick are only half listening. The journalist isn’t really talking to them anyway. It’s Anders he’s speaking to. It’s always Anders.

  The band put their instruments in heavy black cases. They gather armloads of cords. Climb down from the stage. The journalist doesn’t help, but he follows them out the side door to their cars, still talking.

  I know, because I follow them, too.

  It’s dark now. A cool April night, with thick blue sky and tangled clouds shutting out the moon. The woods are still a little too close. They’ve quieted, though. I can feel them pulling back, a loosening in the air. Patrick and Jezz hoist their stuff into the bed of Patrick’s black truck. Anders’s trunk is open. He lays his guitars inside. There are blankets in the trunk, I notice, ready to cushion the cases. It looks like the scene of a cozy abduction.

  The journalist finally stops talking. He shakes hands with the band, Anders last.

  “Thanks again, guys. I’ll be in touch when the piece is up.”

  “Cool. Thanks,” says Jezz.

  “Drive safe, man,” says Patrick.

  Anders doesn’t say anything.

  Patrick shuts the back of the truck. His eyes catch on me, lingering in the shadows, back by the overgrown porch. “Hey.” He nudges Anders. “Look. Your stalker is here.”

  Anders finally looks in my direction. His face stays absolutely still. But his eyes meet mine for long enough that it’s al
most like a greeting. This is as much as I can ask for. I have to keep hidden everywhere else. But at The Crow’s Nest, I’m just another fan. Another follower. Here, he thinks he’s safe. Anders turns back to the car, closes the trunk. He murmurs something to Jezz and Patrick. They all laugh.

  He doesn’t give me another glance.

  They climb into their cars, Jezz and Patrick into the truck, heading toward the east side of town, Jezz’s house, Patrick’s place, and Anders heading toward his house, not far away, here on the northwest, near the woods.

  I wait until their taillights have winked out in the distance, down the cracked asphalt of the road.

  I get my bicycle. I take the path straight through the woods. The trees lean back as I pass. They whisper and hiss. They know what I am. They know what I know.

  My own house isn’t far away, on a mossy dead-end road deep in the oaks and pines. I’ll pass Anders’s house first. Take one more look. Make sure he’s inside. Watch his windows. Wait until he shuts off the lights. Maybe.

  Maybe I’ll wait even longer than that. Maybe I’ll watch all night.

  Anders

  When I get home, I take an epic shower. I do this after every show at the Crow’s Nest. It’s the start of my comedown. And I need to come down, or I’d still be buzzing from the energy of the show at four a.m. I’m sure Mom and Dad think I’m doing some embarrassing and perverted teenage guy thing in here. They’d be surprised to know I’m just standing with my back to the showerhead, my hands hanging at my sides, letting the spray pound the aching muscles in my back.

  Not that I really want them to know this, either.

  I keep the water right on the edge of blistering. Hot enough that when I climb out, the bathroom is one big cloud, and I’m just a shadow on the foggy mirror. Even when I wipe the fog away, I barely recognize myself. I grew three inches last year, long after I’d stopped expecting it. Free weights and push-ups have changed things, too. These days, my arms look less like something that could have been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. Plus, Patrick’s sister gives me free haircuts in exchange for letting her practice her cosmetology school techniques on me, so I don’t look like the poster boy for the fifteen-dollar kids’ cut at ValuClips anymore.

  I look like—

  I don’t know.

  I clear another stripe of mirror with my forearm. The guy staring back at me from that blurry stripe is taller, broader, choppier haired than the kid I still expect to see. I put on the rock-star face. Aloof, a little haughty. A little hard. The guy in the mirror almost pulls it off. He can fake it, anyway. Except for the eyes. His eyes still show what a complete and perpetual dork he is.