Live at Roseland Part 3

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

Part 2 was feeling impossibly long to read in one post, so I broke it in half and made a part 3 here. The last installment, Part 4 is coming next week. Happy No Kings Day!

Photo by Sime Basioli on Unsplash

14

Willow

Think of me as parallel, not above or below. Think of me as a sliding panel, a trick door, or a revolving haunted house bookcase. Think of me as anywhere and nowhere. Think of me on the road and in the air. I jump from puddle to puddle, stream to stream, creek to crick, river to lake, and pond to pond. I am pond scum. Algae. The nucleus of any cell is mostly made up of protein and water, so think of me cellularly, fondy. Dearly, and yes, queerly.

I could tell you about the parallel world, but you wouldn’t get it. We all get here eventually, some of us faster than others. Besides, I don’t want to ruin it for you—the surprise of it all, what it’s like to hover and haunt and what it’s like to get stuck. I could tell you about the regret, but you wouldn’t get that either. It’s a dead thing, or at least at this level. Call it cosmic regret. Call it perpetual heartbreak. Call it suicide payback. Call it my new job.

That day in the river, I lost my heart. Well, let me be clear. I lost the muscle of it—that bloody pump engine stopped beating. I gave up on my body and I stepped out of it like the embarrassing Halloween costume it’s always been. And at first I didn’t miss it. I never asked for size 36D breasts. Nobody wants period cramps and migraines and toenails and snot and eyeballs. Forget being stuck on the ground walking around in shoes and socks. Blisters and scabs. Wounds and goo. Good-bye to all that. At first I was a shaman. I was a superhero without the messy fluids. No blood, sweat, or tears. No shit. No piss. At first I was free.

But I never got past my heartache. I became pain without a cavity, one hundred percent phantom limb. I got tied down and tethered. Stuck. My mom always used to say I was born sad, and if you fall for her hysterics, which I usually did, it made sense that I wound up hauling my misery to the other side in a suitcase. That feeling, that ache did start young. I was seven when I fell in love with Strawberry Shortcake. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, with her fringe of Manic Panic red bangs and smattering of pink freckles. I fell asleep clutching her fake strawberry shampoo scent to my nose like the littlest huffer, and I daydreamed of kissing her in the thatched cottage where we lived with our cat, Custard when I got home from the office. I was always the man. I wore a three-piece suit and carried a briefcase. Rush. Rush. Kiss. Kiss.

And then it was Wynona Rider. First her little butch turn in Lucas as the sweet band fag who knocks on Corey Haim’s trailer trash door in her uniform to make sure he’s okay. It’s Winona who cares about him and sees him for what he is, which is a runt loser with a gift for the grift. Her big brown eyes and the way the dorky uniform’s stiff collar squared her cute chin made me realize my little gay secret wasn’t going away. I loved her in Beetlejuice too, all Goth girl misery—spiky black hair and pale, pale skin. Maybe that’s why I went so crazy for Jen. She looked like a butcher, better Winona. Winona politicized. Lesbian Winona. Winona before Heathers made me hate her. The Winona who could finally love me back. Except she didn’t.

I can tell you this—you haunt who knows you best. And as much as I was sick of Annie and her guy problems, and how everything was about her, even my coming out, she had a hold on me. Fuck it. She called out to me. She was the last person to see me alive and she yelled my name. She tried to stop me and even though I had no intention of turning around, I realized once I was dead that I needed her, missed her, and knew her voice better than anyone’s. She shouted my name three times. I may or may not have heard her. I might have classified her as a gnat, pure annoyance and interruption to the mantra in my head; the fire, the flames, the voice, my voice, the one that kept whispering, “Go ahead, get in, the water’s fine.”

And when I choked on all of the water, when I finally drank the river down and I stopped breathing, it was Annie’s image that movie-screened itself in front of my soon-to-be-dead eyes. I remembered one of the last things we tried to make together. I saw her painting in the campus studio, in front of the portrait of me I never let her finish because I couldn’t stand to pose anymore. I’d been a bitch about it. I didn’t want to be stared at—I was about to come out. I was thinking about it all of the time, and I needed a little privacy. I knew she’d make me ugly, render me real. She’d pull out some dark soul shit and paint it into my irises or into the crease on my forehead. She was a good painter. That’s what she did.

She wore her enormous Dickies overalls over some ripped old gray t-shirt and all of her hair was tucked into a purple paint-splattered bandana. And there were two me(s)—the actual Willow who was crabby from sitting on a stool with her neck locked at four o-clock for three hours and the half-finished virtual Willow in the painting, out-lined, but not fully there, reds, but no blues yet, yellow without any browns. Annie took a step back and ran the tip of her giant hog bristle brush along her cheek and down to her chin. She was about to fill me in. She was deciding on the right color. Sure, the paintbrush is a tool, the thing us painters use the most, but it’s also a magic wand, a pointer, a walking stick, a dowser, and a diving rod. A couple of minutes later I’d leave the studio, storm out in a huff, mumbling something about needing caffeine. I never told her I was done posing, I just decided it in my head. By then, I had become one big interior monologue. The volume was way up. Most of the static was mine.

She tried to finish the painting without me, but there wasn’t enough there. Eventually, not that day, but a couple of weeks later, she gave up and slid the canvas into one of the giant compartments against the wall where paintings went to die.

I hoped, in that last sucking river breath that she’d conjure me back up. I hoped she’d finish the painting. Fill me in. Make me real and alive. Divine me. And as my lungs filled up brackish water, I hoped she’d swim out into the reedy deep bend where the river turned its back on Lamott and I had decided to die, and save me. But it was too late. I’d swallowed too much. I was already dead.

15

Annie

I woke up between D.C. and Raleigh. The bunk was narrow, too low to sit up in, and felt like a rattling coffin. I’d crawled into and fell asleep soon after Tabitha left me, and I didn’t hear the band return to the bus. I turned to the side and tried to adjust my eyes to the darkness of the bunk hallway. Once I was conscious, I remembered my best friend was dead and for a moment wished to be dead myself.

“Jeb’s girlfriend?” I startled and almost hit my head on the top of the bunk.

“Whose there?” My eyes began to adjust to the dark.

“Twig.”

“Hi,” I wanted to act nonchalant. “I’m Annie.” I’d not yet been referred to as Jeb’s girlfriend. Was I? Whatever, there was Twig Austin adam’s apple and all floating like an appartition in front of me.”

“Right, Annie,” he slurred and fell forward. He was taller than I’d imagined, and as he teetered his bottom lip grazed my shoulder. I thought I’d actually die. It was an accident and not a kiss, but I imagined myself screaming into the next available pay phone to Willow, “Twig Austin fucking kissed me!!!” And then I remembered I couldn’t tell Willow shit.

His breath smelled like cigarettes and vodka. I turned on the little lamp in the bunk. Woah, I couldn’t believe how different he looked in person. His face was covered in pimples, his long brown hair was greasy and stringy, and he wore the dirtiest, most expensive looking jeans and a white t-shirt I’d ever seen. Whatever, he just accidentally touched me.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.” Twig stumbled backwards—his left foot seemed to be tangled behind his right.

I remembered the last movie I’d seen him in—Apples and Ice. Twig played a Russian spy who falls in love with an American airline stewardess. I’d seen it with my father, during one of our rare attempts to enact some kind of post-divorce father-daughter activity. My dad complained the whole time about Twig’s barely passable Russian accent, until the guy sitting in front of us threatened to get the manager. “Oh, we’re shaking,” my father snapped back, and I shrunk even lower into the shredded faux-velvet seats of Lamott’s one movie theater.

“You’re okay, it’s going to be okay.”

He stumbled backwards again and grabbed onto the railing of my bunk to steady himself. I’d learned to say this when comforting my mother, who needed constant reassurance to make it through even the most mundane of days. I was good at consoling people, listening to their problems and anxieties. The dazed and confused were drawn to me—I must have looked like the helpful type. Or else maybe I looked crazy myself, so the stakes were somehow lower.

I pulled at the hem of my dress, which even in the dark I could tell had ridden up to expose the crotch of my tights.

“Abby?” Twig leaned in again and rested his chin on the railing.

“Annie,” I clarified. I could see his face more clearly. His pupils looked black and round, completely dilated, the pupils of the tripping. No wonder our conversation was going nowhere.

“You’re Jeb’s right?” he asked, “Girlfriend, I mean?”

“Pretty much, I guess?” I thought of Toby’s hand massaging my neck earlier that night, and that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be someone’s girlfriend after the disastrous end of things with Julian.

“Where are we again?” Twig asked.

“Somewhere between Washington and Raleigh I think.” Twig looked off into the darkness of the bunk hallway. There were little purple lights along the floor to demarcate the walkway, the path from the front lounge of the tour bus to Merilee’s private lounge in the back of the bus.

“No, I mean right now. Where are we? Like where am I standing? And why does it vibrate so much?” he asked.

“You’re in the bunk hallway of The Band of None tour bus,” I clarified.

“Right!” he said and smiled. In spite of his bad skin and greasy hair, his teeth were bright white and straight. They lit up the hallway like a sparkler. “Where’s Merilee?” he asked, finally remembering why he’d come into the hallway in the first place.

“Right there at the end, that’s her door.” I leaned my head and arm out of the bunk to point at it. Merilee’s door opened, as if on cue, and to my surprise Tabitha stepped out into the hallway, holding her combat boots in one hand and her bra in the other. She stuffed her bra into her back pocket and walked in her socks towards us. When she got to us, she leaned into Twig’s ear, and whispered, “Okay Hollywood, your turn.”

Twig and I watched her shut the door at the other end of the hallway. Twig turned away from my bunk and stumbled towards Merilee’s door. “See you later Little Orphan Annie.”

I lay back down. Jeb had taped up a couple of postcards to the interior wall of the bunk—one was of Elvis in his later years, sweating on stage in his polyester white pantsuit, while the front row of girl fans sobbed with longing; another was of a naked Betty Page sitting cross-legged on a bed wearing long gloves, stockings, and nothing else; the third was of Allen Ginsberg, dressed in a dapper white linen suit and making guru-eyes at the photographer.

I ran my fingers along the top plastic panel of the faux-wood bunk. I heard moaning coming from down the hallway, and then a voice saying something I couldn’t make out. I imagined Twig—the old Twig, the one I knew from the poster, the teen heartthrob who’d been styled to look life the safest of rebels—with his head between Merilee’s legs. I imagined her wearing the gorgeous red shimmering dress from tonight’s show, only now it was hiked up around her waist. She ran her fingers through his hair and pulled on the tops of his ears.

I remembered the way Jeb shoved the tin toys off to one corner of the dining room table and pushed me back onto it. I yanked the curtain of the bunk shut and slid my hand down the front of my tights and into my underwear. I pictured Tabitha taking off her boots and pulling her t-shirt over her head as Merilee looked on. I imagined Merilee, Twig, and Tabitha entwined and naked in my bunk, while I watched from the darkened hallway. I saw Willow licking Tabitha’s nipples and moving her lips down her stomach and into her cunt. I saw her resting her face there. I remembered how certain Jeb’s tongue was as he moved it back and forth between my legs and held onto tight to my hips. I saw Tabitha’s thumb rubbing against my hand and Toby massaging my neck.

I closed my eyes and let my body take over. And then I saw only colors and patterns—the deep green of Jeb’s dining room walls, a flash of the darker pink on the tip of his penis as his pants fell to the floor, Julian’s pale torso leaning over me and pressing me down onto his bed, the brown waffle weave of the bunk curtain’s fabric, and then the golden yellow light—all sunshine, all vermillion paint—as I came. I sighed and extracted my hand from between my legs. I looked at the Betty Page postcard and wondered absently how many men had masturbated to her image. Thousands? Millions probably.

I wiped my hand on my thigh and pulled my tights back up. I stared absently at Betty Page, Allen Ginsberg, and Elvis. Was there some lesson to be learned about Jeb from this holy trinity of weirdo artists? Should I cut bangs in my hair and dress like a leather kitten? Did Jeb fancy himself a cross between a shaman poet and a pill-popping rock star? I knew walls—their detritus and décor—could be both random and intentional. I wished mightily that I had a marker in my pocket. I wanted to turn over one of the postcards and scribble something cheesy and cliché—Wish you were here! Graceland was amazing! Or better yet, I wanted to sign my name in chunky block letters at eye level on one of the bunk walls.

I remembered the day we started writing on the walls of Cheap Hits. It was a cold winter Saturday, and we were seniors in high school. Willow was supposed to be behind the counter, but we were sprawled out on the lounge couches listening to Ten Years Together: The Best of Peter, Paul, and Mary. We had an occasional weakness for folk music, and we liked to sing along off-key and full-throated.

We’d just gotten to the part of “Puff the Magic Dragon” when Jackie Paper dies and Willow sat up on the couch so she could better belt out the lyrics. Her hair then was a short black bob with straight-across bangs and she wore oversized overalls with a baggy green wool sweater underneath. I couldn’t tell it then, but it was her first attempt at a more androgynous look. I thought she was channeling the Dexy’s Midnight Runners in their video for “Come On Eileen.”

Keith walked through the double door frame that joined the store part of Cheap Hits to the lounge.

“Customer?” Willow stood up and shot me a guilty look. In spite of her anti-capitalist stance to most things retail, Willow was a hard worker and a knowledgeable salesperson. She loved putting obscure records in the hands of the right customer, and if anyone came into the store looking for a gift, Willow asked a series of detailed questions to figure out just which Pink Floyd or Brian Wilson album might appeal to a nephew who barely left his room or a son who didn’t speak at the dinner table. For someone who didn’t like boys all that much, she was especially good at healing them with music.

“Nah.” Keith threw a bunch of Sharpie markers in our direction. They skittered off of the glass coffee table and onto the floor. “You two are artists, why don’t you have at it?” He gestured towards the white walls.

“But what?” I picked up a Sharpie, opened the cap, and sniffed it. I did this with every art supply—marker, glue, paint, fixative—I’d ever owned. I needed to inhale it, know it in my body, before I could use it.

“Just make it like a notebook, but an artist’s one. Lyrics, graffiti, doodles, portraits, whatever you guys want, just nothing dirty because all of your parents will get on my ass.”

“Not mine.” I enjoyed pointing out the lack of interest my parents took in my well-being or Lamott’s teenage happenings.

“The mayor would love to shut me down.” Keith narrowed his eyes at Willow and pulled at the little leather pouch he kept strung around his neck. We all assumed it was full of blow, though no one had ever seen him open it.

“My Dad is committed to providing the youth of Lamott with safe spaces and wholesome activities.” Willow switched the low timbre of her voice to a higher register, one that she reserved for imitations of girls she found stupid and adults who were full of shit.

“It’s wholesome here,” Keith said as if he were defending the store at a city council meeting.

“Sure, unless you count the giant bongs for sale.” I zipped up my hoodie and pulled at the knee socks I’d taken to wearing over my leggings during the winter. Keith refused to heat the lounge part of the store, so layered up to keep warm.

“Perfectly legal.” Keith shrugged and shuffled back into the retail part of the store. “I can’t take the white anymore. It’s like a mental hospital!” He parted the sea of the beaded curtains that led into his office.

Willow made the first move. She picked up a Sharpie, walked over to the back wall, and began to draw a face. I stood up and followed her, watching over her shoulder as my own nose and eyes emerged from the white bumpy wall.

“Really?” I rested my chin on her shoulder, still mildly huffing my Sharpie.

“What? We practically live here. We should be memorialized. Now you draw me.” She nodded to the right of my portrait-in-progress.

I started to sketch. My style was messier than Willow’s. I never knew quite what would emerge, while she moved slowly and deliberately, stopping occasionally to have me turn and face her so she could verify her work. After about a half hour our faces emerged. My long lashes and pointy nose—the smattering of freckles along the bridge of it—my high forehead and choppy long hair. I managed to capture Willow’s pert nose, high cheekbones, and her arched eyebrows that so captured her attitude towards all but her innermost circle. What did you say? That’s fucking stupid?!

Willow and I took a step back, and engaged in a ten-second mini-critique of each other’s work. Can you make my chin a little more square? What about my necklace? Can you get that in there?

She draped her arm over my shoulder while I fussed with her chin on the wall.

“You think you have this square jaw, but it’s kinda pointy.” We’d been drawing each other for years now so didn’t believe in silent muses.

“It’s square like my Dad’s.” Willow puffed out her chest a little and squeezed me tighter.

“You’re weird.” I scribbled some more of her bangs in and capped the marker.

“Nice!” Willow let go of me and squatted down to draw my neck and the purple crystal I wore on a piece of embroidery floss. I was partial to it then—thought of it as a good luck charm. Six months later, I’d lose it down one of the heating grates in Julian’s apartment. I’d feel pissy that he wouldn’t dismantle the vent to look for it, and then decide it was an offering to the apartment gods, to the place where I’d eventually have sex with him.

I jumped up and down a couple of times in my combat boots. It was how I’d learned to express the complicated mixture of joy, adrenaline, and power that sometimes came over me in Willow’s presence, at particularly good concerts, and when I was fucked up on something. Willow rested her arm back on my shoulder and I wrapped my arms around her waist. In the ninth grade she grew four inches taller than me and I’d never caught up.

“We look good!” I whispered in her ear.

“We rule the back wall!” she said into my hair.

“Andy?”

I heard Twig’s voice again, just outside of my curtain. I wondered how long he’d been standing there.

“Andy Gibb?”

I slid the curtain open a couple of inches. “What?”

“Annie get your gun,” Twig said. He looked flushed, but a little more together than before. He at least seemed to know where he was.

“Whatcha doing up there?” he asked, peered into the bunk, and sniffed.

“Nothing.” I rearranged my dress.

“You want to come up front and watch Martin count the money?” he asked.

“What money?”

“Duh, the money from the t-shirts and the venue.”

“Why?”

“It’s fun and sometimes Martin lets us roll around in it.”

He kept walking, not waiting to see if I was coming or not. I looked at my watch. 3:20 am. I found my black high-top Converse with the broken laces tied together in knots, slid them on and made my way out into the front lounge.

I opened the door and peered into the dim lounge. Twig had been right. Martin was sitting at the tiny kitchen table counting stacks and stacks of bills; ones, fives, and twenties. It was more cash than I had ever seen, and I tried not to stare, but it was mesmerizing.

Martin looked up at me and paused between the stack of bills in his hand and the stacks on the table, “Annie luv, don’t distract us with your beauty or else I have to start over again.” He’d taken his suit jacket off, and rolled up his sleeves, but he still looked very much the businessman, the only one on the tour from what I could tell.

“I thought you were asleep.” Jeb held his hand out to me.

“For a while.” I found a space between him and Ian, the keyboard player, who grinned and said, “Hey there, Annie.” Terry and Bobby were passed out on the other couch, sort of propped up against each other with about twenty empty beer cans stacked up on the floor between them. Tabitha was curled up next to Bobby and fast asleep. She looked like the kind of person who could sleep anywhere. There was a movie playing on the T.V.

“This is my favorite scene in Easy Rider,” Jeb said into my hair. “They’re in New Orleans and they take acid and they meet up with these prostitutes. Watch, they just walked through Mardi Gras and now they’re in the cemetery.” He handed me the bong and I took a hit.

“Fonda and Hopper.” Twig flung himself onto the couch next to us. “Fucking royalty. Look at their faces.” Jeb and Ian nodded, but they didn’t say anything. Were they annoyed by Twig? I couldn’t tell.

I stared at the screen. Peter Fonda crying in the lap of a virgin Mary statue; a brunette taking off her clothes between two bright white mausoleums; a blonde sobbing into Dennis Hopper’s shoulder, “I don’t even know if I like you,”; Hopper shouting in response, “I like you plenty, baby!”; a young girl reciting a prayer in front of a grave, her lips a red O; a man in a suit reading from a Bible while Peter Fonda looks on; and the bright orange New Orleans sun overhead. The director cut from image to image quickly, and there was no real coherent narrative, but the effect was sometimes lovely, sometimes scary, like trips themselves.

“This part is like a Stan Brakhage short.” Jeb pulled me closer to him and I rested my head on his chest. I had no idea what he was talking about so I concentrated on the beat, beat, beat of his heart, and I stared out the window. The trees on the side of the road formed a streak of black against the dark blue sky. Every mile or so, I read a sign for a tiny town I’d never heard of: Farragut, Lenoir City, Crossville, Sparta, Lebanon. I wondered if all small towns in America resembled each other or if that each one was truly unique.

Was there a girl like Willow in Sparta? Someone so sad that she was dreaming about drowning herself? Did she have a friend like me who was completely clueless and who felt so shitty about it that she had to run away from the entire crime scene? I decided as the green and white road signs zipped by, that I could live with the idea that I might not be one of a kind, but that there had never been or would be anyone else like Willow Nelson. Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk. Jeb’s heart marched forward, and I kept my ear pressed against it. His breathing got more steady and I felt his head fall back. He was asleep. The movie ended, and Ian got up and walked back to the bunks without saying goodnight.

$37,650 dollars!” Martin called out from the kitchen table. He wrapped rubber bands around the stacks of money and packed them neatly into a giant plastic pouch. I thought of all of the things I could buy if I had that much money. I could go to school wherever I wanted, and I could buy all new clothes, combat boots, and a winter jacket. I could get a lot of pot and rent my own apartment somewhere and just paint for a year or two. I could buy my mother bottles of wine instead of boxes.

“Goodnight kids,” Martin said and walked back to the bunks with the money pouch under his arm.

“Does he sleep with the money?” I sat up and scooted away from Jeb and closer to Twig, who was repacking the bong with the slow intensity of someone who can’t concentrate. We were the last three people awake on the bus, except for Ralphie the driver who had the curtain between the cab and the lounge shut. Bobby and Terry started to snore and Tabitha had managed to eek out more space for herself and also fallen asleep.

“Has to. Bobby takes the money when he’s fucked up. Once he bought a stripper.”

“What do you mean?”

Twig’s attempt to flick his lighter and align it with the carb was beyond him. I took the lighter and leaned in to help.

“It was confusing. He brought her back on the bus from a strip club and he was totally incoherent. He started yelling at us about concubines and second wives and polygamy. Finally, the stripper was like, ‘He paid me to stay with him for a week.’” Twig blew a long arc of smoke out of his mouth and passed it over to me. “Martin was pissed.”

“Did she stay?”

“I wish.”

I exhaled a long stream of pot smoke out of my mouth and frowned.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I pushed back on the couch cushion behind me.

“I take it you don’t believe in the profession?”

“It objectifies women.” I folded my arms across my chest and looked down at the hole that was forming from my big toe. One half-painted black toenail stuck out from it.

“What if they like it? What if they make a good living?” Twig sat up straight and put the bong on the floor.

I sighed. I already regretted starting this fight. I’d had it so many times before, most recently with some of the students in my Human Sexuality class and with Keith at Cheap Hits, who sometimes drove to Canada to go to strip clubs. Julian had been the only guy who’d ever agreed with me on this. For a quick second I remembered his new girlfriend—the size of her boobs, the proportions of her body, and her blonde, blonde hair. She had a stripper’s body. Or maybe she was more like a burlesque dancer, the ones who wore tassels on their nipples, and not the kind of girl you’d find in a Motley Crue video. But what bugged me the most about her was how different she looked from me. I felt like Julian was sending me a clear message, Not you, not anyone even remotely like you.

“It’s not good for them,” I countered as I wriggled my big toe back into the hole.

“Oh, and I guess you know what’s best for them.” He looked delighted to be fighting with me.

“No, but I think being treated that way, over time, makes everything else, like um,” I paused as I struggled to find the right word, “a transaction.”

“That’s a big word for such a little girl.” Twig looked around the room, as if to check that everyone was still asleep and then he put his hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze.

“Do you know any?” I looked down at his hand and then back up to his face. He grinned at me, all impish, all my hand just does that shit, and then he moved it up an inch. I looked over at Jeb. His head had fallen backwards and his mouth was open. He looked vulnerable asleep and that made me feel guilty. I shifted my knee away from Twig’s warm paw.

“I’ve hung out with my fair share, especially when I was younger, but no, I’m not like friends with any.” Twig scooted two inches closer to me and crossed one of his legs. He stared at the side of my face and pressed his shin against my thigh.

“I like touching people when I’m arguing with them.” Twig put his hand on my shoulder. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

I turned my head to take him in—he was so confusing that I couldn’t respond. I felt the umbrella in my chest—the pot opening and closing me. I shook my head no, and then I shook my head yes.

“No, I am not allowed to touch you? Or yes, I am?” Twig squeezed my shoulder as if to initiate a massage.

“You’re really weird,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of, but I didn’t shake his hand off my shoulder. I was star struck. He had some kind of tractor beam on me.

“Thanks.” And then he leaned in close to my ear and whispered, “You’re basing your argument on a bunch of stupid feminist ideas.”

I knew if I turned my head I would I see his beautiful white teeth and the underside of his jaw, and maybe even his Adam’s apple. By shifting my head a couple of inches I could make the boy on the poster, the teen idol who was still a pretty good starter image for masturbation, into a man. If I turned my head, we would kiss, and that made my stomach feel queasy and my face hot.

Bobby lurched awake, knocked over several beer cans, and stumbled back towards the door to the bunks. “Too much talking!” he bellowed at us tripped over my leg. Everyone in the lounge shifted. Twig moved his face away from mine and scooted back into the corner of the couch. Tabitha and Terry reconfigured themselves so that they were lying down stomach to stomach. Terry wrapped his arms around Tabitha’s body and she slung one knee over his hip. Jeb righted his head and scrunched down so that now one of his knees was pressed up against my thighs. Twig winked at me and laughed. His head tilted back and I saw his Adam’s apple.

“Wait, I remembered why I know how strippers are fucked up.” I put my hand on Jeb’s knee to steady myself.

“Shoot,” Twig said.

“Last year in my Advanced Figure Drawing class, we had a nude model come in every day. And they are all kinds of people with all different kinds of bodies, and one day we had a stripper.”

“You’re an artist? Why didn’t you tell me that?” Twig interrupted. “I thought you’d be studying Speech Pathology or some other girl profession.”

“I’m ignoring that comment.”

“How do you know she was a stripper?”

“Because she couldn’t just pose, like a regular model might. She put herself in all of these stripper positions—like boobs out and pouty lips like Marilyn Monroe or bent over so we could see her asshole, way too crazy for class. And she told us.”

“Sounds kind of hot,” Twig said.

“Maybe for some people, but mostly you’re just concentrating so hard on drawing that you can’t have those feelings. And it got awkward because our professor would ask her to shift the pose, like make it less stripper—he didn’t use those words, but that’s what he meant—and more life-like and she tried to just sit at a chair or put her leg up on a stool, but then she couldn’t help it. She migrated back into thrust and shimmy. Eventually, we all gave up drew her in these pornographic poses.”

“That is an awesome story.” Twig climbed off of the couch and spread himself out on the floor of the narrow aisle running down the middle of the lounge.

“Actually, now that I think about it, I did learn a lot that day. I drew a vagina for the first time. They are really hard to draw.”

“See, a stripper helped you. They do have something to contribute to society.”

I lay down next to Jeb on the couch. He was snoring lightly, but he shifted his legs so that I could fit next to him and rolled over so that we were back to back. “You win.” I leaned my head over the side of the couch to look down at Twig.

“I usually do.” Twig lifted his arm up and reached for my hand. He had a look in his eyes that said to me at that moment, I can do whatever I want, but it wasn’t entirely selfish. It also seemed to say, And so can you.

I squeezed his hand and looked across the aisle at Tabitha and Terry. Terry’s hand rested on Tabitha’s butt and her head was nestled into the crook of his neck.

“Your hand is little.” Twig whispered from the floor. “And you bite your nails.” He ran his thumb over the tips of my index and middle fingers, and then he pulled my hand towards his mouth and kissed the back of it. The kiss was more sweet than sexy. “Annie?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you here?”

“Jeb asked me to come.”

“But why are you really here?”

I thought of Willow and her weird dead presence in my life. I couldn’t shake her and I didn’t want to I guess, but I was hoping to blot out some of the pain of losing her. I thought of Julian walking away from me in the parking lot at Denny’s and I remembered the day my father left my mother, and I guess me too. It became my job to take care of her. It was July two years ago, a humid Sunday night, and we’d all just finished watching the most boring Sixty Minutes ever. I was waiting for Julian to come and pick me up. We were going to party in the woods somewhere, and then back to his apartment where I knew we’d have sex. That was all I cared about.

“Everybody’s old enough, Rachel.” My father came down the staircase carrying a duffel bag.

“So this is how you’re going to do it?” My mother stood in the doorway of the kitchen holding a juice glass full of red wine. It was one of the ways she tried to slow down her drinking—she drank out of tiny cups. It never worked. She just drank more and more of them. “Annie, your father’s leaving us.”

“Jesus you guys, spare me the after school special.” I was sitting on the couch between the staircase and the kitchen. It wasn’t like I hadn’t heard this conversation before. My parents started openly talking about a divorce when I was ten. They just couldn’t make it stick. I eyed the front window and willed Julian’s car to appear. I saw his headlights and then the rusty off white frame of the Toyota Tercel he coaxed to life every morning. I grabbed my bag and made for the front door.

“It’s okay Annie, run away from the most important conversation of your life.” my father yelled after me.

“This is not my life,” I mumbled once I was outside in the sticky July night.

“Leave her alone.” I heard my mother say as I jumped into Julian’s car, smug that I’d made it out the door first, that I didn’t have to watch my father’s back as he struggled to drag his box of prized records and work shirts to the backseat of his car. I hated the feeling of being left behind. I wasn’t going to sit there and take it like my mother, who’d carved out a butt-sized groove for herself on the couch, and who was incapable of leaving the house after she came home from work, let alone for good.

Twig squeezed my hand and kissed the back of it again. The second time felt a bit silly, like we were doing a scene from a play.

I wasn’t going to tell Twig that story. “I’m a runaway.” I leaned over the side of the couch and smiled down at him.

“Me too.” Twig extended his other arm out to me, and for one alarming and exciting second I thought he was going to pull me down into the aisle on top of him. Instead, he used my other arm to pull himself up to standing.

“Runaways and tramps make the best friends.” Twig dropped my hand and ran his fingers through his greasy hair. “Good-night Lil’ Orphan Annie.”

16

Jeb

“MTV wants to send Kurt Loder to Dallas for an exclusive solo interview with Merilee, does anyone object?” Martin asked. He’d wedged himself behind the kitchen table in the lounge next to Merilee while the rest of us—Bobby, Ian, Terry, and me—were sprawled out on the couches.

I shook my head no. We’d already been at it for forty-five minutes. Martin had a stack of coffee and beer-stained papers next to him, and I knew from experience that we weren’t going to end until we’d made it through his pile. The mid-afternoon sun streamed through the windows and bumped up against the dust filaments floating in the bus. I fished my sunglasses out of my pocket and put them on.

Bobby had a hold of a Band on None ashtray. I was worried he might throw it, but when I looked over at him and raised my eyebrows, he just shrugged. He’d gotten pretty Zen about band politics lately. He was probably more bored than pissed.

Terry leaned forward on his couch cushion and wrinkled his forehead. He was either stifling a major fart or trying to decide if something was worth saying. I hoped he would keep whatever it was to himself, and I willed him to shut the fuck up with a thousand tiny brain daggers from my own patch of foam and fabric.

“But Mer, with the royalties structure the way it is, you and Jeb are set for life. Bobby, Ian, and me we have wives and kids. All of our money comes from touring, so we need one more album together and one more tour,” Terry said.

“Terry, luv, we’re just checking in about a solo interview, not the future of the band,” Martin said as he started to twist the wire from a paperclip he’d dismantled around his index finger. Martin held up one of his nicotine stained hands in Terry’s direction. He had one of those voices, soothing and certain that put people at ease, no matter what he was saying, and I’d heard him say some crazy shit, mostly so that people would give us more money.

“I’m not set,” I said as a point of clarification. I’d co-written some of our songs with Merilee, and just three out of our seven hits, so I wasn’t as fucked as the rest of the band, and I had my side project, the tracks I’d laid down in New Orleans with my good friend Denny. I wasn’t sure if Denny had the guts to front a new band, but he was handsome and had a deep voice and about fifteen girlfriends at a time buzzing around and calling him on the phone, which was always a good sign for a potential front man. And after a bottle of Jack, I’d seen him dance around on stage like Iggy Pop, so I knew he had it in him.

“I don’t care if she does the solo interview. I can’t fucking stand Kurt Loder anyway,” Ian said and sipped from the beer he’d wedged between his legs. He had his long blonde hippie hair tied up in some kind of Samurai knot, and his cheeks were flushed from drinking too much.

“Why not one more album and one more tour?” Terry pushed Merilee, who had receded further back into the corner of the breakfast nook and into the neck of the giant sweater she always wore on the bus. I wondered if Terry’s wife Theresa had put him up to this—it sounded like stuff she’d say. Theresa was Terry’s high school sweetheart and she was a menace; paranoid, entitled, mean. She’d gotten even meaner since she was pregnant. We’d all, even Merilee, begged him not to marry her, but he did it anyway.

“But Merilee talking to MTV alone is just the beginning.” Martin’s Jedi voice wasn’t working on Terry. “Can’t you finish the fucking tour before you destroy the band?” Terri stared hard at Merilee.

“That’s what MTV wants—I can’t help it if they don’t want to talk to you.” She leaned rested her chin on her hands.

“Bitch,” Terry said under his breath.

“This is just one the many reasons I’m done,” Merilee said.

I sighed and pushed my sunglasses closer to my eyes. I wanted to block them all out, but I couldn’t help but feel sad for Terry. Fuck, he looked like he might cry. And Merilee, well, I knew she couldn’t hear that the guys needed her, and if she could hear, she stopped caring long ago. She had stars in her eyes and stars in her bed, and I knew she’d be just fine without us. Fuck, I’d be fine too.

I could play my own shit instead of grinning like a circus clown whenever Merilee complained that the latest song I’d written had too much guitar in it, and I wouldn’t have to nod sagely at the sound crew when she bitched about her voice getting drowned out by my feedback. The Band of None had been my dream come true, but great dreams can morph and skid off into some other reality and unrecognizable. This fucking band meeting, for starters. I wanted more pleasure and less business, and even though I couldn’t say it in front of the guys, I thought we should break up too.

Merilee once told me when we were teenagers and really, really high that she wanted to be the next Joni Mitchell. We’d just finished writing our first song together—one that had actual notes and lyrics that the band could play and she could sing, and she said it with such certainty that the hairs on my neck stood up. I knew from that moment on that whatever we had was fragile and that she was always going to be headed for something else and it involved sitting alone at a piano or strumming a guitar on a stool with the spotlight trained on her and only her.

“Because I’m bored and need to challenge myself. Because I don’t want to make another album with a bunch of babies who want to buy second houses on the lake in Demus, and who think I’m a bitch because I want to make art my way,” Merilee said.

Martin started to gather his pile of papers and scraps in a big arm raking motion. The wire from the paperclip had turned his index finger red. “Let’s table this solo interview question for the next meeting. Plenty of time before Dallas. MTV is all patience. Loder loves me, he’ll wait,” he said.

“I hate it when mom and dad fight.” Bobby made a face, grimace-smile, sarcastic.

Merilee rested her hand on Martin’s arm to slow down his paper gathering. “We have different creative paths. It can’t be fun for you guys to stifle your wildness with all of my folk stuff.”

A long strand of black hair fell in front of her face, and Merilee pushed it back behind her ear with her index finger and thumb. It was a gesture I’d probably seen a thousand times, but it still got me, reeled me back in, and made me love her still after all of our band’s bullshit. She and I were the reason The Band of None existed, and had done so well. We made something real together. That tiny gesture, her fingers, the hair, reminded me of that crazy girl who sidled up to my locker in the ninth grade and whispered slyly, “Wanna ditch and go to Arby’s?” Even then she made me feel like it was just us, working on a sandwich or a song.

None of the guys answered, but Terry looked pissed off.

“Remember when we were just getting started and we played that free show in an abandoned mansion?” I could tell she’d re-calibrated, decided not to fight Terry. I couldn’t help but think she was rehearsing a story for Loder, memorializing The Band of None.

“It was originally owned by a table baron and it has a working elevator with a wicker cage,” Ian perked up.

Once, years ago before anyone knew who we were, we played a birthday party in this old brick mansion in New Orleans for a friend of Merilee’s who was house-sitting, and Ian never forgot the place. It had been a wild show—people from the neighborhood crashed, a local jazz band came and jammed with us, some girls took off their clothes and ran up and down the giant staircase, and then the police came. It was a party more than a show—a time when we used to have fun together.

“That elevator was righteous,” Bobby said.

“Didn’t you two trap a girl in there?” Merilee raised an eyebrow.

“The elevator got stuck.” Ian and Bobby said in unison.

“At least you’ve got your stories straight,” Martin said.

“Can we focus?” Terry stared intently at Merilee, who looked somewhere over his shoulder, off into the sunlight. I knew her; she wasn’t going to engage. She’d distract us with stories and keep the rest of the tour, the whole end of us, the band, graceful and light. The vein that made windy path around Terry’s bald head and down the side of his neck throbbed in the sunlight that streamed through the bus window.

When I looked up again, I saw it, maybe even before Ralphie, our driver did—a blur along the side of the road, a flash of brown fur out of the right corner of the giant front window of the bus. What was it? A deer? A bear? Sasquatch? For a couple of seconds it kept pace with the bus, and then whatever it was flung its body in front of us. It made an instantaneous violent death thud against the grill, and then the bus rattled and rocked with the force of impact. There was a second horrible crunching sound as we ran over its body and broke several, if not all of its bones. Ralphie, man of steel that he was, gripped the wheel and kept us from sliding off the road entirely, but the bus swerved hard to the right and onto the berm, before sliding back into our lane. Martin fell to the side on top of Terry, Ian, and Bobby. Merilee braced herself against the kitchen table and I pitched to the left and into the aisle. The kitchen cupboard doors swung open and the contents—cracker boxes, a bag of pretzels, and several granola bars—cascaded down onto Merilee’s head. I heard a second sickening thud from the back of the bus. Blood splattered up all over the windshield and Merilee screamed, “Stop!!!”

“Working on it!” Ralphie shouted back. He looked in his rear view mirrors and eased off of the gas and pumped the brakes until we came to a complete stop on the side of the road. He pulled at the lever that released the door of the bus, stomped off down the stairs and out into the hot Tennessee sun. “Motherfucker!” he shouted at sky as he walked around to inspect the front of the bus.

I squeezed my eyes open and shut a couple of times. I’d fallen into the aisle and onto my back. I looked up at the roof of the bus and the two skylights, which revealed two squares of blue and a couple of cottony wisps of clouds. I felt my heart up in my throat; the too familiar first symptom of one of my panic attacks. I squeezed my eyes shut and willed my heart to slow down. I took a breath in, but it was shallow and unsatisfying. I opened my eyes to the tangle of feet on top of me—Martin, Bobby and Ian standing up and scrambling off the bus. My chest rose and fell, but the speed was all off. I was losing control. To steady myself and because it had been a couple of days, I imagined all of the drugs I’d be able to do in Little Rock. I saw my dealer waiting in the lobby for me at the hotel, and then I saw myself sneaking off into the bathroom while Annie lay naked on the king size bed. I saw a heaven on top of a heaven. No bus. No tour. No band. Just Annie and my medicine.

Terry put his hand down on my shoulder. “You okay?” he asked and I nodded yes even though the blood was still rushing to my head. He pulled me up and I made my way past Merilee who had a fine layer of pretzel dust in her hair, towards the bunks. Before I could get there, the door opened and Twig and Annie trailed out single file. Twig had a hand on Annie’s shoulder, blood on his bottom lip, and a book tucked under his other arm.

“You okay?” Merilee stood up and touched Twig’s lip with her thumb. Twig licked it and grinned. He looked greasier and more unwashed every day, but none of the girls seemed to care.

“He tried to catch me.” Annie was all perfect little white teeth and red, red, lips.

“I bumped my lip against Annie’s head.”

“I basically head-butted him.” Annie rubbed at her forehead. I imagined the two of them intertwined in my bunk staring at my Betty Page postcard, and talking about Twig’s stupid wanna-be band. You had to watch your back on the bus—somebody was always trying to poach. A new person on the tour, especially a pretty girl, was like a bun at a hot dog convention.

“Tough band meeting I guess.” Twig pushed past me and towards the front of the bus, grabbing a dish towel along the way and pressing it to his lip. I wondered how much Merilee told him about the band. I could see him advising her to dump us, to move to L.A., and hire a bunch of studio musicians to do her bidding. “Let’s see what The Band of None killed today.”

We filed off the bus and out onto the side of the road. There wasn’t a building or a car in sight, and the sun was almost directly overhead. No doubt, we were on some backwoods hick road, the kind that Ralphie specialized in finding so that he could get us where we needed to go as fast as possible. The heat was a shocker. It rippled and buckled the asphalt and made my whole body sweat. My heart surged again, but the panic stayed away. I could breathe. Terry, Ian, and Bobby had already wandered off into a patch of short trees and bushes to smoke another joint and take a piss. Ralphie and Martin had managed to get the hood of the bus open.

“Gonna have her up and running in 15 minutes.” Martin shouted at us from under the steaming hood of the bus. Deviations from the schedule made him crazy, and I’m sure he was afraid of losing control of us more than the bus.

Twig put his arm around Merilee’s neck—it was the first time I’d seen them touch in public, if you could call the side of the road in the middle of this hot nowhere, public—and they started to walk back towards the remaining carcass of whatever we’d hit.

“No, I don’t want to see it.” Merilee protested into Twig’s armpit, but she walked with him anyway.

I took Annie’s hand. It was cool and soft, so I put it up to my forehead. I still felt like my heart was going to jump into my throat. She leaned against me and I wrapped my arm around her shoulder. She had on some weird tight skirt that seemed to be made out of yarn and an old paint splattered t-shirt—a Salvation Army art school mess of an outfit that somehow she pulled off. I kissed the welt on her forehead. “Sorry we had to throw you out of the lounge during the band meeting. It’s just the policy. No girlfriends or wives.”

“I don’t mind. Twig was telling me that he didn’t learn how to read until he was ten.” Annie looked up at me expectantly as if she wanted me to marvel at this little piece of bullshit, not doubt sugar-spun by Twig to woo any girl who would listen.

“I’m sure he caught up.”

“Do you guys not like each other?” Annie turned her chin up like she wanted to be kissed. The sun was killing me. I was sure there were about fifty beads of sweat cascading off of my forehead. Her brown hair and wide-set brown eyes made her look like some beautiful trusting fawn. If anyone was going to eat her up, it was supposed to be me.

“We’re cool. He’s just got that L.A. thing going on.” I’d had enough young girlfriends to know that you can’t tell them what to do or who to hang out with. They think you’re trying to pull a Daddy on them and they get pissy fast.

“What do you mean?” Annie pressed. I seriously wished I hadn’t said anything and she’d let it drop. I let my arm slide off of her shoulder. What I’d wanted was to stick my tongue down her throat and maybe touch her tits by the side of the bus.

“You fucking piece of shit!” Ralphie screamed at the hood of the bus and threw a wrench down onto the asphalt. “There are animal guts inside of the engine.” He stared up at the pristine blue sky as if Zeus himself were listening.

“Steady there captain.” Martin walked over to retrieve the wrench and shot me one of his classic We’re fucked looks.

“I’ve never been to L.A,” Annie said. “Is Ralphie okay?”

“Yelling helps him stay calm,” I reasssured her. “Actors are narcissists. It’s not their fault, but it can make them into dicks.

“Doesn’t everyone say that about musicians too?” Annie squinted up at the sun through the visor of her bangs. There were beads of sweat on her upper lip.

I pulled her hips closer to mine and leaned down to kiss her. “Lead singers, maybe, but not guitarists,” I whispered into her mouth and then I put my lips on top of hers. She tasted like Twig’s pot and pretzels. I imagined her pale and naked again on top of the bed in my hotel room in Little Rock, this time her legs spread open wide, her sweet pink pussy waiting for me as I shot up in the bathroom sink.

“You have to see this!” Twig shouted at us from further down the road. I ignored him, so that I could keep kissing Annie, who I could tell by the way her tongue was moving had forgotten about Twig and was going to let me do anything I wanted to her in Little Rock.

“It’s disgusting! Come on!” Twig shouted. I opened my eyes. Annie’s were already open and focused, very much looking into me or at me for something, I could only guess at. I closed my eyes again and lowered my hand back down onto her ass.

“These are the biggest antlers I’ve ever seen!” Twig yelled at us.

Annie stopped kissing me and took a step away. “He’s not going to stop.”

Merilee walked away from Twig, bent over the guardrail, and threw up. She held her palm up to us, a warning.

“Part of one of those antlers is wedged into the grill.” Martin came out from behind the engine to talk to us. He was covered in grease and had already sweat through his shirt.

Annie started to wander off down the road in the direction of Twig and Merilee. Twig waved her forward, but Merilee intercepted her.

“No way, Annie. I may not have a mothering bone in my body, but this I can do for you. It’s like Texas Chain Saw Massacre over there.” Merilee put her arm around Annie and walked her back over to me.

“But what is it?” Annie craned her neck back in Twig’s direction.

“Deer or maybe moose. Do they have moose in Tennessee?”

“You look blue,” I said to Merilee. “And there’s barf on your shirt.”

Annie made a face, but Merilee just squeezed her harder. “You’re like a brother to me Jeb, really, thanks.” Merilee scowled over at the hood of the bus. “What the fuck Ralphie?”

“I can’t fix it. We need a mechanic.” Ralphie stepped out from behind the engine and kept his eyes on the ground. In general, aside from Martin, who was technically in charge of Merilee on tour, the crew was terrified of her. She was the only one of us who consistently and regularly ripped them new assholes for just about any mistake. She’d once made my guitar tech, Simon, cry because he ate all of her special dark chocolate. Granted he was also strung out, but I’ll never forget the sight of a six-foot-five former drummer of the one of the 70s most virulent London punk bands weeping behind one of the stage lights because Merilee had called him a “fucking fat pig.”

“Why does she hate me so much?” he sobbed into his hands as I awkwardly patted his back.

“She hates most people,” I’d tried to confort him. “It’s not personal.” Merilee’s default position was disdain. At least that had been my experience, and I’d known her longer than anyone.

“My one night off better not get fucked up!” Merilee shouted to the hot sky and stomped her way back onto the bus. Terry, Ian, and Bobby re-emerged from the scrubby side of the road looking like they’d just seen a bunch of fairies deep in the woods, who’d put a sleepy spell on them.

The men drew straws to see who would have to walk to the nearest payphone to call a mechanic, and fuck if I lost. The band could have just pulled rank and sent Martin or Ralphie, but Martin had a bad heart and Ralphie limped from some combat injury he refused talk about from Vietnam. They were both already practically in tears over the state of the bus, the fact that we were off schedule, and Merilee’s mood.

“I’ll keep you company.” Twig had no idea I found him annoying. If anything, he seemed to manufacture reasons for us to hang out. Actors loved musicians. I’d seen it before. He probably had twenty questions for me about guitar pedals.

“Why should two of us have to sweat our balls off?” I said, but I could tell there was no stopping him. Annie and the band wandered back off into the woods for some shade, and Twig and I started to walk.

“I bet we hit a grocery store in a mile or less.” Twig said as we started to walk away from our mangled bus.

I grunted back. I didn’t feel like making small talk. It was too fucking hot. Twig got it and we settled into silence for what seemed like way more than a mile. There wasn’t much of a berm, so we walked in the middle of the road, staring off into the dense woods. I heard thousands of insects rubbing their legs together.

We passed an abandoned fruit stand and trudged on. So far, it was the only sign of life. My black t-shirt and black jeans were soaked through with sweat. Twig peeled off his t-shirt and wrapped it around his head like a turban. I swatted at the cluster of bugs that had made a game out of dive-bombing my eyebrows and looked off occasionally into the woods—the leaves on the trees barely moved, but the air felt quivery. The cicadas amplified their sound, stepping up their leg movements until they reached a crescendo.

“I’m taking my pants off too,” Twig unbuttoned his jeans, stepped out of them, and used the legs to tie them around his waist. He shielded his eyes and looked off into the horizon of the road. I stared at his legs which were pale, almost hairless, and skinnier than I’d imagined. His boxers hung low.

“Why are there no cars on this road?” I asked. I pulled my t-shirt over my stomach to wipe the sweat off my face. I had no idea how far we’d walked.

“I lived in a van when I was a kid.” Twig offered, out of the blue. “We were homeless when we got to L.A. and my parents were hippies and campers and they made it pretty nice. We had a stove and bunks, but my little sister was terrified we’d leave her behind.” He paused and stared off into the woods. “So being on a bus and driving across the country feels like home to me.”

I remembered of all the weird places I’d lived in growing up with my mother—the apartment above the Italian butcher that was freezing cold and smelled like blood, the trailer with a hole in the floor that my Uncle Ray shared with us until my mom couldn’t stand it anymore, and the hayloft we slept in for one hot summer while my mom looked for work on the farms outside of Lamott. I’d often wished she’d leave me behind or that I could somehow track down my father, who I’d heard from my Uncle Ray was a gambler and a drunk, but she kept me close. “Little man,” she called me and for a long time I loved it. I puffed out my tiny boy ribs and marched around her like some twisted little orbiting spaceship. Later, when I was a teenager I got sick of it. I didn’t want to be my mother’s husband, the only man in her life besides her brother.

“I get that, my mom was kind of a free spirit.” It was the most I could manage to say in the heat.

“We should have brought water,” Twig said. “My mouth is so fucking dry.”

“Didn’t think of that, thought we’d have found something by now,” I said, and then to keep us from thinking about dying of thirst in the middle of nowhere, I changed the subject. If we obsessed over water we’d just make ourselves thirstier. I learned that in the one year I spent in Boy Scouts. “You having fun with Merilee?”

I realized I never really talked to any of Merilee’s boyfriends. Mostly, I never met them, but I was Merilee’s first and even though I sometimes hated her, I still felt protective of her, loved her even. She’d had this really serious thing for a couple of years, this guy who lived in New York City and made documentary films, but it didn’t work out, and I only met him once. He was too normal for me and Bobby pissed him off by spraying beer all over him backstage during a keg stand gone wrong. After it was over Merilee told me he couldn’t handle the touring.

“I’m in awe of her voice and talent, so it’s hard sometimes not to act like a fan and she’s older so that’s good and bad,” he said. “What about Annie?”

“I just met her,” I said. I wasn’t yet able to admit to myself that she’d cast some kind of spell over me. I hadn’t felt this way in a long time.

“And?”

“We have a connection. It’s weird, there’s something, some force pulling us together.” I trailed off. “And I wanted to help her. She needed a rescue. She’s hot, right?”

“In that innocent way.” Twig bent down and pulled a small bag of powder out of his sock. From his front jean pocket, he unearthed a spoon and a tiny sponge.

“Well fuck me!” I exclaimed. I had no idea he was holding.

“Please tell me you’ve got a lighter.”

I patted my back pockets. Score!

“It’s Apache from Mexico. My dealer lives next door to me in the Canyon. She pretty much buys for just me and Slash from Guns’ n Roses.”

“Gotcha,” I said as if I knew what it was like to share a dealer with Slash.

We wandered off into the woods and began the delicate collaborative work that only two junkies can manage. We huddled behind a big tree near a stream to protect us from the non-existent breeze. I held the spoon while Twig spilled the powder into it. He scampered down to the stream for a couple of drops of water for the syringe and then squirted them onto the powder. I hit the lighter, we watched it cook down, and I felt the rush of what was going to happen next. We soaked up the mixture with the sponge. Twig filled the syringe, kicked off his boot, peeled off his sock, sat down in a leaf pile, and shot up between his toes. He passed the syringe and sponge to me and I sucked up what was left. I took my belt off and cinched tight around up my upper arm. I wished I could still shoot up between my toes—those were simpler times. But the belt worked and I found a vein to hit.

The effect was immediate. I leaned back against the tree and slid down to the ground. Rush. Euphoria. Glee. The return to the amniotic sac. I had no idea what to say to Twig, but I mouthed something at him about how H was a thousand times better than fucking, even though fucking was the only thing even came close. He nodded but he had the far away look of the irrevocably stoned. I knew then that everything would be all right. Somebody would fix the bus and they’d find us. Merilee would do that solo interview and eventually the band would break up. I’d start a better band! Annie was mine! She was beautiful and smart and she’d run away with me! Twig was my friend. We understood each other. It all made sense. I didn’t need to fix anything. All I needed was to fix up!

I stared happily off into the haze of gnats and heat that just minutes ago were driving me crazy and decided that they were nothing more than features of the landscape, just like Twiggy and me.

I remembered all of the fucked up things I’d done in the woods—the times I’d emerged from trees, guilty and tender. My Uncle Ray’s trailer back-ended into a long stretch of woods that eventually gave way to a creek and farms if you walked for long enough. Once I burned up all of my plastic toy soldiers after a fight with my mom. My friends and I spent most of the summer between fifth and sixth grade camping out with our bikes and some mildewed Army tents we’d bought at a garage sale.

I fucked a girl for the first time back there, on a bed of pine needles, underneath an ancient evergreen tree. Her name was Jennifer Miletello and she was my friend Ronny’s older sister, so totally off limits. We’d been sneaking off together at Ronny’s house. She’d pull me into the bathroom and grab my dick through my pants, and I’d come in about five seconds. Or she’d just kick me in the family room to try to get me to get up and chase her. I loved the way she screamed and squealed—all high-pitched and giggly—when I jumped off the couch to chase her into the backyard. Ronny hated it, although I don’t think he knew about the bathroom stuff.

“Let’s take a walk.” She stood at the door of my Uncle Ray’s trailer, a total fucking surprise in tight bell-bottom jeans and smelling like hair spray and bubble gum lip-gloss.

I slammed the door on my mom, who was asking who was there from the shadow of the kitchen, and followed her into the woods until we found the tree and sat down underneath it. She kissed me a couple of times, peeled off her pants, and leaned back on her elbows.

“Do you want to?” she asked and I nodded, shocked at my good fortune.

I wrestled my pants around my knees and she touched my dick with her hand once before I managed to squeeze myself inside of her. She and tight and warm like nothing I’d ever felt before. I moved in and out like three times before I came all over the inside of her leg. I was thirteen! Now, I realize how terrible and boring that must have been for her. But she moaned appreciatively and we lay there for five minutes with our pants down around our ankles and our arms wrapped around each other. It was the closest thing to paradise I’d ever had, and maybe still one of the happiest days of my life.

And then she stood up and got her pants back on, and said, “I wanted to do that.” She looked a little stricken, as if she had to say that to remind herself more than me.

“Me too,” I said and then, “Thanks,” but I knew those words were completely inadequate for what I felt. I pulled a twig out of her hair and we held hands until we reached the seam of the woods.

As we stepped onto my Uncle Ray’s property, she dropped my hand and turned to me and narrowed her eyes. “This never happened.”

“It didn’t?” I still couldn’t believe my luck. And because I hoped it would happen again, I never told anyone.

We left that secret underneath the pine tree. Like a lot people who grew up in rural places, I still thought of the woods as a place to do forbidden things, a landscape outside of the law and away from parents, where I could be my most primal, fucked up self. It wasn’t until I left Lamott that I understood that parties typically happen indoors. I’d grown up going to keggers in cow pastures. Maybe that was why I liked heroin so much—it was like a woods unto itself. Total freedom. Total privacy. If I’d learned to do anything besides play guitar in my thirty-five years, it was to walk out of the woods as if nothing had happened, and to step onto the stage as if I weren’t completely wasted. This is ground control to Major Tom.

17

Willow

Maybe I broke the bus. Maybe I was the animal that threw itself in front of its tires and got tangled up in the grill. Maybe I broke the spell and speed of travel with my death urge. I was, more than anything else, good at dying. Maybe I meant to slow us down because I needed a drink.

First, I followed Annie. She grabbed her sketch pad and wandered off into the woods to draw a tree she’d never seen before. But she was too still and she bored me, so I found Jeb and Twig. I’d always been drawn to men and boys. In high school I pretended I wanted to fuck them, so that I could study them, see how they walked and talked. I was curious about their errant thoughts, how they got girls to worship them, and later how they tricked the world into revolving around them. I began to notice how the sea of people in the hallway near the cafeteria parted for certain boys and how the air around them became wake and quake.

I coveted their props—pocket knives and wallets, pants with a certain cut, button-down shirts, and key chains. At first my parents thought it was cute that I wanted boy objects—I liked The Hardy Boys better than Nancy Drew. I insisted on tube socks instead of knee socks. I begged for a full wardrobe for my Ken doll while Barbie languished in one slutty pink dress. Later, my father yelled at me for stealing his ties and shirts and banished me from his closet. “Wear your mother’s shirts for Christ sake,” he muttered on the way out the door a couple of weeks before I walked into the river.

By then, I’d been out for a couple of months and he’d shut me out. Even though I made fun of his job, I missed hearing about the world of men. He stopped telling me stories about the firemen who lived in the firehouse underneath the city hall. He wouldn’t talk sports with me anymore either. He thought it was his fault I was becoming butch and that I loved girls, so he tried to cut me off, somehow stop the flow of testosterone.

But when I met Jen, I realized I never really wanted to be a boy. I wanted the power and the swagger. I wanted to walk into a room and alter the air, change protons into neutrons, shift matter, and make the lights zig and zag off and then on. Sometimes you need a costume before you can become the person you want to be. I wore my Mohawk up and my men’s shirts buttoned to the neck to trick everyone into looking. I did that until I found a girl who could let me be naked, one who could see me.

The little stream where Jeb and Twig cooked up was slow and meandering, clear and buggy, full of small stones and frogs. I watched them shoot up and nod off. They looked cosmically happy, made stupid by junk, all drone and buzz, the way I often imagined I could feel if I stopped haunting and went somewhere else. But where would I go? Who would watch over Annie? Who would remind her of me, but me?

I took in their deep nothingness. I was the stream. I was those men. And I remembered a book that Keith kept under the counter at Cheap Hits. To be honest, at first I thought it was bonkers, but I often looked at it when I was bored. It had a royal blue cover with a white mandala drawn onto it. In the center of the mandala was a drawing of a chair and around the outside rim of the circle, the words Remember Be Here Now, Remember Be Here Now, Remember Be Here Now, Remember Be Here Now, written four times. The paper inside was brown like grocery bags. In it, the yogi, Ram Dass told the story of enlightenment—his and ours.

I teased Keith about it, acted like it was the worst kind of hippie shit, a total affront to my hard-edged punk sensibilities, but I read it anyway. As I watched Twig and Jeb back up against a tree and nod off, I thought of my favorite page. A hand-drawn Hindi goddess whose name I’ve never known, holds out her arms, Aprhodite-shell-style. It’s a total 70s drawing, cheesy for sure. She’s wearing a toga and her hair is long like in a shampoo ad and there are words written above her head. “Nothing to do. There is nowhere to go and there is nothing to do.” And on her body, the words continue to curve and curl around the two-page spread.

What else is there to do?

Going back into the world it’s called

It’s a good step

Am I going backward or forward

I can’t do either or them

I can’t go backward and I can’t go forward

And I can’t stand still

All of its irrelevant

Then, in Cheap Hits, on slow afternoons, I came to think of her as the centerfold for an enlightenment that would never, ever make any sense to me. When I was alive, I believed myself to be a person of action. I found nothing to be irrelevant. Everything—every word, movement, color, and landscape—was a sign. And then I died and got stuck, and the words finally made sense to me. What else is there to do? I can’t go backwards or forwards and I can’t stand still. I wished I could go back into the world. I wished, for old times sake, I could be those men. I wanted to feel the bark of the tree against my neck and through my sweaty t-shirt. I wanted to be alive so that I could do something stupid like shoot up. I wanted to be alive enough to die again. I wanted to be reborn.

18

Annie

“Can I get some air?” I shouted from the back seat.

Jeb and Twig took forever to come back, but finally a cop came along and radioed a mechanic, who drove out to help fix the van. We’d made it to Memphis and it was after the show.

“What?” The driver, I think her name was Michelle, yelled over the music. It was The Replacements, Let It Be, an album I could give or take. We’d met Michelle backstage and somehow she’d convinced Tabitha, one of the twins in Velvet, Twig, Toby and me to let her drive us to a party.

“The window? I need air or I’ll barf,” I shouted back.

She nodded and rolled the driver’s side window all the way down. I breathed in the hot night air and tried to focus on what little bit of landscape I could make out from the hump of the backseat. I saw mostly the asphalt road in front of us, and the mosquitoes committing suicide against the windshield. We were somewhere outside of Memphis.

“Seriously, it’s amazing, like something out of I Love Lucy.” Tabitha was up in the passenger’s seat, sitting on Toby’s lap. She rubbed the sleeve of Michelle’s vintage dusty rose-colored dress between her index finger and thumb. It looked like it was from the 1950s with a white Peter-Pan collar, darts, and puffy sleeves. Toby leaned his head out the window, like a dog.

I was sandwiched between Twig and one of the Velvet twins, their long legs splayed out to the side, while mine were scrunched together. I gave Twig’s knee a shove with my thigh, but he didn’t budge. I was too embarrassed to admit that if the Velvet twins weren’t on stage, I could not tell the guitarist and singer apart, so I kept my eyes on the road, willed myself not to barf, and ignored whichever half of Velvet happened to be next to me.

“I bet you all have really particular tastes in music.” It was the first full sentence Michelle had managed since she got us into her car.

“We love folk music!” Velvet stuck out his thumb in mock enthusiasm.

Twig leaned his forehead against Michelle’s headrest, and shouted at the back of her neck, “Are we there yet, Papa Smurf?”

“I cannot believe that you are riding in my car!” Michelle screamed back at Twig over the wind. She slowed down, shifted gears, and took an exit ramp that led to a smaller road, a subdivision full of houses that looked exactly alike, and then onto a cul-de-sac.

“America is so fucking wrong.” Velvet said as we pulled into the driveway of a split-level ranch house with identical rounded shrubs and clusters of purple impatiens planted in the front yard.

“Don’t judge us by our towns.” Now that we were parked and talking I gave up. “Hey, which brother are you?”

“I’m the one with the guitar.”

“But if you’re not on stage that doesn’t help me?”

He ignored me and climbed out of the backseat of the car. Twig put his sneakered foot up against my butt and gave me a push.

“Ouch!”

“Faster pussycat. I’m loosing my buzz.”

We followed Michelle up the cement walkway and into the front door of the house, which seemed way too quiet to have a party going on inside of it. Toby put his arm around Tabitha, but she shook him off and moved closer to Michelle.

“Do you live here?” Tabitha had changed out of her uniform of cut-offs, tights, and a sweatshirt and into a red tube skirt and a yet another oversized Band of None t-shirt that no one had ever seen before and would never get their hands again. She’d also changed the laces in her combat boots from purple to neon green.

“It’s my boyfriend’s house.” Michelle found a key underneath the welcome mat and let us all in. She turned around and looked at me pointedly as we climbed down the stairs and towards music I could just make out. “I wish we could have convinced Merilee or Jeb to come.” I sensed that aside from Twig, the rest of us were poor substitutes. “You kind of look like her. I mean, the same pale skin, different hair though.”

“They need their beauty sleep.” Twig put his arm around Michelle and gave her a squeeze. She looked up at him, all dreamy-eyed, clearly in awe.

Once the engine cleaned out and running and we picked up Jeb and Twig from the side of the road. There was been no time for sound check, but they band sounded amazing, as if they weren’t about to break up and all hated each other. Backstage after the show had been like navigating someone else’s well-lit family re-union.

“Here’s what your boyfriend looked like for the one semester he spent in college.” A big guy with a goatee shoved an old photograph of Jeb into my hands.

“Annie, this is Rick, my college roommate.” Jeb looked over my shoulder at the photograph and sighed. “Dude, are you here to blackmail me?” Jeb was wearing bell-bottom jeans and cowboy boots. His hair was long and shaggy. I couldn’t say I recognized him.

“So cute.” I meant it, but I was also struck for a second by how much older Jeb was than me.

A woman tapped Jeb on the shoulder and Rick excused himself to go and talk to Merilee, who had an expression of utter doom on her face as he approached.

“Why little Merilee Adams!” He bellowed as he walked towards her.

Jeb’s face lit up and he bent down to give the woman a bear hug.

“Hey sweetie.” She looked over at me as Jeb put her back down on the ground. “I’m Judy. I’m one of the first girlfriends, and I hope that you’re one of the last.” She looked much older than Jeb, and was wearing an oversized Band of None sweatshirt and black stir-up pants. She took off her Band of None baseball cap and ran her a manicured hand through her blonde permed hair. I could not imagine her and Jeb together. She looked like a heavy metal fan to me, or maybe someone who loved Heart.

“I’m Annie.”

“So young, Jeb.” Judy spoke as if I weren’t standing there and looked over to the food table at the two girls who were making their way through a bag of Ruffles. “Next time I see you, you’ll be trying to date my girls.” She spoke loudly enough for her daughters to hear, and the oldest one, who I guessed was about fourteen, gave her mother a dirty look as she shoved a handful of chips into her mouth. The younger one waved at us and turned around to forage for more food.

“They’re kinda shy.” Judy reached past me to tuck a strand of Jeb’s hair behind one of his ears. “Old habits,” she shrugged at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bobby, Ian and Terry taking swigs from a flask and laughing.

“I can give you guys time to catch up,” I said, taking a step back. Judy was intense, and I wanted more than anything to be sipping whiskey with the rest of the band.

Jeb grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. I sensed I was not supposed to go.

“So how did you guys meet?” Judy took a baby step closer to Jeb.

Jeb rocked back on his heels. “She’s from Lamott.”

“He picked me up outside of a funeral home.” It was the first time anyone had asked about how we got together. I would need to work on this story, not make it into such a joke. I stared over Judy’s shoulder and envisioned Willow’s coffin, silvery and gleaming, bobbing up and down the weedy banks of the Mohican like some kind of make shift boat.

“Oooh sexy.” Judy raised her eyebrows at me, and then looked intensely at Jeb. “After me, your tastes changed. You went totally weird girl.” I continued to zone out. Willow’s coffin boat rocked back and forth in the water. I could see it moving away from me, out into some unknown, larger body of water. I should have known Willow Nelson was no tributary. She was meant for rougher, deeper waters. I squeezed my eyes shut to will away the image of her coffin and body floating away from me.

Jeb laughed uneasily and looked back and forth between the two of us. I hated it when someone totally normal called me weird. I mean, I got that I came off as freakish, alternative, different—it was what I was going for and I understood my effect, especially on people like Judy, who wore stir-up pants and listened to Poison. But who was she to name me?

“Jeb!” Merilee called over to us from across the room. Rick had a hold of Merilee’s wrist.

“It’s so tiny!” Rick yelled into the room and held up Merilee’s arm. I felt suddenly sorry for the band.

“Uh-oh. I think Rick’s had too much to drink.” Jeb walked away from us and towards them.

“I don’t think Jeb and I will ever get over each other.” Judy leaned in to whisper into my shoulder. I shot Tabitha a Help me! look, but she was busy gushing over Michelle’s leather jacket. She’d painted a picture of the band on the back of it. It was pretty amazing—that level of detail on leather.

“Just be careful, Hon.” She squeezed my arm and leaned in again and spoke into my cheek. “He’s a handful.”

“Okay,” I said absently as she wandered off to collect her daughters from the food table.

Michelle opened the faux wood door of a giant rec room. Calling what was happening in this room a party, had been an overstatement. There were two girls with matching Manic Panic dyed pink hair kneeling at the coffee table and cutting into a small pile of cocaine with a credit card. Michelle’s boyfriend—a massive guy with a shaved head, cuffed jeans, and a military jacket—got up off the couch to greet us.

“Michelle said she’d try to get the band to party with us.” He shook hands with Velvet, Toby, and Twig. Clearly, he had no idea who was in The Band of None. “She got the Dead Milkmen to come back here once too.”

“This is Bill.” Michelle stepped into the middle of the circle that we’d formed near the door. “And those are my little sisters, Karen and Cassie.” The two girls, looked up from the careful lines they were sculpting and grinned.

“Twig, Annie, Toby, Tabitha, and Dave.” Michelle pointed at each of us, Bill nodded, and then Michelle stepped backed out of the circle to look the door we’d just come through. Finally, I knew a Velvet’s name!

Tabitha eyed the deadbolt on the door. “My parents live upstairs. This is my apartment, but sometimes my mom gets nosy.” Bill gestured for us to have a seat in front of the coffee table. Toby, Dave, and Twig pushed past Tabitha and me to sit down.

“Jeb is going to be so sorry.” I’d wanted Jeb to come too, but he said he’d be waiting for me on the bus. Martin made Michelle promise to have us back by 2 am.

Tabitha took my hand and gave it a tug. “You okay with that stuff?”

“I’ve never tried it.” I’d grown up watching that over-the-top “This is your brain on drugs” commercial, where an angry man fried an egg in a hot sizzling pan to somehow indicate what “doing drugs” could do to you. Long ago, probably on that warm May day when a police officer came to our seventh grade Health class to show us grisly photos of heroin addicts shooting up in New York city stairwells and crack babies writhing in their incubators and my teacher, Mrs. Helmquist cried quietly at her desk, I decided that the frying pan metaphor applied only to coke, crack, and heroin, aka, hard drugs.

Michelle got up and put a new cassette in—it was Louder than Bombs, one of my favorites. Morrissey’s magic started in on me, “I left the North/I traveled South/I found a tiny house/And I can’t help the way I feel.”

“Do you want to try?” Tabitha whispered into my ear.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not as crazy as you think. The first time I did it, I thought I was crossing this major line, like straight-up addict, but it’s actually just kind of fun and talky.”

Twig inhaled a big line and passed the straw to Toby. “And it is really so strange?/Oh is it really so strange?/Oh, is it really so, really so strange?/I say No, you say Yes/And you will change your mind.” Morrissey’s voice always filled me with longing. I felt like he understood small towns—their inertia and heft, the way they created ballast and drag in people. I usually listened to The Smiths from the cell of my room, face down on my bed, and floating.

“But it will make you want to fuck someone.” Tabitha raised one eyebrow at me.

“I can’t fuck the person I want to fuck.”

“Yes, you can.”

“No, I can’t. Jeb and I are never alone.”

“Just do it standing up or in a bathroom.” Tabitha wasn’t buying it. “Or find someone else who will fuck you.” She ran her index finger up and down the length of my forearm, but the vibe was impatient, tetchy. I thought about Julian and Willow—the people in my life who’d made so many of my decisions for me. Willow would have had an opinion about this particular drug crossroads—she might have even agreed to try it with me. Julian would flat out disapprove. He thought cocaine was capitalist—a get-ahead drug, something for stockbrokers and wanna-bes who thought they were somehow reenacting the movie version of Less Than Zero. I’d never been able to admit to Julian that I loved that movie—the Bangles soundtrack, Robert Downey Jr., Andrew McCarthy, James Spader, and even Jami Gertz. I also loved the scene in Saint Elmo’s Fire, when Demi Moore’s character had done a bunch of blow and has a breakdown in her loft apartment with the billowing pink curtains. Maybe I just liked cocaine dramas.

I tried for a second to conjure up Willow’s face, the particular look she gave me when she thought I was about to fuck something up. She set her lips in a straight line, opened her eyes wide, and sucked in her cheeks. I saw her pale green/gray eyes and her long brown lashes, and nothing else. She blinked at me, slowly and deliberately, and then faded out. I saw her silvery coffin again, this time piled high with a bunch of pink flowers, out of the water and back in the funeral home.

“Just come sit at the table. You don’t have to do any. It’s not like high school. Nobody’s gonna ‘peer pressure’ you.” Tabitha smirked as she made air quotes around the words peer pressure and pulled me over to the coffee table. We got down on our knees.

“Annie and Tabby!” Twig held up his arms in triumph. “Our girls!”

Dave put his arm around me and pulled me close. He smelled like the leather jacket he was wearing. Toby looked over at me, smiled, and shrugged. What the fuck? he seemed to say with his shoulders. Johnny Marr’s guitar catapulted us into the last stanza of The Smiths song, “Why is the last mile the hardest mile?/My throat was dry, with the sun in my eyes/And I realized, I realized /I could never /I could never, never, never, go back home again.”

“Can I have a little of that?” I leaned over the table and tucked my hair behind my ears. “What do I do?” I asked one of Michelle’s sisters.

“Put the straw in one nostril and then snort.”

I leaned over my little line and inhaled deeply. The rush was immediate and head-clearing. I felt my nose in a way I never had before—its canal-like passage way into the back of my throat. The bridge of it throbbed. Twig licked his finger, wiped up the rest of my line, and rubbed it onto his teeth. I felt a small rush of happiness, of possibility. I looked around at all of us kneeling at the coffee table. They were strangers basically, I knew that, but I felt connected to them. Every one of these people is interesting, I thought.

“This is so fun!” I shouted at Dave.

He nodded enthusiastically and leaned over me to get at one of the sisters. “I love your hair color!”

The straw went around the table a couple more times. I inhaled through the other nostril and looked on as Tabitha and Toby leaned back onto the floor to look up at the ceiling. There was a Grateful Dead tapestry pinned up there. I stared up at it, felt the coke drip down the back of my throat, and thought of Keith’s Dead stories.

“Let’s play a game!” Twig said to the table. Tabitha and Toby sat back up and Louder Than Bombs clicked into the next track, my favorite song on the album, “Sheila Take a Bow.” “Is it wrong to want to live on your own?/No, it's not wrong - but I must know/How can someone so young/Sing words so sad?” “It’s called, ‘I was so fucked up once I…’ and then you just finish the sentence.”

“I’ll start.” Toby adjusted his Communist Manifesto cap and licked his lips.

“Uh-oh.” Tabitha grinned at him and for the first time on the tour, I saw a sparkle in her eyes, the reason maybe they got married.

“I was so fucked up once I shit my pants in a grocery store.”

Howling around the table. “I was there! It’s true!” Tabitha rocked back and forth on her butt. She had her skirt hiked up around her thighs, and I could see the crotch of underwear. Pink with white flowers.

“I was so fucked up once, I got pulled over by the cops in L.A. for a DUI, and the first thing I said to the police officer when he asked for my license was, ‘It’s all good.’” Twig gripped the edge of the coffee table and beamed at us, as if we were the cop he was trying to charm.

“Did you get arrested?” Tabitha asked.

“My lawyer made it go away.” We all nodded and hummed as if we knew what it was like to be as famous and rich as Twig.

“I was so fucked up once, I thought the car I was driving was a boat.” I said.

“That happened to me once too!” Bill looked at me excitedly.

“It kind of made it easier to drive,” I said.

“Right?” Bill eased his big frame back onto the couch. “I was so fucked up once, I forgot my truck at a gas station.”

“I was so fucked up once, I punched my brother in the face.” Dave, put his arm around one of Michelle’s sisters. “Do you guys ever do shit like that?”

“Not anymore,” the girls said in unison and threw their heads back in a pile of giggles. “Jinx, buy me a beer,” they shouted at each other and snorted. Dave stared at them, completely mesmerized.

“We were so fucked up once, we lost our clothes,” one of the sisters offered. She was wearing overalls on top of a white tank top, Dr. Martins. Her sister had more of a hippie look—a flowery skirt and some kind of sweatshirt that looked like it was made out of hemp.

Michelle frowned at them. In the dim-lighting of her boyfriend’s apartment she looked twenty-five. I couldn’t be sure if her sisters were over eighteen. “I was so fucked up, once I stole a bottle of wine from a liquor store and I didn’t even know it.”

“Did you get caught?” I asked.

“That’s the crazy part. I just walked out the door with it and nobody said a word.”

“It’s all in the attitude. Act like you own that bottle and you do.” Twig turned to Tabitha. “How about you?”

“I have a lot to choose from.” Tabitha leaned back on her elbows and looked around the coffee table. She looked like she could one-up us all. I wondered about the world that made Tabitha. We hadn’t really talked that much. I didn’t know where she was from or if she liked her family. I didn’t even know what she listened to besides The Band of None. How long did it take her to grow her dreadlocks? What was her deal with Merilee? With Terry? With the whole band?

“I was so fucked up once, I dropped out of high school so that I could go on tour with The Band of None!”

“Tab.” Toby put his hand on Tabitha’s shoulder.

“What? That’s fucked up, isn’t it? I have no future and I sell t-shirts out of the back of a van.” She laughed too hard, but nobody else did, and so there was an awkward second or two or everyone trying to figure out what to say.

“We have a future.” Toby rubbed Tabitha’s back and she leaned into his shoulder.

“No I don’t,” she said quietly.

“But you get to travel all over the country.” Michelle twisted her long blonde hair into a rope and piled it on top of her head. It curled back down slowly and fell onto her shoulders.

“And everybody’s crazy about you,” Twig offered.

I looked down at the rug, the deep rust colored shag of it. My dad had a rug like this is his apartment downtown. It hid everything. I had so much to say to Tabitha, but none of it was coming out of my mouth. “You can do something else,” I managed.

Tabitha looked up at me—we locked eyes. She shared some of Willow’s intensity—her way of saying exactly what she was thinking and of letting someone know the precise moment when they were failing. I sensed somehow that I said the right thing. I wished I could have had a moment like this with Willow before she killed herself. Why hadn’t she talked to me? Why didn’t she tell any of us?

“Ok, pity party’s over.” Tabitha fell back into Toby’s lap and he leaned down to kiss her. I looked on as Toby traced the outside of Tabitha’s lips with the tip of his tongue.

“Sounds like we need a refresher course.” Bill stood up, took another packet of white powder out of his pocket, and threw it down on the table. The sisters got to work pouring it out and cutting it into several tiny lines. I felt my heart surge forward in anticipation. We could all do just a little bit more, I thought. That would make us feel better! Fix Tabitha’s mood! I rubbed the back of my hand underneath my nose.

Twig and Dave had crawled over to the giant T.V. on the floor and put a tape in the VCR—one that had been sitting on top of the TV. I stared at the screen. Big tympani drums, haunting eerie trumpets in the flattest of keys, an organ and then Alex’s face—the icy blue eyes, the drawn-on lashes on the left cheek, the red hair, and the black bowler hat. Alex sat with his legs propped up on naked female mannequin wearing a merkin and a wig. He took a sip of medicated milk and the camera panned out to his gang. The four of them were dressed in white cuffed trousers with suspenders, white shirts, and combat boots. Voiceover, “There was me, that is Alex and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Trying to make up our razoodocks what to do with the evening.”

“No fucking way! A thousand guys have made me watch this movie about a rapist.” I snorted another line and turned my back to the T.V. to block out Alex. I couldn’t tell you how many parties I’d been at where A Clockwork Orange or Pink Floyd’s: The Wall was playing in the background. I’d seen boys I thought were cool cheer during the rape scenes. They were drunk, but still.

“But it’s Kubrick.” Twig sat cross-legged in front of the T.V.

“I don’t care. We can’t watch this.” I looked around the room for support. Everyone was leaned over the table either doing a line or waiting for one. Tabitha came up for air.

“It proves some kind of point about art and sociopaths, but it’s a nightmare to watch.” Tabitha moved away from Toby and draped her arm across Twig’s legs. “Girls hate it.”

“I don’t feel bad for Alex. I just don’t. Even later when they put the eye clamps on him.” My nose felt all tingly again. I noticed that I was moving my hands a lot, waving them around in front of my chest for emphasis.

“Turn it off!” Michelle’s sisters called out from the couch.

Dave sighed and pressed stop on the VHS machine. “It’s based on a novel.”

My knees felt numb from kneeling for so long, so I stood up. I had to go pee. The bathroom was cool and dark—the only working light was in the vanity and it was faint, a glow. The faucet in the bathtub dripped, dripped, dripped. I looked in the mirror and wrinkled up my nose. You did the right thing. I told myself. I felt like I’d done something heroic—saved the party from a potentially dark turn. I slid open the door of the medicine cabinet and peered inside. Toothpaste, dental floss, a prescription for antibiotics, a brush full of long black strands of hair, and a piece of hotel soap.

I was about to slide the mirror shut, when I saw it—the black leather bracelet Willow had custom-made for her last summer at the leather kiosk in the center of Lamott’s shitty little mall. It was a three-inch wide strap of tooled black leather with two big silver snaps. Simple. Pretty. Unique. I was surprised when she showed it to me. The guy who ran the kiosk specialized in cheesy trucker belts and fringy purses, but he was good at his craft, and he made the belt I’d bought for Julian too.

I reached into the cabinet, pulled out the bracelet, and sniffed at the inside of it. Sweat. Cocoa butter body cream. Willow. What are the fucking chances that someone else has this bracelet? I thought as I put it back on the shelf, and slid the medicine cabinet door shut. I imagined Willow floating underwater, arms extended, the bracelet un-snapping itself from her wrist, and rising up to the surface of the river. The light in the bathroom flickered off.

“Shit.” I said into the air. I felt around for the toilet with my foot and hand. I sniffed hard to swallow the icky acidic coke drip at the back of my throat, and I pulled down my skirt. I squatted down onto the toilet and peed even though my legs had started to shake. I wiped, yanked my skirt back up, slid the medicine cabinet door open again and felt around in the dark for the bracelet. It was mine, I decided, I needed a relic, a totem of Willow, but when I put my hand where I remembered it was, the bracelet was gone. My fingers bumped up against the tube of toothpaste, the prescription bottle, and the bristles of the brush. My scalp tingled, and I had the terrible sensation that someone was brushing my hair. I felt the bristles connect with my scalp and my hair moving.

I reached a shaking hand up to the medicine cabinet mirror and slid it shut. The brushing sensation stopped, but the tiny room remained dark. I fumbled for the doorknob, but where there should have been a door, a knob, or a seam, there was just a flat wall. I panicked. I opened my mouth to scream, but no words or sounds came out. I felt suspended in darkness, like I was floating in a pool of black. I leaned in again towards the mirror, until my nose was pressed up against the glass, but I couldn’t see my own reflection. What little vision I had left folded in on itself. I saw a blurry mass of black scribbles like a child’s angry drawing or a DeKooning. I heard water gurgling and rushing over me. My legs wobbled and I slid down onto the floor. The tile felt cool and wet. I must have passed out.

I dreamed I was Willow. I saw water, a brown yellow river, rushing and weaving. I saw the reedy shore and the rocky banks, and then I hurled my body into it. I saw murk and silt, muck and dark, and then the startled whiskers of a carp as he swam nervously away from me. I grabbed at weeds and clawed at the muddy, rocky bottom. And I kicked and I choked. My heart fluttered a frantic dispatch. I gasped and I gagged. My lungs filled with water. They hurt. This is it, I thought, I’m going to die. I saw flashes of images—Willow’s parents sitting in their breakfast nook in the morning sun, her first bike, the purple one with training wheels and a white banana seat, the beat-up corduroy couches in Cheap Hits, and the heart-shaped face of a girl she loved. Jen. And then I stopped moving. I began to float. I was dead, and I knew it. Someone would have to come and collect me. They’d have to fish me out, and I felt cosmically sad about this. I was detritus now. River garbage. An object. No longer a girl.

I woke to tapping in my ears, a kind of Morse code that made no sense. Tap, tap, tap, tap. That same dripping sound I’d heard when I saw Willow outside of the funeral home. I managed to stand. I felt drunk and woozy. I reached again for the doorknob and thank god, this time, it was there. I wrapped my hand around it and pulled, but the door still wouldn’t open.

“Willow?” I whispered into the dark bathroom air.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Faucet. Puddle. Dripping ghost of the girl I loved and would never get over losing.

“Willow please!” I pleaded. “Let me go!”

I yanked again on the doorknob and it gave way. Twig fell through the door and against me.

“Got worried about you.” He kicked the door shut behind him and once again I was in the dark. “What the fuck are you doing in here?”

“Waking the dead,” I managed because I couldn’t find any other words to explain what had just happened.

Instead of asking me what I meant, Twig laughed. I could make out the white of his teeth in the dark. I remembered that before I’d come in the bathroom I was messed up and horny. And Twig standing next to me, breathing on me, made me realize that I wanted someone to fuck the thought out me, to render me senseless and stupid, incapable of grief, longing, or haunting. I wanted someone to blot out the memory of what I’d just seen. Twig must have sensed this because he pressed me up against the bathroom sink and pressed his lips onto my neck. If he noticed I was terrified and shaking, he didn’t say anything.

“Sorry about the movie. I didn’t know,” he panted into my clavicle.

“Know what?”

“That you were…” Twig trailed off. “You know…”

“Raped? I wasn’t.” I put one of my hands firmly on his chest and pushed him back an inches, so I could speak. “I don’t care about the movie.”

Twig ran his tongue up my neck, over my lips, and then onto the tip of my nose.

“What about Jeb?” I asked, but it was a formality. I was too out of my head and too freaked out to really care about after effects and what ifs.

“What about Merilee?” he said as if that was an answer. “Nobody has to know anything.” Twig moved his tongue over to my ear and sucked on my earlobe. “And besides, we’re just talking.”

“No we’re not.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve been on the tour before. I know what goes on.”

“What?” I rested my head on Twig’s chest, grateful for its steady beat, his warm human presence.

“Experiments,” he whispered and slid his hand into the waistband of my skirt. I stopped him, but he moved his hands up to my breasts and ran his thumb around my nipple through the fabric of my shirt and bra. I lifted my head, arched my back, and leaned into his lips. They were full and soft, and tasted like cocaine and cigarettes. He moved his tongue over mine and I pressed my chest into his. He slid his hands down my back, onto my butt, and back up again to my shoulders. I felt the electricity of a new body, one that I wasn’t supposed to touch, and I kissed him harder. I opened my eyes to look at his face. His eyes were shut and I zoomed into the landscape of his eyebrows, which were thick and same dusty blonde as his hair. I closed my eyes again and concentrated on Twig’s tongue—the expert way he moved it against mine. He felt alive, and that was all I wanted. Not Willow. Not dead.

I understood then, mid-kiss, that my punishment for Willow’s death would be to relive my own inaction, to stand forever on that bridge and watch her walk away. I took a step back from Twig. His mouth hung open for a second as if he were waiting for me to come to my senses, to remember that I was kissing a movie star and get back to it.

“I want to go back to the party.” I whispered into his mouth, and I opened the door and left.

18

Annie

I woke up halfway under the hotel bed with a towel around my head and my hair still damp. My lace dress was hiked up around my waist and my feet were jammed into my converse. Why was my hair wet? Maybe I taken a shower or gone swimming in the hotel’s beautiful purple-tiled pool and put my dress back on? No idea. As I wedged myself up onto my elbows to take a look around the room, my head emitted a tiny bleating bourbon throb and my eyes met the one shaft of sunlight pushing through the six inches of space between the two giant curtains.

I crawled on my hands and knees over to the window and tugged at the hem of the curtains to try to make the sun go away, but I was too low and the tracks were sticky. The six-inch sunrise stayed. I looked over at the king-sized bed. There were four bodies in it, splayed out on top of the thick white duvet. Jeb lay face down and fully dressed, boots still on. I got up onto my knees so that I could see over him, but my stomach lurched forward and I quickly lay back down on the carpet. It looked like Bobby, one of the Velvet twins, probably Dave, and Tabitha. I recognized her dreadlocks, and the ornate spindly catfish tattoo she had between her shoulder blades. She was naked and pale except for her red and pink striped bikini underwear.

“Tabitha.” Nothing. “Tabby.” Still nothing. I lay back down.

I remembered in a hot flash the upholstered leather benches and dark wood of the restaurant where we ate ribs and biscuits and drank mint juleps, the game of toasts that Jeb and I started with the people at the bar (“To Aretha Franklin!” “To Bessie Smith!” “To Booker T. Jones!” “To Dolly Parton!” “To Elvis Presley!”), and the maze of side streets where Jeb pulled me by the hand for over an hour drunk and stumbling so that we could find a guy who had something of his that he really, really needed. I remembered that I tried to keep up with him, shot for shot because I had my own shit to blot out on those haunted, guilty streets.

“Wait!” I called out to Jeb who was rushing down the hallway to get into our hotel room.

I ran to catch the door, which was about to slam in my face. I fell onto the bed, and rolled over on my back.

“Jesus, rude,” I said to the ceiling. Jeb was already in the bathroom with the door shut, and he didn’t answer me. “Fine, be that way.” I tried to use the toe of one sneaker to pry off the other, but I kept slipping. “Stupid shoes.” I slurred, sat up to untie them, managed to get one off, and then sank back down into the bed. The duvet was plush and comfy, the softest thing I’d felt in at least a week.

I drifted off and dreamed I was in the woods near my grandma’s house in Western Pennsylvania, alone at dusk. Her house was gone, but her camper, the one I used to sleep in when I stayed overnight and I played “camping” was parked nearby. I examined its door—the flimsy latch that passed as a doorknob—and then turned to face the now-darkening woods. The shape of the camper, its heft and coloring was not unlike the tour bus. I couldn’t bring myself to go in, didn’t want to I guess, so I walked away from the camper bus and out into the woods. Branches snapped as I stepped on them, and my rib cage felt tight against my heart. The sky was white gray, the color of dried concrete, and the bare tree branches above my head made a spider web out of the sky.

“Willow!” I shouted as if she were just up ahead of me, as if I was on the foot bridge in Lamott again calling to her.

“Willow!” I shouted louder into the sky.

“Willow!” I screamed it this time, the dream me mustering the force I didn’t have on the day she died. My throat tightened; the tendons in my neck stretched.

“Why are you trying so hard?” she whispered from behind me. I turned around to face the camper, which had fully morphed into the tour bus. She wore a long flowery nightgown with a bow at the neck, like a kid would wear. Her feet were bare and her legs hairy. Her Mohawk was down to one side and the shaved sides of her head were fuzzy and grown in. She stepped off the bus and Merilee followed, clad in a giant t-shirt of the Twig Austin poster I used to have hanging in my bedroom—his face across her chest. They looked like there were having a slumber party; pajamas and secrets. Did they know each other? How did I miss that? The dream me felt excluded, judged, and then jealous. I understood that they were a couple, and that Willow had found a girl she could really love. She’d replaced me. It was the thing I’d feared would happen when she told me she was gay. I would no longer be the most important woman in her life.

“Yeah, stop it.” Merilee and Willow spoke in unison, one sing-song voice. I remembered my favorite photograph by Diane Arbus—the identical twins with their matching lace collars and a shared haunted knowing look.

“You always do that,” Willow said. It was the same tone she used when she told me something I loved was hopelessly straight.

“Yeah, like that time when she,” Merilee leaned over and whispered the rest of the sentence into Willow’s ear. Willow smiled and kept her eyes on me.

The dream wobbled a bit around the edges, and the tree branches shook in the wind. I looked down at my body and saw that I was dripping wet, shivering. My clothes clung to me, and my teeth started to chatter uncontrollably.

“She drowned.” Willow wasn’t looking at me or Merilee anymore. She stared up at the lattice work of tree branches and at the cold grey sky, and her eyes rolled back into her head, until they were all white. Her feet hovered an inch or two off the bus step.

I felt incredibly sad—my stomach dropped, my jaw slackened, and my heart ached outward into the trees like echoes and bird calls. I couldn’t bear to feel this way, to have seen Willow and to have missed her again, and to feel the weight of my failure as a friend, so I woke myself up.

“Jeb?” The room was still dark except for the sliver of light coming through the crack of the bathroom door. I slid off the side the bed and walked shakily towards it. I knocked. No answer. “Jeb?” I said it louder this time. Still nothing. I turned the doorknob and opened it.

Jeb was on the floor, half slumped against the biggest bathtub I’d ever seen. He looked up at me and held out his hand, “Baby.”

“You okay in here?” I looked over at the bathroom counter. I saw a syringe and some burnt foil. I looked back down at Jeb. “I didn’t know you…” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Oh that’s not mine.” Jeb looked over at the counter too, his eyes were lidded, heavy, but he looked happier than I’d ever seen him. “Bobby’s paranoid and he keeps some of his paraphernalia with me. God, I worry about that guy.”

I sat down on the bathroom floor next to him. I was wasted, but I got it. I was my mother’s daughter; I knew something about denial and the kinds of lies people told when they were high and happy—the sloppy ones that nobody bought, but that sounded perfect to the liar. And so I already had in me the enabler’s way of responding. I’d learned long ago not to question why she kept a bottle of Vodka in the laundry room near the ironing board or why every time she went to the grocery store she came back with three cases of beer. She had an excuse for all of the bottles and cans and for all of their hiding places.

“Annie, Annie, my angel.” Jeb sighed and pulled me over onto his lap. He looked down at my one shoe, and then forward to untie it for me. His fingers were expert and he managed to untie the knot I just kept making worse. He pulled off my shoe, lifted my shirt over my head, and undid my bra. He buried his face between my breasts and breathed in deeply. I ran my fingers through his hair.

“We’re living the dream Annie.” Jeb said and moved his tongue over to one of my nipples. I arched my back and reached down to undo his belt buckle. Jeb felt warm and hard in my hand. I looked around the bathroom—at the giant tub, at the beautiful white tiles, and the matching terrycloth robes hanging on hooks.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I breathed into his ear.

“Sure baby. Why not?” he huffed back into my neck and lay me down on the bathroom floor. That was the last thing I remembered from the night before.

I sat up again to check out the bed. I wanted more than anything to get in it, but there was no room, and my stomach wasn’t cooperating. Jeb was still asleep. Bobby had managed to turn over and was on his back now, snoring and snorting. From the other end of the bed, I heard Tabitha whisper, “Like this?” and then the deft clang of a belt coming out of its buckle.

I felt a sour wall rise up from inside my stomach, a tidal wave of bourbon and ribs. I bolted up from the floor and ran around the bed to get to the bathroom. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tabitha slide her hand into Dave’s tight black jeans. I took in what we’d done to the room. Bottles everywhere, slices of half-eaten pizza on the carpet, Terry asleep in one of the chairs, both lamps knocked over and without shades, and cigarette butts everywhere. I crunched through some broken light bulb on the carpet and pushed open the bathroom door. More wreckage. The tub had overflowed and the floor was slick with a half an inch of water. I threw myself down in front of the toilet, which not been flushed. I grabbed at the flush and pulled down hard. As the water mixed in with someone else’s alcohol-laced piss, it all came out.

When I finished I stood up and walked over to the mirror. Someone had written in big red lipstick letters across the bathroom mirror, “I’m with the band!” I looked like shit. My nose was runny, I had red circles around my eyes, and I tasted like vomit. The hem of my dress and my legs were all wet from the floor. I looked over at the bathroom door and felt a wave of whining hangover rage. Why were there so many people in our bed? Why wouldn’t Jeb wake up? How did they all get in? Did we let them in? Did he? What was Tabitha doing?

I swung open the bathroom door, ready, I thought to kick everybody out, but I lost my conviction when I saw Tabitha, naked and rocking back and forth on top of Dave. Jeb, Bobby, and Terry were still asleep, oblivious. She and Dave ignored me. He was buried in the duvet and Tabitha had her eyes shut tight. I hurried past them and out the door of the hotel room. It slammed behind me.

The hallway was calmer. The maid’s cart was parked at the end of it. I heard the vacuum whirring inside of another room. Order. Someone would clean up. The carpet was dry and thick and the walls were a light chocolate color. I walked down to the end of the hallway, and around the cart. Toby was sitting on the other side of it, reading a book, his feet propped against the wall.

“Hey.”

“Hi.” He had his cap pulled low over his eyes and he looked up. Did he know Tabitha was in Jeb’s room fucking Velvet? Was that really part of their agreement?

“What are you reading?” I looked down at my socks, which were soaking wet. I leaned over, pulled them off, and chucked them into the garbage can on the maid’s cart.

Toby sighed loudly. “Do you read theory?”

“For classes I guess, mostly I read novels.” My toes felt nice against the plush hallway carpeting.

“I stopped reading fiction two years ago.” Toby placed the book between his legs, and moved the brim of his cap up so that I could see his dark brown eyes. I looked down at the cover of us book, Jean Baudrillard, America. The letters were large and red above a drawing of a dessert, some tents, and an oil derrick.

“Why?” I still tasted vomit in the back of my throat, but I tried to will it away.

“Escapist.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Can you just leave me alone? I’m kind of having a shit morning.” Toby stood up and shut his book. “I don’t really need to have a genre debate right now. You’re a girl, you read fiction, I get it.”

“Fine, I’m having a shit morning too. You don’t have to be a dick about it.” The smell of chlorine filled the hallway. I needed sunlight and air.

Toby put one of the soles of his combat boots against the wall and leaned back. “I can’t take you, all wide-eyed, all pretty, all ‘I don’t know what I want,’ all hick girl on the big tour.”

“Hick girl?” I itched at the collar of my dress. The lace was old and stiff, and sometimes it gave me a rash. “Okay, professor.”

Toby moved his face closer to mine. “You know exactly what you’re doing. You want everyone to love you. You’re worse than Twig and Merilee. At least they’re honest about it.”

I scratched again at my clavicle. I felt impossibly tired. I couldn’t exactly object. Don’t we all want to be loved? Aren’t we all trying to get whatever attention we can out of whoever happens to be our audience of the moment?

The door to Jeb’s room opened and Tabitha stepped out in her socks, cut-offs, and a t-shirt, carrying her combat boots. She looked up at us and waved sheepishly. I raised my hand but failed to make my fingers or wrist move—I was too brain dead. Toby stared down at the carpet as if he were trying to memorize the pattern of its fibers. “Transparency,” he whispered into the collar of his shirt.

“What are you talking about?” My head started to throb again and the hallway titled twenty degrees. I pawed at the wall for support.

Tabitha stopped midway between Jeb’s door and us.

“Be honest.” Toby hissed at me. He must have seen Twig follow me into the bathroom in Nashville.

“Okay, well, I don’t want to fuck you.” I whispered back as Tabitha stood up and continued towards us.

“Already knew that.” Toby stuck his arm out and held it in the air as he waited for Tabitha.

“What did you know?” Tabitha asked as she settled into the crook of his armpit.

“Nothing.” Toby and I said in unison.

“Okay weirdoes.” Tabitha looked back and forth between us and then turned to face Toby. “Let’s find a bed and sleep forever.” She yawned dramatically and then eyed the wet lower half of my dress. “Annie and I trashed Jeb’s room last night.”

“We did?”

“You started it.”

It bothered me that I couldn’t remember the second half of the night. There had been the after party with strangers and then the city with Jeb, but that was it. Sure, I was often messed up, but I didn’t usually black out. The whirring of the vacuum stopped and a petite middle-age woman stepped back out into the hallway to retrieve a bucket from her cart. She smiled absently, politely. I smiled back, but I felt a pang of guilt at the memory of the pizza ground into the carpet of Jeb’s room.

“I gotta eat something,” I said, turned on my bare feet, and walked towards the glass doors that led to the pool.

The sun was out. It was easily noon and the purple tile of the pool glistened in the heat. The pool was empty except for one lone swimmer, Merilee, doing laps. She had on a turquoise bathing suit that fit her perfectly and matched the chlorine blue of the water. Her bathing cap and goggles were black. She looked like a petite aviator, the swimming Amelia Airheart. I walked over to one of the lounge chairs underneath an umbrella and lay down. I grabbed a towel next to me and wrapped it over my body. I closed my eyes and tried to soak the sun into my face. I needed vitamins, anything. There was a glass of water on the table next to my chair. I drank it down. I decided I hated Toby and felt a little better.

I watched Merilee swim rhythmically back and forth across the length of the pool. She was fast and purposeful, like some kind of water metronome. Her arms made a splash beat—a small cut into the surface of the water, and in the deep end, she managed a pretty solid kick turn. I wondered what her hotel room looked like right now and I imagined Twig in the bed, under the duvet, waiting for her to come back from swim. I remembered how Twig tasted when we kissed in the bathroom—like smoke and medicine, stale and sexy—and the way he pinned me up against the bathroom sink, just enough to that I was torn between saying “ouch” and just kissing him harder.

I imagined Twig and Merilee alone in their room, having the kind of morning Jeb and I might have had if there weren’t four other people passed out in his bed. Maybe they ordered breakfast in bed. Maybe the read the newspaper or watched a movie. Maybe they fucked until Merilee had a screaming orgasm and came out for a swim.

I wanted breakfast in bed; omelets and bacon under a silver dome. I wanted to wear the terry cloth robe and watch T.V. and after we finished our champagne, I wanted Jeb to untie the sash of my robe and run his hands all over me. I thought of Toby’s stupid word, “Transparency.” I hadn’t told Jeb any of this—it seemed too explicitly bourgeoisie, not punk enough, not feminist at all. Wasn’t I supposed to disavow comfort? Hadn’t I trained myself to never want it and not ask for it? Wouldn’t Willow and Julian be proud of me?

And then I imagined Twig and me in Jeb’s bathtub while he was passed out on the bed. The door to the bathroom was open and Jeb could wake up at any time. Twig had his hands cupped around my breasts. It was a bubble bath. I opened my eyes. My vision went splotchy and hot. I pulled at the crotch of my underwear through my dress, which felt bunchy and damp.

I stood up and wandered over to the small wooden bar. There was a guy working behind there.

“Could I get breakfast?”

He nodded. He was sweating in a vest and dress pants in the Little Rock sun, by a glistening pool he couldn’t swim in.

“Can I get it out here?”

“Sure,” he said, but I saw him eye my dress, look down at my beat-up Converse. I must have smelled like the toilet I’d just been hugging. “What do you want?”

“Scrabbled eggs, bacon, toast, juice.” My stomach still felt tender.

“What’s your room number?”

“Uh,” I had no idea.

“So I can charge it to your room?”

“Yeah, I get it,” I looked over at Merilee in the pool. She looked like she might never stop. I’d lost count of how many laps she’d done.

“I’m with the band, you know, The Band of None.” I gestured vaguely into the air with my hand. “You can put it on Jeb Pascoe’s room.”

“Band of None?” he asked. “I don’t know of anybody staying here by that name.”

“The lead singer is swimming right over there,” I said pointing.

He looked over to the pool and shrugged. “Maybe there’s another band staying here?”

“What do you mean?” My tongue felt gummy, too big for my mouth.

“Are you sure you’re supposed to be here ma’am?” he asked.

I reached around my neck instinctively for my backstage pass, but I wasn’t wearing it. It was in the room somewhere. I didn’t have the room key either or even my bag with my wallet in it, not that my drivers’ license would prove anything.

“Let me just check with security,” he said. I noticed that the sweat was pooling underneath his eyes. He didn’t seem much older than me. Maybe twenty-five. lean cut.

“Why? I’m not doing anything,” I said. My voice cracked.

“But you don’t even have a room key?” he said.

“It’s in my room.”

He reached out to touch my elbow and I pulled away. “Don’t get upset. This happens all the time with fans and bands,” he leaned forward to whisper to me. “I know you really want to meet them, but I have to tell you that stalking works better at night.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Don’t fucking touch me,” I said.

“Ma’am, you can’t use that language here. This is a family establishment, and Little Rock is a Christian city,” he said. I noticed a crucifix around his neck, nestled into the blonde chest hair near his collar.

“It wasn’t last night,” I said. The only thing I knew about Little Rock was that in the 50s they tried to keep a bunch of Black kids from going to their shitty segregated white high school. As far as I was concerned it was still the same racist place.

“It was for some of us,” he snapped back. He reached for my arm again and this time I took a step back. He sighed and reached for the walkie talkie he had fastened to his belt loop. “Security. Code 7. Pool deck.”

“Why are you doing that?” I remembered the time Willow, Julian, and I got thrown out of Lamott’s one bowling alley for taking all of the balls off of their shelves and rolling them down the lanes. We deserved it, but the manager’s greasy, hairy hand on my wrist still felt like a violation.

He lunged again for my arm and I jumped back. “What is it with you and grabbing me?” I said. “Do you have a problem with women,” I added, a phrase I’d picked up from Willow, who had all manner of confrontational language she liked to use on jocks and meatheads. She’d said the same thing to the bowling alley manager, a man who my mother later told me had just lost his wife to breast cancer. After that I’d wanted to go back and apologize, but Willow wasn’t having it. “A guy can love his wife and still be a misogynist.” “And a capitalist pig,” Julian added.

He glared at me. “They’re going to throw you out.”

“Oh my god, hands off,” Merilee shouted. “She’s with me.” She rested her elbows on the side of the pool; she was panting but otherwise serene. I bet she hadn’t been kicked out of anywhere lately. “Don’t be such a goon.”

“Sorry about that ma’am. I didn’t know she was your friend.” He retreated back into the air-conditioned hotel. My stomach churned around on its own emptiness; I wondered if he was going to bring me any breakfast.

“You have to use the code names,” Merilee said as she breast-stroked over to the ladder of the pool.

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t Jeb tell you?”

I shook my head. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“We register under assumed names when we’re in hotels,” Merilee said. “I’m Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Jeb’s Phinneas Gage. Terry’s Don Johnson. Bobby and Ian keep changing theirs—I don’t know what they’re using on this tour. And piece of advice, you can never walk into a hotel and say, ‘I’m with the Band of None’ because the staff’s been instructed to pretend like you’re a lunatic fan or the press and play totally dumb.”

“Good to know.” I sat back down on the lounge chair to nurse my sour stomach. I wished I had thought to look for my bathing suit in the room or grab my sketch pad, anything to distract me from my hangover.

Merilee pulled herself out of the pool and walked over to the pile of robes and towels piled neatly on top of the bar.

“Have you seen Twig?” she asked, wrapping her hair up in a towel and arranging herself on a nearby lounge chair.

“No, but there are a lot of people in our room. He might be in there somewhere,” I said. “I woke up halfway under the bed.”

Merilee stood up and pulled her chair out into the sun. “Twig says you’re funny,” she said.

“He did?”

“And that made me think that I should pay more attention to you.” She lay down on her back, pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her robe pocket, and put them on. “Or maybe it’s your freckles. They’re disarming and they remind me of my sister.”

“You guys close?” I’d often longed for a sibling, someone who could take the edge off of dealing with my parents.

“She died when I was ten.”

“I’m sorry, I knew that, it’s in the song.” How could I have forgotten such a basic fact about Merilee’s very public life.

“Thanks. It was so long ago, but it’s still the worst thing that ever happened to me. She was thirteen and she was my idol, kind of the antidote to my mom was and still is, awful. She believed in me.” Merilee pushed her sunglasses up against her nose. I couldn’t see her eyes. Her description cut into my heart. Hadn’t Willow been like that for me, even though I’d never articulated it or thanked her for it? I stared at the pool water and tried not to blink.

“My best friend Willow just killed herself. She was like that to me, the way you describe your sister.”

“Willow Nelson was your best friend?” Merilee sat up and turned towards me.

I nodded in the direction of the pool, afraid to look at Merilee. Talking about Willow, being hungover and almost thrown out of the hotel, the dream—it was all too much.

“I’m so sorry Annie. I really am.” Merilee placed a cold-from-the-pool hand on my back and left it there. Her hand—it’s presence and eventual warmth—connected somehow to my spine, which had been determined to stay straight, to not bend under the weight of losing Willow. I folded myself over my knees and let out a small heave of air and then a deep sob. Merilee’s hand stayed. I let my tears fall. I stared out at the pool through a shimmering veil of them.

“I should have stopped her. I saw her walking by the river and I kept calling her, but she didn’t hear me or she didn’t care.”

Merilee swung her legs off of the lounge chair and pulled my knees so that I was facing her. “You have to try really hard not to carry that around. It’s poison, that responsibility.”

“But I should have got off of the fucking bridge and followed her.” I rubbed at my eyes, which felt red and raw.

“Come on, you didn’t know.” Merilee took off her sunglasses and looked me in the eyes.

I sniffed hard, wiped at the tears on my cheek, and nodded. But I wasn’t sure I believed her. For years, Willow and I had been each other’s keepers. We listened to the same music, shared the same friends and stories, and took whatever college courses we could get together. I was used to being asked, “Where’s Willow?” because I usually always knew.

“I just want to move on and stop thinking about her every second. I want to stop feeling so haunted. She’s everywhere.” I stopped short of confessing my sightings and what felt like possessions.

“I still dream about Emily sometimes,” Merilee said. “It’s good, it’s a connection. Don’t wish it away.”

I stared down at Merilee’s pale lovely knees. She was probably the only person who knew what she was talking about.

“Thanks,” I said and changed the subject because I felt self-conscious. “I drank your water.”

Merilee lowered her sunglasses to the end of her nose to look at the empty glass. “He’ll get me another one.” She craned her neck to look around for him.

“You scared the shit out of him.”

“Me?” Merilee said. “I’m not scary. I’m barely five feet tall.”

She was tiny. I couldn’t get over the reality of her size—how such a small person could control so much—the crowds, the crew, the band, all of us tip-toed around her like she was a monster with a terrible headache. In her bathing suit, she looked even smaller. Her stage dresses were fitted, but had strange hems and necklines and colors that made her the focal point. They had special lighting for her too. I’d watched enough shows to know that she got the brightest, kindest lights and she got them more often. Jeb’s lighting was good too, but sometimes I wondered if Terry and Ian knew how hard it was to see them from the crowd. They were in shadow behind a giant drum kit and a bunch of keyboards.

I stared at the pool and used a hotel towel to wipe the remaining tears and snot off of my face.

“So what do you do anyway?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” I said, as if no had ever said this to me this before. In fact, everyone asked me this. I often wondered if I had a look of pure indolence. Or maybe I looked clueless, like I didn’t know how to do anything.

The waiter, my enemy, came back with a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast for me. I was so happy to see food. Merilee asked for toast and orange juice, and she made a face in the direction of my plate.

I bit into my bacon and felt relieved. Merilee swiveled back around on her lounge chair so she was reclining again. “Do you want some?” I asked, holding up a soggy piece of bacon. Willow and I had always eaten off of each other’s plates.

“I’m a vegetarian,” she reminded me.

“Oh yeah,” I said.

“So?”

“What?”

“What do you do?”

“Oh yeah that,” I put a fork full of scrambled eggs into my mouth and swallowed. “I’m a student. I’m a painter. I study painting, I guess.”

“Twig said you’d say that.” She acted like I was giving a fake answer.

“Do you like paintings?” I said.

“I love Cy Twombly and Chuck Close,” she said. “Giant and abstract.”

“Does Chuck Close do those giant portraits that are like all cubed up close and clear far away?” I asked, skipping over Cy Twombly because I’d never heard of him.

“That’s him,” she said.

“I do portraits mostly. Figures. Messy stuff. I use a lot of paint, if I have money for it, which I mostly don’t, so I draw a lot. My favorite painter is Mary Cassatt. She did a lot with mothers and their kids. I also like Warhol, but everyone does so that doesn’t matter,” I said, sort of trailing off. I was tired of saying I like Mary Cassatt, it had become a stock answer, but it was easier than explaining that I was lost as a painter lately, and that I felt like some sort of fucked up hybrid of Monet and Keith Haring.

“You should draw me,” she said, looking off into the pool.

“I could,” I said, but the thought filled me with dread. She’d be too easy to piss off with a drawing she didn’t like. How could I capture her odd expressions of prickliness and warmth and her big luscious mouth? I preferred to draw strangers in a class or my friends, people who were getting paid and didn’t care or who were easily impressed, which included the men in the band.

Merilee made a face at my plate again, stood up, and hurried over to low bushes planted around the side of the pool. She bent over and gagged quietly onto the top of one of them. It was the most discrete and polite barfing I’d ever seen. She looked like a cat with the slightest hint of hairball. I wasn’t even sure if anything came out. I looked around for the waiter, but then I relaxed. She was the lead singer of The Band of None. She could do whatever she wanted.

“Do you need help?” I shoveled a hunk of scrambled eggs into my mouth, relieved to be the one who wasn’t barfing.

She gagged one more time for good measure, held up a finger in my direction, and then walked slowly back over to her lounge chair. She lay back down and closed her eyes.

“You could give me a record of before and after,” she continued as if she hadn’t just yakked into the bushes.

“What do you mean?” I asked, stuffing the last piece of toast into my mouth. “Before what?”

Merilee stood up again, took a step over to my lounge chair and sat down next to me. The wet hip of her bathing suit pressed up against my scratchy lace hip of my dress. She smelled clean like the pool. I wasn’t quite so nauseous, but I still felt like something I’d coughed out of my own stomach. I noticed the faintest line of freckles along the bridge of her nose. She leaned in to whisper into my ear and her wet hair brushed against my cheek. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked and then pulled back a few inches to see my face. “You can’t even tell Jeb. Actually, you especially can’t tell Jeb.”

She smiled big and I noticed her eyes were more green than blue. She barely knew me, and she wanted to tell me. Whatever it was, I already felt honored. I nodded, even though I instantly envisioned myself crawling back into our hotel room’s king’s size bed and saying to Jeb, “Guess what Merilee just told me?”

Merilee leaned back in and whispered, “I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant,” and for one tender second she rested her head on my shoulder and squeezed my arm.

“Is that a good thing?” I asked. “I mean, what you want?” I’d never had a positive, excited conversation about pregnancy before. All of the talk with my friends was full of dread and fear. Willow had a close call in high school with her then on and off again boyfriend Grant, who hated condoms. Growing up in in Lamott we all knew how far you’d have to drive and how much it would cost to get an abortion. It was a three-hour drive and it cost $380 dollars. In Ithaca, you could go to the Planned Parenthood, but you still needed $450. You could pay by check or with cash.

Before I had sex with Julian for the first time I went on the pill. He went with me to Lamott’s free clinic, and played with a plastic model of a uterus and vagina while the nurse examined me. I took it dutifully every night before I went to sleep, and I was aware of how stupid it made me. Even with Jeb, I was already careless. I had no idea where he’d been, who he’d been with. It was 1990 and we’d all been terrified by years by sexual education that said we were going to get AIDS and die, and yet we all did stupid shit and worried we would in fact die from it or get pregnant trying. Willow used to yell at me about being on the pill instead of using condoms.

Merilee gave my forearm another squeeze. “Yes, I mean, it’s not the ideal moment and well, it’s always complicated, but, yes!”

I snapped out of my sex=death reverie and said what I thought was the proper thing to say. “Congratulations!”

Merilee nodded. “I mean why else would I be barfing in the bushes and two weeks late, right?”

I thought of myself, knees wet and hung over, sitting in toilet water, barely an hour ago.

“You could be drunk or smoking way too much pot—that makes people really late sometimes,” I offered. I was still having a hard time thinking this was a good thing.

“I don’t smoke much. You may not have noticed, but I don’t party like the rest of the band.” She stared off into the pool’s blue water. Her neck was long and white. She turned back towards me. “I mean it—this is a major secret. The stuff with the band right now is a mess and we’re in the middle of a tour and if it’s true it’s going to mean a lot of things that I can’t even process right now.”

“Is Twig the father?” As I said his name, I flashed again to our make-out session. What was I doing? What kind of a person was I? The guy was going to be a father. The hotel waiter brought out Merilee’s toast and juice. I didn’t make eye contact. I decided I hated him forever. She put a piece of toast in her mouth and groaned with delight.

“Bread!” She smiled and chewed loudly. “He’d be an okay dad, right?” she asked.

Before I could decide whether to lie or not, Twig came out of the hotel’s glass doors and into the pool area. He wore some incredibly low slung cut-off jean shorts and he had a towel wrapped around his neck like a scarf. “Favorite women!” he shouted at us.

“He doesn’t know,” Merilee whispered into my ear and squeezed my arm even harder.

“I thought you guys might hit it off.” He passed by our lounge chairs, all grin, all high-voltage, and then he cannon balled into the pool.

He landed in the center of the deep end with a mighty reverberating splash. I watched the surface of the water ripple and lap up against the side of the pool. Merilee held onto my arm while we waited for Twig to come up to the surface and say something stupid and charming that would make us laugh.

19

Willow

Some things are better when you don’t have a body, some worse. I miss my fingers, touching people. I miss lying with Annie on her bed shoulder to shoulder and staring up at her beautiful, paint chiseled portraits. I miss the feel of my fingers encircling her wrist, pulling her through a concert crowd, and giving her shit about some breeder band she loved. I miss the weight of the girl I loved, Jen, bearing down on me and pressing me into the futon. It only happened once, but I miss it like a habit. I miss shaving my head and running my own hands along the back of my neck. I miss bleeding and cutting—the messy stuff, the kinds of rituals I wasn’t suppose to love.

I miss opening and closing safety pins, the perfectness of that invention, the way the little sharp pin fits so snuggly into the clasp. The inventor, Walter Hunt—I looked it up once in an encylopedia—must have understood how sharp needs soft. It’s a small house, that clasp, with its window/eye looking out onto the world, and it holds onto a tiny weapon or a useful tool depending on your mood. Some people were like, “Why do you fuck up your clothes and then put safety pins in them?” “How could you pierce your ear with a safety pin?” But they never understood the beauty and simplicity of that device. Punks did. We got it. Anyway, I guess I miss them. I miss holding an object of pure utility and beauty in my hands. Pressing on the spring. Perfect little lever.

Sometimes I miss talking, the mechanics of it more than the words themselves. I miss the feel of my tongue against my teeth and lips. Yelling. Saying something annoying or funny. Quips. I wish I had an audience, could tell a joke. But when I waded out into that stinky river, I gave up action for wisdom, traded in movement for knowledge. By drowning in it, I got to know that water. I understood the silt and rust that made its smell. I drank up the paint thinners and varnishes used to make the chairs. I ingested the sawdust and the metal shavings from the screws. I made a meal out of a factory and it killed me.

Nobody knew about the science of Lamott’s river water—its true contaminants and pollutants. Not then anyway. There were no scientists in Lamott, except for the biologists at the community college. Last I heard, they were measuring the effects of late spring snowfalls on the growth of Lamott’s mushroom population. And my dad wondered why I chose sociology as my major. Mushrooms! Come on. I wanted to know about all the kids who took mushrooms! What about asking why they liked them so much? Who would study what shrooming did to the girl who was about to come out of the closet? The girl who was me and sixteen and spent the better part of her afternoon making out with another girl, from a nearby farming town, who smelled like hay and had an amazing tongue that darted and flicked between her lips and then descended down her neck and eventually between her legs.

The shock and joy of it, and that girl went home with the smell of hay on her hands and her parents were watching T.V. It was Jeopardy and she sat with them even though she was still really fucked up and she ate their chips and dip and the consistency was all off—too creamy, too crunchy—and during a commercial break she said, “I think I’m gay,” but they didn’t answer or they didn’t hear her, so she said it louder again and held up a greasy, dip-heavy chip emphatically. “Mom, Dad, I think I’m gay.” And still they didn’t answer or they didn’t hear her and then the commercial was over and it was double jeopardy and they started to offer up their answers and she decided that they literally couldn’t hear those words. “I’m gay,” somehow, it was out of their decibel range. And she thought of hay girl and she went into her room with the dip and locked the door and stayed in there until the shrooms wore off and she could fall asleep. She cried weird hard happy and sad tears at the joy of making out with this girl, a girl and the difficulty, no the impossibility of talking about it.

She, I, didn’t mention it again for four years. She swallowed the tears, licked them off of her own cheeks before they could fall off of the cliff of her chin. I knew water then too. We all knew the alchemy of our own tears.

But for me now it’s different. Wherever there’s water now, I am in it. And I felt a rippling. I watched Annie take a drunken swim in a Little Rock pool in the middle of the night with that girl with the dreadlocks who annoys the fuck out of me. They shared a bottle of Jack Daniel’s after the show. It was a gift from a local Nashville businessman. “We still distill it an hour outside of Nashville. It’s special, like you,” he wrote in a note for Merilee, who left the bottle on the food table and chucked the note in the garbage. They finished off the last of it in their underwear and then they jumped in and splashed around and yelled at each other about the songs on R.E.M.’s Murmur and I was jealous. Jealous of the sheer impact of their bodies—the kick of their knee joints, the tug of their waists turning in and around me, and the float and drag of their breasts. They hit the water hard. They splashed and kicked. They shouted, until a manager came and threw them out. I wanted that again for myself. Impact. Dent. Contact. Ignition.

Make a list, I thought to calm myself down. Water—what you are right now—is everything. You are everything. The ocean, rivers, lakes, the cells in our bodies, tears, piss, beer, tea, coffee are water-based. You have so much now, so stop coveting the living. But I couldn’t. I was there on the street. I was in my room that day when Annie came to say good-bye. I danced at the show. I followed Jeb and Twig into the woods. I planted my bracelet and then I stole it back again.

I stayed there in the pool. I became that water. Waiting and watching. List keeper and universe tender. Hovering woman. Shaman. Ghost. Remember, that’s what I am. I knew Merilee was pregnant when she slid into the water. I felt the tiny burgeoning pool of water forming in her stomach. She kept at a steady, repeating thought as she swam back and forth across the pool. “What if it’s true?” What if it’s true?” “What if it’s true?” Something shifted in her while she swam. The willing and wishing we do to make something uncertain and scary into a hypothetical good.

When Twig jumped in, a hundred percent bluster and wake, I thought of all the guys I’ve ever hated and or had to pretend to think we’re interesting because recently I was a woman, and even if you’re not all that interested in men, if you like weird music or a straight-edge ethos or any kind of militant Marxist politics or anything really different in the world, you spend a lot of your time listening to these guys.

The wake settled and the bluster died and he held his breath for what seemed like an unnatural amount of time. His lungs filled with air and then tightened, and I remembered my own breath, what it used to feel like to move air in and out of my body. That day in the river I fought myself. My body resisted my will, and my lungs contracted and burned. Eventually, they just hurt. I ate all the water. I sensed that he was the kind of person who could do that too, and I felt myself softening a little towards him. Movie star. Idiot. A man who could drown.

We were all moving. Annie towards Merilee and Merilee towards Annie. Twig towards the both of them. Jeb was asleep and for that moment nobody thought about him or the band. Even though Twig didn’t know and we did, we were all in our own way thinking about the baby. Annie was scared for it, scared for all women who were pregnant and not sure. Merilee was calm and stupid, they way anyone is in the first trimester when all you care about is not throwing up and whether or not you show.

Twig stayed down underwater, trying in whatever way that he could to get back into the womb, to kick around tight and snug in that warm amniotic fluid. I was thinking about how exciting it might be to start over, to begin again, you know, with life. I remembered, finally, the song I had in my head the day I walked into the river:

“Down by the ocean it was so dismal,
Women all standing with a shock on their faces.

I’d been listening to it for days. I was obsessed with the relationship between the girl and the singer. Patti and her sweet angel. I loved the lines, “Girl is washed up” and “Pretty little girl, everyone cried.” Kept thinking they could apply to me, to all the lost ones. Water, water, the tears, the ocean, the pool, and that in some sense I had released myself, had given up on those lyrics even. I loved them that day, needed them to act, and then they disappeared. Poof! Gone out of my ever-loving, over-thinking brain.

I imagined that somehow, now that those lyrics were gone, I could be that new creature. I could be that baby, I could start over again, but this time with knowledge.

20

Annie

I dialed Julian’s number and waited for the operator’s mechanical, efficient voice. “Two dollars and seventy-five cents.” I put all the quarters I’d bummed off of Bobby into the slot. I sat down on the little wooden bench in the one phone booth outside of the arena in Dallas, and then I slid the glass door shut. The air was immediately stifling, so I opened it back up and waited for my call to connect. I kicked the toe of my sneaker against the ripped-apart half of the yellow pages that were dangling off of a chain. The booth smelled like B.O. and concession stand French fries. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I woke up missing Lamott and needing to know if Julian cared that I left.

“Yeah,” Julian’s husky, bothered voice greeted me.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“It’s the girl who got away,” Julian breathed into the receiver. “What’s it like hanging with rock stars?”

I stared out of the phone booth and into the steamy heat of the parking lot. There was a fancy black van idling in the middle of the sea of black asphalt. Ian told me at the food table this morning that it was MTV’s and later that afternoon Kurt Loder was coming to interview Merilee.

“Fuck off!” Julian yelled away from the receiver and off into his apartment. “Lance is such an asshole since he started fucking that cheerleader. He thinks he can just use the phone whenever he wants.”

“Which cheerleader?” I remembered the pathetic band of girls who cheered for all of Lamott Community College’s sports teams combined, and the way they huddled around each other at the LCC café like it was still high school and there was a cafeteria with unspoken rules about who got to sit where. Still, I thought, Yay for Lance! He never gets any!

“I don’t know, Crissy or Cindy or Jenny or Barbie.”

I heard myself giggle appreciatively into the receiver.

“So seriously, are you moving to Hollywood? What’s it like ‘On the Road?’ as they say?” I could tell by his teasing tone that he was happy to hear my voice.

I remembered myself doing lines of coke with strangers off of a coffee table. I thought of Twig’s lips against mine in someone else’s bathroom. Bobby’s gyrating ass. Jeb’s syringe and the mournful way he called me “Baby.” Toby’s angry Marxist scowl and the cool pressure of Merilee’s hip against mine by the pool. I thought of Willow’s bracelet in some random fan’s bathroom, and the way she lifted me off of the arena floor. Could I recreate all of this for him? Tour time wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced. It was exhausting and exhilerating and I wasn’t sure if I could describe any of it. It was mine too, something totally separate from him.

“We just drive around the country and get fucked up.” It was the most I could muster, and it was true without giving away any details.

The wooden seat of the booth felt wet against the backs of my legs. I kicked at the shredded phone book and tried to breathe through my mouth. The black van had circled the parking lot and was now parked in front of the backstage entrance. The tinted bus door opened and Kurt Loder stepped out onto the asphalt. He squinted, fished a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket, and walked into the backstage entrance.

“Shit. MTV just got here.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to be on TV because Keith will tape it and make us all watch it at Cheap Hits. He’s about a day away from putting a map up in the front window and charting your progress with a pushpin.”

“Just Merilee. She’s the star.” I imagined the MTV’s Breaking News logo—the spinning white satellite with the giant orange M emitting a lightning bolt shock out into the blue black sky—and then the fast-spinning earth and giant typewriter keys, N, E, W, S, banging onto the screen. “Hi I’m Kurt Loder and this is MTV News. Lead singer of The Band of None, Merilee Adams, announced her pregnancy today along with plans to launch a solo career. The rest of the band could not be reached for comment.

The operator cut into our conversation. “Please deposit fifty cents.”

“I don’t have any more quarters,” I said to the operator and to Julian.

“Please deposit fifty cents.” The phone clicked and crackled for a second time.

We both sat there in silence. I couldn’t bring myself to say what the sound of his voice made me realize. I miss you. I still love you. I didn’t want to be the pathetic ex-girlfriend forever. I also had major feelings—an intense connection, an understanding, something like love—for Jeb too?

“You okay?” Julian’s voice softened into the gravelly timbre he used to reserve only for me. “God, this whole Willow situation…” he trailed off.

“I’ll never be okay about Willow.” I still wanted to tell him about all of the ways in which she’d come to me, but the pay phone clicked again, threatening to cut me off. “Please deposit fifty cents.”

“Annie, I miss you.” I’d waited all summer for Julian to say these words, part of me wanted to ask him to repeat them. “Lamott’s really stupid without you and Willow in it.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but the phone clicked again and then I heard the familiar comma of the dial tone, waiting in the air for the next call. “I miss you too,” I said to no one.

I hung up the receiver and looked at my watch. 12:30 pm. Dallas. What to do? I cupped my fist around my watch face and pressed the Indiglo button a couple of times to make it light up. Julian missed me! As much as I wanted to pretend I didn’t care, I felt triumphant. For two months, he’d ignored me. At least now, I had his attention. I pulled a stapled-together zine some guy in the audience in Nashville had given me from my back pocket. “My Favorite Sell-Outs.” The cover was a collage of dollar bills, album covers, and an old-timey microphone. I opened it up and read the first page:

Because you can’t blame your favorite bands for having a hit…

Because you can’t stop loving the lead singer even though you heard

she has a stylist…

Because even though arena shows are a pain in the ass and full of

douche-bags, sorority girls, and moms the show is electric

and transformative…

Because they still sound great…

Because you love them. You can’t help it. You just do…

We are proud to bring you issue #4.5 of “My Favorite Sell-Outs”

Featuring The Band of None!! xoxoxo, Melissa and Danny

I turned the page and stuck my head out of the booth to get some air. The lawn in front of the arena was surprisingly lush and green. Someone had planted several flower beds worth of impatiens and tulips around the small saplings that dotted the lawn. The sprinklers went off and flick-flicked water in long arcs across the grass, and I conjured up an image of myself kicking off my shoes and running through the grass to cool off. Instead, I stayed in the booth, hot and spacey and continued to read:

Why I Still Love Merilee Adams by Danny

Even though The Band of None’s newest album Steeplechase is a huge hit, she’s never stopped dancing like she’s having a seizure. True, her clothes have changed—and not for the better. (What happened to those Salvation Army dresses and giant cardigans she used to wear?) But even in a designer gown, she’s still a spaz-attack. If you don’t believe me, check out those weird robot arm moves in “Grand Canyon” or the fact that one of our trusty sources told us that she fired a choreographer that the record label sent to set of the video. And best of all, we can still count on Merilee for a healthy Lefty reminder about what’s terrible in America right now. In a recent Rolling Stone interview she said, “We should try to be more like France or Canada or even Holland. That should be George W. Bush’s main goal in the next three years, to turn us into one of those countries—universal health care, state sponsored child care, legalize marijuana. Why not?”

Jeb Pascoe, 100% Weirdo! by Melissa

He insists, no, he excels at playing those flowery ska-raggea guitar solos that we haven’t heard anywhere else. Rumor has it that he’s a heroin addict, but we don’t care. I think drugs make him better and weirder, but maybe I’m offending our straight-edge readers out there. Special sorry shout-outs to Marcy and Jason in Nashville. Anywho, Jeb may be featured in Guitar magazine’s recent article “Top 100 Guitar Heroes of All Times” and in conversation with the legendary guitar company, Fender, to put out his own line of specialty Pascoe guitars, but he still took the time to let me interview him briefly backstage earlier this summer when yours truly was on vacation with her parents (kill me, I know) in San Francisco and managed to snag two tickets to a Band on None show. When I asked him if the intense success of the last two albums has made it harder for him to stay creative and focused, he said, “No, in fact, it’s made us even more committed to making good music. We have a higher bar now and more fans who expect a lot from us. We’re not going to let them down.” And then he took a swig from his bottle of Jack Daniels, ate a piece of salami off the nearby food table, and complimented me on the newly shaved portion of my head. Swoon! And the rest, is, well, a secret.

I crumpled up the zine and tossed it into the dirty corner of the phone booth. Enough with Melissa and her over-familiar tone and winky-winky zine-speak. I stared out through the arcs of sprinkler water and saw Jeb coming towards me with his giraffe like-lope. So rare was his appearance at this hour, that I blinked hard to make sure I hadn’t conjured him up or made a mirage out of what was one part longing, two parts boredom, and three parts heat.

“Hey,” he said, wedging himself into the booth and pressing my body back up against the phone. I looked up at his face—his sideburns had grown longer and wilder in the last week, and the effect was way more devil-at-the-crossroads than before. It suited him. “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.”

I closed my eyes and leaned into him. His shirt was wet with sweat, and the booth still smelled awful, but I imagined us shutting the door and going at it. Instead, he brushed my hair off of my forehead and gave me a peck on the cheek. He took a baggie out of his back pocket and waved it in front of my nose. There were two little square paper tabs swimming in its plastic sea, each one was marked with a tiny purple Christmas tree stamp. “To make up for Little Rock. Let’s eat these and go to the zoo, just me and you.”

“There’s a zoo here?” I asked more to stall than anything else. I wasn’t sure I wanted to trip. Willow once told me that taking acid more than twenty-eight times in a year could make you schizophrenic. I wasn’t anywhere close to that, but I liked some control over my tripping environments. No public spaces, just apartments and small parties. Also, who would be my guide? I’d never tripped without Julian or Willow. Would Jeb know what to do with me if I flipped out? Could I trust him?

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s so hot, and acid last forever. What if it’s too much?” I wriggled past him and stepped outside of the phone booth. My head felt five degrees clearer.

“I think this stuff is pretty mild.” Jeb tugged at the belt loops of my shorts with his one empty hand.

I looked over at the MTV van, which had since disgorged two cameramen and a bunch of heavy looking microphones, booms, and lights.

“Bobby says they have something called Primate Canyon and there’s a Hippo Camp.” Jeb glanced over at the van. “It’s gonna be a circus here and Terry’s already having a tantrum in the locker room. Bobby will probably do shots and pass out on camera just to get some attention. Fuck, if I know where Ian is right now, but Merilee and Twig are having their make-up done. Let’s run away today, runaway.” Jeb pulled me close and wrapped his arms around me. He kissed the top of my head and then moved down to my earlobes. His breath was hot against the side of my face. The sound of it reminded me of a conch shell—the rushing, whirring oceanic void.

“It’s really called Primate Canyon?”

Jeb opened up the baggie, extracted one of the tabs, and placed it gingerly on the tip of his index finger. “Body of Christ?”

I opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue, and let the bitter tab dissolve next to my cheek.

Jeb called a cab from the phone booth.

The driver eyed us suspiciously from the rearview mirror for the entire hour-long ride, while a wooden crucifix with a bloody Jesus stared at me from the dashboard. He’d taped a copy of that “Footprints” poem on the back of his headrest, and I read the first two lines over and over again, “One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord./Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.” The air conditioner was broken and he fiddled with the radio every five minutes to find a new Christian station. Jeb stared out the window in what seemed like contented anticipation, while I wiped the sweat off my face with my t-shirt and wondered why I’d never had a dream about God or Jesus, pretty much ever. Willow, I suspected would have enjoyed the hypocrisy of our cab ride. She’d always been partial to heathens and atheists having to interact with Born-Again Christians especially in tight spaces.

The zoo turned out to be a screaming, roiling mass of people. As Jeb pulled me along by the sweaty hand towards the now mythical Primate Canyon, the acid started to take effect. A toddler sobbed over a puddle of chocolate ice cream while his older brother danced a haughty jig around him, “Your treat died! Your treat died!” For one terrible second, the toddler’s screaming face pooled and shifted like the puddle of ice cream.

“His face is melting,” I said to Jeb, who had no idea what I was talking about and had let my hand drop so that he could turn the map around and around. The girl at the ticket counter had drawn a special direct route with a giant black marker on top of the visitor’s map so that we could go to Primate Canyon first.

“This is not a map. It’s a drawing with animal prints on it.” Jeb seemed relieved to have admitted that out loud. He walked over to a nearby garbage can and tossed the map. He came back grinning. “We do not need that drawing.” I shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand. I felt my skin burning. I wished I’d gone back to the bus to get sunscreen or my sunglasses. Anything. I felt exposed and freaked out by the kid’s melting face. I needed a shield.

We walked forward, but in no particular direction. There were white wooden signs with stencils of animal shapes on them, but they told us nothing about Primate Canyon or Hippo Camp. We passed several exhibits and vetoed them for hard to pin down drug-addled reasons.

“Petting zoo?” Jeb, in a fit of heat despair, had rolled the bottoms of his black jeans up to his knees. His calves looked pale and exposed. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen his legs in daylight.

“Too much touching,” I said.

“Lion’s den?” I pointed to a stencil of a lion’s head with huge canines.

“They might eat us.” Jeb took his t-shirt off and wrapped it around his neck. I threaded the bottom of mine through the collar to make a halter.

“Alligator Swamp?” Jeb scissored his arms to indicate a giant pair of jaws.

“Too many teeth.” Something had happened to my vision. I saw stencils of animals everywhere I looked—monkey, lions, alligators, lizards, parrots, elephants—overlaid on top of whatever else I saw, like some kind of acid graffiti wallpaper.

Jeb surged ahead and I saw a young mom in a bright pink tank top yank her kid by the arm out of his path. I tried to get an objective look at him. We were probably the only half-naked tripping people in the zoo, and what clothes we had on were either ripped, safety-pinned, or black.

“Monkeys?” I turned towards a little old lady, who was covered in stencils of lizards. She looked like Minnie Pearl from Hee Haw—straw hat and a ruffled dress. I used to watch that show with my grandma when I was in grade school. We sat at the kitchen table while she drank a can of Genesee Cream Ale and I ate a sleeve of Ritz crackers. I had a special place in my heart for Minnie, whose homemade country dresses and price tag hat, I later realized were kind of vintage and DIY. My grandma and I loved it when she screamed, “Howdy!”

She pointed towards a curve in one of the paths and said, “Why you’ all dressed in black?” She eyed us up and down. She looked equal parts confused and disgusted.

“We’re in a band,” Jeb said.

“Oh.” She shrugged, getting over us. “You should get some ice cream, it will cool you off.” I decided she was an angel, sent from my grandma’s TV in 1985 to help us find our way. Minnie! I thought, as she walked away. Thank you. We will.

As if on acid cue, we spotted a guy dressed as a cow selling ice cream out of a cooler. Jeb gave him a fist full of dollars and magically, he handed us two jumbo size ice cream sandwiches.

I folded down the foil of my sandwich and took a bite, but the texture was all wrong. The ice cream felt too cold to eat and the chocolate flakey and messy, like a cardboard version of itself. I watched Jeb down his in five seconds. Mine started to melt, but I couldn’t think of how to throw it away. The gold foil seemed permanently affixed to my hand. Minnie had conjured it up! Jeb had bought it for me! I wanted to want to eat it, but I’d lost control.

“Help,” I said quietly. The kids were still everywhere, fighting with their parents, demanding stuffed animals, popcorn, and candy, and they were all covered in stenciled animals.

Jeb looked over at me. “What’s up little lady?”

“I’m melting,” I whispered at the ice cream and into the foil mess of chocolate and vanilla.

“Oh babe. He wrinkled up his forehead, plucked the ice cream out of my hands, and carried it over to a trash bin.

“It was taking over! Thank you! Thank you!” I gushed, overly grateful. I scanned the horizon for any sign of monkeys. I felt baffled by the organism called zoo. Why did the man selling ice cream have udders affixed to his chest? Why were there so many animals for sale? Every two feet, we passed someone hawking a balloon Toucan or a stuffed Tiger. Jeb placed his hand on the small of my back and moved me gently forward until we stood under a giant wooden arch that said, “Primate Canyon,” in fake tribal, quasi-African burned-out letters.

“We made it!” Jeb grabbed me and pulled me close to him in a bear hug. I squeezed him tight, relieved.

“I thought the zoo was going to win.” I looked up at the letters, which had started to dislodge and pool in the center of the arch, a la Salvador Dali, I thought to my art majoring dismay. I hated Dali. We made our way to the first enclosure.

“Baboons!” Jeb waved his arms over his head in a gesture that was either intentionally or accidentally monkey like.

“Look. They’re coming out onto that ledge in the rock face.” We pressed our faces up to the mesh that surrounded the enclosure.

The biggest baboon wandered out of his cave and stared off into the distance. He grabbed at a stray piece of apple one of the zookeepers had left for him and put it absently into his mouth. He chewed and stared, chewed and stared. Two smaller baboons walked out on all fours, clambered down off of the ledge and onto the scrubby ground of the enclosure. They settled in front of a low tree and began to scratch under their arms. Two more—the babies—scrambled out from behind a giant rock on the ground and onto the backs of one of the female baboons before tumbling off to the side and into a pile on monkey rough housing. The kicked up dirt and made high squeals. All of them had red asses, which looked chapped and raw.

“Each adult male controls a small group of women or a harem,” Jeb read off of a giant placard.

The male’s face was dog-like. He had a corona of gray whiskers and a snout. His teeth were all fang. Yellow. Werewolves, I thought. He yawned and stared over in our direction, and then he walked over to one of the females and began to gently pick through her dark brown fur, removing several bugs from her coat and putting them in his mouth.

“The Ancient Egyptians considered Hamadryas baboons sacred,” Jeb continued to read out loud. “Lone males may attempt to lure or kidnap a young female from another group.”

I stared, utterly transfixed by the monkey drama unfolding in front of me.

The two baby monkeys climbed on the back of the lone female. One tumbled over her shoulder and attempted to nurse, but she brushed him aside and looked over at the two adults. The male baboon barked at her—a loud dog-like “Ruff!”—and continued to groom the other female.

“They are distinguished by a pink or red face and rump.” Jeb turned towards me. His face was red and sweaty. My own sweat slid down the back of my neck and into the collar of my t-shirt. “Those are some pretty crazy monkey butts.”

“They’re pornographic. Look at his penis.” It hung down low between his legs like a small red windsock. I leaned back on my heels and pulled gently at the mesh. I wanted to yank it down and to climb into the monkey pit. That, or set them free. I wondered if they liked living in Dallas.

The babies, at least, looked delighted. They rolled around on top of each other, like two halves of a giant furry wheel. It was hard to tell where one stopped and the other started. They cascaded out of their roll and one grabbed at the tail of the other one and gave it a yank. The one with the yanked tail, bopped the yanker on the head with a potato, picked it up, and started to take bites out of it.

I pressed my face back up against the mesh. The lone female turned to meet my gaze, but it was a disinterested look, abstract and vague. She had Willow’s same eye color—gray with flecks of green, cat-like, steady. I stepped back from the mesh and sat down on the semi-circular bench facing the enclosure. Jeb sat down too and put his arm around me. I rested my cheek against his shoulder. The mesh pattern—a gray steel cross-hatching—replaced the animal stencils. I blinked hard, but it wouldn’t go away.

“The female monkeys are sad,” I said. The air around the bench buckled and shimmered in the heat, kind of like a heat rainbow.

“Nah, we don’t know that. There’s free food and they’ve got their guy.”

“They’re trapped.” I kicked at the dirt underneath the bench.

“Baby, it’s a zoo.”

“Duh.” I felt peevish. I missed being on the bus, Twig, Merilee, everyone.

“Maybe the band doesn’t work because our alpha chimp is a woman,” Jeb ventured, changing the subject, ignoring my monkey sadness.

The bench felt wobbly underneath us. It could have easily been floating a couple of feet off the ground. I steadied myself by focusing on the male baboon’s snout. My mesh wall paper created a permanent fence around whatever I happened to be looking at. Willow had also once told me that LSD started out as a truth serum in the military.

I felt my tongue and lips forming words against my will. “Merilee’s pregnant,” of “I have visions of my dead friend,” they wanted to say. I bit my tongue to keep it from moving, and looked down at my hands. The blue nail polish I’d started the tour with was nearly all chipped off. I peeled off the remaining window pane of blue from my thumbnail.

“Aren’t there some species of monkey that have women in charge.” I stared through my mesh gaze as the baby monkeys beat each over the head with carrots stalks and lettuce leaves.

“Don’t know, maybe,” Jeb said. “But that’s kind of an exception.”

I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair. It was soaked through with sweat. I pictured myself as a waterfall, cascading, falling, and telling.

“Maybe I just need a harem.”

“Seriously?” I raised my eyebrows at him. “So in you ideal world, you’d have a couple of wives who cleaned your fur and took care of your babies.” I felt indignant, but I also knew I was being a hypocrite. I’d made out with Twig. I thought about getting back together with Julian every day, and yet I really liked Jeb, wanted him, felt obsessed with him even, probably because he seemed perpetually just out of reach. Did he understand how fucked up I’d become since Willow killed herself? Did he care?

“It works for these guys.” Jeb waved his big hand at the mesh enclosure.

I turned back to the baboons. One of the babies took a shit on top of a rock and scampered back down towards the male, who grabbed his tail and pulled him close to his chest. The baby squealed and tried to squirm away, but the father held on tight and pulled him back in.

The benched rocked again underneath me and I clamped my hands down between its wooden slats. The baby monkeys’ faces started to grimace and slide.

“Why are you saying that?” I turned away from the baboons. “Are you trying to tell me something about how you think men and women should interact, about us?”

“No, I mean, I do think it’s cool, their structure I mean, but mostly I love monkeys and I thought we should look at them,” Jeb said and held up his hands mea culpa style in my direction.

“Do you think we should be non-monogamous?” I blurted out and then burst into hot guilty tears.

“I, uh, I don’t know, do you?” Jeb looked like this was the last conversation in the world he wanted to be having while tripping.

“Monkeys can’t talk,” I said as if to settle it and wiped the snot off of my upper lip.

“You two okay over there?” I rubbed my eyes, turned around, and saw one of the zookeepers—a middle-aged guy with a serious mullet perm dressed in a brown uniform carrying a pail of fruit, coming up behind us. “You’ve been here for about two hours, staring at our baboons.”

“They’re amazing.” Jeb got up off the bench.

“We think so,” the mullet zookeeper said and then leaned in to whisper, “You should come when the females are in estrus. Their rumps swell up and get even redder and frankly, it’s kind of like a porno. I feel sorry for the parents who bring their little kids because it pretty much requires the conversation about the birds and the bees.” He narrowed his eyes at Jeb, “Are you?” he asked and then trailed off because he couldn’t quite place him.

“I’m in a band,” Jeb said, “But you wouldn’t know us. We’re small potatoes.”

I’d seen him lie about his fame when he could get away with it. I couldn’t imagine how he could be so together while tripping. He was having a normal conversation with a strange zookeeper. I felt like I was dripping off of his side with my mesh cage vision. I missed the stencils. I started to step away, small steps. I must have looked antsy.

“Ah, I broke the spell,” the zookeeper said. “You two were having a moment.”

“I just want to see the lizards before the zoo closes,” I managed to croak, but as I said the word lizard, the zookeeper’s hair flash-turned into the conical spine of a dragon. I squeezed my eyes shut to try to will away the spikes.

“You okay?” I heard the zookeeper say. I shook my head no a couple of times, but I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes. The tears were back and started to stream out of the corners of my eyes. I felt Jeb put his heavy arm around my waist, solid, secure, he had me. “She’s having some kind of heat stroke I think,” he said. “I’m going to get over to the gift shop to cool off.”

“Heat stroke is no joke in Texas,” the zookeeper said.

“Take care,” Jeb said and pulled me mercifully away from all of it. I folded myself into his body, and I let him walk me out of Primate Canyon. I pretended I was blind and that no one could see me, though I was sure I felt people staring. I listened only to the sound of his heart beating through his wet shirt. We walked for a while like that, merged, one almost, until he led us out of the gates of the zoo and I managed to open my eyes for a second and peek at the parking lot. Mercifully instead of mesh, I saw a rainbow of cars and a cotton-candy pink sundown laying itself down on top of them. A cab pulled up and of out the sea of cars and it was turquoise and it reminded me of a bar of Zest soap, my father’s preferred brand. Jeb opened the door and we got in the back seat, and the cab was air conditioned, and it felt cool and magical and maybe okay.

“I like you a lot,” he said into my hair, after he told the cab driver where to go. “And I’m not with anybody else right now.”

“Okay, I mean, I don’t really care. It’s just that you said that the thing about harems and I got super paranoid and—“ I trailed off.

“They’re just monkeys,” he said and I nodded, not because I believed him, but because I was fucked up and that’s what I did then when I confused. I moved my head up and down. I acquiesced. I assented. I said yes, when I wanted to say no or even, maybe. I went along, to get along. It was easier that way.

I knew they weren’t just monkeys and I knew were having a conversation about something real, something I wanted but had no language for and had been conditioned to believe I was not entitled to, something that I’d learned to think of entirely in romantic terms. I called it monogamy. I called it love. And like most of us, I worked at possession to get it. What I really wanted was a place—a landscape or a territory—to mark as my own, but either I was too scared to ask for it or the wish was too subterranean. Instead, I hoped that someone, Julian, Jeb, or Twig, would claim me so that I wouldn’t have to do it myself.