We Were Here
Slumped in the backseat, I can see
the light of the streetlamps streak across the cool glass where I am pressing
my fingers because I need to feel something cool against my skin. Leah is up front because she’s carsick again. We only let her sit there when she
complains. So I’m behind Tasha, instead
of next to her where I belong, when the car picks up speed for the bridge. I feel a crack of air from the open window
rush over me as she flicks her cigarette out.
It’s muggy inside and there are haloes around every light. The dashboard glows between the front seats,
loud with little neon signs and buttons.
They’ve all got something to say, but I’m not listening, I’m not
listening at all. I’m not the one
driving tonight. I watch the orange
ember of Tasha’s cigarette bounce away in the rearview mirror. The body next to mine presses closer as Tasha
leans on the gas pedal. I can feel the
pressure of her foot pull on us and the hollow space in the back of my head where
something tightly curled unfurls like a flag in the moment of weightlessness
when we fly, five girls, over the rise.
In the air, my stomach flip-flops. Even Leah laughs out loud.
“You don’t seem that carsick,” Tasha
says.
“Well, that’s because I’m sitting in
FRONT now.”
“Whatever,” somebody next to me
says—Sara or her sister Julie.
It’s always the beginning or the end
of the night when we’re in the car; it’s that infinite time in between other
times. We’re half-drunk, half-tired,
half-sick of each other already. Sometimes
I’m the one driving and Tasha’s next to me, squeezing my knee where my skirt
slides up, saying do it again, and I do.
I do it over and over if she wants, back and forth across the
bridge. The seams of the asphalt bump under
the tires and the light flickers through the suspension cables in two different
rhythms, and I wish her hand was on my thigh right now. There’d be so much less to explain later.
Sometimes we go back and forth
across the bridge squealing and laughing until someone threatens to piss their
pants or barf, or we remember important things could be happening without us.
This is what it’s like to be young. It’s the feeling of moving. It’s the feeling of someplace else to be. Our city is full of empty spaces to speed
through, empty parking lots and all-night diners and overpasses and bridges to
nowhere and a big wide-open sky that never gets any closer no matter how fast
you’re going.
When the tape deck crackles with the
first familiar notes of a song we all know, Leah reaches forward to turn it up at
the same time that Sara says, “I’m like so
sick of this song. The Sisters are good,” she goes on, “but not once you
listen to the same fucking song a hundred-million times.”
Leah is singing along like a karaoke
queen and pretends not to hear. She’s in
drama club, so her affinity to Sisters of Mercy is inevitable, in my opinion.
“Come on.” Sara is not discouraged by our lack of
response. It’s all the easier to
disagree with everything we haven’t said.
“We’re going to listen to enough of this whiny crap at the house. I mean, seriously, do we have to be all goth
all the time?”
Julie is only older by a year, but
likes to remind Sara as often as possible.
“It’s not like you have to come
with us. You know, we could drop you off
someplace to hang out with your friends who are cooler than us—oh wait.”
I do not like sitting in the back
seat with them, but at least I’m not in between them.
“Shut up, Julie. Why do you have to be such a raging
bitch? I’m just saying I’m tired of this
song—”
“Shut
the fuck up, both of you,” Tasha says, hitting the eject button. “God! Nobody’s
cooler than us and we’re going to listen to Madonna and that’s it.” She pops the tape out, inserts one of her
infinite collection of Madonna mix-tapes, and turns it way up. All with one hand on the wheel and her eyes
on the road. I don’t have to sit next to
her to see this. I know it by heart—how
the night outside reflects on her clear blue eyes in flashes and moving arcs.
Then
there’s nothing else to say, and we begin the ritual of passing one item after
the other from hand to hand to hand: lipgloss, cigarettes, eye-liner, perfume,
paper coffee cups, crumpled dollar bills, packs of gum, the glowing red disc of
the car lighter. In the shifting light
and weaving traffic, we perform a ballet of careful hand-eye coordination. We spray each other’s hair, check each
other’s teeth, pour liquids from bottle to bottle. Then, just after the train tracks, there is
the final flurry of powdering and patting and smoothing and scrunching.
The
glory of arrival is what makes up for the lack of places to go.
We
park in the shadow of the Benjamin Moore Paint Factory sign: a black rectangle in the night sky. The side facing Broadway is lit up all night
long, like someone might have a Friday night paint crisis and find salvation
here.
In
the empty street, Madonna falls silent. Tasha
climbs out of the car and says, “Alright, bitches. Let’s go.”
On the corner ahead there’s an old church with boarded-up windows that
we keep talking about breaking into, but tonight is not the night. (Tonight is never the night—we’ve worked too
hard to look this way.) So we turn and walk
down the sidewalk to a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and open the
gate. The small white house inside has
metal-grated windows, and its resemblance to a crack-house is not just coincidental. It almost definitely was one, before our
friend Conrad rented it for band practice slash recording studio purposes. He told Tasha they found needles and pipes everywhere
when they were cleaning up the basement.
But we don’t care what it was before.
Now Christmas lights shine all over the Astroturf-and-cement backyard. Deep bass notes swell out of the house and
rise to meet us as we line up to stuff our two dollars in the glass jar sitting
on the porch. Tasha always puts in a
five. I can feel it still, from crossing
the bridge, the flip-flopping in my stomach, and it’s mixing with the vibrations
of the music. Tasha’s ahead of me, but
when she reaches back to grab my hand and pull me close to her, it’s like the
world’s as it should be again, because we’re together and we’re here.
“Conrad,”
she says, and he opens his arms to us both at once. He’s built like a superhero and dresses like
one too. Broad shoulders and bulging
muscles, tight black t-shirt and leather pants, etcetera. I think I can feel his abs rippling as he
presses us against his chest. Even in
our platform shoes, he towers over us, which is why he can wear makeup and
still emasculate the hell out of every boy we know. He sings like David Bowie crossed with Peter
Murphy and we worship him and fear him and never ask him to buy liquor or
cigarettes for us. He knows exactly how
old we are. He knows a lot of things he
shouldn’t. Like that his best friend
Andy fucks Tasha in the backseat of his car sometimes before going home to his girlfriend
of a hundred-million years.
Where
am I while this happens? Sometimes
waiting for Tasha in the car, finishing my cigarettes, then hers. Sometimes I’m still inside, dancing like I
don’t care I’m alone. Sometimes I’m in
the back room rolling around on one of the dirty couches where so many have
rolled before.
I
don’t mind too much when I have to wait for her. Andy’s the DJ, and he’ll play any song we
want if Tasha just bats her eyelashes at him.
And he’s not the one she goes home with at the end of the night. After the two a.m. Taco Bell stop and dropping
everyone else off one by one, at the end of the night it’s just me and Tasha. We fall asleep with smoky hair in my big bed,
where we smear mascara all over the pillow cases and wake up with the sweat of vodka tangled in the sheets. In the morning,
it’s me and Tasha: drawing each other’s eyebrows, putting ourselves back
together again with the help of CoverGirl and Almay and copious quantities of
one-hundred-percent cotton Q-tips. We do
it over and over again, the next night, the next weekend, and everything else
in between—high school and parents and boyfriends—is just that, just in between.
When
she says “Conrad” he says “Babygirls” and before there is too much of that,
Leah and Julie and Sara are pushing us from behind to go on, get inside.
The
backyard smells like clove cigarettes and Rave extra-super-hold hairspray. We are people who like to look at each other
and not say anything, like gazelles and lions eyeing each other across the
savannah. Our scene is not a loud
scene.
I
notice him by the fence and neither of us speaks and then Sara says, “Who’s got
the vodka?”
We
adjourn to the bathroom to swig from a plastic Coke bottle, Leah, Sara and
I. Tonight, Julie thinks it’s
embarrassing and cliché for us to go to the bathroom together. Next week it will be Sara who says so, or
something just like it. The sisters’
worst fear is that they are exactly the same, so they take turns with personality
traits and opinions to maintain a constant level of disagreement. You could shuffle them like a deck of cards,
deal two hands, and watch them go at it all night. It’s always a fair fight, and whoever loses this one will win the next time.
Leah’s
parents are lawyers and she goes to a different high school and she doesn’t really
give a shit about any of us, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, one knee
crossed over the other. Doesn’t even
pretend to. Her point is to be somewhere
other than where she should be. Plus,
she doesn’t know how to drive—says she never has time for driver’s ed with all
her AP classes. She takes the bottle
wordlessly. Sara’s talking about how
annoying Julie is and someone’s been pounding on the door for too long to
ignore but we do, drinking fast till we get dizzy. At a lull in the music, I hear Tasha’s voice
yelling, “You fucking cocksuckers, let me in!”
She almost falls through the door when I open it and Sara spits up some
Coke because she’s laughing too hard. Leah
acts grossed out, which we ignore as usual.
“Jesus
Christ,” Tasha says. “I just went to
request a song. I guess I have to catch
up with you guys.” She throws her head
back finishes the bottle in one long gulp.
The light in the bathroom is red, like a darkroom, so she’s dyed
cherry-popsicle from head to toe, skin and hair all equally pale in the regular
light of night. They call us Snow White
and Rose Red out there, the ones who recognize us from parties but don’t know
our names. She’s got a snag in her
fishnet tights. She tosses the empty in
the corner—near but not in the trash can.
Leah’s eyes get huge, and I wait for her to say something while Tasha
bends over with the lighter. She props
one foot on the edge of the tub next to Leah, first the right, then the left,
Leah squirming beside her. She pinches
the lace between her fingers to hold it away from her skin and fixes the hole
in her tights, then continues with a series of perfectly spaced smoldering
holes. She says, “Don’t worry,
ladies. I’ve got some more for
later.” Leah fans the smell of melting
nylon away with a hand in front of her nose while Tasha pulls another Coke
bottle half-way out of her purse, gives us a wink.
The
dance floor is where we rule. Not the
front room but the second room, where it’s a little darker and the sound’s a
little deeper. We use our eyes when we
dance; even if our bodies never touch, something invisible between us keeps
other people out. Tasha leans against
the wall with parted lips, half-smiling.
She crosses her arms in front, then unfolds them as she turns to the
side with one hand fluttering. She acts like
she’s unaware of the eyes watching her orbit, which is something I have never
been good at. There is an open window
behind her that looks onto the backyard.
I close my eyes and open them and he is watching me there. What he looks like through the frame of the
window is very far away, like something in a museum.
If
he were a painting, he would be a portrait of someone unspeakably sad trying to
pretend like they’re not. Looking at him
does something to me that makes Tasha say, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,”
I say. “Johnny’s here.”
When
he walks in, Julie and Sara stop to talk to him. He keeps his hands in his pockets and it’s a
long time before he makes his way over to me.
I
watch the way his hands stay in his pockets as he leans over, whispers “Hello”
in my ear, then kisses me there, on the cheek. I tell myself this means
something. We had sex twice before he even
kissed me on the lips, so in public on the cheek must be something.
“Hello,
sir,” I say, and I put my arms around his neck because I don’t have any
pockets.
“How
are you tonight?” he says.
“I’m
fine,” I say. “And you?”
“Very
well, thank you.”
In
a minute he says, “You look lovely.”
And
I say, “So do you,” which makes him smile.
What
Johnny looks like actually is nothing I’ve ever seen before. He is the strangest person I have ever
brought to my house and my parents, who think of themselves as understanding
people, don’t understand at all.
His
hair is one thing: long in some places, shaved in other places, blacker than
anything because there is no sheen to it, no visible surface, something more
like a void, like your hand might reach for it and fall right through. Then there’s his face, which is chalk-white
and soft, except for the eyes. The eyes
even gravity cannot escape from.
Altogether, it is too much. I
can’t resist. I want to erase the years
of scars that climb his arms like coils of rope.
I
tried to count them once while he was sleeping, but I lost track when I
realized they didn’t stop at his arms.
When
he sleeps sometimes I listen to him breathe and it is completely without
rhythm. I wish someone could explain to
me how that’s possible. It doesn’t sound
like the breathing of something alive, and sometimes I think he’s going to die
right there next to me.
These
are the usual things I think about when I see Johnny, when we touch each other and
I see people watching the way we touch each other. But tonight I’m thinking more. I’m thinking about the cut on my thigh and
how it got there. I wonder what it means
and I keep looking at his face like it might tell me something. But he says things in the usual way, and his
eyes look down in the usual way.
I
haven’t told Tasha yet, about what happened when I went to his store after
hours, and I am dying for that part of the night to come.
He
works in a costume shop, which is the only thing that makes sense for the way
he looks, and there were mannequins all around us in the dark, dressed up in
corsets and wigs. Every time a car
turned onto the street the headlights lit up everything, torsos and limbs and
weird moving shadows. Then there was darkness
again. In the middle of all this, I was
up on the glass countertop with a razorblade pressed against my thigh. His hand held the blade there waiting. Like it was a question and I knew the answer. I flexed my fingers in the secret cave under
my thighs, hiding by my bitten fingernails.
We
had been snorting lines off the counter.
That’s what it was for, the razorblade.
We were not alone. His friends
were there, Christopher, and a girl I didn’t know. There was a whole wall of windows. I thought anyone could see us, but he didn’t
care; he picked me up by the waist and put me there on the counter. My skirt was sliding up and the glass was
cold and smooth. I needed that feeling
then, of something cold and smooth like glass.
He hiked my skirt higher and higher and stood between my knees. I looked behind his head to see the
others. They were laughing. There was powder coating the back of my
thighs and where my fingers were hiding and I could smell it in my nose. Metallic.
He kissed me then, on the mouth, and he kissed me everywhere, and I
leaned back, and he bent down, and I guess it was there on the counter. He held it to my leg and looked up at
me. Behind his hand was his wrist and on
his wrist were those scars and behind them there was him. I nodded my head, and it didn’t hurt so
much. Maybe that was the drugs. He kissed me some more. He cleaned the blood he drew, erasing the
long red line with his tongue.
The
look in his eyes did not change, before or after.
Now
he takes his hands out of his pockets, maybe to show me they’re empty. I dance away from him slowly, trying to stay
afloat. I look for Julie and Leah and
Sara and Tasha because they are the islands I swim toward. He follows me a little, grazing my hips with
his fingertips. I can see that he wants
me to say something, but I just smile at him.
Finally he says, really quiet, “I hope I didn’t hurt you. Last night.”
“No,”
I say. “It’s ok,” I tell him.
Tasha
is gone. I try not to act like I’m
looking for her. He grabs my hand as I leave
the room, squeezes it while I walk away from him.
I
wander the house and I can’t find her in the yard or the front room, or the
porch or the back room, but I notice Andy is missing from the DJ booth. In a dark hallway between dark rooms there’s
a black curtain hanging over the wall.
Behind it, there’s a doorway and a flight of stairs leading to the
attic. Most people don’t know it’s
there. I push the fabric back and peer
up the stairs where Andy has Tasha pressed against the wall. It’s loud and they don’t notice me. Tasha’s leg is lifted high, in the crook of
Andy’s arm, and I have a view straight up her skirt, of the pale stripe of
flesh above her thigh-highs, of the bubblegum-pink thing he is reaching for
with his hand, while he groans and she giggles and I don’t want to see what
happens next, but I do. And then I let
the curtain fall, and think about it.
What all of this is. This wanting
to get inside of things.
Tasha
is the reason I get discounts at the record store and free drinks at bars and
she is the reason bouncers forget to check our IDs. Because of the way she cocks her head and
looks up from under her blonde bangs, because of the little black star tattooed
on her breast. I don’t have to do these
things because she does them for me.
I
wonder what makes me different from Andy or any of those boys. What makes me different from Johnny besides
the mark he made on me. If we are always
going to be one of us marking the other, or marking ourselves so everyone knows
who we are, what side we’re on.
This
is the night the police come and kick us all out of the house. We stand in the yard, impatient because we
don’t understand what’s happening, while they walk up and down the porch
pointing to things. The magic has gone
with the music and the lights are too bright.
Conrad nods his head and keeps his giant arms folded across his chest. They say something about a cabaret license
and Tasha whispers to me, “Isn’t that a wine?”
It hurts too much to see him like that—our hero! He’s bigger than them. In the comic book version, our hero would
never go down without a fight. “I got your cabaret license right here,”
he’d say. KA-POW.
We
turn away so we don’t have to watch what is really happening. We hurry to the other side of town where we
hear there’s a warehouse party. If we
leave right now we might not miss things that could be happening without
us. We don’t turn at the train tracks to
go over the bridge again because we don’t want to squander the rest of the
night.
We
don’t know yet that we’re not coming back.
The
bridge is still there, the little white house, the church. They are there where they were, I think, but
we are not.
What
I remember about that party is mostly from pictures Tasha shows me—later,
spread across a table at a café where Conrad is our waiter and somehow the
years haven’t changed him, only us.
He
calls us Babygirls, but we are not.
I
don’t remember the camera. Where did it
come from?
Tasha
shrugs. “I had a whole universe in that
purse.” Her hair is longer but still
smooth and white as the inside of a seashell, a pair of folded wings. It sways when she laughs. She’s still the prettiest thing in the room
and I feel again what it’s like to be the one sitting with her. But now she’s not mine. I only have two hours before she has to be
home to breastfeed. “Can you believe how
huge my tits are?”
She
has two kids, a husband, Madonna bumper stickers on her minivan. I have this scar on my thigh I can never
explain.
She
shows me we were there: skinny seventeen-year-olds
in fishnet stockings, leaning against her Dodge Daytona with our arms wrapped
around each other. The rest of them,
too: Leah and the sisters, posing for
the camera, smoking, pouting, standing in combat boots in somebody’s
shower. Of Johnny, there’s only his
shoulder with the back of my head at the edge of one frame. A flash of red hair. I remember I held his hand, what it felt
like—cool, damp, rough like stone—but there’s no picture of that.
I
tell Tasha I can’t find the bridge. I’ve
been gone a long time, but I drive up and down Broadway whenever I’m here,
looking for it.
Tasha
says, “What bridge?”
“On
the way to the house, remember?” I nod
in Conrad’s direction.
“Oh
yeah,” she says, then she’s quiet while I watch her eyes flicker over the tail lights
and traffic ahead like we’re there, in the car, again. Her pale blue, clear-as-water eyes are painted just like
mine. My hand remembers how to draw the
thin black line, the way it curves down and up and flattens at the corner: a sharp, clean wedge. It ends just above the freckle whose position
I still know by heart. The shape of that
black line, how to trace it perfectly—we taught each other that.