Live at Roseland, Part 1

a novel by Carley Moore

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictiously.

Copyright 2025 by Carley Moore

ISBN: MALKAPIPPIMARINA

Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash

“Because properly conceived and handled noise is not noise at all.” - Lester Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun,” Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“You who long for things/who can’t understand borders/who like to spread your magic and your blame/forgive yourself.” - Brenda Hillman, “First Tractate,” Death Tractates

“You’re either on the bus or off the bus.” - Ken Kesey to Tom Woolf, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Skip down to Part 1 if you don’t feel like reading any backstory.

Reader’s Note: As some of you may have read, there’s been an interesting conversation bubbling up on Substack about self-publishing novellas and novels on the platform, the state of publishing right now, and the usual questions writers raise when we think about self-publishing. Last week, after reading

Peter C. Baker

‘s New Yorker essay on

Naomi Kanakia

“s Substack novella (among others), I decided to ask my readers to vote on which of my three unpublished (and not for lack of trying) novels they’d like to read on Subtack. Kanakia has dubbed this moment when a lot of traditionally published writers are going rogue, “Substack Summer.” I’ve published with a big five house, a big indie, and small indies. I’ve Kickstarted a book too, so why not try this out?

Lincoln Michel

and

Courtney Sender

have been writing great responses to this moment too.

People voted and the following novel, Live at Roseland, won. If you like, you can read a description of Live at Roseland in that previous post of mine.

My elevator pitch for it is: It’s 1990, and small town failure Annie decides to run away with a famous local-indie band when a tragic loss changes the course of her life.

So far the book is free for you to read, though I may paywall the last section, paywall the whole book at a later date, or keep it free forever. But anything you can give to help a single mama out is so appreciated and makes my day-to-day life much easier.

I may also write little meta essays about the sections if I feel like it and/or there’s interest.

No presh to read or finish!

I’ll publish “Part 2 - The Road” early next week. In the meantime, please share widely, heart this first section, comment, and re-stack your favorite sentences, even if you read just a little bit of it.

I’m my own editor for this book, though I did work with an agent on it before it went out on submission eleven years ago.

Enjoy the typos!

xoxo

Carley

Part 1 – The Town

July 1990

1

Annie

I pulled the black sharpie marker out of the back pocket of my jeans, tugged at the cap, put the tip up to my nose, and inhaled deeply. Then I began to write unsteadily on my upper left arm, “Lost,” pausing after the “t” to inspect my work. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth—its presence seemed suddenly significant to me, and for a second or two I felt entirely undone by the realization that it was this oddly shaped fleshy pink slab of muscle that made me speak. How did it work? What made it capable of such feats? I shook my head back and forth to remove this errant, overly complicated bit of marveling and put the tip of marker back onto my arm. I continued, “If found, call 716 555-5555,” but I ran out of room for the last four numbers and I crossed onto my hand. I extended my arm and admired my work—it was straightforward, but clever, I decided. I didn’t consider what my mother would actually do if someone called our house and said, “Hey we’ve found your daughter. She’s fucked up on something, and not exactly speaking, but somebody wrote this number on her arm.” I didn’t think this, because during that summer—in the three-month interval between graduating from Lamott Community College and my arrival at whatever four-year state school would end up having me—I was trying to train myself to not think of my parents. And in that particularly heightened state, having ingested a tab of acid about four hours ago, my parents had thankfully receded into the realm of abstraction, accompanied every so often by a mosquito-in-the-ear-like feeling. I saw my mother’s pile of tissues on the nightstand, the terrycloth robe that she’d taken to donning the second she got home from work, my father’s acoustic guitar still propped against the coffee table even though he’d moved out six months ago, and his ashtray—the one he kept by the rocking chair in the dining room, also forgotten and still with the old butt of a joint in it.

I thought then, in the fervor of faux revelations that are the hallmark of all really good trips, that maybe just maybe, my parents were pure image and image only. Maybe I wasn’t twenty years old and still living with my mother. Maybe I wasn’t sad about witnessing the burnt-out end of my parents’ marriage and what it seemed to mean for the future of all of my relationships. And maybe I wasn’t tormented by the fact that my father ignored me, and that now that we weren’t living under the same roof, we hardly ever saw each other except for at shows. And finally, maybe my parents were like a movie I could dip in and out of, taking in as much of the plot as I could handle before leaving the theater for a snack or a bathroom break. Or maybe I’d leave the movie all together. Decide it was stupid and that the characters are lame. I’d let my seat cushion fly up, walk out of the dark theater, nod at the surly, pimply guy behind the snack counter, and step out into the sunlight.

I looked down at my side at Willow, who was passed out next to me. Her long black velvet skirt was tangled around her scuffed-up combat boots and her XXL military green t-shirt was ripped at the collar as if someone had tried to grab her by the neck and just missed. I wouldn’t be surprised. She was the kind of weird that pissed off most of Lamott—old Italian grandmas who got their hair permed once a week crossed the street to avoid her, muttering “La Bufana” under their breaths, toddlers with sticky jelly fingers turned into their mothers’ legs when she walked by, and local business owners who would have scowled if they could have gotten away with it, but couldn’t because she was the mayor’s daughter, grimaced-smiled at her and said all-I’m-going-teach-you-a-lesson-politely, “Good morning Willow!” She either ignored them or whisper-hissed “Capitalist Pig” when they passed us.

I ran my fingertips along the stubble on her head. She kept the sides shaved close and died them a deep blue/black. The long Mohawk strip at the top of her head she bleached into a yellowy-white. Tonight it was down. It usually was—she only put it up for special occasions like an out-of-town hardcore show or a road trip to a gay bar in Buffalo or Rochester. I wasn’t invited to the gay bars. I stared at her delicate wrists, pert nose, and pouty lips. Her girlier features softened in her sleep and became more visible. Or maybe her defenses were down. We’d been friends since middle school and I’d watched her butch transformation closely. Lately, she looked like a wild punk pony; all mane of hair, all skinny and un-broken, wary, and pissed off. Wild horses, couldn’t drag her, well, anywhere.

I wanted to tell her my genius tripping idea about parents. I wanted her to see that if we took this on, it could have profound and lasting implications. She especially needed this information. Her father had been in the midst of a decade-long affair with his secretary—a woman with giant, teased blonde hair, and faux Chanel pink suits. Willow hated this woman, or at least she used to, in high school when we spent time actually talking about our parents. I wasn’t so sure anymore. Since she’d come out to me six months ago, her likes and dislikes were more abstract to me. We’d had a particularly intense Lamott Community College course together—Human Sexuality—and the class, she told me, had politicized her, made her aware of her own silence. I nodded as if I understood what she meant and pulled at a loose thread on her bed’s comforter. I tried to say the right things, “I love you,” and “I accept you,” but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was an idiot because I hadn’t known. What kind of a best friend was I?

“Will,” I whispered into her ear. “Willow,” I cooed and blew gently on her smooth cheek. I moved some of her bleached blonde hair off of her forehead. I re-positioned her head and torso, so that she was firmly on her side and not her back.

She moaned, rubbed her nose, mumble-slurred, “Hate your party. Hate boys,” and then passed back out. Earlier, at the kitchen table of the boy we barely knew who had just rented this apartment, she chose shots instead of acid. We were both going for obliteration, but for different reasons. In the truck ride over, as Willow revved the engine impatiently at red lights, she’d said to me, “I’m going to this party because you’re fucked up and I love you, but seriously I can’t do this shit for much longer. I’m tired of being the only dyke in the room.” I nodded appreciatively, aware as ever, that the more out Willow became, the less she seemed to want to do with me.

“Willow, I’m going to walk around the apartment. I shook her one last time to see if she wanted to come, but she didn’t budge, so I stood up and secured the strap of my bag across my chest. I’d tripped enough times to know to bring my own supplies. I had a bottle of orange juice, some band-aids, my notebook, the sharpie, some lipstick, and a small package of cashews in my bag.

I opened the bathroom door and poked my head out. I didn’t know how long Willow and I had been in there, but the hall was dark except for a child’s fish nightlight plugged into a socket. The hall looked incredibly long and complicated. I couldn’t imagine what was behind the doors. I pulled my head back into the bathroom and looked at my reflection in the mirror. I saw parts before I saw the whole—my shoulder-length dyed-red hair tucked behind each ear, the line of freckles along the bridge of my nose and under my eyes, my wide-set green eyes, my slightly chapped pink lips, and my high forehead. You’re pretty I said to myself. No, you’re hot, I added, aware that I was channeling his voice now—my ex-boyfriend, Julian, and the things he used to say to me, the phrase that always felt like he was trying to convince the both of us. I opened the flap of my bag and felt around for the box of band-aids. They were for kids, so they had shooting stars and moons on them. I took one out and affixed it to the bridge of my nose. I read somewhere that this is calming strategy—a way to steady breathing and lower stress. I looked at myself one last time in the mirror and took a couple of deep breaths. I watched the tiny stars and moon rise and fall and then I took one last look at Willow, who was snoring softly.

I stepped out into the hallway. I felt the walls—they were textured, and bumpy against my fingertips. I could feel them for hours, so I kept my feet moving. I didn’t want to get lost in the hallway.

I opened a door, a bedroom—there were three guys and a girl sitting on the floor around an acoustic guitar. They were staring at it, talking about it.

“We could all, like, play it at the same time,” the girl offered. I’d seen her before, but we didn’t really know each other. She was the sometime girlfriend, official mascot of an entire group of skater boys, who I knew from our town’s one record shop, Cheap Hits, but didn’t really hang out with. She lived on a farm, and supposedly gave indiscriminate and expert blowjobs.

“Nah, that wouldn’t work. One person needs to play it and the rest of us can sing something,” one of the guys responded. I recognized his voice. It was Butch. He was one of Julian’s friends, a guy who was older than all of us, and who’d been legally emancipated from his parents since he was fourteen because they were so fucked up. He was straightedge, kept his head shaved and wore a uniform of combat boots, rolled up jeans, and an old army jacket. We’d had a required Intro to Philosophy class together a year ago, and he’d driven me crazy for most of the semester by calling me Kierkegaard because I stayed after class one day to tell the professor that I thought Fear and Trembling was groundbreaking. Butch had been out in the hallway eavesdropping, eager to catch me in a fit of brown-nosing stupidity. Now he waved at me to come in.

The other two guys looked up at me and nodded. It was Hotdog—Butch’s sidekick, who pretty much only interacted with people by drawing them and Steve, who had recently run away from his born-again Christian parents and according to Willow was living in the back of Cheap Hits. The room was dim—there was a lava lamp going in the corner. The girl ignored me.

“Does anyone have a drum?” she asked.

“I can draw one,” Hotdog offered.

Steve pulled his knees up to his chest and shot me a pointed look—it was one he’d given me before. Come over here. Put your tongue in my mouth.

“Will you draw me?” she asked.

Hotdog nodded absently and the girl unzipped her sweatshirt.

“Blue guitar,” Butch said.

“Annie?” Steve asked in my direction, holding out his hand.

“I’m looking for Willow,” I lied and slowly backed out of the room, afraid that one of them might follow me and make me stay. I closed the door tightly and pressed my cheek against the hallway wall. Wrong room, I thought. Wrong vibe. That girl. Steve. Butch is so fucking condescending. It occurred to me that the wall was bumpy because it was covered in peeling wallpaper, and I ripped a small strip off and put it in my pocket. A keepsake, for what, I didn’t know, but I wanted it. I wished Willow were sober enough to help me, or at least upright so she could walk around with me, decipher for me. My heart beat against my chest. I sensed that this was a critical juncture in my trip—a crossroads. I was having a good time, but it could all go south.

I opened the next door, stepped in, and shut it behind me. It was dark, but I heard breathing. My eyes adjusted. There was a mattress on the floor, someone giggled, and someone else turned on a light.

“Fuck Annie, what are you doing?” he stood up. I could see Julian’s boner through his jeans. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

He was shirtless and I noticed the tooled leather belt I gave him for his nineteenth birthday, the one that spelled out his name. She was naked, except for white bikini underwear that had a tiny red bow on the waste line, above the crotch. Her cheeks were red; her long blonde hair framed her boobs, which were way bigger than mine.

“This is Annie?” the girl asked, folding an arm across her chest. “The love of your life?” she added, giggled again, and crossed her legs.

“I’m tripping,” I said. I wanted to clarify, to make them understand that I wasn’t at my normal processing capacity. This cannot be happening. I cannot see this. “So, I can’t, like, do this.” I pointed to the mattress.

“You’re tripping without me?” He looked hurt.

“Oh Jesus, really?” the girl said, looking back and forth between the two of us. “Where’s my shirt?”

“No, I’m going,” I said, but my feet didn’t move. I hadn’t seen him for three weeks, not since the night he broke up with me at the Denny’s by the mall. We were sitting in what I had stupidly come to think of as “our booth”—the one right next to the waitress’s station, furthest from the front windows, where if you felt like you needed to, you could make out with some degree of privacy. I’m going to New York, he said. It’s better if we do this now. Since that day, I’d been walking around with an embarrassing animal longing, a desperate, pathetic need to see him. Just let me bump into him I’d pray to gods I didn’t believe in as I walked around our decrepit downtown, and made up excuses to go to the few places he might be—Cheap Hits, the Salvation Army thrift store where most of us shopped, and the stoner park near his apartment. I had vivid, painful dreams, in which he was peeling off my clothes, kissing my stomach, and telling me over and over again that he loved me, no, that he worshipped me.

I looked down again at the girl. She’d put a shirt on, but seemed in no hurry to go. My first time with Julian had also been on a mattress on the floor. He had his own apartment and we’d been together for almost two months. He made me dinner—something with curry in it, something I’d never had before, and couldn’t pronounce. The room was dark; he’d lit candles on the windowsill and was playing my favorite Echo and the Bunnymen album, Ocean Rain. He kissed every inch of me. I opened my legs and his tongue felt amazing and I arched my back, and I came, which I’d never quite managed with another person before. And then he was inside of me, moving and moaning, and I knew that we were both happier than we thought possible, that somehow we’d found each other.

“We fit together,” I said as he lay on top of me smiling.

“Yeah, like Lincoln Logs,” he said and hugged me tighter.

I looked over again at Julian, who was still shirtless. Seeing his body, his long, wavy black hair, his blue eyes, made me feel queasy. The mattress started to undulate on the floor—someone had spread a child’s bed sheet over it. There were tiny cowboys on horses, or maybe they were pirates or spacemen, I couldn’t be sure—galloping across the flannel. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the cowboy pirates move. He threw his lasso up over his head in the direction of another cowboy spaceman. I wondered for a second how it would play out—Could he rope him? Could he catch him?

I looked up from the sheet. Julian and the girl were staring at me.

“Wow, she is fucked up,” the girl said. I resented her tone—that she and Julian were somehow in a position to assess me, my condition.

“No, I’m not,” I said, but I realized I’d do anything with this girl, on this mattress, on these sheets, just so that I could press my body against Julian’s “Annie, where’s Willow?” Julian asked. I knew he was looking for my keeper, someone to pawn me off on—since he’d known me it had always been Willow.

“Passed out,” I mumbled.

“You guys should go home,” he said.

“You’re not my dad,” I said. “I can party,” I added, aware that I’d never actually used this particularly uncool, cheerleaderesque phrase before.

The girl sighed audibly, bored with us.

“Can we talk in the hallway?” he asked, took me by the elbow and led me out of the bedroom.

“Who is she?” I asked. I felt tears on my cheeks, but I convinced myself I was not crying.

“She’s just visiting.”

“From where?”

“From before.”

“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to know. The wallpaper undulated and rippled again. I pulled off another strip and then I put one of my hands on his shoulder to steady myself. “Before me?”

“Not exactly.”

I stepped back towards the bathroom door. I felt embarrassed. There was another girl all along. There were probably several. This is the only guy you’ve ever really loved and he’s a total liar. I reached up and felt my face—it was hot and wet. I looked again at the walls, which in their newest incarnation, had also started to cry. I leaned in to take a closer look—at the ends of each strip of loose wallpaper; I saw beautiful, crystalline, droplets of water.

“Whoa,” I said. “The walls are crying.” I put my index finger underneath one of the biggest drops and waited for it to hit my hand. I saw a tiny wet world inside the droplet—a rainbow, a tree in full bloom, and a cloud.

Julian smiled. “God you’re so raw,” he said it like he meant it, like it was a compliment. “You’re such a little wound.”

I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about.

“Annie, don’t try to make me take care of you,” he added, but I could tell he wanted to, that there was something about me fucked up that he found newly interesting.

I tried to look up at him expectantly, to position my body so that I could somehow fall against his, but my head kept turning towards the tears coming off of the wall.

“I gotta go,” I finally managed and stumbled back towards the bathroom.

I can’t say exactly how I got Willow up, out of the party, and into her father’s brown Toyota pick-up truck. I also can’t say how I installed myself in the driver’s seat, adjusted the mirrors, and turned on the ignition, but I did. Somehow I remembered to fasten our seatbelts and to roll Willow’s window halfway down so that she could have some air.

“Willow, look at me,” I said.

“Why do we have to leave?” Willow shouted into the passenger side window. She must have done eight or nine shots of shitty Vodka with Hotdog. I’d lost track.

“Julian is fucking some girl upstairs,” I answered. “We gotta go.”

“Oh no!” Willow wailed, and she even managed to sit up straight and look at me. If anyone knew how devastated I might be, it was Willow. He and I had been together for three years. Julian was part of the reason I’d gone to community college instead of going away—him and the fact that my parents were broke. “Fucking fucker,” she added for effect and then slid back down into her seat.

I nodded, but I couldn’t really think about Julian. We were in the car, we had a new landscape to deal with, and I had to take charge.

“I can’t really drive, so you have to help me. Can you call out traffic signs and lights? We’re only going to drive like three miles, so it’s going to be easy, but you’ll have to be a second set of eyes.”

Willow nodded and sat up straight again. “Captain,” she mock-saluted with one shaky hand. “I’m ready.”

“We’re going to the ravine. We can park the car there, hang out, and then walk to my house or yours.”

“We can do this, we can totally do this,” Willow said, trying to give me confidence.

I turned the ignition and pulled the car out of the driveway. The roads were empty. I guessed it was three or four in the morning, and I was in and out of my senses. Sometimes, the truck felt more like a boat than a car. The road waved and rocked like the sea, and I was pretty sure that the steering wheel was actually a ship’s wheel. I ignored all of the lights on the dashboard because they were too distracting and I couldn’t remember what they meant. After thirty seconds of a The Smiths, The Queen is Dead, I made Willow shut off the tape deck. The opening drum solo made my head hurt. We went through just two traffic lights, but as we approached each one, I had to ask Willow to verify their colors. Red looked purple to me, and green came out turquoise. But Willow got into her job, and she dutifully called out light colors, stop signs, and the one car that pulled up behind us at the second light.

“Is that a cop?” I asked as we idled. I looked at my eyes in the rearview mirror—my pupils were huge and black. My eyes, I panicked, would give me away.

“No, I think it’s an old lady,” Willow answered, turning around in her seat.

“Don’t let her see you,” I said. I was pretty sure that my seat cushion was somehow giving me a massage, but I didn’t tell Willow. I didn’t want to freak her out.

The car behind us turned in the other direction, and we were left alone to drive the long stretch of dirt road that led to the ravine. In that last mile, I let myself relax. I convinced myself that the car knew what it was doing, and would get us to where we needed to go. I wasn’t wrong about that. In small upstate New York towns, on certain June nights, when you’re just messed up enough, and the air is infused with the smell of cut grass, fertilizer, and dogwood, you can take a deep breath and just know that it’s going to be all right. As long as you stay put, take care of your parents, and keep your bad habits a secret, you’ll do just fine.

We rolled the windows all the way down. We put our Smiths tape back on and I let the drums bang around in my chest. I had my hands on the steering wheel—I was the captain of my little ship!—but I knew that it was the car that was in control. I felt its steel carcass vibrating underneath me; its animal, electric presence. I imagined it was some kind of cosmic horse, and Willow and I were its secret, stealth riders. I looked over at Willow, whose mane of bleached hair streamed out the window. I felt grateful for her strength and good sense, happy that she hadn’t yet abandoned me for the radical lesbian collective she’d been talking about moving to in Ithaca. She’d visited a month ago, there’d been a girl, but something had happened. She cried on the phone with me, but she wouldn’t tell me anything. “It’s embarrassing,” she snapped and I let it go. The smells outside the truck distracted me again. I looked out the window into the deep, black night, and sniffed in the air. Green! You smell green! I told myself.

I slowed down near the entry to the park and managed to stop the car, park it, and turn off the ignition. Willow and I got out of the truck. I could hear the water of the ravine rushing against its sides. The abrupt shift from moving truck to stable land, the realization that we’d made it safely when we could just as easily killed ourselves, and our knowledge that we were both very fucked up and that the love of my life was a cheater and a liar—hit us.

Willow leaned over near the front tire of the truck and barfed.

I walked over dutifully to hold long strip of hair away from her face, and tell her that she was going to be okay.

“We can’t do this all summer,” Willow said between heaves.

“I know,” I said as I rubbed her back, but I wasn’t so sure she was right.

2

Jeb

I fish-eyed the practice room. I stood stick still behind my biggest amp and tried to become all eye, all gaze, and fully present. My acupuncturist—and those were her bullshit words about the eye and being present—told me to try this technique if I felt a panic attack coming on, and while I wasn’t fully headfirst into the occasional chest thumping and heavy breathing that punctuated the beginning of one of my thrillers, I was feeling the early warning signs; like wanting to take a shit and dreaming about a fix up.

Bobby, our keyboardist, had draped himself over two giant black speaker cubes on wheels and was pushing off with the toe of his dilapidated Converse from one end of the room to the other while smoking a fatty. His path was not clear, and so every couple of inches he hit a snag of wires or some random garbage-picked chair and yelled in the direction of the floor, “Get the fuck out of my way!”

Terry, our drummer and the only person in the band I still hung out with off of the tour, was over in the corner office of the practice space, hunched over the black rotary phone, nodding and looking miserable. No doubt his pregnant wife, who was not happy about us holding a practice session while home, was tearing him a huge asshole. I’m sure she wanted Terry at the house so she could send him out for the wrong flavor of ice cream. The poor fucker! I hadn’t seen him smile since he announced he was going to be a daddy four months ago.

Ian, our keyboardist, was in the crapper at the other end of the long hallway that connected all of the practice rooms. He’d be back in five minutes, ready to go, always a professional, just waiting for the next command. Whatever was inside of him, he’d wrestle it out, stand behind his synth, and play whatever notes you put in front of him. As long as you didn’t ask him to write anything or have an idea of his own, Terry was just fine.

“Jebby, I think I got it.” Merilee sat behind the piano with a purple marker in one hand and a cup of herbal tea in the other. “Come over!” She looked up at me from crest of the piano and smiled; all high voltage, all Hollywood. Her face hadn’t changed much since I met her in high school—she’d thinned out in the cheeks, but she still had those same dirty, sexy lips and flirty eyes that made me agree to start a band with her even though she couldn’t read music or play an instrument worth a shit. After all of these years of us writing together, she still got excited when we figured out a new riff or a particularly melodic phrasing. She genuinely loved writing songs and found the puzzle of it satisfying. Maybe I was jaded or tired of bending my music to fit to her lyrics and vision, but it all had become a terrible job to me—the writing part that is—not the road, I still loved the wildness of the tour.

I closed my eyes and took one more deep breath. My stomach still gurgled and pulsed and I could still see a bunch of needles floating around my head like angels in the sky, but my heart had slowed a bit. Maybe I wasn’t a total pussy for hiring an acupuncturist.

I walked over to Merilee and sat down next to her on the piano bench. She smelled like her hair, kind of musky and a little unwashed, but sexy. We hadn’t fucked for years, but there was something between us still, some residual kink, some way we were wired, that kept me from ruling out the possibility entirely. Not that I needed it.

“So I think if I change these notes here in the bridge then it won’t be such a high jump for me in when we get to the chorus.” Merilee gestured at the piece of paper she spent that last twenty minutes scribbling on in purple marker. We were trying to re-learn two or three of the songs from our first album for our current tour. We needed something to make our older fans feel special, but Merilee’s voice had changed considerably since that album came out and we were all 25. She couldn’t reach some of the highest notes, and the rest of us had to re-learn our parts, and in my case, re-write the guitar stuff from memory because I’d never written it down. My fingers sort of knew what to do, but it was slow going and painfully boring for the rest of the band.

I squinted and then rested my head on her shoulder instead. She shrugged me off. “I’m serious, do you think that will work?”

“Gotta play it to see,” I stood up and wandered back over towards the giant window that looked out onto downtown Lamott.

“Where’s Ian?” Merilee called to my back.

“Jerking off.”

“Go make him stop.” Merilee’s favorite way of bossing the band around was to try to make me her minion. Bossy by proxy.

“No can do.” I stared down at the sidewalk in front of the recording studio. Mostly, downtown Lamott was a wasteland. I couldn’t believe people still lived here year round. Sure, I had my house, but I also had my apartment in New York City to keep me sane. There was Cheap Hits, the local record store/head shop, the bank, a couple of useless clothing stores full of three-year old merchandise, and a string of spectacular dive bars. I had a soft spot for most of those bars for either nostalgic or drunken reasons. My Uncle Ray took me to One for the Road most days after his factory shift ended and he picked me up from elementary school. I sat in the booth and ate a bag of chips while he downed two beers. I sneaked sips of his beer when he went to take a piss, and the waitress with her huge, blousy tits winked me on.

Smiley’s had the best wings in town, and a cute bartender who was in love with me and who sometimes blew me in the photo booth at midnight during her break. When we were starting out we played shows at The Frog Hotel and The Keg, and those places were always kind to us, even though our weird sound baffled the audience. I squinted down at the little patch of cracked sidewalk in front of the bank, and saw my mom maneuvering her walker in through the front door. No doubt, cashing the check I’d just left on her kitchen counter. Lamott was like that, every time you looked out a window or walked down the street, there was somebody you knew, doing something that made you feel either relieved or guilty.

“He’s a quick jerker-offer.” Bobby sat up and took one last toke of his joint before putting it out on the heel of his sneaker.

“I do love my sluts.” Ian pushed through the door and back into the practice space. He had a Penthouse stuffed in his back pocket, and you could practically smell the jizz on his hand. Merilee rested her head on the keys of the piano for one disgusted second and then sat up straight. She had learned to pick her battles. Terry saw us coming back together and hung up the phone. I swear, rehearsal time was 80% fucking around and 20% actual playing.

Merilee started to bang out the opening bars of “Big Pink Sky” as the rest of us scrambled over to our instruments. Originally, there was no piano part for this song—none of us owned a piano when we wrote it. I played along, my intro chords were pretty straightforward, so I knew what I was doing until I got to my supposed solo, which was frankly still a mystery to me. Who knew what I’d played ten years ago, I’d probably improvised most of it in the studio. I looked over at Ian who’d stopped playing his keyboard all together and had his hands up in the air. “No point,” he mouthed at me. Merilee started in on the first verse, “I’ll meet you at the edge of the lake/You’ll touch my legs through the seaweed/The sky will always be pink, pink, pink.” She stopped singing and playing when she noticed Ian resting his elbows on the table behind him.

“What’s wrong?” Merilee stood up and came around from behind the piano bench.

“Well, now that you’ve added piano, there’s no need for keyboard.” Ian ran his fingers through his wavy blonde hair. It stayed suspended above his forehead for a precarious ten seconds before falling back down to the side.

“But I’m doing all of these staccato notes, and we still need you to lay down the minor chords.” Merilee pushed her hair behind her ears and batted her eyelashes at me for back-up.

“The song sounds too different.” Bobby plucked a funky series of notes on his bass, as if he were in his dream band, a cross between Funkadelic and Sun Ra. “The point is for the older fans, like nostalgia, right? It doesn’t even sound like ‘Big Pink Sky’ anymore.”

Merilee shrugged, “The real problem is that you guys are drowning me out. Terry, the snare is too loud and Jeb, come on, we talked about this.”

“I gotta take a piss.” I unclipped my guitar from its strap and stalked out of the room. The bathroom was a dump—pretty much what you’d expect from a practice space that got used three or four times a year in a town that had birthed just one famous band—a dirty toilet, a lone light bulb, and barely a square of toilet paper. No wonder Merilee refused to use it. I splashed cold water on my face and stared at my reflection in the mirror. My nose looked fleshy and red, but I had a square jaw, most of my hair, and wild sideburns that girls liked to rub up against. My blue eyes, my mother’s only true gift to me, stared back at me. You gotta do it. You gotta make it through this tour and then you can take a break. Maybe this is your last album. Fuck it! You could live off of these royalties, maybe not forever and maybe not always high and throwing money around, but you could make it. I sighed and let a long fart reverberate into the already stinky bathroom. It felt good to get something out. Frankly, it was the only honest music I’d made all day. She’s just going to keep asking you to turn it down until there’s nothing left but a pretty girl and a big black piano. I thought of my friend Denny, the five or six tracks we’d laid down together in a studio in New Orleans last summer. Denny had a huge, scratchy voice, that no amount of loud guitar could out sing. There was definitely something there worth figuring out.

I reached up behind the bathroom mirror and felt around. Knowing me, I’d been here before, and I’d thought ahead. I pulled a small bottle of Johnny Walker down, wiped the dust off of the cap, and drained the remaining three inches. “Ahhh,” I said into the mirror. I reached up to the mirror again and ran my fingers more thoroughly up and down its grimy ledge. My fingernail snagged against a small tiny plastic bag. “Hell yeah!” I laughed into the mirror and jumped up to grab for the bag. There wasn’t much left, enough for a couple of bumps. I fished my keys out of my jeans pocket and inhaled deeply a couple of time. I tossed the bag into the toilet, flushed it, and kicked through the door open with my motorcycle boot.

“Quittin’ time!” I yelled into the practice space, walked down the stairs, and into the Lamott summer sun.

3

Annie

The ravine was steep and rushed in most places, but if you followed the path that ran along its side for long enough, you’d come to a deep, nearly still pool of cold black water where it bottomed out.

We waited until the sun came up until we got in. Willow slept curled up against the passenger window and I watched the sky turn from electric blue to neon pink while I tried not to think of Julian naked. I became obsessed with the speedometer’s inner workings and convinced myself that the radio knobs were somehow connected to an alien life force. I was happy when Willow woke up, so that I could free myself from the tiny complicated truck-world my tripping brain had created. We stripped and left our clothes in slumped versions of ourselves on a giant rock near the edge of the ravine’s pool.

Willow let out a little howl as she slid into the water. “Jesus,” she said as she allowed her head to go underwater. “I’m sober now,” she added when she came back up.

I watched from the shore and then took a running jump into the water. I didn’t know it then, but that was the summer I started to hurl myself into things, at people, towards any body—living or landscape—that would have me. My principle, it seemed, was movement, friction, combustion, and above all else contact! Over thinking was for the timid and weak, and I was newly determined never to reveal myself as either. Now that I was single, I planned to place my body smack dab in the middle of as many situations as possible. Assessment and outcomes were for scientists. I would become pure experiment.

I straightened my body and plugged my nose at the last second. The water engulfed me. I felt the cold on my spine and the souls of my feet. I went way down and sprang quickly back up to the surface. My nipples hardened and the water lapped up between my legs. I opened my eyes and looked for Willow who was frowning.

“You splashed me.”

“Sorry.”

We doggie paddled around each other in wide circles for a couple of minutes before we made our way to the edge where there were a couple of rocks that jutted out and made for good seats.

“I’ll miss this,” Willow said, waving her arm in the direction of the trees. I wasn’t sure if she meant the landscape or me. I still felt insecure about our friendship—how and if it might change now that Willow had come out. And she had become distant, I was heartbroken over Julian but I wasn’t crazy. I could tell that something had shifted. I’d been surprised when she called me up last night at ten, returning the long rambling message I’d left on her machine about “a party in some guy’s apartment” and that “Julian wouldn’t be there,” and said, “Fine, let’s go.” When I was feeling sorry for myself, I feared that soon she’d find my replacement—someone more political, and let’s face it, gayer than me—though I never said this out loud to Willow. I wanted her to think that nothing had changed.

“I miss your boobs,” I said and raised my eyebrows in mock-perv fashion. It had become our custom, in these later years of our friendship to comment on each other’s bodies, to compliment in the voice of whatever characters we could muster—dirty old man, football player, little boy—the parts of our bodies that we appreciated or even coveted in the other. Aside from Julian, Willow probably knew my body best, and in many ways she knew it better than Julian. She knew it when it wasn’t trying so hard, when it was not performing some more adult version of itself.

“I’ll miss your toupee and your big strong hands,” Willow said, playing along, but she folded her arms protectively over her boobs. Had I gone out of bounds? Maybe my newly out best friend didn’t want me talking about her breasts like some dirty old man. I turned my back to her, and pushed off from the edge. “I’m saving these for Patti Smith,” she said at my back, breaking character.

“She’s not gay,” I blurted out, as if it mattered. I kicked back towards the ledge. I felt goose bumps forming on my arms. I was acting like an idiot.

“Could I just have my fantasy?” Willow shot-back and squeezed the water out of the ends of her hair. “Don’t you think it would be hot to make out with a girl who was confused?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I lowered my lips into the water and blew out a breath of bubbles. I hadn’t ever thought this particular scenario through. “Confused, like how?”

“Like she needed to be taught how to do stuff, and I could be her guide.”

“That could be hot.” I kicked my legs hard to stay afloat. “But in the end Julian was always confused and it sucked.”

“Not like that,” Willow said, sighed in exasperation, and swam out to join me in the middle. We treaded water, our feet cycling close to one another, but never touching.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay. You don’t know. You’re just hopelessly straight.”

I submerged my face in the water to keep from crying. I knew she was right, but I couldn’t take it, and I was tender from tripping and my run-in with Julian. I was trying, didn’t that count for something? I came back up and tried another angle.

“Are you ever going to tell me what happened with that girl in Ithaca?” I knew it was a wound, raw still, maybe just starting to scab over, but I wanted to know, and I wanted Willow to trust and confide in me again.

Willow frowned into the water. “Do you want to know how I made her come with my hand? The way I moved my thumb over her clitoris and how she cried out and that I ate her out for like an hour and it wasn’t enough for me?”

I knew she was testing me, to see if I’d balk at her new sex life. “Sure, I mean, yeah,” I stammered. “But I also want to know why you’re so upset.”

“Duh Annie,” Willow swam towards the tiny patch of morning sun that hit the surface of the ravine.

“What?” I swam after her.

“Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“Yes!” I said impatiently. “Keep talking to me like I’m a fucking moron.”

“Fine. I will. We had this amazing 24 hours together. I saw her apartment—she lives with a whole bunch of other dykes and they have this communal vegan kitchen with a goddam functioning chore wheel and we all hung out together and they totally got me. I could just be myself and not explain everything, like I’m doing even now. And then we went out to dinner, just the two of us, and we had all of these drinks with actual leaves floating in them, and we walked back to her place, stopping to make out on the street a couple of times and then we flopped down on her futon and she let me fuck her and taste her and it was pretty much the most amazing night of my life because I saw what I could have and what I could be. In the morning, she made me breakfast and walked me out to my car and I drove back to Lamott all giddy, all ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ all ‘I have a community and maybe a girlfriend’ and then she ignored my calls for like days and when she finally did pick up the phone, she said, ‘I can’t be with you. I’m in an open relationship, but you are way too intense.’”

Willow took a big breath and swam back over to one of the rocky ledges. Her back was skinny and muscled. I watched her shoulder blades cut into the water. I wanted to swim over to her and give her hug, but she’d become prickly lately, resistant to my touch. Maybe she needed space.

“Will, I’m so sorry that happened.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Okay.” I could tell by her body language that the wall was already back up, and that I better not push, but her humiliation seemed disproportionate to me. I had no way to fathom the years of longing and desire that got put on that one girl, that one dinner, that communal apartment. “Can you at least tell me her name?”

“Jen.” Willow whispered it onto the surface of the water as if she were freeing a delicate bird from its cage. Reverence. Holy. Like she had a new religion and she’d met its high priestess. I kicked hard to swim further away from her. I was jealous, but I didn’t want her to know it. If there was a cult, I wanted to be in it. If there was a communion I wanted to eat the stale wafer and lick the too-sweet grape juice off of my lips. If there were disciples, I wanted to be one of them.

“You know, in my favorite episode of Magnum P.I., Tom Selleck got lost at sea and had to tread water for over twenty-four hours. He survived, you know, kept his spirits up, by flashing back to when he was soldier in ‘Nam.” I changed the subject. I gave up.

“You tell me about this every time we swim here,” Willow said. She looked relieved to have stopped talking about Jen with me.

“Because it’s awesome, and it always helps me tread water for longer.”

“Are we going to talk about Julian?” Willow asked.

“Maybe,” I answered, but I knew we would, endlessly, relentlessly, trying to figure out why he had betrayed me, us. I went underwater. I flapped my hands and kicked my legs hard so that I could get deeper. I wanted to feel my ears shift and pop, to know that the water had me, and if I waited too long, I would have to rush to get to the top. I opened my eyes. I could just make out one of my own hands in front of me—a ghost appendage, moving like the palest fish I’d ever seen. I couldn’t see much else. The water was brown with dirt, with a couple of slants of light coming down into it from the early morning sun. I came up.

“You’ve never really trusted him,” Willow continued as if I’d been on the surface the whole time.

“I wanted to, I mean, I did for a while, especially after we started having sex.”

“Maybe it’s just not good to go out with someone who’s so, well, wanted,” Willow offered. “Girls throw themselves at Julian.”

“Not all girls.”

“Weird girls.”

She was right. Goths, punks, skater-wannabes, betties, straight-edgers, potheads, and hippies, Deadheads— all liked Julian because he’d been the first person in Lamott to turn visibly different in the middle of high school. The rest of us had only been dreaming about how to make our internal weirdness manifest on our bodies, our skin, our hair, and our clothes. Julian grew dreadlocks, pierced his nose, wore combat boots, and ripped t-shirts before anyone knew that those were things you could do. So we saw him as a leader, a cult figure. It helped that he was a painter, his mother was French, and his father was a Human Sexuality professor at Lamott Community College. The same one that galvanized Willow to come out of the closet.

“What did she look like?”

“Blonde, big tits, not weird actually,” I said. “She could have been a cheerleader, but older.”

“Who the fuck is she?” Willow asked with just the right amount of indignation for the both of us. “We know everybody in Lamott.”

I nodded and felt my nose get tingly. I stuck my face in the water again and came back up, but the tears came anyway, hot on my cheeks, and somehow made heavier by the after-effects of tripping.

Willow kicked over to me and draped her arms around my shoulders. “It totally blows and he’s acting like a major dick,” she said. How could she be such a good friend to me, when I had become so utterly useless to her? Why was I incapable lately of ever saying the right thing?

The weight of her arms around my neck made it harder to tread water, so I shook her loose and floated on my back. “I don’t understand how he could change his mind so quickly about me,” I said more to the morning sky than to Willow.

“You just have to get through the summer and then you’ll be gone,” she said.

I turned over onto my stomach and blew bubbles into the water. I couldn’t tell if I’d stopped crying or not. I felt one hundred percent wet. I hadn’t yet told Willow about my most colossal fuck-up. We’d spent a lot of the last year of our collective community college hell scheming about our futures. Willow was planning on taking a year off to travel and last time I checked had saved up $2000. I was supposed to go to art school.

“I kind of screwed that up,” I admitted. I was finally ready to let someone yell at me. My parents hadn’t even asked if I sent in my transfer applications.

“What are you talking about?” Willow asked.

“I kind of forgot to send in my applications,” I admitted. “You know most painters don’t even go to college. They just move to New York City and take classes at the Art Students’ League,” I said.

“Is that your plan?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Jesus Annie, sometimes I truly don’t get you,” Willow said and kicked away from me. “You are really letting a guy ruin your life.”

“Your lips are blue,” I said, swimming towards her and changing the subject again. Maybe I wasn’t ready for a lecture.

“Yours are purple,” she said. Maybe she didn’t feel like giving one.

“Do you want to go eat something?” I asked, although my stomach wasn’t quite ready for food.

“I want an omelet and pancakes for the table,” Willow said.

As we started to swim back to the edge, we both heard someone whistling off in the distance.

“Fuck,” Willow whispered. “Hurry up, someone’s coming. Get out.”

I managed to get out of the water and put my underwear and shirt on. Willow was struggling to get into her skirt, and holding her t-shirt over her breasts. We were drenched, so what little we had on, clung to us, made us look even more naked.

“I swear, I didn’t see a thing,” the voice said. He came stumbling off of the rocky path from behind a cluster of pine trees, and it was pretty obvious from his expression that he’d seen at least our naked scramble out of the water, and maybe more. “I thought I was the only one who came down here at this hour.”

Willow gave me a sideways glance and I stifled a squeal of recognition. We were used to looking up at him, from the first or second row of the all-ages shows his band, The Band of None, played in Lamott, when they happened to be on a break from touring. He was a stoic on stage, firmly planted to left of the lead singer, Merilee, the guitarist, famous for his ornate, flowery solos and for bringing a reggae down-beat to an otherwise white, indie band. While Merilee spun around on stage, sometimes nearly falling off because of torque, Jeb stayed put, barely lifting his feet off the ground and occasionally looking out vacantly into the audience as if we were fog. It was Merilee who touched the tips of our fingers when we held them out, and who talked to us between songs about Jack Kerouac and the oppressive Italian weddings she had to attend as a little girl.

I’d once gone backstage after a show in Buffalo with Julian, who wanted to talk with Merilee about a doing benefit show in Lamott, but I had stayed predictably mute, in awe of the thirty-three year old woman who’d dropped out of the same high school I barely graduated from, and wrote the lyrics to the songs I’d memorized while lying in my bedroom. In high school Willow and I had recorded all of their videos, staying up until two in the morning on a Sunday night to watch 120 Minutes. Jeb had been backstage too, talking to someone at the food table absently, and staring at me intently. I stared back. I liked the feel of his eyes on me, their blue flame heat, but I was with Julian, and honestly, I thought he was old. He asked me some random questions about Jack Kerouac and Beat poetry, which made me nervous because I was terrible when it came to talking about writers. I could never remember who wrote what or plots or even main characters. Conversations about books often felt like pop quizzes to me. I’m sure I stammered and mumbled. My focus, my interest in the band had always been about Merilee. She was one of the many female lead singers I worshipped. Like Patti Smith, Blondie, Bjork, Kim Gordon, and Kim Deal, she held her own in a band full of men. I found this enviable, powerful even. She wrote all of the lyrics and parts of the music. She came from a fucked-up local family. Rumor had it, that after she wrote a song about her brother enlisting in the military, he didn’t speak to her for two years.

“A lot of people swim here,” I managed. My underwear stuck to my wet butt. My t-shirt was short. I was sure he could see my pubic hair. Willow had given up on trying to get her shirt over her head. She held it against her breasts like a shield.

He raised his eyebrows. He was wearing faded black jeans, scuffed motorcycle boots, and a vaguely Western black button-down shirt. My tripped out pupils got caught up in the ornate stitching along the collar and the mother-of-pearl snaps. I’d always thought he was chubby, but now I could see that while he did have a gut, his legs and arms were muscular. His face was round too, but he had a strong chin and deep blue eyes. His hair was thinning, and a slightly off shade of brown—like he colored it.

“You’re Annie right? We met backstage last winter?” he asked, looking intently at me for what felt like too long and then turning towards Willow. “And you are?”

“Willow.” She sounded hurt. Everyone in Lamott knew Willow.

“Oh right. You work at Cheap Hits.” His voice was deep but quiet. I realized I already liked it, and this annoyed me. I imagined what he would sound like on the phone. I was drawn to people who I couldn’t picture yelling at me. Before my father moved out, I hated his explosive weekly tirades about emptying ashtrays and helping my mother with the laundry. Two tasks, he himself, refused to do.

His eyes moved back and forth between us, and for a second I knew we were in the realm of fantasy. Two college girls. Best friends. One butch, one femme. When Willow first came out or when we went out of town to shows, people sometimes thought we were a couple. I was flattered but Willow acted like it was the most ridiculous scenario in the world. I recognized from the time I’d spent in my father’s guitar room leafing through his stash of Penthouse and Playboy that we were very much at the beginning of a porno scenario. All we had to do was say something scripted, something silly. We’re wet. You caught us. Don’t you want to get in? The water’s really warm.

I wondered if I was capable of saying such things. I doubted it. I felt a lump forming in my throat already. I needed to be drunk to say anything even vaguely sexual, and even then it always came off as aggressive and bossy, not the effect I’d hoped for.

Willow rolled her eyes and re-positioned her shirt so that it covered more of her stomach and less of her boobs. She’d been over The Band of None for a while.

“You’ve been to our shows right?” he asked.

“A lot,” I said.

“Your Dad’s got a hardcore metal band, right? What are they called? Darwin’s Revenge?”

“Darwin’s Avengers,” I corrected him. My father’s band was an embarrassment to me, a reminder of his refusal to grow up. My friends thought my dad was cool, but all I saw was an angry man who was trying to get in on what little scene our town had. Besides, I hated metal. It was an affront to everything I believed—the hair, the leather, the men, the posturing. “He’s also a lawyer,” I added.

Willow turned her back to us and slipped her t-shirt over her head. She stuffed her bra into her back pocket and turned back around. “You know, you shouldn’t scare people like that,” she said, looking him in the eye. “By sneaking up on them.”

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re right.” He balanced the toe of his boot on a big rock in the path and leaned into like it was a stool or he was doing some kind of runner’s stretch. He seemed to be in no hurry.

I stepped into my jeans and slid them over my legs and butt. I jammed my feet into my Converse and shot Willow a pointed look. I couldn’t really believe we were taking to him—the lead guitarist, the person in the band who was closest to Merilee. He was famous. I mean, he grew up in Lamott, and started out just like us. We were lucky to have access to him—he went out to our three local bars, he bought groceries at Quality Markets, he owned a house—but even if you took him out of this place and dropped him down in Los Angeles or New York City, he would still be actually famous. People might stop him on the street and try to talk to him. True, they’d be more interested in Merilee, but they’d still recognize him. I felt my cheeks getting red.

“We gotta go,” Willow said, looking around in the dirt for her shoes. “Did I leave my combat boots in the truck?” She looked bored, as she often did lately when she was talking to guys.

My heart felt sludgy in my chest. My stomach was too empty. I hadn’t eaten anything for almost twenty-four hours. “There probably in the back. I think I remember you kicking them off,” I managed.

He pushed the big rock off to the side of the path. I could see his leg muscles through his jeans. He was stronger than I imagined, but I still couldn’t help but think of Julian’s body. His was my go to form. Wiry and lean. I thought of him standing by the mattress, shirtless, his pubic hair peeking out from the waistband of his jeans.

“By the way, I’m Jeb,” he said.

Willow and I nodded, as if we didn’t know.

“Some friends are coming over to my house on Friday night after the free show. It will be low key, nothing major. You guys should come.” Willow started to shuffle over to the part of the ravine where we could climb up. “Just don’t invite a bunch of people. I’m kind of private,” he added.

“Okay,” I said, turning to follow Willow back to the car. I could feel him watching us as we scrambled up the embankment. The slight heat of his stare felt good and real, solid against Julian’s absence and betrayal.

4

Annie

The front door of Cheap Hits was locked, so I walked through the side alley and inched between the dumpster and a brick wall so that I could get to the back fire escape window. I was on my way to my part-time job as library page—a position I’d held for the last four years and found punishingly boring, but too easy to give up. The two old-lady librarians who’d hired me, Norma and Bonnie, were the same two women who had hired my mother when she was in her twenties for the very same job. It seemed that mindlessly shelving books in a place where no one spoke louder than a whisper was something the women in my family found appealing.

Most days, I stopped by Cheap Hits. There were very few hang-outs in Lamott and Keith, the owner, who musically favored the punks, temperamentally was most like a hippie, and physically wished he could be a skater had managed to create something special that brought together the holy trinity of subcultures—skaters, punks, and Deadheads. It was the only place to get any good music; Keith was willing to order anything, including imports, as long as you paid half up front, and Willow worked there. It was where I met Julian, and the place where most party schemes and show trips were hatched. If The Jesus and Mary Chain were playing a show in Toronto, chances are you’d find out about it first at Cheap Hits. When the Cocteau Twins new album, Blue Bell Knoll came out, Willow and I managed to convince Keith to play it for the entire afternoon, until the skaters revolted and demanded to hear Social Distortion.

The heavy window was propped open with an old waterlogged unabridged Webster’s dictionary. In order to wedge myself in, I had to move the dictionary and let the window rest on my back as I climbed through. My positioning was awkward, the window was too heavy, and I scraped my bare shin on the rough, peeled-paint sill.

“I’m bleeding,” I called out to the empty lounge, once I was inside. Nobody answered.

Cheap Hits consisted of two storefronts, one side was for hanging out and one side was for retail. What was most amazing about the space was that it was pretty much ours—it belonged to all of the kids who got tired of wandering around the mall or got beat-up or threatened whenever we went to the grocery store or the roller rink or the Putt Putt course or the Dairy Queen. Keith controlled the retail side—the wall of cassettes, the bins of LPs, and smaller selection of compact disks, concert VHS tapes, t-shirts, hippie bracelets, Grateful Dead patches and bumper stickers, and the hand-blown glass bongs and bowls behind the counter, but the lounge was ours.

I squinted to adjust my eyes to the darkness. Willow and our other friend Chris had recently hung a giant Batik bedspread over the front window to keep people from cupping their hands onto the window glass to stare. Willow and Chris were the only two out gay people in our scene. Chris had bravely come out in the tenth grade, in the middle of a discussion about genomes and gender in the fourth period. I remember the way he raised his hand, just a minute before the bell rang to announce to the class that he’d read that there was a gene mutation for homosexuality and that he was pretty sure he had it.

The teacher, Mrs. Taylor, looked nervously around the room through her thick glasses and mumbled, “That’s personal, Hon,” while the football players and wrestlers in the back row, snorted and coughed under their breath, “Faggot.” It was nothing new, except that Chris and I wisely barricaded ourselves in our English teacher’s office after school until the jocks got bored and went home. Maybe because she waited until college, Willow’s coming out seemed less socially dramatic. Her mother cried for a week, and her father stopped talking to her, but she insisted that they were coming around and that it was going to be okay. Chris and Willow had turned the space by the window into a kind of sub-lounge. They made a library there out of donated books and set up giant pillows. Willow even hung up one of my drawings. I couldn’t help but think they’d made it for themselves more than any of us—a kind of gay oasis in a not entirely accepting alternative scene.

“Where the fuck is everyone?” I said more to myself, now that it seemed like no one was around. “Willow?” I called out and then looked down at my shin—a steady teardrop of blood made it’s way toward the ankle strap of my sandal.

I wandered through the lounge and past the two old mis-matched plaid couches arranged around a glass coffee table, which looked like a prop from the set of Scarface, the three arcade games (Pac Man, Galaga, and Space Invaders), a pool table, and a broken air hockey console. The walls, pretty much every inch of free space were covered in our graffiti. When we were in high school, Keith said the white walls were making him crazy and he bought us a bunch of Sharpies and let us have at it. His only caveat was that we keep it clean. The result was like a giant notebook of secrets, half-secrets, doodles, portraits, self-portraits, favorite quotations, beloved song lyrics, and stupid jokes. Sometimes when I was bored, I just read the walls. They were thick with print, and occasionally someone wrote shit about you or left you a love note or a compliment on the wall that you might have missed. There were exchanges in progress, drawings half-finished, and ideas fully realized. We loved those walls. No one had ever given us that much space to say pretty much whatever we wanted.

I crossed over into the store and grabbed a tissue from the tie-dyed tissue cozy on the counter and pressed it to my skin. It stuck there, and made a small blood Rorschach pattern onto the white weave. I made my way towards Keith’s office, which was off-limits to all but a select few: Willow because she worked in the store, me because I was Willow’s best friend, and Steve because he was currently homeless and sleeping on the couch Keith kept in his office.

I heard Willow laugh and the bubbly gurgle of a bong being lit for the first time. I walked through the beaded curtains and into the office. Keith was reclining at what looked like a dangerous angle in his office chair. Steve and Willow sat on the floor with a red-three foot high water bong in between them. Steve has his mouth around the top of a bong, while Willow worked the carb.

“You could, like, answer me,” I said to them. “I’m wounded.”

“Oh, poor Annie, why don’t you come over here and I’ll lick the blood off of your leg?” Keith said and let his chair fall forward. He was wearing his usual uniform—cut-off shorts, Birkenstocks, and a tied-dyed Dead shirt straight off the racks of the store. Nobody knew exactly how old Keith was. He kept his hair in a kind of Morrissey pompadour, but the effect was not exactly handsome. His face was too chubby for that haircut. Keith had a girlfriend named Kelly who worked as a nurse in the emergency room and spent very little time in the store.

“Eww, AIDS,” Steve said and exhaled a big cloud of pot smoke. Willow shot him a dirty look and kicked at his shin with the toe of her Dr. Martins.

“There’s something wrong with you,” I said in Steve’s direction and glanced at Willow who did not return my look. Keith spoke to Willow and I mostly in innuendo and dirty talk if he was paying attention to us at all, and he was usually pissed off at somebody in the lounge. He complained often that as a group we were cheap and lazy, and that he spent too much time trying to keep the cops out of Cheap Hits because of stupid shit that we’d done at parties.

“Pot is great for pain management,” Steve said and patted the dirty space of oriental carpet next to him.

“There’s a band aide in Keith’s desk drawer,” Willow said, exhaling her hit and reclining back onto her elbows. She was wearing her usual uniform: an old military shirt, a long black skirt, and her Oxblood Dr. Martins. Since the ravine, she’d managed to add a streak of turquoise Manic Panic to the part of her hair. She must not have slept either. We never made it to breakfast. After we unstuck ourselves from our clothes, Willow dropped me off at home, so that we could both get ready for work. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling for two hours before forcing myself into the shower. I still felt devastated and speedy from the night before.

I got a band aid from Keith’s desk, ignoring the fact that he refused to move his knee so that I had to touch it to get the into the drawer. I scanned the contents of the drawer—I saw a one hitter, a couple of joints, some tiny empty plastic bags, a hacky sack, a condom, and an old calculator. I grabbed one of the joints and shoved it in my pocket for later.

I peeled the tissue off of my leg, winced, and put the band-aid on my cut.

“Do I have to stand to use this thing?” I asked. Now that the bong was in front of me, I could accept that I hadn’t really come to check on Willow, I’d come to get high before work and to forget that Julian already had a new girlfriend.

I stood awkwardly over the bong and let Steve maneuver the carb and filter. I inhaled as much of the smoke from the chamber as I could and then clapped my hand over the top and passed it back to Keith who finished my hit. I felt the familiar tightening in my lungs and then the swell outward as I tried to keep from exhaling too soon. After I’d run out of air, I exhaled the smoke into the center of the room, and watched the bong move from Keith to Willow to Steve. I shook my head no when it came back to me. The alarm clock on Keith’s desk said “12:15.” I sat down on the floor next to Willow, and said to no one in particular, “I have to be to work at 1.”

“You’re hair looks awesome,” I said in the direction of Willow’s shoulder.

“Uh, I feel horrible,” Willow said. “I thought maybe if I died my hair I’d feel less like an asshole.”

“Maybe if you start dressing like a girl again you’ll feel better.” Steve eyed Willow’s shirt and made a face.

“Fuck you. You’re homeless. Don’t tell me what to wear.” Willow kicked again in the direction of his shin, but he scooted back six inches to avoid her boot and snorted with glee.

“You gotta get bigger boots if you want to beat up boys.” Steve leaned back and waved his giant size twelve combat boots in the air.

“Loser,” I mouthed at Willow, but she ignored me and narrowed her eyes at Steve. “If I had a nickel for every homophobic comment,” she began.

“Don’t be so uptight,” Keith interrupted her.

“It’s harassment.” Willow sat up straight.

“No it’s not. It’s called ‘Life in Lamott.’” Keith kicked the drawer I’d open shut. “Did they arrest that pervert at the library?” Keith asked, I suspected to change the subject.

Two days before, one of the homeless guys who regularly napped in the periodicals took off his clothes and ran in circles around the reference desk, while the Norma and Bonnie emitted tiny bleats of “Help!” and “Oh, dear!” I watched, riveted from the mezzanine with my cart full of 800s until two cops showed up and tried to coax him into putting his pants back on. Eventually, they gave up on the pants and just put him in handcuffs.

“It was Theodore one of our regulars. He got over-stimulated looking at a book of Thomas Eakins’ male nudes.” I liked Theo. We sometimes talked about our favorite painters. I didn’t add that the only thing that grossed me out about my page job was that sometimes I shelved books whose pages were stuck together with cum and that the children’s books were always full of boogers.

“That’s disgusting,” Willow added. She did not understand my interest in the homeless guys at the library.

“Nudity is primal man, sometimes, we just need to get naked,” Keith said. He’d spent a summer long ago touring with the reconstituted Dead and could always be counted on for major amounts of hippie blather. Still, even though I did not in general, respect Deadheads, especially girl Deadheads with their jingle-bells ankle bracelets, patchouli scent, circle dancing, and over-all positivity, I liked Keith. He’d given us the store, he let us do mostly what we wanted, and he had great stories.

“Keith, tell us about the time you teleported onto the stage,” I asked and Willow nodded. We loved this one.

“So I was on tour with the Dead and I had hooked up with this totally hot girl who was making vegan burritos out of the back of her van, and she asked me if I would keep some blotter of hers safe. She was feeling paranoid about the cops or about her old man who she thought might be coming back around. So I was like, sure, I mean, I’d have done anything for this girl. She’d just given me the best blow job of my life!” Keith paused to see if Willow and I were still will him.

“Yeah man!” Steve said, made happy, I suppose, by the thought of quality blowjobs.

I saw myself, draped over Julian, undoing his belt buckle, peeling down his underwear, and sliding his perfect erect cock into my mouth. I willed the image out of my mind and smiled at Keith to continue. I looked over at Willow. I wondered if she was disgusted now by the thought of blow jobs. She had boyfriends, not anyone recently, but in high school she dated this skater guy Grant for months, and even though they fought every other day, they had a lot of sex. We talked about it constantly—Grant’s enormously large and curved penis, how sometimes she just couldn’t deal with it. She rolled her eyes at the three of us and Keith continued.

“So she hands me like 50 tabs of acid wrapped in plastic and I shove them into the front pocket of my cut-off jean shorts and then I kiss her good-bye and descend down from the mayhem of the parking lot into the deep and divine chaos of the show. Now I know you three are not Deadheads, so I will spare you the ten-minute riff on what Jerry Garcia used to be like live, before the diabetic coma, but let me just say that he was kinetic, a shaman really, someone who could channel other realms and bring those worlds onto the stage. So I’m dancing and sweating like a motherfucker and I’m not wearing any underwear, because I’d been balling and I’d somehow lost it or maybe I didn’t care, who knows, but the acid must have slid out of the plastic wrap and onto my skin because after about an hour, I start to lose my mind!”

“What happened?” Steve asked. He had his flannel shirt tied around his waist and his blonde hair shaved crookedly all around the bottom half of his head. He wore a black Danzig t-shirt, a band that too many guys had forced me to listen to, and I just didn’t get. He wasn’t bad looking, I decided, but he was a slut and a homophobe.

“I rose up out of my own body—I shit you not—and I teleported onto the stage. There were two Keiths—the guy dancing like a maniac down in the pit with all the other freaks, and the new Keith who was on stage with Jerry, and let me tell you something. Jerry had the most beautiful vibe. It was peace and love, and a 100% musicianship up there.”

“But were there really two Keiths?” I asked, certain that this story needed a dumb question to see it through to its end. I glanced over at Willow who was staring intently at the graying fringe at the edge of the shake-laden oriental carpet. Lately, she often seemed somewhere else.

“Good Annie, I see you are paying attention. Alas, there were not in fact two of me. It turns out that because I was tripping my face off, I managed to scramble up on stage and scare the shit out of Jerry, all the while convincing myself that I had magically floated out of my own body. Two roadies got me off the stage, roughed me up a bit and sent me back out to the parking lot. I hooked up with my lady friend again, but when she figured out what I’d done with her acid she wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Awww,” I cooed. Willow looked up and raised her eyebrows, checking me, I suspected for my hopelessly girly response.

“It was all worth it—I mean to have that kind of experience with Jerry, to feel his aura in that way, that’s a once in a lifetime deal.”

“I need to go somewhere,” Steve said. “Travel or something.”

“Right?” I said and then look up at the old-style school clock that Keith stole from the high school dumpster. It said, 12:30.

“I gotta go,” I said, stood up, and waved good-bye to Keith, Steve, and Willow, who barely managed to nod in my direction.

“I have to open the store back up,” Keith said and he followed me out of the office, through the store, and to the front door, which he unlocked for me. “Bye Bananarama,” he said. When he was feeling affectionate Keith called girls that. For boys, he usually chose “Poison” or “New Edition”—all bands we hated.

“Oh, and Jeb asked me to ask you to come over on Friday,” he said.

I nodded, a little too stoned to fully commit. I’d forgotten that Keith and Jeb were friends, but it made sense. They were around the same age—they probably both went to Lamott High.

“Is that a yes?” Keith asked.

“I guess,” I said, but I felt annoyed that he was bugging me.

Keith must have sensed that because he shifted gears. “After the show, I mean, it will be a fun party and maybe you could paint something for Jeb sometime.”

“You told him I paint?” I asked, happy to shift the subject from me to my paintings. I was desperate to sell a painting, to do something with my work other than keep it all in my bedroom or hanging on my friends’ walls.

“Yeah, sure, I mean, he knows,” Keith said.

“Okay, okay,” I said, “Are you going?” suddenly afraid that I’d be trapped in a room full of middle-age rockers with no one to talk to.

“Yeah, of course, Jeb and I go way back,” Keith said and I felt satisfied I’d have at least one person to hang out with.

I let the door of Cheap Hits slam behind me and I started to wander up Main Street towards the library. When I got to work, I did what I always did: I spoke to no one, I put away three carts of books, wasted way too much time in the art history section, and hid out behind the library to smoke the joint I’d nicked from Keith earlier.

I wasn’t one of those spoiled and lucky rich kids whose parents bought her a car when she turned sixteen. Thank God Lamott High offered Driver’s Ed or I probably would have never even learned how to drive. Sometimes, if my mother wasn’t passed out she remembered to come and get me, but mostly I depended on Julian and Willow for rides, and Julian had stopped driving me around when he dumped me. That left Willow, who was, after all, entitled to her own life, I reminded myself.

I didn’t mind walking. I veered off to the left at the bottom of Lamott’s Main Street, so that I could take the footbridge over the small river that ran through the center of town. I measured my footsteps carefully—one foot in front of the other. I felt lightheaded; my eyes were sticky and I wondered how often the people around me could tell that I was high. Did the librarians know? The same, sweet little old ladies who hired me over four years ago, when I was a virgin, a girl who’d never even been drunk?

I stepped onto the footbridge and ran my fingers along the rusted green steel slats along either side of the walking path. I looked down and saw the water meandering through the planks of wood. The river was in the dusky shadow of the bridge. I felt sleepy and spent—still psychically addled by the acid and Julian. The steel guardrails, the wooden floor, the moving water, and my body on the bridge felt, somehow, architecturally of the same piece. I’d always loved this bridge. It felt magical and surprising. When I was a kid, I used to pretend that their were trolls underneath, waiting to extract some coveted object from me—an ice cream sundae, a cloak of invisibility I’d stolen from them long ago, or my first born.

I squatted at a gap in the slats, the place where you could stick your head through to get a closer look at the water and I saw her. Willow, much further down the river, picking her way along the shore, her back to me. She’d changed into yet another version of her usual high priestess meets soldier uniform—crushed red velvet floor length skirt, scuffed combat boots, and a camouflage military shirt, buttoned all the way up to the top.

“Willow!” I called out. I’d never known her to care about this river or let alone to take a walk by it. I wondered how she got down there. I’d never actually been off the bridge and down beneath it. The sewage treatment plant and the chair factory my uncles worked in until they got laid off a year ago, buffeted the water at this part of the river. It was brown and brackish—still near the banks, and meandering even in the middle. There were a couple of “No Trespassing Signs,” and one lone sign that said, “Danger. No swimming.”

She didn’t answer or even turn towards me.

“Willow!” I called again, cupping my hands around my lips to make my voice carry. She continued to walk away from me. I sat down on the planks of the bridge and wriggled my legs underneath the slats so that they were hanging off the side. I pressed my forehead to the metal railing—it was still hot from the early July sun. I watched Willow as she poked her way down the shore. I saw her pick up a stone and throw it into the yellow center. She pulled a small dead-looking tree out of the ground by the roots and chucked that into the river too. I stared long enough and she got far away enough, so that she became abstract and fuzzy, image of a woman, rather than a real woman, more movie than person.

The brackish, woodsy landscape and the heat coming off of the railing reminded me of a bonfire Willow and I’d once built together. Willow’s father had taken us camping for the night at Allegany State park. It was September, and we were in 9^th grade and not adjusting well to the chaos of high school. Willow had been shoved naked against a locker while changing in the pool locker room and I’d been relegated to a 10:40 am lunch period without any of my middle school friends. I’d taken to sneaking away to hide in a bathroom stall to avoid the embarrassment of sitting alone in the cafeteria. So we were both feeling tender and defeated, though we’d told no one but each other about these humiliations.

Willow and her dad were still close then, and he must have sensed something was off. She was still the tomboy who found his hobbies fascinating, not the angry butch woman he’d eventually shun. We were staying in a cabin, but the whole park was overrun by raccoons, who kept walking up onto the small porch of the cabin to stare into the windows at our table full of food. Willow’s dad let us build a fire to keep them away and so that we could roast marshmallows.

We carefully arranged the kindling and the branches we’d collected. Willow struck a match and lit the end of a greasy paper plate from our lunch of hot dogs. We stared into the fire pit, as the plates and newspapers curled up onto one another and ignited the next layer of small twigs. We ran back and forth into the dimly-lit woods to gather more sticks and logs, working in the warm shadow of our fire. We had a shared project, a simple goal, start a fire and keep it going. We dumped more twigs and logs into the pit, and within ten minutes our small flames had turned into a five-foot high bonfire. I took Willow’s hand and we stared into the flames, our eyes and fingers locked into something primal and magic.

“Easy girls.” Willow’s dad jogged out of the cabin and next to the fire to pull us back by our shoulders, but I knew we were safe. I had her hand and she had mine, and I knew we’d make it through high school if we just stuck together.

The flames licked and kicked at the starry sky. The twigs and sticks cracked and popped in heat. The wind changed and blew smoke into our faces, but we stayed put, Willow’s dad between us, with one hand on either of our shoulders.

Perhaps then, we weren’t so combustible. We wanted someone to grab us by the shoulders and hold us back, and we could still listen to reason.

“Willow!” I called her a third time. I stood up and waved in her direction, but still got no response. I felt suddenly silly and clingy. Wasn’t she entitled to her privacy? She clearly wanted to be alone. I thought of our painful conversation in the ravine—the way I forced her to spill her guts. Maybe the pot was making me paranoid, but how had I become so colossally bad at giving my best friend space?

And then I watched her wade out deep enough into the water so that her skirt started to float up around her like an inky dark cloud. She didn’t take off her combat boots and she didn’t look down. Knee-deep in, she turned back around and kicked back to the shore.

“Willow!” I shouted one last time towards the sky.

Nothing. She kept walking away from me and towards the chair factory, until the river turned and she wandered out of my sight.

5

Willow

I wasn’t planning on going under, but I lost my footing. I didn’t figure the water would be so cold and yellow. Later, some of my friends would make a big deal about the fact that I’d been reading Virginia Woolf. There was a copy of Mrs. Dalloway on my nightstand, but I hadn’t even started it. I knew she’d done it by wearing a dress weighted down with stones in the pockets. But I wasn’t wearing a dress. I had on my usual militant oracle get-up—a Stevie Nicks inspired long skirt and the Marine uniform shirt I’d found on the 50 cent rack at the Salvation Army, buttoned up to the throat, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. And I wasn’t thinking about Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath or John Berryman or William Burroughs or any of the mad geniuses. I was thinking that I was bored, but bored outside of myself, like there were two of me: bored me and then the me who was somehow hyper aware of her boredom. That second bored me, that meta-me, made the boredom worse, egged it on, and asked it to do something with itself. She’s the one who said, Take a walk by the river. And later, Wade out into the middle of it.

As I wandered along the shore, I thought about all of the chair parts that must have gotten thrown into the river and floated off down to Pittsburgh or eventually even to the Atlantic Ocean. I remembered my favorite book as a kid, Scuffy the Tugboat, and how he too, eventually made his way from stream to sea, to a bigger, more exciting life. I thought too about how water makes boundaries less clear, divisions and territories harder to define, and that if I could be really honest with myself, I’d understand that every landscape is liminal—slippery and provisional. Even certainty is built on the back of questions.

I felt bad that it was a kid who found my body. Some dreamy little seven-year-old, who lived in the shitty apartments behind the high school, whose mom ignored him when her boyfriend was there, which was a lot. He knew how to make his own grilled cheese sandwiches and he liked to walk along the river and look for frogs. Sometimes if he caught one, he tortured it, not to kill it, but just enough to show it who was boss. So much for frogs. Nobody needs that memory—the body of a woman, face down in the weedy muck, her skirt wrapped around her legs, her hair splayed out like the kid’s drawing of the sun.

And my parents, my poor sad parents. I was an only child, a huge disappointment to them, even at twenty, but still they had hope. We were all, in our own way, hopeful.

6

Jeb

Think of me as your all-access backstage pass.

I spent the two hours before the free show doing a radio interview and the standard meet n’ greet. You’ve got to admire our local radio personality, Slap Dash. He’s seventy-four and spends every day deejaying both “The Breakfast Club,”—a daily 6 am (I shit you not!) coffee and pancakes celebration of pretty much any citizen of Lamott, at any age, who happened to be celebrating a birthday and decided to wander over to the make-shift studio at Denny’s—and “The Talk About,” the 4 pm gab fest about local politics and events. But don’t let the old silver fox with the dulcet voice fool you. Dash pulled a couple of Mike Wallace moments out of his hat.

Dash: So what makes this fifth album so special compared to your last four?

Me: Now that we’re more well known, we could get some special guests to join us in the studio for a track or two. We got Michael Stipe to do a duet with Merilee. Tracy Chapman came in to play acoustic with me and to sing some back-up vocals and we got Kim Deal and her sister, Kelly to write a couple of really loud songs for us. We’re also more mature as a band so I think the sound has really gelled and you can hear a new level of confidence in our playing.

Dash: Is there any truth to the rumors about you and Merilee?

Me: That I’m having our love child?

Dash: (Laughs) Seriously, we’re all friends here. I used to shop with you mom down at Brigotta’s, you can tell Grandpa Slap. There must be a whole Keith Richards Mick Jagger thing? You know, the guitarist and the lead singer locked in a death match for creative control?

Me: Keith did coin the term LVS, Lead Vocalist Syndrome.

(Laughter in the studio).

Dash: (Lowering voice to almost a whisper) You think Merilee’s got that?

Me: (Laughing) No, but we do disagree on stuff. Looks, she’s out there right up front, doing things that I can’t do. Her vocal power, the amount of oxygen she’s got to move out of her body and into these arenas (because that’s where we play now), the dancing, the beauty of her lyrics—hands down to all of that. But my job is to make sure that there’s space for the music, our unique sound.

Dash: As I mentioned before, may of us know your family from around Lamott. Your mother, your Uncle Frank. How are they feeling about your success?

Me: My mom dressed me up as Elvis for Halloween when I was two. She bought me this ukulele to go with my costume because I was so small it looked like a full-sized guitar and you know, that’s the first instrument I learned how to play. So I think they’re just relieved that I graduated from ukulele to something bigger.

Dash: I hear you’re a big Roy Orbison fan.

Me: I admire him on all fronts. His guitar playing which is so smooth and yet completely emotional. His voice which is just pure honesty, total crooning love. And his clothes. I mean, the man, is a genius of dignity in those beautiful black shirts and ties.

Dash: I’m going to change the subject here for a moment. (Dramatic pause).

Did you know Willow Nelson?

Me: No, I didn’t, not really. I met her once or twice at the local record store, but we never really talked. I’m shocked though, I bumped into her yesterday, and she seemed, well, okay.

Dash: I hear the band’s decided to dedicate tonight’s show in her memory.

Me: Yeah, a lot of our hometown fans, some of the younger ones in high school and at the community college especially, were close to her, so we’d like to show our love and support.

Dash: Well, listeners you heard it here first, tonight’s show is in memory of Willow Nelson. The police pulled this young woman’s body out of the river this afternoon. As many of our listeners know, Willow is the daughter of our town’s esteemed mayor. She was a, er, a unique young woman. Our prayers go out to Willow’s friends and family. We’ve been in the studio with Jeb Pasco, guitarist and songwriter for the Band of None, who’ll be playing a free show tonight at the Lamott Community College gymnasium at 8 pm. Thanks for coming on “The Talk About” Jeb.

Me: Thanks for having me.

During the meet n’ greet, I had my picture taken with three girl scout troupes, the Kiwanis club, the Rotary Club, five guys from a neighboring town’s dwindling steel workers’ union who had me sign their teamsters jackets, several members of the Lamott high school band and jazz ensemble, the junior high school acapella songbirds, a dance collective consisting of three middle-aged women in matching burgundy leotards, and a class of cosmetology students who told me they listened to our last album while they were learning to give permanents and highlights. One of the cosmetology students, a beautiful girl with a round ass and smoky eyes pressed a note in my hand that read, “I’d like to cut your hair, no charge. Call Vivienne at 555-555-5555.” I signed a stack of 200 t-shirts and 150 posters. Our drummer, Terry, re-introduced me to our ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Kearney, who’d once thrown me out of class for drawing a dirty picture of Juliet while we were rehearsing scenes from Romeo and Juliet. I can still get a hard-on thinking about that drawing. My Juliet had pert little tits and her long skirt hiked up around her waist, so that the members of my small group could see that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Mrs. Kearney came to have us sign her copy of On the Road (she knows I’m a big fan) and scold me for dropping out of school after 10^th grade. I guess she forgot about the drawing. Ian and Bobby were down at the local newspaper doing another interview. We did this all without Merilee, who on this tour, decided to do only the biggest meet n’ greets and national press, but not local. Lead vocalist syndrome? You tell me.

After the meet n’ greet, backstage was still a mess. Bobby and Ian’s five kids were running around—some asshole had given them squirt guns and they were blasting the shit out of each other and us. I took a couple of soaks hard in the chest and then I wrestled Toby, Bobby’s oldest boy to the ground and tickled him until he screamed “Uncle Jeb!” Tracy and Sylvia, Bobby and Ian’s wives were making a big deal out of ignoring their kids, who’d they’d been alone with for the last three months while we were on tour. Terry and I snuck off to a bathroom stall in the men’s locker room to smoke some bowls and then I hid out near the speakers to listen to the The Herons, a local blue grass band, who were our usual openers whenever we played anywhere near Lamott.

The Herons were just three guys—two lean, bearded, stellar banjo players who were twin brothers, and a big fat jug player named Watson, who I’d known forever. The twins told knock-knock jokes between songs and harassed each other about who their mother had loved more. Their songs were about broken hearts and getting drunk, the banjo playing was fast and furious and the jug work was and discomfiting in its skill level. It’s wild to see a jug and a man make that much noise! Watson is nuts and if he’s feeling it, he will stage dive with his jug. I thought they were hilarious and tight, but the little sliver of crowd who’d come early was milling around, talking to each other, and ignoring the band.

I noticed Keith in the center of the crowd with his arm around some chubby guy, who looked miserable. I hoped Keith brought me some medicine, and I wondered if my latest obsession was in the crowd—I’d already jerked off twice to Annie scrambling bare-assed out of the ravine. I made a mental note to tell my roadie, Ben, to look for her during the show and see if she wanted to come backstage, and then I remembered that her friend was dead and she probably didn’t feel much like partying. I hurried off to change and smoke another bowl. Merilee was holed up in the tour bus, no doubt pissed off at one of us for making her do another hometown show. She’d been fighting with her family lately, mostly because she’d bought a house in another part of the state, and they all felt betrayed. Merilee’s father died when she was ten, her mother was sick with dementia, and her brother was jealous because she’d gotten out and was famous. She had five aunts and about forty cousins and they all wanted, no, needed, something.

We all met up in the cinderblock hallway near the back entrance to the gymnasium. Merilee, fresh off the tour bus, was wearing this long sheath of a purple dress. It flared out in some weird way at the bottom and revealed her toned calves and cute bony knees. It was tight across her chest and hips and reminded me that she still had the body of my dreams—the one I would most consistently like to fuck. Somewhere between the last tour and this one, she’d gotten a fashion designer to do her wardrobe, and the effect was a little too glam for our band. She’d become an up-scale version of herself, a beautiful dresser who was slumming it with us.

“This is the last fucking time,” Merilee said to us as we waited for the student-body president, some farm kid turned community college revolutionary, who had a shaved head and was wearing two Band Of None t-shirts, one right on top of the other—to announce us.

Ian and Bobby said nothing—I knew they were excited to play for their wives and kids. My mom was at home listening on the radio, her knees couldn’t take the standing, but my Uncle Frank was out there somewhere, proud and bragging to strangers I’m sure.

“It’s for the kids, Mer,” Terry reminded her. “Remember when we all drove up to Canada to see Patti Smith in 1979—how awesome that was for us as a band?”

I eyed Terry, who was too stoned to remember that his fit of nostalgia would not work on Merilee.

“We are no Patti Smith Group,” Merilee said and rolled her eyes in my direction. I could remember a time when Merilee had fun with us backstage—when she used to smoke a bowl and make us laugh by trying out Motown style dance moves. Or when she judged the eating contests that Bobby and our roadies used to stage when they were bored.

I shrugged if off and pointed at the kid on stage, who had just finished shouting into the mic and was now beaming and clapping at us.

“Show time!” I said to the band and then turned and gave the kid the thumbs up sign.

Terry went out first, head down, small wave, and then sat behind his kit. Ian followed, also keeping his head low, and started to play the first couple of chords from our big hit, “Steeple Chase.” Bobby jogged out onto the stage, his bass already strapped to his chest. He paused mid-stage and spun around twice, a bit awkwardly, before saluting the crowd, who cheered loudly. He was usually drunk by the time we played. Merilee rolled her eyes at me, which had pretty much become my cue. I walked onto the stage and a new set of lights came up to showcase me, my guitar, and the second-most important person in the band. I waved too, and looked out into the crowd. I saw the usual row of screaming girls up front and a couple of tall guys back by the speakers, but the lights were too bright and I couldn’t see much else.

Merilee bounded onto the stage and positioned herself, back to the audience in front of Terry’s drum kit. She spun around a couple of times for effect, but she kept her head down, her long thick black hair in front of her face. Sometimes when she was spinning like that I could picture the fourteen year-old girl who I started a band with, the one who used to smoke joints with me behind Lamott High’s cafeteria dumpster, and who skipped every one of her classes except art. I often didn’t know what happened to that wild girl who let me feel her up every time I taught myself how to play a new song on my guitar, but when she whirled around like that, in spite of the dress, I could see her.

She danced over towards me, still keeping her back to the audience. I smiled at her, nodded, and then closed my eyes as I concentrated on the complicated notes that led into the song’s opening. After an extended intro, Merilee turned to face the audience and danced up towards the front the stage. The first couple of rows of fans surged forward in anticipation. Merilee grabbed the mic and cooed into it, “It feels great to be home!”

The crowd roared its approval and pushed forward again. She tossed her head back and then started to sing the opening lyrics, “You said you’d chase me. You said we’d play tag, but I’m still hiding and you’re still counting.” The girls in the front row lifted their hands up to Merilee, up to the band, and she ran along the edge to touch their fingertips and to collect the presents they’d brought for her—lone roses, a tie-died scarf, a homemade t-shirt, all the while belting out the lyrics to a song about an affair gone bad, one that Merilee likens to a game of hide and seek, a game of tag, and eventually a deadly steeplechase. I closed my eyes and settle into my part, moving my hand across the neck of my guitar and into my chords, my solo, and the ending. I fell into the trance-like state that washes over me when I’m playing. I thought about the notes coming off of my guitar, the music I’m playing moving into the hot air of the gym and disappearing. I loved that about live shows, about touring. It’s gone—whatever you’ve done, whatever you manage to create, mistakes and all, its ether.

I looked over at Merilee’s who was on the floor of the stage. She usually ended the song this way, on her stomach, dress be damned. I slammed down the last chord and we all stopped playing in a messy clatter. The audience continued to shout and applaud. I heard a girl call out, “I love you Jeb!” Bobby hurried behind the drum kit for a pull off of his flask.

Merilee sat up on her knees. Her dress was covered in dust, but she didn’t seem to mind. For all of her bullshit, I knew she still loved to perform, got totally into it in the same way I did. She kept the mic close to her mouth and started to talk to the crowd in that mesmerizing, I’ve-got-a-secret-kind of way that all lead vocalists seem to somehow intuit.

“Did any of you know Willow Nelson?” she asked into the mic and out into the darkness.

Some portions of the crowd cheered, which didn’t seem like quite the right response, but Merilee tried to fix it.

“Well, we didn’t know her, but we heard that she was a good friend and a rock star in her own way,” Merilee continued, but even stoned I could tell that the tone of this dedication was wrong. It shouldn’t come on the heels of a hit, of everyone throwing themselves around the stage. We should have talked about this as a band; figured out before we went on what we were going to say.

“We want to dedicate this show to Willow, to the memory of Willow, and to you, her friends and family,” Merilee said and looked over to me to start the next song. The room felt quiet, too quiet, even for this heavy dedication.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bottle whiz up out of the center of the crowd in a long arc towards the stage. It landed just two or three inches shy of Merilee and smashed into tiny light green shards. She dropped the mic and I moved off to the side to see if I could make out who had thrown the bottle. The fans in the first couple of rows turned around to see what was going on behind them. Ian, in an attempt to lighten the mood, said into his mic, “Hey, we don’t throw things at Merilee. She’s our friend.”

Merilee picked up the mic out of the glass and shouted into it, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I could hear all of her bad mojo about Lamott, all of the stuff she told me at five am on the road when she had insomnia and there was no one else to talk to and she remembered that deep down we liked each other—the pressure she felt from her aunts to take care of her mother, a woman who’d treated her like a servant her whole life; her brother’s demands that she pay for his kids’ Catholic school and their school clothes every year regardless of whether or not she felt like Catholic school was a good thing for children, which by the way she didn’t; the feeling she was pretty sure she could sense coming off the of the crowd right at this moment which felt like a noxious mixture of needy, needy love and resentment of the girl who got away and who didn’t dress like them anymore and who maybe because of her new clothes and her really good haircut thought that she was better than them—coming out in that one pissed-off question.

The stage manager put the house lights on and the crowd moved back onto itself. The fans up front looked confused—some hadn’t even seen the bottle in the air or hitting the stage. They thought Merilee was yelling at them.

It was a small show, probably about 1000 people, but the gym was at capacity, and crowd was packed in tight unless you were on the sides and in the back. I thought of the hardcore punk shows Terry and I went to when we were in New York and wanted to remind ourselves of what was possible—G.G. Allin, the Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, and Samhain—shows where the mosh pit rolled up onto the stage, back to the bartender and into the pissy bathrooms, where the lead singer and the rest of the band were locked into a SITUATION with the audience and you weren’t always sure you were going to get out of there alive. I’d once seen G.G. Allin roll around in glass on stage, bleed his way through a couple of songs, and then collapse onto the audience, who carried him dutifully, worshipfully even, out to the ambulance on Avenue C that the promoter had the foresight to call. Now that was a show! But we were not those bands. Our fans didn’t mosh, at least not when they came to see us, and Merilee sometimes stopped us mid-song if she felt like anyone was getting crushed up front. We were an indie rock band with a quirky folksy female singer. Our fans were girls and women, nerds of all persuasions, principled sensitive guys, gay men, and the occasional guitar aficionado, who understood that I was up to something different, or at least trying.

“You’re full of shit!” a voice called out from the center of the crowd.

Everyone in the band cupped our hands over our eyes to see who was yelling. The crowd shifted and I saw Keith next to the same chubby guy I spotted before the show. He was sweaty and maybe crying and Keith was trying to hold him back.

“She hated you guys! She was a punk! Her hero was Poly Styrene!” he shouted at Merilee.

“It’s okay, man,“ I said, stepping forward. “We love the X-Ray Specs too.”

Merilee had positioned her body halfway behind me. She was using me as a shield, but she was still holding the mic, and I was pretty sure she was going to let this kid have it.

“Mer,” I said into my shoulder. “Why don’t you go take a break?” but she didn’t budge.

I’d been on the road for long enough to know that places have personalities. Even the most boring towns and cities have some kind of emotional cornerstone. You just have to pay attention for long enough to access it. Sometimes you feel it in a particular place, a park or a bar, but often it’s just in the air. Anger, bad luck, lust, sex, pot, bourbon, bread. Yeah, sometimes food is a mood. We once played in a pickle-manufacturing town, and that was pretty much the mood. Pickle. Sour. Crisp. A side note. Lamott was always a moody place, and what we were experiencing right at that moment was the Lamott mood tinged with teenage mourning and rage.

Before he could answer me, someone shoved him from behind and he turned around and threw a punch. Keith ducked and the crowd broke off into tiny fighting factions. I quickly lost sight of any one particular person—the crowd became a mass of backs and hair. Girls were screaming and pulling on the shirts of some of the guys, but it was pointless. The couple of volunteer security officers supplied by the college started to wade into the fray, but there was too much shoving and they didn’t get very far.

I looked over at Bobby who’d stopped playing his bass and Ian who’d stepped out from behind his keyboard. They looked a little stunned. Merilee had a look of total horror on her face. She hated violence, but more than anything she hated to lose control. She was used to having her audience wrapped around her finger, of getting them to scream with delight with the flick of her skirt or the toss of her head. This was no longer her show. It didn’t belong to any of us anymore. We were watching the crowd. They were the stars.

“Stop it! Everybody stop it! Stop it, right now!” she shouted into the mic and set off some-ear splitting feedback. She threw it back down onto the stage and looked over at me. “You’ve got to do something. Make them stop.”

Terry was standing next to me now too. He was holding his sticks and smiling. I’d seen that look on his face before. It was usually right before we did something really stupid.

It occurred to me that whoever that guy was that had thrown the bottle at Merilee and shouted us down was right. If Willow Nelson was truly a punk, if her hero was really Poly Styrene, then we had no business dedicating a show to her.

Maybe this teaming mass of fighting, sweating bodies was more of her thing.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked Terry.

“This could be our Altamont,” Terry said and smirked. We’d recently re-watched the Rolling Stones documentary, Gimme Shelter. Terry and I were egomaniac enough as musicians to wish that we had the kinds of fans that routinely went bonkers in our presence.

“Nah, but we’ll finally get to party,” I said.

“Babies, I’m in a band with babies,” Merilee said, looking back and forth between the two of us. Bobby took his bass off and leaned it against Terry’s drum kit riser. “I got to go find my kids.” Ian nodded and followed him off the stage.

“Ready?” I asked.

He nodded and threw his drumsticks behind him. We jumped down off of the stage and hurled our bodies into the mass.

The last thing I heard before I got punched in the nose was the sound of the fire alarm going off.

When I came to, there was a fireman standing over me. He was holding a Sharpie and one of our first albums. “You feel like signing this before you get arrested?”

I nodded. “Who should I sign it to?”

7

Annie

On the way to Willow’s funeral, I paused in the foyer, to say good-bye to my mother who was lying on the couch and staring up at the ceiling. She’d positioned the spigot of her box of chardonnay at the edge of the coffee table so that she could refill her “World’s Best Aunt” mug without having to get up.

“You want some ice,” I asked. I’d grown up a tiny bartender, able to sense when glasses needed ice or a refill.

“No hon, it’s good. I’m only having the last of the box anyway, just a teensy sip,” my mom lied. I could tell from her positioning on the couch, the akimbo angles of her legs and the use of the baby word, “teensy” that she had opened the box a couple of hours ago and would definitely finish it off. She’d be passed out by the time the sun went down.

“You okay to go without me?” my mom asked. She propped herself up onto her elbows so that she could get a better look at me. I’d done nothing but cry, sleep, and get high since I’d found out, and every bit of food I tried to eat, I barfed right back up. My eyes were swollen, puffy, and pink.

“Yeah mom, I know you don’t like these things,” I said. She had a rule about funeral homes and wakes—anything associated with the dead, she would not attend. I wondered what she’d do when her own mother died.

“Do you want me to call your dad to go with you?” she asked.

“I want to go by myself,” I said and I meant it. We both knew there was no way my dad would go anyway. “I’m going to walk. I need the air.” I let the screen door slam behind me and wandered out towards the street. I knew that I wasn’t really taking anything in or maybe I was in shock. My head felt foggy and my tongue leaden. As I forced myself to walk down my street and in the vague direction of the funeral home, I kept up a steady chant in my head. This is not happening. Willow is not dead. This is not happening. Willow is not dead.

“Is this real?” Julian asked. We sat in his trash-filled car, outside of Lindy’s funeral home, trying to get up the courage to go in. I was surprised when Julian pulled up alongside of me ten minutes into my walk halfway to the funeral home.

“Get in,” he said through the open window of the passenger side door.

“No,” I shot back.

“You’re not going to walk the rest of the way.”

“Yes, I am.”

Julian turned the steering wheel gently and eased his front tire onto the sidewalk to block my path.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” I looked over at him through the windshield and then I gave up, opened the door, and sat down. I hated him for having a new girlfriend, but I was tired of walking. Besides, Julian was friends with Willow and knew how much I loved her, and he certainly understood that my parents were useless. I felt grateful to have him, if only for this moment.

We sat in silence for the rest of the two-minute drive to the funeral home. Julian parked far from the entrance, rolled down the windows, and turned off the engine. Neither of us made a move to go into the funeral home, so I slid the mixed tape I’d just made for Willow into the tape deck and waited for the first track to click into place. It was “Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth. I loved the soft girl growl of Kim Gordon at the beginning of the song and then the hard and fast bridge into Thurston Moore’s guitar and deeper voice. I still couldn’t believe they were a couple, partners in a band that made such necessary music. Gordon cooed, “Spirit desire. Spirit desire. Spirit desire. We will fall.” Julian shoved his seat as far back as it would go and reached over me to rummage around in the glove compartment. He pulled a silver flask out of it, took a big swig, and handed it to me.

“To Willow,” he said.

I took a sip and made a face.

“What the hell is that?” I asked, taking two more big pulls.

“It’s French, Pernod. Somebody gave it to my mom at Christmas, and then I stole it for repurposing.” I passed the flask back to him and he drank more of it.

“Willow would have hated this,” I said and reclined the back of my seat. I waved my arm in front of me to indicate the whole of it—the funeral home, the people dressed up and parking their cars in neat rows so that they could go and ogle her dead body. The booze made my cheeks feel warm and my head tingly. “Something so public, I don’t know, so regular.”

“Maybe,” Julian said. “But haven’t you ever had one of those sick suicide fantasies, like I’m going off myself just so I can make everyone come together and celebrate me?”

“Yeah, you’re right. Or I’m going stick my head in the oven so that everyone will be totally sorry they we’re mean to me and that they didn’t love me enough when I was alive,” I added and then felt my face redden because I’d had those fantasies about him, even more so now that I’d seen his new girlfriend.

“So we should go in and turn it into a Willow party.” Julian said.

“And also we should feel bad about all the ways that we didn’t pay attention to her when she was alive,” I said.

“Sounds complicated,” Julian said and then added, “Are your parents all over you?”

“My mom tried to hug me, and then she cried, which is not the way that’s supposed to go. I’m not even sure if my dad knows that anyone died,” I said and added, not to be outdone by the dysfunction of my own parents, “I suppose your dad will want to write a book about this.”

“He didn’t say much, just asked me if I knew why.” Julian stretched his arm out and rested his hand next to my head. Every hair on my head seemed to sway in the direction of his hand, but we didn’t touch. “He always liked Willow.”

“Do you think Willow’s dad’s secretary will be there?” I asked, changing the subject. Maybe it was the married way of coping with the small-town boredom we all felt, but Lamott’s parents seemed particularly adulterous. I’d heard rumors around Lamott that my mom was having an affair too, but I couldn’t figure out with whom or believe that she had the strength for such an act. I’d also seen my dad flirting with random middle-aged women at Bluegrass shows. I’d known for a while that my parents were incompatible—my dad was almost pathologically insensitive—full of himself and his ideas, and not the best listener either. My mom was the most sensitive person I’d ever met. She had a hard time going to the grocery store because she was convinced the cashiers were out to get her. In a way, my parents were both self-absorbed, just differently so.

“Probably.” We’d all seen Willow’s dad walking into The Taco Shack and The Cherry Lounge for lunch, his palm on the small of his secretary’s back.

“Why would she do it?” I asked, switching back to Willow. My mind felt scattered. I’d been jumping from thought to thought for the last twenty-four hours.

“You tell me,” Julian said. “I lost track of her the last couple of months. She got so angry when she came out. She was like anti-men.”

I hadn’t told anyone that I’d seen Willow wading around in the river two days ago. I wasn’t sure if I believed that it had happened. My stoner memories often felt like they were covered in gauze, and it was a shrouding that I wanted to keep intact. I couldn’t bear to think that if I had climbed down off the bridge and followed her, she would still be alive.

“No she wasn’t. She was mad, but not at men, or at least not at you.”

“She called me a sexist fucker at Cheap Hits one day.” Julian took another big swig from the flask and passed it back to me.

“I think that was on my behalf.” I gulped hard and my throat burned. I was drinking to keep from crying and from straddling Julian and putting my tongue down his throat. I felt gross for wanting to jump Julian outside of Willow’s funeral. I stifled a burp. “She never said anything about wanting to die,” I said. “The last thing we spoke about was this girl in Ithaca who broke her heart. They met at a pro-choice rally and had this amazing night together but that was it.”

“Did you meet her?” Julian asked.

“No, and I had to force Willow to tell me what happened.” I felt my whole body tense up like the lump that was forming in my throat. My nostrils flared and tingled and my eyes filled with tears. I took the flask out of Julian’s hand and drained it. Julian turned up the volume in the tape deck. Thurston sang, “It better work out/I hope it works out my way/Cause it’s getting kind of quiet in my city’s head/Takes a teen age riot to get me out of bed right now.”

“Jeb Pascoe had to get stitches,” Julian said, breaking the silence.

“Where?”

“Dunno,” Julian replied. “But Keith said they might get sued.”

“That’s dumb,” I said. I’d heard about the riot that broke out at The Band of None show, and it seemed like more Lamott nonsense. Fighting instead of feeling. Breaking shit instead of thinking.

I let a couple of tears escape from the corners of my eyes while the song finished and then I pivoted the rearview mirror so that I could fix my smudged mascara. Julian put his hand on my back and patted it, just like you would a little kid or a sister. I hated him for touching me that way. Hated his pity.

“You ready?” Julian asked.

I nodded and popped the tape out of the deck. I wanted to put it in her casket. Songs to take into the afterlife.

We stepped through the glass doors and onto the plush blue carpeting of the funeral home, which smelled a lot like the basement of the bank next door where my grandmother kept a safety deposit box. She’d brought me there once a couple of years ago to show me a ring she’d promised my mother, but never given her because of some fight with my aunt who wanted it too. It was a garnet stone, and the red reminded me of all of the wine my mom loved so much. “When I’m dead, you’ll get it,” my grandma said. “It suits you best. It’s dark like you.” I nodded absently, impatient, I’m sure for my visit with my grandma to end. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but I held her responsible for all of my mom’s bullshit.

There were several groups of people clustered together. I nodded at Keith who was disconcertingly dressed in a suit. He stood next to Chris, who had decided to cover his black eye from last night’s fight with a pirate’s patch. He winked his one good eye at me and for a second I felt my throat loosen up. Mr. Kittridge, our high school art teacher, who I hadn’t seen since graduation over two years ago, and was the only teacher in high school Willow had liked, stood talking next to Dr. Klein, Julian’s father. I had no idea they were friends. Willow, Chris and I had been in Dr. Klein’s Human Sexuality class together last semester. It was a great class—Dr. Klein was an interesting speaker, but it had been weird for me to listen to my boyfriend’s father talk about sex to a lecture hall full of people. At the beginning of the semester, I told Willow about the bowl of condoms Julian’s father kept in the entryway of their house. “Birth control is a human right,” he’d bellowed at me one of the first times I came over to the house, and I blushed as I often did in his presence. What was even weirder, is that Julian and I ended up using the free condoms in the bowl, pretty regularly once we started having sex. “Ew, but cool?” she shrugged her shoulders and I nodded.

Mercifully, Dr. Klein hadn’t seen me yet, but his presence initiated another flash of longing for Julian and for the electric feeling of padding out into the Klein’s living room naked to fish a condom out of the bowl, while Julian waited in for me in his bedroom, hard and ready. Even though Julian had his own apartment, we spent a lot of time at his parents’ house, especially when they were away, and I missed the certainty of their house, its organization and bounty. Julian’s parents acted as if children, even adult ones, should have what they needed—including free birth control. I looked to the side at Julian and wondered if he had these kinds of memories about me, but his face registered nothing. He looked blank and pale, a mirror of every single other face in the room.

Butch, Hotdog, and Steve formed another circle. Butch saw us and raised an eyebrow in our direction—his customary, annoying greeting. Hotdog kept his head down. Steve made puppy eyes at me.

“What do we do?” I ignored Steve’s look and asked Julian. I’d never been to a funeral before. My father was estranged from his remaining family in California—a sister who he insisted was after his money and his younger brother, my uncle Tim, who called once a year from San Francisco, usually high, with a crazy story about Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Allen Ginsberg—and my mother’s family was alive and well, miserable but kicking, and all living in or right around Lamott. We were stalled out near the door, taking it all in, but we hadn’t really moved. “What do we say?” My heart had taken over for my brain—I felt only its dumb thump. “Let’s just go and stand by Chris.”

“We have to go and say something to her parents, about how sorry we are,” Julian said and I followed him through the center aisle, between the chairs. My tongue thickened as Willow’s parents came into view. Willow’s mom had left a teary message on my answering machine, but I hadn’t had the courage to call her back. They’d known me forever, and I’d spent plenty of time in high school eating through their pantry and raiding their liquor cabinet. I tasted the Pernod in my throat, and for one desperate second, I thought I might barf.

“Annie!” Willow’s mom wrapped her arms tightly around me and I leaned my head awkwardly onto her small shoulders. I felt her heart thumping against mine. She let out a small gasp of a sob and choke-whispered into my ear, “You have to come over to the house. There are things for you, stuff, er, I know Willow would want you to have.”

I squeezed her back, but I couldn’t get any words out. I knew I was the closest thing to a daughter she had left, and that if I could just open my mouth and say something, anything we might be able to comfort one another. I stifled back my own sob and she rubbed the back of my hair for what seemed like forever. I sniffed hard and took a step back, suddenly embarrassed by the way I was behaving. I felt the room staring at us, and Julian standing behind me expectantly. I wished desperately that he would go away. We don’t need you! I wanted to say. You’re a fucking traitor!

Willow’s mom took a tissue out of the pocket her fitted black dress and dabbed at my cheeks. It was more than my own mother had done. I felt suddenly the oddness of our situation—she’d lost her daughter and I’d never really had my mother. She blew her nose and turned towards Julian. Her hair looked newly permed and colored, but her eyes were red and puffy from crying.

“Thank you for coming Julian. Willow always idolized you.”

“I’m so sorry,” Julian said.

I looked over at Willow’s father, who pulled me in for a silent hug and nod, but that was all. His his face looked permanently fallen behind his glasses. I’d never seen him so removed, so un-like the mayor of a small town. Willow always made fun of him for shaking hands with nearly everyone he passed in downtown Lamott. She had no patience for giant scissors and ribbon cutting, Rotary, and Little League ceremonies.

“Willow and Annie, the two wildest girls in Lamott,” Willow’s mom took a step closer to her dad. I realized that I hardly ever saw them together, and that dressed up and side-by-side, they reminded me of younger pictures I’d seen on the mantel of their fireplace.

“Who’s going to be your partner in crime now?” Willow’s mom reached out and squeezed my hand tightly as a tear ran down her face and into her neck.

“Willow is always, I mean,” I stumbled over the verb tense. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I wasn’t going to be meeting Willow at Cheap Hits later or calling her on the phone at midnight to see if she wanted to meet in the painting studio the next day. “Willow was the wild one,” I managed, trying to fix it. I hated myself instantly for fucking up something, which seemed so simple. Present tense. Alive. Past tense. Dead.

I eyed the casket, which was closed. I wanted to verify her death, make sure it was true. I needed to see her body. I half expected her to be wearing the outfit I’d seen her in from the footbridge. And if she wasn’t wearing that same long skirt and military shirt, I wanted to make sure her parents had chosen something equally Willowesque, something badass, something more butch than femme to send her off in. I had the ancient Egyptian view of the dead—that they needed the right possessions. I was still clutching the mixed tape I’d made, which now seemed like the silliest of relics, voices twice removed for someone who could never hear them.

Her father took off his glasses and fished a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his eyes.

“She was the wildest, wasn’t she?” her mother admitted, staring off over my shoulder. “She was always so different,” she added, falling back into Lamott speak. Different was the polite way for adults to let others know that they found someone to be a freak, a foreigner, strange, queer, an outsider, someone who didn’t dress right or talk right, or wasn’t willing to adjust. I’d been hearing my mother’s relatives use this word my whole life. “Well, that movie was different.” “She certainly likes to do things differently.” “You know, he’s different.” I always wanted to shout back, “You mean, you hated the movie!” or “You think she’s a fuckup!” or “You know, if I weren’t here, you’d just call him a faggot!”

“That’s why I loved her,” I said.

There were people behind us waiting to talk to Willow’s parents, but her mother didn’t seem in any rush.

She leaned in and whispered, “Did you know much about this girl in Ithaca?” Willow’s father looked up for a moment in anticipation. We all knew Willow had come out to her parents about six months ago, but they hadn’t taken it well. I was surprised that they would bring Jen up.

“Not really,” I answered and Julian nodded in agreement. “Just that Willow really liked her and that it didn’t work out.”

I looked over at the casket again. Her parents had chosen a beautiful silvery colored one and it reminded me of a storm cloud. If the closed casket were a locked box, a secret, a shut mouth, then Willow’s suicide would be a perpetual mystery—unsolvable and unknowable. Even if Willow had left a note, we’d still have questions. And without a note, we all knew nothing. Were we all prepared to say, “She killed herself over a girl.” Was that really what happened?

Willow’s mom’s face fell. For a second, we’d been clues, potential information, but now Julian and I stood there, uselessly alive.

“I’m so sorry,” I offered, but it felt empty, callous even, something I was supposed to say. “I don’t know why this is happening.”

“Willow was fearless.” Julian rocked back onto his heels.

Willow’s mom gave my hand one last squeeze, and said, “Annie, come over, okay?” I nodded and we moved out of the way and back towards the rest of the mourners.

We walked towards Chris, Steve, and Keith. Keith put his arm around me and I settled against his warm body. I spent more time in Keith’s company than I did my own parents.

I watched Julian’s new girlfriend walk through the doors of the funeral home, and I wanted to punch her.

I raised my eyebrow at Julian, but he ignored me. “Why is she here?” I demanded. “She didn’t even know Willow!”

“She’s here to comfort me,” he said as if it were the most reasonable answer in the world.

“You are so selfish!” My voice carried across the room, and Willow’s mom looked up at me for a second.

Keith pulled me back towards his side, “Not here. You can get even later,” he whispered at the side of my face.

I didn’t think it was possible to hate Julian more than I already did, but it was.

“I tried to talk her parents into having some time for people to say things, you know, pay tribute to Willow, but they wouldn’t go for it,” Chris said.

“That’s bogus,” Steve said, but I was only half listening. I watched Julian walk over to his new girlfriend and steer her towards his dad. Julian introduced them and the girl smiled and laughed. I thought of the bowl of condoms, and my stomach turned again. I tasted the sour medicinal taste of the booze in my throat. I looked over at the closed casket, and realized that Willow’s body really was in there. Just because I wanted physical proof, and I couldn’t have it, didn’t mean that she hadn’t died.

Julian looked toward me and smiled faintly, as if I were some distant far away image of a person he’s once known. I was an after-school special or a pathetic character in a romantic comedy who’d been dumped. I felt scripted, like there was something I was supposed to say, some biting line I should cough up, but I drew a blank.

“I need air,” I said and pushed past my friends. I made my way out the door of the funeral home and towards Julian’s car. For some dumb reason, I meant to sit in the passenger’s seat and calm down, but I quickly realized I didn’t have the keys because Duh! I wasn’t his girlfriend anymore. The ride to the funeral home and our time together in the parking lot was all because of pity. I had no right to anything of his. I wasn’t about to go back in, so I sat on one of the car stops and looked out onto the road that turned into Lamott’s only bridge for cars. The June evening sun was fading and I had to squint to see into the distance.

8

Annie

I decided the funeral home was precariously placed on the edge of a piece of land just before the bridge so that everyone that came to it would see that it was a portal, a place of pure threshold, entirely liminal. My routine longings—to escape, to run away, to get out, to do something—came flooding back to me, but now they felt tinged with mystery, with Willow’s secret burning behind them. Had Willow been trying to run away by way of that slow-moving river? Was death the only way out of Lamott?

A red pick-up truck whizzed past, with a boy hanging out the passenger side window, and two more in the bed of the pick-up. “Hair fuck!” the three of them yelled gleefully in unison. The truck slowed down just enough for me to look up and recognize the boy in the passenger seat as someone who’d been in Driver’s Education with me long ago and who was also taking classes at LCC, another jock asshole, who I couldn’t help but hate myself for finding cute. He winked at me, and added “Anarchist!” and the truck accelerated and sped off and through the next light. None of us had ever been able to figure out the exact etymology of “hair fuck.” It was a classic bit of Lamott linguistic idiocy that took hold late in the late 80s. Redneck football player 1: “Why do they fuck up their hair?” Redneck football player 2: “Cuz they’re hair fucks.” Cue drunken cheerleaders giggling and chanting: “Hair fucks! Hair fucks! Hair fucks!”

I stuck out my middle finger and waved it high into the air in the direction of the back of the truck. The boys in the back flipped me off in return. This had become our street theater—the ways that the jocks and the punks spoke to each other in public in Lamott, but still I was relieved. I’d been called far worse. Lesbo, Satan worshipper, devil fucker, anarchist, commie, witch bitch, and feminist, as if that alone were an insult. These boys had no menace in them, I could tell. They were happy, flirting with me even. I’d seen jocks piled out of pick-up trucks and chase skaters with hockey sticks. For a while, there was a rumor that all of the punks, hippies, and skaters were looking to sacrifice a blonde-haired, blue-eyed virgin to the devil. Julian was said to be our leader, and he was the most visible among us. A football player once pinned Willow against a wall outside of the community college. I remembered how mad she looked and the crazy shit that she said to him. “You want to rape me, don’t you? You’ve done it before, I bet. Rapist.” He had his knee pressed up between her legs and none of us knew what to do until Keith miraculously appeared with a baseball bat.

I reached up to touch my hair, and thought for the umpteenth time, “It’s not that crazy.” It was an unnatural shade of red—the sun had turned my dye job the color of an overripe strawberry—and Willow’s recent unsteady scissor work had made the ends jagged and of several different lengths, but it was nothing like Julian’s long mess of girlish curls or Willow’s tall almost seven-inch bleached white Mohawk. I thought of Willow’s white hair floating in the river, and shook my head to get the image out.

I remembered the one class that Willow and I had together in the last year of high school—it was Figure Drawing II and we were seniors. That was the semester and the class that Willow chose to debut her new haircut. It was the safest room in the high school, and she had the most friends in there—me, Chris, Hotdog, Steve, and a couple of art historian wannabe girls who found the freak artists fascinating. I think I gasped when she walked in—no girl had ever managed to get such height in her hair, and I felt breathless at her bravery, at her willingness to turn herself into a boy, or someone who with each passing day looked less and less like a girl and who didn’t seem to care.

Mr. Kittridge had fought the school board so that we could have nude models and every week he managed to find a new and challenging body to put in front of us. My drawings were shitty and smudgy and always somehow off, but Willow always acted like they were good. She had this way of nodding at me and of saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” to whatever I had managed. Since then, my drawing had gotten so much better, and I no longer wanted to crumple up my paper and cry whenever I fucked something up, but it was Willow who first taught me how to keep trying, to believe, even if you’re not satisfied.

I started to nod yes into the graying night and my head kept bobbing up and down. I needed to convince myself of something. My boyfriend had dumped me, I’d graduated from Community College, and my best friend was dead. Was I moving forward or backward? Was I moving at all?

The nodding was rhythmic and steady. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I was trying to say yes to myself, to will my body into some kind of motion, some kind of decision, but I felt no pull in any particular direction.

I wanted clarity, knowledge, a road map, anything. The leaves on the maple and elm trees cast a shadowy canopy over the empty road. A squirrel scurried down the base of a tree and back into the parking lot of the funeral home. I turned to watch him go. He paused near the front tire of a car, stood on his hind legs, and sniffed at the air. I envied his super-powered nose and the simplicity of his life. Look for a nut. Eat it or bury it. I turned back around to stare into the darkening street. The air felt heavy and stagnant, as if all of it were being sucked out of the grey blue sky. My body was vacuumed out and de-pressurized; my head empty and stupid. I felt blank, dead too somehow, and the tiny remaining part of me that was still alive, panicked. I raised a numb hand to my chest, but I couldn’t feel my heart. I ran that same hand along the ground and found a small pebble. I started to tap, tap, tap it against the sidewalk. Tap, tap, tap, tap. The gesture felt mindless, rote, like a nearly dead fly banging up against a closed window, over and over again.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And then a voice whispered from somewhere deep inside my new void, “Just look at me.”

I dropped the pebble, but all around me was the still, static, stupid buzz. Drone. Waste. Empty. I felt two hands press up flat against my back and stay there. Gentle pressure. Cold palms to either side of my spine. I shivered.

“Who’s there?” I turned my head to the right to look behind me, but there was no one or no thing. The pressure on my back lifted, but the chill stayed, and when I pivoted my neck back around, I saw her. She’d somehow appeared in the ten-seconds I’d turned away. I made my eyes big and then I shut them tight. Go away, I pleaded in my head, as if I was seven and I’d just dreamed there was a monster under my bed. When I opened my eyes, she was still there. I stared. I was still de-pressurized. Dumb. Mute. Half-dead. Draining. Trickling out. Going, going, gone. A balloon deflating. A heart’s last beats in the hands of a surgeon.

She’d become a wet thing, a river creature, more fish than woman, more green than pink, more rot than flesh. But I knew that outfit—the red velvet skirt and the Army shirt. “Private Frost” it read, and I swore it was glowing. Maybe it had been her only light in that murky river. I remembered our delight in finding a poet’s surname affixed to military issue, our idiot’s glee at thinking that subversive. She dripped loudly. A puddle formed around her bare feet. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I thought of sewers and pipes, the water that collected in cellars and underneath logs. Left behind. The waste. Her clothes clung to her body and I saw the curves she worked hard to keep hidden, her large breasts which she’d taken to flattening with two sports bras, and the hips that even in loose skirts made guys who were confused by her shaved head turn around on the street and stare. Her feet were bare. The river ate her boots—the finger-like tentacles of the algae un-laced them and slid them off before she was swallowed whole.

Her skin shimmered yellow-green like stained glass, like fish belly, and her eyes weren’t eyes anymore, but white orbs, milky planets without an iris to orbit. Somehow though, in spite of the river, her Mohawk was up, egg-white stiff, the full corona, divided into eight tall spikes.

My jaw tightened and I ground my butt into the concrete car stop. My neck locked in place. I couldn’t turn it.

Let’s just give up. Let’s die. I felt her pleading from across the road, but I was tunneled out and without a heartbeat. I was slowed-down and cold. I was for the moment, already dead.

I felt the Pernod in my throat again, and I swallowed hard to keep it down. I kept staring at my watery Willow. I saw that all the buttons on her shirt had come off but one. Her feet were cut up and there was a deep gash on her cheek. She still had on the friendship bracelet I’d made for her in 11^th grade, and her fingernails were broken and dirty like she’d clawed and pulled at the river bottom, like she changed her mind and she wanted me to know it.

I was still staring when a black SUV pulled up and the window rolled down. My neck unlocked and the air came back into my chest. My heart pulsed and heaved and the buzzing stopped. I felt all of the blood rush back into my face. I flexed my hands. I was warm, sweaty even. I stood up so that I could see over the hood of the car and keep her in my sights, but in that instant she, it, my Willow, was gone.

I would later read about the ways in which spirits could make themselves known. When I first landed in New York, I’d stumble into a witchcraft store on 9^th Street in the East Village called Enchantments, and thumb through a book entitled, A Guide to Understanding the Afterlife. But even then, after a year of hauntings, I didn’t see it as my reality. The first sentence of the book read, “On rare occasions, spirits can move light and energy to make themselves known. This is how they manifest.” I jumped when the tattooed woman behind the counter, called out to me, “We can cast a spell for your ghost or make a candle for an intention.”

“Ghost?” I looked over my shoulder as if she was talking to another customer.

So that first time, exactly forty-eight hours after some freaked out little kid found her body face down in the river, when I saw her standing on the slate sidewalk across the street from the funeral home, I didn’t trust myself. I couldn’t possibly. I didn’t believe in ghosts.

I marveled at what I could conjure up out of grief. I thought of myself as Dr. Frankenstein. I missed a girl, so I made a new one. And what was she, this Willow? A ghost, a hallucination, what the river coughed up, what the coffin couldn’t hold, what her parents refused to let us see, guilt, love, denial, a drunken vision, a shadow woman, a sign, or a story, I didn’t know, but I was prepared to stay forever, to play chicken with it, with her, and to win this staring contest. I had no choice.

“You want a ride?” the driver asked. It was Jeb Pasco and he was wearing sunglasses, but I could see the stitches just above his right eyebrow.

I nodded yes and broke the spell. I could stand up and so I did. I got into the car. I was ready to go.

Jeb tossed his sunglasses onto the dashboard. The tight line of five or six stitches above his eyebrow looked painfully red and raw. Before I could say anything, he leaned over and folded me into a giant, rib-crushing hug. “I am so sorry, Annie,” he whispered into my neck. The strength of his body got to me and even though the angle was awkward—the gear shift dug into my thigh—I melted into him. I did what I stopped myself from doing in the funeral home. I let loose. I sobbed into his neck, I made strange animal whelps, and Jeb squeezed me even tighter. He took in my watery sadness like a sponge, like he was meant to take care of me.

I don’t know how long we sat there with me sobbing and the car in park, but eventually I pulled away and Jeb rummaged around in his glove compartment for tissues. I took one and tried to wipe away my snot and smudged mascara.

“You’re helping me,” I said.

“You sound surprised.” Jeb shifted gears and drove away from the curb of the funeral home. “Is this okay? He waved at the road. “Driving?”

I nodded yes. I was trying to collect my thoughts, explain. “You don’t even know me. Willow was my comfort, my world really.”

“I like you, why wouldn’t I help you?” Jeb tried to wink at me, but his stitches stopped him from moving his eyelid at all and instead he winced in pain. “Besides if you have a fascinating conversation about Jack Kerouac with a hometown girl backstage, and then you see her curbside, looking miserable, you’ve got to intervene. That’s just called good citizenship.”

I rolled down the window and breathed in the Lamott summer night air—cut grass and ice cream truck. Could I tell Jeb what I just seen? What the hell was that? I didn’t have any language to describe it. Had I already gone off the deep end? I remembered our backstage conversation a little better now; my claim that Bukowski was better than Kerouac. More dirty, more real.

“Why did she do it?” I looked down at my hands, the now chipping black polish Willow herself had applied less than a week ago. “I mean, what the fuck, it was impossible to get her to talk about her feelings. She put up a wall, shut me out.”

“Our first bassist hung himself, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why or worrying that somehow the band had caused it, because bands are really intense and he and I fought a lot about songs and creativity in general.” Jeb paused and turned onto a side street and then onto a dirt road. Lamott was a small town surrounded by farms and woods, so if you knew you’re way around, within minutes, voila, instant nature. His SUV rocked back and forth on the road. “This still okay?” He squinted ahead through the leafy branches that closed in on the windshield. “I want to show you this place I really love.”

“Yeah.” I pulled at the hem of the black dress I’d taken from my mother’s closet. It was too long and made me feel like a secretary or that somehow I was wearing a mourning costume instead of my own sad skin. “The Band of None had another bassist before Bobby?”

“We’re talking like way back, when we were all in high school. He was in the band for about ten minutes, but we all liked him, and I felt close to him.” Jeb maneuvered the car off of the dirt road and into the woods. The tires snapped through leaves and branches.

“But he wasn’t like your best friend?” I felt the need to clarify our situations, make sure he understood that this was not an entirely analogous story.

“No, and I don’t want to pretend that I know what you’re going through, but I read a lot about suicide after he died and I learned that often there aren’t warning signs. You can’t always know and mostly you can’t stop it.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but I appreciated his attempt to make me feel better. Jeb stopped the car and shut it off. We got out and I followed him down a leafy path. At some point, as we dodged the thorny branches that crissed-crossed in front of us, he took my hand and he didn’t let go.

It was dark by the time we reached the edge of a small pond. The frogs—the thing he’d brought me to hear—were already at it. Calling to one another from across the water, a thousand bleeps and blurts, croaks and cries, conversations in a language I’d never heard before, a code that only a frog brain could crack. Jeb pulled me towards a fallen tree trunk and we sat there in hip-to-hip silence until the mosquitos started biting. The frog serenade, Jeb’s massive frame and steady grip, and the all-too-rare feeling of finding a new landscape in Lamott, a town that had long-ago revealed most of its secrets, made me feel better. I settled into the dull pulsing between my legs that I hadn’t felt for anyone except Julian for the last two years.

Later when I started my psychology coursework, I’d learn that Jeb was wrong and that suicides often do leave warning signs. They become withdrawn or angrier than usual, and they sometimes return objects or items of importance to their friends and loved ones. I would remember the The The cassette Willow gave back to me, and that I was so obsessed with her coming out and how it would affect our relationship that I couldn’t see that she was pulling away from everyone, and not just me.

But I didn’t know any of that then, and Jeb was the first person to comfort me. I took what I could get. I heard what I needed to hear. The frog calls—their mating ritual—felt like a prelude to another new landscape and a different language—one that had been alongside of me all along but out of my decibel range. Willow had always made me mixed tapes, introduced me to bands she knew I would like, and now that she was gone, I still wanted new music. I needed a soundtrack, and Jeb looked like he had one. And I needed someone to follow—my disciple’s heart was leader-less. So when we stood up to walk back to the car, I pushed Jeb up against a tree trunk and kissed him hard.

“You didn’t just bring me here to listen to the frogs, did you?” I whispered into his neck after that first kiss.

“Nah,” he said and my heart leapt up into my throat because maybe just maybe he could save me from myself.

9

Jeb

I woke up wrapped around a mermaid. I extracted my leg from around her thighs and leaned my head on my elbow to get a better look. The sheet twisted around her waist and legs and stopped underneath her tits, which were pale and round with large wine-colored nipples. Her heart beat just below the hard ridge of her clavicle. I watched her chest move up and down, and I moved a long strand of her hair away from her lips, which were pouty and had traces of lipstick in the corners from last night. The rest of her hair splayed out onto my mattress. Her shoulders were covered in freckles and she had a small brown mole near her left armpit.

I wanted more than anything to roll on top of her or get her to crawl back on top of me, but I’m a big guy. I don’t want to scare a girl or pull a Fatty Arbuckle. I’m aware too, that a rock star in the morning—post show, post glow, after the conquest—is different from one at night.

“Oh, no,” she groaned and squinted an eye open in my direction. We’d probably smoked too much, and she drank even more—a half a bottle of wine at least.

“That bad?” I asked, mock hurt.

She sat up on her elbows, winced, and then slid back down. “Why did you let me drink so much?”

“You seemed to like it,” I said and pulled at the sheet around her legs.

“I did,” she said and wrapped one of her legs around my body.

I flexed the fingers on my right hand. I hadn’t yet taken the eight or nine Tylenols I needed every day when touring just to get my hand normal enough to play. I thought of the syringes in my bathroom and the little packet of powder hidden underneath the blender in the kitchen. That’s what I wanted and needed most—my medicine. But I was trying to slow it down, trying to need it just a little bit less. I wanted to convince myself that fucking could be just as good as smack. Believe it, I told myself and then I moved my hand back under the sheet and between Annie’s legs. She was felt warm, sweaty even. She squeezed her eyes shut again, opened her legs, and sighed. I wondered what she was thinking, but I didn’t’ ask. I’ve been with girls who can barely look at me they’re so starstruck or ones that giggle nervously the whole time. In the best-case scenario, they seem to forget that I’m in a band. It was like that last night. I moved my hand gently back and forth—the movement wasn’t entirely unlike playing a guitar. I mean, I’m known for my fret work. I have pretty adept fingers.

“I don’t really do this,” she said, opening her eyes again.

“What? This?” I asked and looked back down at my hand between her legs.

“No, sleep with famous people.”

“I’m not famous. I’m just the guitarist. Merilee’s the famous one. Sleep with her and you’re definitely a groupie.”

“Does she have guys who wait for her after shows?” Annie asked. I was used to girls being obsessed with Merilee.

I kept moving my fingers back and forth because I wanted us to stop talking and to get us back to that blissed-out dumb animal state we were in last night. My roadie Ben used to have this t-shirt that said, “More Fucking” in this hilarious old-timey calligraphy. I’m not sure he ever got laid wearing it, but it pretty much sums us all up, all of us on the road at least.

“Sure, but you’ve been to our shows. You’ve seen our fans. The dudes are not always the most masculine.”

“Hmmm,” Annie said and closed her eyes again. Whatever I was doing with my hand, my index finger and thumb was starting to have an effect.

The phone rang, but I ignored it. The answering machine picked up and I heard my stupid annoying voice, followed by my roadie’s even more stupid and annoying voice. “Beep. Jeb, change in plans. We’re getting on the bus tommorrow at six instead of midnight. Beep.” I got distracted for a second thinking about getting my dealer to come over earlier than we’d planned.

Annie rolled over toward me, moved the sheet away, and pressed her body against mine. Her eyes were still squeezed shut, but she opened her mouth to kiss me. I took in the stale morning, smoky taste of her tongue, and I kissed her back. She was wet and pushing up against me and before I knew it, she’d grabbed a condom from the nightstand, un-peeled it, and I was inside of her. We rocked back and forth on our sides. Her head was in my neck and she was breathing heavily and then suddenly she looked up at me intently, square in the face. She was pretty, young, and newly miserable by loss. I could tell that by the intensity of her gaze, and what she’d told me the night before. She was a painter, she liked my wind-up toys, my music, my pot, and my bed. I hadn’t told anyone, but I’d thought about her off and on again for the last year, since I’d seen her at the craft services table—the girl with the reddish-blonde hair from Lamott who met my gaze and talked to me, even though she had a serious townie boyfriend, the one who has no idea that her father sends me a demo tape once a month that I throw into a drawer, the one I found naked in the ravine with her now dead friend, the one who needed a ride last night, the one who needed someone to give a fuck.

She rolled me over onto my back and climbed on top of me. She put my dick back inside of her, but the look was still all intensity, all heat, all open. She rocked back and forth on that amazing pelvis, I closed my eyes and moaned and then she stopped again.

“I forgot to apply to college,” she said.

“Me too,” I said and kissed her neck, tried to pull her back down, get her hips moving again.

Why was she stopping? I worried for a second about my age. I was 35, and she wasn’t even 21. We couldn’t possibly care about the same things. I had gray pubic hair, and the hair on my head was thinning and receding. Her hair was thick and full, her skin pale and dewy. She had dark circles under her eyes and flecks of mascara on her lashes, but fuck! did she look young.

“I graduated from Lamott Community College this spring, but I never sent in my portfolio to the art schools that have good painting programs and are cheap—Savannah and Purchase. I had everything ready on a pile on my desk—the transcripts, the envelopes, the slides. I even had stamps, but I just kept not doing it and not doing it, and then one day I woke up and the deadline had passed.”

“Maybe you don’t want to go,” I offered and for a second I thought of Jenna, the sophomore at Oberlin that I met a couple of months ago at one of our shows, how Type A she was, how organized, and how clearly different she was in temperament from Annie. I remembered I owed Jenna a letter, and that she wanted to visit me on the road, and that we needed figure out where we could meet.

“It’s okay not to go,” I said, snapping back to the beautiful naked girl on top of me who was confiding in me, and who I inexplicably, pathetically, felt myself wanting to take care of. I could hear Merilee complaining about Annie already, “Not another puppy dog, not another lost one.”

“It’s not okay. I mean, I want to go away, I want to get out of Lamott, but something happened to my brain when my ex-boyfriend broke up with me. I have kind of stopped doing anything, and now Willow’s gone.”

“But I’m something. I’m an action. You’re here,” I said.

Annie nodded and started to wiggle around on top of me again. I’d miraculously stayed hard during that whole exchange—a testament I guess to her body. Maybe this girl could slow me down, be my medicine.

She felt warm and tight, pink and young. I grabbed her tits and then slid my hands down onto her hips. She started to move more rhythmically, thrusting her pelvis back and forth like she was losing herself, becoming animal. She closed her eyes tight, groaned, and then made little whimpering sounds.

And she stayed there, draped over me, a small woman piled on top of a rock. I hoped for a second that she felt safe. Orgasms, women—especially the young ones—and my hometown—they all made me feel romantic and stupid. We kissed for a while and then I turned her over onto her stomach and came back inside of her from behind. She felt tighter still! I pushed hard a couple of times and lost it. Rockets! Volcanoes! Fireworks!

“So you leave tonight?” Annie asked, wriggling out from under me and flopping down onto her back.

“Yeah,” I said. “We go to D.C. and then Nashville and then a bunch of places in the South, Texas, and then eventually we fly back to New York City.”

“This was fun,” she said, “I didn’t expect it. You’re good, at er,” she paused and blushed. Fucking cute.

“Making you come.” I squeezed her hip and grinned.

“Yeah, that’s it.” She sat up and started to scan the room for her clothes.

“You in a rush?” I asked.

“I have to work.” She looked suddenly sad, like she remembered how she’d wound up at my place.

“Can I get your address?” I asked.

“To like write me?” she asked, but she looked incredibly skeptical.

“I like to send my friends postcards and presents from the road,” I said.

“Friends?” she asked. I could tell she was getting pissed off.

She struggled into her underwear and slipped her dress over her head. She put her bra in the pocket of her dress and scanned the room for her shoes.

“Wait,” I said. I didn’t want her to get dressed, and I realized that I didn’t want to go either. It had been so long since I’d really connected with anyone, and the tour was a grind and a mindfuck and band politics twenty-four, seven. I thought of how fun it could be to bring Annie to the next couple of shows, to show her places she’d never seen before, to put her in my bunk on the tour bus, and have someone to entertain me backstage. I thought of how much better my hotel rooms would be if she were in them, naked. I saw myself fixing up in the bathroom and then wandering out to fuck Annie.

“Have you been to the National Gallery in D.C.?” I asked.

“No, why?” she asked, but she was on her knees looking around underneath the bed for her shoes and her bag. I didn’t have much time.

“They have my favorite painting there, it’s by John Singer Sargent and it’s called “Nonchaloir” which is French for “repose.” He painted his niece and she’s wrapped up in this cashmere shawl, and huge satin skirt, but her hands and lips are so sexy, so exposed, and so raw. Sargent thought of himself, of painting, as a form of pimping.”

Annie stopped looking for her shoe. “I like Mary Cassatt better than Sargent.”

“But have you seen a Sargent in person?” I asked.

She shook her head no, and looked over at the clock radio. 11:40. “I”m late.”

“Annie, this is crazy, but why don’t you come with me for the next couple of shows?” We can check out D.C. and Nashville and then I’ll send you back on a plane or something.”

She looked nervously again at the clock. “I should like stay, and deal with myself right now, my mess of a life.”

She had that grim Lamott look on her face—I’d seen it on so many of my friends’ faces, the boys I grew up with who decided it was their destiny to suffer through cold gray winters and eat every kind of starch imaginable. I couldn’t save any of those guys and honestly I’d stopped caring long ago. But this girl, I could help, and in the soft halo of my second orgasm, I decided to be her “Get out of Jail Free” card.

“I can show you the Sargent. You’re a painter! You need to see how he creates light in the wrinkles of her dress,” I added, aware now that maybe I sounded desperate.

She wriggled her left foot into her other converse sneaker. She was completely dressed now and moving towards the hallway.

“Just think about it. Leave, and go to work, but promise me you’ll think about it and if you want to go just pack a small bag and meet the tour bus at the Sunoco on the way out of town.”

“I just want it to be a real thing.” She paused in the frame of the bedroom door and turned around to look at me. “Not like out of pity.”

“Baby, I don’t pity you.” I leaned up onto my elbows so that I could look her in the eyes. “I really, really like you. I have since that day I saw you backstage.”

She grinned. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

She walked back over to the side of the bed, and leaned down onto the bed to give me one last slow kiss. And then she left.

10

Annie

As I trudged up the steep hill that Willow lived on top of, I knew everything was different. I remembered the night before with Jeb. I wished I could tell Willow about it—I wasn’t so sure she would have cared, but I was used to reporting back to her. We’d always been curious to know if the rumors about his house were true, so she at least would have had a forensic interest.

“He’s got a stripper’s poll in the living room, and there’s a wall-size portrait of Elvis in the bathroom. He keeps all of his cocaine in the freezer. The bathroom has two sinks and a weird French toilet. The piano had to be lowered into the house from a helicopter, and he’s got a whole room that’s a closet for his clothes. And get this, there’s an entire cupboard for chocolate.” The girl’s ponytail bobbed up and down as she took big sips of beer from her red plastic cup, and gushed into her circle of sweater-wearing friends. We were at a stupid Lamott Community College kegger, Chris had dragged us to in our first year at LCC, and we were guzzling our own beers fast to try to make the party bearable.

“Have you been there?” Willow interrupted, breaking out of our circle of weird and into their circle of cool. She especially could not abide this new type of wannabe fan; the kind that only had The Band of None’s latest album and who had started to show up at their concerts in droves because MTV now played their videos during regular airtime instead of only 120 Minutes. They were the same species of popular girl who’d laughed at our clothes in high school and shouted “Hair fuck!” and “Anarchist!” at us from the cars their rich parents bought them as the drove by Cheap Hits.

“My friend has, and she told me all about it.” The girl set her lips in a tight line, as if it hurt her to have to speak to Willow.

“That so?” Willow asked, turned her back on the girl, and rolled her eyes at me.

“Your house is so beautiful.” I stood transfixed in the entryway as Jeb sat down on a giant pink upholstered couch. We’d driven to his house from the frog pond, stopping to kiss at red lights. He’d painted the walls of the kitchen robin’s egg blue, the dining room a deep forest green, and the living room magenta. The outside of the house was a pale yellow and with turquoise trim. I was so in awe of the colors, so blown away that someone could make a house into an artist’s palette. A huge abstract painting hung on the opposite wall of the couch—it reminded me of a jungle. Green brushstrokes made into a hash of fern fronds and flower petals. There was a large TV on the floor, some stereo equipment, and a tangle of chords. One lone black guitar sat propped up against the only other chair in the room, also pink. There were several small tables placed around the room, with pretty lamps on each one.

“I still live with my mother, and everything in our house is kind of accident. My dad used to find these horrible tables out by the side of the road. They’re basically garbage, and we still have them even though he hasn’t lived with us for two years,” I said.

“I grew up like that too. All haphazard. My mom and I didn’t even really have a home half the time.” Jeb took out a bong from behind the couch, lit the carb, and waved me over to the couch.

I walked out from under the arch and sat down. Jeb passed me the bong and helped me light it. I inhaled deeply, too much, and began an embarrassing thirty-second coughing fit. Jeb brought me a glass of water and watched me drink it down. He put his hand on my shoulder and rubbed at the cheap fabric of my black dress. I couldn’t believe my mother wore these kinds of polyester secretary dresses every day. No wonder she left them in a dirty pile in the corner of the bathroom floor at 5:15 when she got home from her paralegal job. I’d come to see these black husk as my mother’s shadow selves, the remains of the sober working woman that managed to get through another day before opening her evening box of wine.

“Do you want to see some of my toys?” Jeb stood up and I followed him into the dining room. I imagined the stripper poll and the pile of blow, but instead we stood in front of an antique hutch, which was filled with twenty-odd tin toys. He opened the glass doors and started to take them out one by one, winding them up with a tin key, and setting them loose on the table. There was a seal with a ball on its nose that spun around to reveal several flower-petal like fronds, a monkey in a yellow suit, and a carousel made up of airplanes and zeppelins. He set loose a gorilla with a symbols and a little girl with a drum. There was a race car and jockey on a horse, a muscular male gymnast spinning around and around on a bar, a hula dancer in a bikini top, and a Elvis-like character with a guitar. There was a even little sailboat in it’s own pool of tin water and basketball player who shot a tin ball through a hoop. Once they were all going, he darted around the edges of the table to keep them from falling off.

I stood there, mesmerized by the whirring din, my heart beating too fast from the pot. One by one, the toys wound down. The monkey gradually stopped clanking his symbols together and the boat stopped moving in its own water. The hips of the hula girl swayed one last time and Elvis stopped thrusting his pelvis. The carousel and the gymnast flew off the table in one last spasm of activity and Jeb scooped them back up.

“Shit.” I picked up the sailboat and held it to my chest. I’d always been a sucker for toys. “They are so cool. It’s totally different, but they remind me of the paper dolls my grandma kept for me at her house. You know, like from the 50s.”

I could feel Jeb staring at me. His eyes were on my neck and face. “I had a feeling about you Annie, since I talked with you that day backstage.”

I put the tin boat back down on the table. “I don’t really like the Beats.” I felt like I needed to distinguish myself from that girl that day a year ago, the one who was pretending and showing off, the one who had a best friend and a boyfriend. “I don’t even like to read.”

I moved a step closer to him, and he slid his hand over and rested it on my butt. “That’s better,” he said. The gorilla smashed his symbol one more time, and I jumped.

“They do that. Sometimes one will move in the night and scare the shit out of me.”

Jeb moved his hand up to the top of my dress, back down to my butt, and back up again to the zipper. He unzipped my dress and found my lips at the same time. Before I knew it the dress was on the floor and he had his hand down the front of my underwear. He kissed me hard and slow, just the way I liked it. And then he picked me up and laid me gently on top of the table, moving the tin toys out of the way so that he could burry his head between my legs. I stared up at the ornate magenta-colored press-tin ceiling until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I squeezed my eyes shut in anticipation. I imagined myself as a butterfly taking flight, my legs opening up like wings. The ceiling became the dark sky of my pleasure, and I came in a rushing wave of happiness.

“Annie.” Jeb looked up from between my legs and I sat up on the table. “I feel like I’ve known you for a long time.”

“Me too.” I scooted down to the edge of the table and took his hand. “Let’s go upstairs.”

And now I was breaking into my dead best friend’s house. I crawled through the window of Willow’s bedroom. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done this before. In high school, when Willow still had a curfew because she had parents who actually cared where she was, we regularly snuck out through her ground floor window to meet up with boys and make out in the woods or to crash whatever party we’d heard about through the grapevine of gossip that was Cheap Hits chatter. I always felt sorry for the kids who had hoped to have a few friends over while their parents were vacationing in Niagara Falls, and who wound up with a broken coffee table and vomit on their parents’ bed.

I swung my legs through the window frame and stepped down onto the hot pink shag rug that we’d found at Kmart freshmen year of high school, when we thought we needed a particularly teenage decor. I spent a lot of time lying on that rug and running my fingers through its long synthetic tentacles, while Willow sat crossed-legged on the bed and leafed through the latest artist monograph she’d checked out from the small but serviceable art section of the library.

I scanned the room and tried to take it all in. She’d recently pulled down a bunch of posters—only The Smith’s Meat is Murder and Sinead O’Conner’s The Lion and the Cobra had made the cut. She taped up an Act Up! poster in the place where she used to have The Clash, London is Calling. The dimensions of the Act Up! poster were smaller than The Clash one, and the sun had faded the red wall around the original poster, so the effect was a dark red frame around a pink triangle. I scanned the pile of books she had on her nightstand—Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. These, I decided were not clues. They were books for her Women in Literature class and Willow rarely sold back her books. I stared at Sinead’s downcast eyes, her long lashes and the patch of dark stubble on the top of her shaved head. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest. I wondered how they’d arranged Willow’s arms in her casket, and then pushed the thought away. Was Willow even in her casket? I opened the top drawer of her dresser and pushed past her underwear and sports bras to where I knew she kept old letters and the occasional poem she scribbled on a piece of paper, but there was nothing there. Neither of us kept a journal—we were painters, we’d leave that for the poets and novelists.

Her latest goldfish, Georgia, flapped its tail at me from her bowl on Willow’s desk. Georgia’s water was clean—like someone had recently changed it. The bed was unmade—her black sheets faded to a dark gray and twisted around the bottom of her twin mattress. The quilt she loved, the one that her grandma made for her when she was ten out of scraps of fabric re-purposed from pillow cases and older quilts, had fallen off the side of the bed in an accusatory lump. Willow had asked that all of the pieces be purple or blue and her grandma had obliged. The bed looked like she’d just gotten out of it. Willow always kicked off her sheets and covers in the morning. She liked to force herself awake, and she loved to pull the blankets off of anyone sleeping to her and cackle laugh when they cried out.

I unlaced my combat boots and noiselessly slid them off. I didn’t want to see Willow’s parents. I’d listened guiltily to her mom’s last message on my answering machine before I erased and walked over. “Honey, it’s Peggy, come by when you can, okay?” Willow’s mom pleaded into the machine.

I padded across the shag rug and over to the bed. I lay face down on it and pressed my face into her pillow. I inhaled deeply and smelled her purple hair gel and the flowery translucent face powder she loved. I rolled over on my back and reached for the quilt and sheets. I pulled them up and over my head. I made a cave. If I couldn’t find clues, I’d make do with transport.

I remembered our first sleepover. We lay spine to spine, talking and giggling until dawn. We said the kinds of things girls can only to say to each other when they’re in middle school and it’s okay to fall in love with your best friend. We’d found each other in the corner of the gym during a sweaty Friday night dance. I was hiding from a freckled kid in overalls who had decided it was okay to snap my bra repeatedly while I yelled into the DJ’s ear a request for either the Thompson Twins, “Lies, Lies, Lies” or Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Willow was about to pull the fire alarm.

“Make yourself useful?” Willow asked, just as my eyes began to adjust the dark netherworld of the corner next to the bleachers. We had English class together, but we were arranged alphabetically, and that and the matrix of five rows of desks in four columns situated us at opposite ends of the room.

I nodded and moved in closer. She had her fingers on the pull-down lever of the red fire alarm bell.

“Like shield me with your body or something? I don’t want to get caught.” Willow didn’t look like Willow then. She had long permed hair and braces and she favored mono-cromatic outfits. That night, and for most of eighth grade it was purple. Purple jeans, a purple turtleneck, and purple and gray Nikes. Sometimes, she added suspenders, but only if the jeans were too big.

I looked nervously through the slats of the bleachers just above her head and at the row of wall-flowered sneakers, and moved my body a couple of feet in front of hers. I heard her take a deep breath in, exhale, and count, “One, Two…”

“Hey you two, get out of that corner.” Some random mom chaperone waved a flashlight at us from the base of the bleachers. Willow and I stepped out of the shadows and back into the discoed light of the dance.

Willow sighed and shrugged. “So much for ending this particular little patch of hell.”

I felt my eyes widen. Even though we’d failed, I was delighted. It never occurred to me that I could take actions that would end any of the torments of middle school, especially a school-wide dance. I assumed it was a curse to be endured, and that there was no such thing as agency in the 8^th grade. So I forced myself to go to each and every one of them, dressing with a grim determination that even my father noticed when he’d dropped me off that night in front of the jaws of the newly-constructed drab concrete slab of a gymnasium that our principal called “modernist.” “You know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” he said as he put out his cigarette in the overflowing car ashtray.

“I know,” I said defensively, as if his vaguely anti-authoritarian approach to my education made any sense to me. He’s also recently told me to quit studying so hard for my math quizzes. Clearly, he had no stake in my future. I waved his cigarette smoke out of my face and hopped out of the car, determined to be noticed at this dance by someone, anyone.

“Ms. Taylor is crazy right?” I managed as several sets of stiffed-armed couples see-sawed their way across the dance floor to Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” “Like that day when she blew her nose directly into the trash can.”

Willow grinned. “It was gross, but I’ve never had a teacher who acts like her.”

“She’s definitely entertaining.” I had to admit that we were all in Ms. Taylor’s thrall. She could hold a room. “I loved it when we had to write those letters to our favorite poets.”

“Who’d you write to?” Willow looked me in the eyes. I knew it was a test, and I wanted suddenly very much to pass.

“Sylvia Plath.”

“Me too!” Willow grinned wide at our moment of connection. I noticed she had purple rubber bands on her braces. “Do you want to go to the pay phone with me? We can call my mom to come and get us early.”

“Yeah, definitely.”

The next weekend, I had my first sleepover at Willow’s. She seemed to intuit that my house was a no-fly zone, a place I wanted to hide from my friends and escape as often as possible. Later, she’d find out why, and insist that we spend time there anyway. “It’s your house too you know,” she’d remind me, and she was right. I needed to stake out my territory.

“Whatever I do when I grow up, I want it to involve a uniform. Like a zookeeper or a someone who works in a laboratory and wears a white coat or a smock.” The morning sun was coming in through the slats of blinds, making a light mosaic across the floor. I was on the edge of sleep and sliding into a dream’s soft new world, but determined to keep talking.

“Uniforms are cool. I like the ones that stewardesses wear.” Willow’s back felt warm through our nightgowns. “I came down for breakfast and my mom was like, ‘I didn’t buy those bras just so they could sit in a drawer. Go back upstairs and put one on.’”

She pressed her spine more fully up against mine and whispered, “I hate it when they talk that way. When I’m a mom, I’m not going to be bossy.”

We drifted off, dreaming of our future selves, convinced that we knew who we’d be and how we’d act. Later, we’d decide that we were lost sisters, twins who were somehow separated at birth. We were both only children, so we romanticized siblings. Bunk beds, matching outfits, late night talks, and allies against parents.

I flipped the quilt off of my head and looked around the room. My chest, the bed, and the room felt flat and pressed down—two-dimensional. I had the sense I was sitting in the midst of a television sound stage—that Willow’s possessions had become props or artifacts—and that somehow there was another dimension, a fourth wall to look behind, a portal I needed to tap into to the get to the real Willow.

The door to Willow’s bedroom opened slowly, creaking on its hinges, and I sat up. I realized how I weird I must look lying in Willow’s bed with her sheets wrapped around me.

“Mrs. Nelson?” I called out to the door, but nobody answered. “Peggy?” I knew she preferred to be called by her first name, but I always hated that hippie trick.

The door continued to open slowly and deliberately as if there were a hand pushing it open from the other side. I leaned over the side of the bed, my mouth open, ready to speak, but there was no one there. The photo-lined hallway that led out from Willow’s bedroom and into the kitchen was empty.

“Fuck this,” I said to the door, to whatever hallucination cum visitation I was having right then.

The door swung back hard and slammed shut. I shuddered. The room felt still, cold, and dialed back—that same empty energy I felt in front of the funeral home. I kicked off the blankets, stood up, and walked over to the door. I wrapped my hand around the doorknob and tugged, but the latch caught, like it was locked from the outside. I turned around and hurried back over to the window. I slipped my combat boots back on and laced them up with shaky fingers. It’s daylight, I told myself, Don’t panic, but it was my last human thought.

My head emptied out and I felt my heart slowing again, shutting itself down, and settling in for something that felt too much like quitting. I was a bear in hibernation. A fish, barely alive, but waiting for spring at the bottom of a frozen river. I had a dying animal urge to find a hole and fall into it. The sunlight made a square of light on the pink shag rug and I stared at it, like a cat made stupid by light and shadow. I heard droning, insect buzz. Bees swarming and busy, working through an unconscious code, on liquid command from the queen. I was a hive mind. Aflame. Do it, the queen said. Go ahead. Die.

The door rattled and creaked, like someone was trying to break in. I gave up on my laces. I managed to stand up and fling myself belly first out the window. I landed on top of the dogwood. Several branches snapped under my weight, but it held me for a second or two before I slid down the ground. I stood up and stared down at my arms and legs. I had a long scratch down my thigh and another one across my forearm. I relished the sting of these cuts. They meant I was alive. The air outside felt lighter than in Willow’s bedroom. De-pressurized. The dumb numb fog lifted to eye-level, and I felt my heart again. Run, it said. Go! I looked off down the street, and I saw a girl up ahead crossing the street. She looked six or seven and she wore a red bathing suit with tiny rainbows on it. I recognized the suit—it was one I’d seen in a photograph, one of the ones on Willow’s mantel. She was six and at her grandma’s condo in Myrtle Beach, a front tooth missing, standing in the water and holding a small plastic yellow shovel. I’d been staring at it for years. My parents didn’t hang pictures or buy frames. Occasionally, my mom managed to affix something to the refrigerator with a magnet, but they were unprotected and random, covered in kitchen grease before long. So I treated Willow’s family’s pictures as my own. I knew them and noticed if her mom moved one. The little girl up ahead had Willow’s same hair color—the darkest brown, its natural color before she’d bleached and shaved it.

“Hey!” I called out to her, but she didn’t turn around. I needed human contact, a voice, confirmation that I existed.

I noticed the tiny plastic yellow shovel in her hand, and the way the bathing suit rode up her butt. She had flip-flops on and they flap-flapped away from me.

“Wait!” I yelled but she kept walking.

“Willow!” I cried out. I didn’t care that I’d lost it. She turned, cocked her head to the side, and waved her shovel at me. I saw the missing tooth, the tanned cheeks and burnt nose, the crookedly scissored bangs. The girl in the photograph. Past Willow. A ghost of a ghost. She didn’t speak to me, but I understood something in that moment. I got that we weren’t saying good-bye, that figment or not, she had her own plans.

You don’t get it, do you? I’m water now. I’m leaving. I’m going, going, gone.

And then she turned the corner and I lost sight of her. I ran to catch up, but when I got to the intersection, it was empty. No girl. No shovel. No stick legs walking determinedly ahead and away from me.

I looked up at the traffic light. It’s electronic buzz and click felt turned up, like a speaker about to pop.

Years later, when I watched David Lynch’s Blue Velvet during the day in a sticky second run theater on 13^th Street, the hairs on my neck stood up. I knew what it was like to tap into to something animal and dark. I understood teeming insects and small-town underworlds. I knew the pull of undertow and underwater because I’d lost Willow. I knew possession and confusion, or at least by then had accepted it as part of my reality. I’d lived inside of that severed Lynchian ear, decaying in the hot summer grass.

But at that moment, under the glare of the July sun and the amplified noise of the traffic light, I decided two things: I’d gone crazy and I could keep it hidden.