Last Things

by Jacqueline West

  Will tugs the pencil out of her fingers. He opens his hand and the pencil falls to the table, rolling across the scarred wooden surface. “Look. You just used physics.”

  “So, you’ll be at the Crow’s Nest tomorrow night, right?” Frankie asks Carson. “If your dad’s gasket has been repaired, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What else are you going to do in this town on a Friday night?” Sasha pushes. “Count how many times you can drive up and down Main Street on one tank of gas?”

  “Come on,” adds Frankie. “Everybody’s going to be there.”

  Carson shrugs. He leans back in his chair, trying to look bored by everything. “I’ve heard all their stuff a hundred times already.”

  “You have not. They’re writing new stuff all the time. Anders says they’ll have at least two brand-new songs tomorrow.”

  Carson sticks his hands into the pockets of his letter jacket. “It’s kind of crazy that they have time to write songs at all, with their busy devil-worshipping and animal-sacrificing schedules.”

  Frankie tips her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t all metal bands worship the devil?”

  “I don’t know,” Frankie says. “Don’t all football players keep roofies in the pockets of their letter jackets?”

  Carson pulls his hands out of his pockets.

  “Speaking of new songs.” Sasha shoves her textbook to the side. She taps Frankie’s hand with the end of her pencil. “That soft one, that ‘Deep Water’ one. Is that about you?”

  Frankie tucks her hair behind her ear. It makes a perfect, pointed curl against her jaw. She smiles. “I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s definitely about you. There’s that line about ‘Her eyes are so dark I can only see myself. . . .’”

  “Narcissistic,” murmurs Will.

  “And ‘I wonder what she’s hiding, deep deep down where no one wanders.’”

  “And dirty,” Will adds.

  Now Sasha smacks him. “It is not.”

  “It does kind of sound like you,” says Carson. His face twists into a smile. “Does he call you and read you his latest lyrics over the phone?” He puts on a lower, raspier voice. It’s supposed to sound like Anders. It doesn’t. No one sounds like Anders. “Oh, Frankie. You’re so dark and mysterious and fine. You’re so metal you blow my mind.”

  Frankie is still smiling, but there’s a little defensive hardness in her face now. A jagged rock in a meadow. Frankie wants people to think she and Anders are together. She wants it to be the truth. Her eyes steer away from Carson and trail through the library shelves, drifting toward me.

  I turn back to the open encyclopedia. I need to be more careful.

  “I need to finish this page,” says Frankie, opening her math book. “Or, actually, Carson needs to finish it for me.”

  “Why do I need to finish it?”

  “Because you’d rather have us drive you home than ride the bus.” Frankie’s smile is playful now. “Right?”

  “Fine.” Carson spins her book toward him. “But I warn you, I’m not a math genius.”

  “Good,” says Frankie. “Neither am I. We don’t want Ms. Grover to get suspicious.”

  “Freaking physics,” huffs Sasha. She throws herself back in her chair. Her profile faces me. Behind her, on the other side of a half-bare bookshelf, I can see Jaden Angstrom reaching down for his book bag. Its strap is hooked around the shelf’s bottom corner.

  Jaden pulls. The bag resists. The rickety shelf wobbles.

  I see Jaden strengthen his grip. I see him pull again. Pull harder. I see the shelf begin to tilt.

  And then I feel the shelf’s splintery wooden edge in my hand.

  Without even thinking, I’ve crossed the floor. I catch the bookshelf before it can smash down on the table full of Frankie and her friends.

  Will jumps out of his chair. Together we push the shelf upright. A few ancient hardcovers, jostled out of place, tumble down and whack against the gray carpet. I catch two books awkwardly in my arms.

  Everyone stares. Sasha, still hunched over, protecting her head with one arm. Carson, blank faced. Frankie.

  I shove the books, sideways, any which way, back onto their shelf. I make sure my movements are slow and clumsy.

  Foolish. Foolish.

  “Quick thinking, Superman,” says Will.

  “You mean Supergirl.” Frankie’s words are for Will, but she’s looking straight at me. “Or Wonder Woman. That’s more like it.”

  I start to back away. “It wasn’t that heavy.”

  “Heavy enough to hurt somebody,” Frankie says. “Sasha could have been avalanched by books.”

  Sasha is still just staring at me. She looks like she’s flipped over a rock and is studying the things scuttling for shelter beneath it.

  I take another step backward.

  Carson is watching me, too. He and Will are both looking at me like they’ve never seen me before.

  And they haven’t. Not really. That’s been the whole point.

  I turn around now, toward my own table, ready to slip back over the edge.

  “Hey, wait,” calls Frankie’s voice. “What’s your name again?”

  I pause. There’s nothing dangerous in Frankie’s eyes. No shadows, as dark as they are. Just depths.

  “Thea,” I say.

  “Thanks for saving us, Thea.” Frankie’s smile. Pearls in a red-velvet box.

  “Nice reflexes,” says Carson.

  “Nice flannel,” says Sasha, not quite under her breath.

  I touch the cuff of the old gray-and-black plaid. It’s a men’s shirt, secondhand and a little too large, even on me. The cuffs are so worn and frayed that they feel like silk. I smile. “Thanks.”

  I move back to my table. I don’t rush. I am as gray and soft and indistinct as my shirt.

  I love this shirt.

  “You know who that is, don’t you?” I can hear Sasha saying to the others, in a too-loud whisper.

  “No,” says Frankie.

  “I’ve never seen her before,” says Will.

  “Yes, you have,” Sasha hisses. “That’s that psycho who lives in that shack in the woods with Mae Malcolm.”

  “I don’t know who Mae Malcolm is, either,” says Will.

  “Dude,” says Carson, disbelieving.

  “Yes, you do,” Sasha insists. “She’s that hermit who sometimes shows up around town, drunk, telling people about some awful thing she foresaw or whatever.”

  Will’s voice is even dryer than usual. “So she’s a witch.”

  “No, she’s, like, a lunatic.” Sasha hesitates, probably taking another look at me. “I guess that girl’s her niece or something. You’ve seen her, you guys. She comes to every single one of Anders’s shows. She’s, like, his stalker.”

  “We go to all his shows, too,” says Frankie.

  “But he actually wants us there.” Sasha’s voice gets sharper.

  “He wants everybody there,” says Frankie. “I think that’s the point of performing. To have an audience.”

  Sasha says something else, something in a genuine whisper this time. Carson answers her. Soon their conversation moves on, bumping away from me back to its usual course.

  I sit still, my eyes on the encyclopedia. Sacraments. Saints. Saint Petersburg.

  Frankie is kind.

  It’s too bad, really.

  Because Frankie Lynde has to go.

  Anders

  “Stop. Stop. STOP.”

  Patrick raises his sticks. He grabs a shivering cymbal between two fingers. Their hiss dies away in the oily air of his parents’ garage. “What?”

  “The beat there,” I say. “It changes time signature. It’s one six-eight measure and then a seven-eight one.”

  “And then it switches back?”

  “Yes. It’s one-two one-two-three one-two—”

  “I know what seven-eight time is.”

  “Then why are
n’t you playing it?”

  Patrick’s knuckles whiten. “Dude, if I hadn’t heard this song for the first time four minutes ago . . .”

  “Whoa.” Jezz speaks up. “Anders, why don’t you just play it again?”

  I let out a loud sigh.

  “I don’t need to hear it again,” says Patrick before I can even start. “I need the chance to freaking think for a second before I can pull a perfect drum line out of my—”

  “Okay, okay,” says Jezz loudly. “Someday we’ll be able to read each other’s minds, and then geniuses like Anders won’t have to feel so tortured and misunderstood. But until then, we’ll just have to deal. So let’s try it again.”

  “All right.” I pry my fingers off the neck of the guitar.

  I need to get this song out. It’s been pounding through my body since last night, tripping up my heartbeat with its rhythm. I need to hear it outside of my own head, ringing against the walls of Patrick’s garage. I need to be part of it. I need to bring it to life.

  I also need not to be an ass.

  “Sorry,” I mumble.

  “Just play the chorus again.” Jezz positions his hands on the bass.

  I move through it again, more slowly, speaking the words in rhythm.

  Come out come out wherever you are

  Come out and play

  Crawl out crawl out whatever you are

  You win you win

  I give in

  Jezz finds the bass line. He thrums softly along. “It’s creepy, dude.”

  “Of course it’s creepy,” says Patrick from behind the drum set. “Everything we play is creepy.”

  “Hey! You know what we should do?” Jezz gives a little hop, and his floppy blond hair slides down over one eye. “We should write one giant, sappy, totally cliché love ballad. Like, slow-dance-at-prom, end-of-the-movie ballad. We should wait until the crowd is going crazy, like, after ‘Superhero,’ and then we should just slide into this love song and watch their heads explode.”

  Patrick’s hard face snaps apart with a grin. “No. We should write a polka. We can become the world’s only polka-metal band.” He starts tapping out a three-four beat on the snare. Oom-pa-pa. Oom-pa-pa.

  “You mean the world’s first polka-metal band.” Jezz adds a bass line. “We’ll start a trend.”

  Patrick laughs. “Dude. We’ll be huge in Germany.”

  I start to smile, strumming a G chord. “Ach, Hedwig, I love ya. . . .”

  Jezz hoots. “Dere’s no one above ya. . . .”

  “You’re better than Blutwurst und Bier.”

  Patrick cracks up.

  The laugh warms the air. There’s more laughter from the backyard, where Mac and Lee and Ellie are sprawled on the lawn furniture. Some other kids, people I don’t even know, are lounging around on the lawn. We always leave the garage door shut during band practice, but we open the door to the Murrays’ backyard, so whoever’s out there can listen.

  People started showing up to our practices about three years ago, when we went from mediocre to almost good. Now they come every day. At first having them there felt flattering. It made us show off, made us work a little harder. Now it also makes me tired. I have to keep on the face, keep up the act.

  Someone is always watching.

  And I sound paranoid.

  “Perfect,” says Jezz. “We’ve got our polka-metal prom ballad. Now we sit back and watch the money roll in.”

  I pull my phone out of my pocket and check the time. “We should get back on track.”

  “What do you want to do?” asks Patrick. He plays a quick, tapping roll on the drum’s metal edge.

  “We need to do ‘Come Out and Play’ again. I want to do it at the Crow’s Nest tomorrow.”

  “What?” Patrick’s sticks stop. “We’ve got three new songs already.”

  “Three out of fifteen isn’t that many.”

  “We won’t be ready.”

  “We will if we practice enough now.”

  “Dude.” Patrick scrubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. “This is, like, sweatshop music. You keep cranking out the songs, and we keep assembling the pieces.”

  “I have to,” I say. “Or they just pile up, and it’s—” I flick at the strings with my fingernails. “Okay. Fine. Whatever. We’ll just play old stuff.”

  “I’m not saying I want to just play old stuff.”

  Jezz flops down on an overturned crate, settling in for the long haul.

  “I’d rather play stuff we’ve actually polished. Stuff that’s decent,” Patrick finishes.

  “Play ‘Blood Money’!” shouts Ellie’s voice from the backyard.

  “We haven’t done that one in forever,” Jezz points out.

  “Do we really want to play stuff we’ve already done a thousand times?” I ask the guys. “That’s like watching the same TV show over and over and over.”

  Jezz shrugs. “People do that.”

  “Stoners do that.”

  “Dude, stoners are people, too.”

  “Let’s just play a decent mix of old and new stuff then,” Patrick says, twirling a stick through three fingers. “Four new songs. Max.”

  “Or you could do some of the new songs on your own, Anders,” says Jezz. His tone is light, but I feel the air turn cold again. “Much simpler.”

  I look down at the greasy cement floor. Seeds from the backyard’s drooping birch tree are scattered everywhere, like tiny bread crumbs. “No,” I say. “One solo song is enough. More than enough.”

  Jezz slides off the crate. “Is the writer from the Tribune going to be there?”

  I keep looking at the floor. There’s a grease stain the shape of a huge hoofprint just to the left of my foot. “I think so.”

  “All the more reason for us to keep the new stuff pared down,” says Jezz.

  “All the more reason for Anders to do more solos,” says Patrick. “That’s why they’re coming anyway. Right?”

  “That’s not why,” I say. But I’m not sure he even hears me.

  “Come on,” Jezz tells Patrick. “Anders might be an obsessive-compulsive weirdo, but he’s not an asshole.”

  “I didn’t say he was,” says Patrick. He taps both feet impatiently on the pedals. The big drum pounds like a racer’s heart. “I just think he likes being in the spotlight.”

  Now I look straight into Patrick’s eyes. “I don’t care about the spotlight.”

  Patrick’s mouth curls.

  “I don’t.” A lie. He knows it. “I just wanted to be good at this.” I shake the guitar on its strap. “I don’t care about the rest.”

  “Sure,” says Patrick.

  “I don’t.” I’m lying to both of us now. Without recognition, what proof do you have that you’re any good? And I need that. I need to know it. “I’m not in this for some kind of fifteen-minute, freak-show fame,” I say loudly. “It’s not about me. It’s about us. It’s about our music.” Then, because Patrick is still glaring at me, I go on. “Look. I just got a call from S&A Management. They were practically begging me to meet with them. And I turned them down.”

  Shit.

  I hadn’t meant to tell them this. I’d planned to keep it secret. I hadn’t meant to throw it out like this, in the middle of an argument, like gas on a bonfire. And I know, by the way both the guys are turning toward me, that I’ve made a huge mistake.

  “What?” Jezz is saying. “S&A Artist Management? Like, that agency in the Cities? You turned them down?”

  “They wanted to meet with you?” Patrick says softly.

  “They wanted us.” I meet Jezz’s eyes. I can’t even look at Patrick now. “They’ve heard us play. I guess they sent a scout once, and we didn’t even know. They wanted to get to us before anybody else could.”

  “And you turned them down?” Jezz says again.

  Ellie and Lee and Mac have gotten up and gathered at the open back door. Their faces peer in at us, watching. Christ. Even this has to be a performance.

  “You guys.�
� I rake my sweaty hands through my hair. “S&A is small stuff. Little, local stuff. We are going to be big. There is big stuff on its way. I promise you.”

  Because I am going to get everything I want. Everything. Just like someone else promised me, months and months ago, that night behind the Crow’s Nest.

  “You didn’t even ask us,” Patrick speaks up. His voice is dangerously low. “You just made the call. On your own.”

  “We all said we’d wait until we were done with school. Right?” I’m getting louder now. “That’s what we said.”

  “Well . . . yeah,” says Jezz. “But there’s only, like, a month and a half left. And it’s S&A.”

  “Right. It’s S&A. We can do better.”

  “Who cares what we can do?” Patrick’s voice cuts in.

  I look back at him.

  Patrick’s forearms are like bridge cables. Years of high-speed metal drumming will do that to a guy. The cables twist as he turns the drumsticks slowly around in his hands. “This isn’t about us. You didn’t even ask us. This is all about you.”

  I can’t answer. He’s right. And I’m caught.

  “But we’re here, too,” says Patrick. He’s still speaking in that strange, low, calm voice I’ve only heard him use once or twice before—and once was right before he turned around and punched a redneck jackass named Kev Burr in the face. “We were going to do this together. Take a year. See what happens. But if you make all the calls, and you mess up, you pull us down with you.”

  “It’s true, Anders,” says Jezz. His voice is lighter than Patrick’s, but there’s a seriousness in it I don’t even recognize. “Maybe that was our chance. We shouldn’t just throw it away. I mean, this is Greenwood. You work at the plastics factory, you work for the mill, or you get the hell out.” He shrugs, giving a lopsided smile. “I thought we were getting the hell out.”

  “We are.” My hands are starting to shake. “I swear. We are.”

  Patrick sets his sticks on the head of a drum. They make a papery thud. “Why are we doing this, Thorson?” he asks. “Why are we practicing every single day? Why are you staying up all night writing songs and losing your mind when we can’t instantly learn them? Why are we doing two goddamn shows a week for free?” His voice is getting stronger. “Why are we even a band? If you’re not all in, why don’t we just shut the garage doors and play some Mastodon songs? Hell, why don’t we just play some Halo? Why are we doing any of this?”