Last Things

by Jacqueline West

  And I wake up starving.

  In the kitchen I thump through the cupboards, pulling out the coffee filters and the big tub of Folgers, setting out mugs for Mom and Dad.

  I find a skillet. There’s a half stick of butter in the fridge, and most of a carton of eggs, and a loaf of white bread. It’s been a couple of years since I made French toast, but I think I still remember how.

  I’m halfway through the first pan when Mom drifts into the kitchen in her worn blue bathrobe.

  “You started coffee? And French toast?” She leans over the stovetop, beaming. She rubs my back between my shoulder blades. “What’s the occasion?”

  I shrug. “I was hungry. And I wanted to do something for you two.”

  Mom’s smile quivers. She actually looks teary. Guilt spears me, that such a stupid thing means this much to her. I turn my eyes back to the next slice of bread.

  “You were out late last night,” says Mom, patting her eyes on her cuff and pouring coffee into her mug.

  “Yeah. You didn’t wait up for me, did you?”

  “Oh, I went to bed around midnight. I just noticed that you weren’t home yet. I assumed you’d stayed late at the Crow’s Nest.”

  I had stayed late at the Crow’s Nest. And then I’d spent another hour or two driving around town, long after all the businesses were locked and the houses had switched out their lights.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “How did it go last night?”

  “Fine.”

  Fine. Except that my band—my best friends, the guys I’ve spent every day with for the past four years, musicians who can back me even when I’m playing some song I’ve never played before—is blown to shrapnel.

  But I’m not going to think about that.

  I can’t. I can’t even think.

  “Whoa-ho,” says Dad, shuffling into the kitchen. He’s already dressed in his jeans and button-up plaid shirt. I don’t think I’ve seen him wearing anything else in years, not early in the morning, not late at night, not even on the days when he’s got no work to get dressed for. He probably showers in jeans and a button-up plaid shirt. “What’s going on out here? Did we hire a chef?”

  Mom pours Dad a cup of coffee. “Come and sit.” She pats his usual spot at the table. “We’ll all eat the very same thing at the very same time!”

  Mom sets out the fake maple syrup and the fake orange juice, and I put down the plate of French toast.

  We all dig in.

  “Not bad,” says Dad, nodding at me over a forkful. “I think you’ve got a backup career here, if the guitar thing doesn’t work out.”

  This isn’t really a compliment. And I know Dad doesn’t really mean it as one.

  Mom makes a little tutting sound. “So, Anders,” she says brightly. “We need to talk about your graduation party.”

  I swallow a mouthful. “We do?”

  “Yes, we do. We need to talk about when you want to have it, and what you’d like to do, and how many people you want to invite, and if you want Last Things to play. . . .”

  My chest gets tighter with each word. “I don’t know.”

  “We could set things up in the garage for the band. Couldn’t we, Brian?”

  Dad nods slowly. I can tell that he’s mentally moving his truck and parking it somewhere else, putting his power tools in the basement, shunting the long-dead boat motor out of sight. “Sure,” he says.

  “I think that would be perfect. There are relatives who haven’t heard you play in ages. I’m sure they’d love to hear how far you’ve come. They’ll be blown away.”

  I shrug with one shoulder. I’m still starving, but the French toast feels like a gooey lump in my mouth.

  “We could grill out,” Mom goes on. “Brats. Burgers.” Her face is still smiling, but now there’s a little question in her eyes. A little worry. “We could swing that. Right?” She sends a silent message to my dad.

  I shake my head. They don’t need to spend a bunch of money on something that doesn’t deserve celebrating anyway. I’ve got no plans left. No future that I can even really picture. “Everybody grills out. Let’s just have cake.”

  “Well,” says Mom, “that just leaves the big question then.” She pauses dramatically. “What kind of cake?”

  The kitchen phone rings before I can answer.

  Mom pops up. “I’ll grab it.”

  Her voice comes back to us from around the corner. “Hello? Yes? Oh, good morning! How are you?”

  Dad points at me with a loaded fork. “I mean it,” he says. “This is good.”

  I give him a half smile. “Good.”

  “You know, you could get a restaurant job this summer. Maybe at Roxy’s. Maybe at the golf course. Pay would be decent.”

  I slosh some orange juice into my glass. “Restaurants always want you to work weekends.”

  “Hmm.” Dad pauses. “And you’re still planning to play those two shows a week. For free.”

  The realization hits me. I won’t be playing those two shows a week. I won’t be playing any shows at all. The future is as empty and flat as a sheet of paper.

  I nod anyway.

  “So,” says Dad. “Did you talk to Ike Lawrence about him covering your expenses?”

  The tightness in my chest pulls again. “No.”

  “Are you going to get on top of that?”

  Mom reappears around the corner. The receiver is pressed against her chest. “Anders,” she says, in a hushed voice. “Did you see Frankie Lynde after the show last night?”

  I set down my fork. What townie gossip is calling my house to ask my mother about our stupid fight?

  “Yeah,” I say warily.

  “About what time did you see her last?”

  Something in me stiffens. “I don’t know. After we played. Probably around ten.”

  “And then she left?”

  “Yeah. I think so. Yeah.” I stare at Mom. “Why? Who’s on the phone?”

  “It’s Mrs. Lynde.” Mom blinks back at me. “Apparently Frankie didn’t come home last night.”

  The room goes gray.

  “What?” I say.

  Mom just goes on looking at me. Dad sets down his fork, too.

  “Maybe she just—” Maybe what? I can see Frankie’s face—her perfect, furious face—turning away from me under the dim lights of the parking lot. And then what? Then I was alone with the anger and the sickness burning me up from inside. But what about Frankie? Frankie is never alone. My voice sounds brittle. “She probably spent the night at a friend’s or something.”

  Mom nods. “That’s what her parents are thinking, too. That’s why they’re calling everyone she knows.”

  “She’s not at Sasha Nelson’s? Are they sure?”

  “I don’t know. But you saw her leave at ten? Was she by herself?”

  The parking lot. The rage thumping through me. I try to remember.

  “I think so,” I say. “Yeah. I think so.”

  I hear Mom repeating my words into the phone.

  Dad sips his coffee. I look at my plate.

  The fight. The stupid freaking fight. The smell of French toast suddenly makes my mouth fill with bile.

  After another minute Mom comes back to the table.

  “Well, they’re worried,” she says. “Of course. But they’re still thinking that maybe she went to a friend’s who they haven’t thought of yet, and that she just fell asleep or forgot to call.” Mom leans over and puts her hand on top of mine. Which is so much more than I deserve, it almost makes me scream. “I’m sure that’s all it is, Anders.”

  None of us eat any more.

  After another minute I get up and clear my plate.

  Back in my room I sit down on the end of the bed. Still no Goblin creeping out from underneath. Maybe he’s avoiding me, too.

  Or maybe something’s wrong.

  I think back. I last saw him on Thursday night—the night Frankie climbed through my bedroom window. So, all day Friday, and all day Saturday, while I�
�ve been obsessing over that stupid meeting and the blowup with my band and whatever’s going on with Frankie, my bony old cat has been missing.

  . . . That’s what you stand to lose, Anders. All the things you love. One by one, says the music executive, her dark eyes on me. Oh, Anders. You are going to be so, so sorry. . . .

  Last Things. Goblin. Frankie.

  For a second I can barely breathe.

  I jerk to my feet.

  I could search the house and the yard, even though I already have the sick, certain feeling that I won’t find anything. Then I could head out there, into the woods. I could search for Goblin. I could go farther, all the way back to the Crow’s Nest, and look for any sign of Frankie. I could look and look and never find anything. Or I could find something that I don’t want to find.

  I glance out the window, into the darkness of the trees. And then I see it.

  It’s drawn on the glass.

  It’s just faint enough that I might have missed it if I hadn’t looked at it head-on.

  An X. It crosses my window from edge to edge. It’s drawn in something red brown and flaking. Something that looks a lot like blood.

  My heart pounds harder. My head starts to swim.

  Oh, Anders. You are going to be so, so sorry.

  Thea

  I move through the trees.

  Pine needles and dead leaves whirl under my feet.

  There is nothing here that can scare me.

  Delay me. Yes. But only if I fall behind.

  And I’m fast.

  I’m faster.

  I’m lighter.

  I barely touch the ground.

  I skim through the shadows. It’s not morning yet, but the darkness in the sky is starting to weaken, rinsed at the edges like a stain in cold water.

  Light will come. Inevitably.

  But now they’re here. They’re everywhere. Seeping out of the roots, hiding in nooks and hollows. Teeth and claws and too-long arms. Silent, black-furred feet. They’d like to snap my neck. They’d like to tear me into pieces.

  But they can’t. Not them. I know them. I know everything I need to know.

  It’s been a long night. My arms ache. My hands are sore. But the scratches and scrapes, the one bad slash under my eye, have already healed. It’s the delicate little ones like Frankie who sometimes put up the toughest fight.

  I circle the sagging shed, again and again, dead leaves flying, scattering drops of river water from one of Aunt Mae’s empty bottles. The ring of stones gleams.

  Very faintly, through the layers of walls and soil, I can still hear her screaming. But she’s getting tired. She’s hoarse. She’ll stop soon.

  And no one else will hear even this wisp of sound.

  No one can get close.

  No one will find her.

  Anders

  Big things start small. That’s how they get in.

  You make one little choice. You choose to take guitar lessons. You choose not to quit the lessons, even though you suck so bad that at first you’ll only practice shut inside your bedroom closet, where no one else can hear. Every day you make the choice to practice instead of going off with your crappy bike or your skateboard or your computer games like the other kids. You choose to put on that same metal album eight hundred times. You choose to learn every solo. You start hanging out with other guys who like the same kind of music you do, other guys with instruments that they actually practice, too, and then one day you choose a name for your band.

  After a couple of years, you choose to play in public for the first time. You do it again. And again. You choose working and pushing and failing and writing and playing again until you’re actually good and you’d do anything, anything, to be even better. And then you start to get famous, and everybody around you knows who you are, and then one night you do something idiotic in front of a giant crowd of people who all know your name, and just like that, all at once, your whole life starts to disappear.

  Your whole life.

  All those tiny, stupid choices turn into one huge, godforsaken mess, and when you look back at it, you can’t even see where things started to go wrong. But you know it was your fault. Because you did it. All those little, gigantic things. Every single step of the way.

  That’s how it started at the Crow’s Nest: Small. Embarrassingly, pathetically small. We played a local talent night. I think there were five people in the audience, not counting the other musicians who’d come to play. And there we were, me and Jezz and Patrick, scrawny sixteen-year-olds with crappy amateur instruments and a name—Last Things—that we’d finally decided on after fighting over it for weeks. We played an Opeth cover, pretty badly, and one song that Patrick and I had cowritten that was called “Apocalypse,” which truly sucked, and some decent Deftones. We were just decent enough that Ike Lawrence asked us to play again for the next local talent night.

  We practiced like crazy in between. I convinced the guys to start meeting three times a week, and Patrick talked his parents into letting us take over half their garage.

  And I practiced. I’d been working an hour or two each day. Now it was three. Sometimes more. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with cramps in my hands and realize that I’d been playing imaginary chords in my sleep. Music followed me everywhere. I could literally feel it thumping in my bloodstream. And that was all I wanted: to be part of it. To be a conduit for it. To be one tiny piece in whatever it was that made it real.

  We played our three songs at the Crow’s Nest. We got the longest, loudest applause of the night. It was incredible.

  Ike offered us a night of our own.

  It was a Tuesday, when the Crow’s Nest would be half empty, almost dead by eight. But we took it. We felt like gods.

  I went straight home from that local talent night and wrote three songs, all of them crap. Then I wrote one that was a little less bad. Then I wrote one called “Blood Money.” I could tell it was all right, because I went around humming it to myself for days, its rhythm stuck like a burr in my head. Patrick added some great lines.

  We played it on Tuesday night.

  People went nuts.

  We did tighter and tighter covers. Patrick and I wrote more songs, sitting up late in his bedroom or mine, surrounded by empty Mountain Dew cans, scribbling and testing and trying again.

  Ike gave us a Thursday night.

  Somebody came from the local newspaper. They wrote about us: “Young Locals Take Aim at Heavy Metal Fame.” They wrote that Jezz’s name was Jess, and that Patrick had said he was inspired by Slipknot, when Patrick actually hates Slipknot and had just said that the drummer Joey Jordison was awesome. Jezz laughed about it. Patrick was pissed.

  Then someone came from the Bemidji newspaper, which has about eight times the circulation of the Greenwood Gazette.

  And then someone posted a clip of us playing on YouTube, and things started to spiral.

  By the end of summer, a couple of metal bloggers had made the drive just to see us. Another came in early September. He wrote for an actual online magazine, one we’d even heard of. He looked only a little bit older than we were, with stringy dark brown hair and a round face and thick-framed glasses, and he had an ancient black leather jacket that he said had once belonged to Dimebag Darrell.

  After our set he hung out, chatting, helping us move the drums, wind the cords. He was too excited about metal to even bother pretending to be cool, which made me like him a million times more.

  When we had everything packed up in our cars, he still made no move to leave. Now he was talking about metal movies, documentaries, the best tour DVDs. Patrick finally had to leave, taking Jezz with him. The writer shook their hands. Then he pulled them both into big, back-pounding hugs.

  “This was awesome, you guys,” he said. “Awesome. Really. Can’t wait to hear what you do next. Awesome.”

  And then it was just the two of us, standing in the parking lot.

  “Would you mind talking a little longer?” he asked me. “It wo
uld be awesome to hear more about your songwriting. We barely covered that.”

  “Sure,” I said. This guy was so baby faced and metal nerdy, I didn’t feel uncomfortable, even when I was talking about myself.

  “One thing—I hope you won’t care, but I’ve been jonesing for three hours now.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and gestured to the edge of the woods, away from the No Smoking signs that Ike put up around the patio and that everybody else ignores. “You mind?”

  “No,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  We shuffled into the trees.

  It was the very beginning of fall. A few sugar maples were starting to change color, but most of the woods was still thick and green. It smelled like fall, though: that sharper, smokier smell on top of summer’s rotting sweetness. The trees rustled around us as we walked away from the Crow’s Nest. There was a half-moon. The writer guy flicked his lighter, and for a second I could see his round, orange-tinted face beside me, and then his cigarette flared and the light went out.

  “So,” he said. “Anders Thorson. That’s even an awesome metal name. Anders Thorson. It makes you sound like one of those Norwegian black-metal dudes who burned churches.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. I don’t think that was my mom’s goal when she picked it.”

  He laughed, too. “How did you feel about tonight?”

  “You mean about our set?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded eagerly. “Were you satisfied?”

  “I’m never satisfied.”

  “Ah.” He smiled and blew out a puff of white smoke, which disappeared up into the dimness. “So you’re a perfectionist.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” The term perfectionist has always seemed dumb to me. Like wanting things to be perfect is so weird that it needs its own special term. I kicked a clump of ferns. “But I know what good enough is. And I know when we’re not there.”

  The guy’s eyebrows went up. “You’re really close.”

  “Well, thanks. Another five or ten years of insane practice, and then . . . maybe.”