And Other Stories (23 page)

I had to turn and look. It was New
Girl.

Piper opened her mouth, but New
Girl finished, “No, I must have misheard. I mean, you’re a girl,
not a light plane.”

For a second, I adored New Girl.
Then she turned to me and said, “And you don’t look like a
Beth.”

It’s one thing to step into the
searchlight yourself. Dragging someone else in with you is rude.
“My parents couldn’t spell ‘Goddess,’” I said, and bolted for the
table where Janelle and Barb were sitting.

They asked me about New Girl. God
knows, they couldn’t help but notice her. I just said she was in my
English class.

But I thought about it for a long
time. New Girl is an equal-opportunity insulter: Randy the townie
and Piper the officer’s brat both got a faceful. She doesn’t care
if she sticks out like the proverbial thumb, and she has no clue
about the class structure.

Obviously, Dead Chick
Walking.

•

I don’t know how to tell this. I
don’t even know if it happened. But if it didn’t happen, what
did?

I’m really careful about what I
drink at a rave. Beer out of a bottle, watch it being opened, then
don’t let the bottle out of my sight. Keg beer, watch the cup all
the way from the tap to my hand, and then don’t let the cup out of
my sight. Never hard liquor, because the bottle stays open too
long. What did I say earlier about only being selectively stupid?
You never know when somebody’ll decide to spring enlightenment on
you unannounced.

I have to cover that because that’s
the first thing you think—it’s still what I think, except I know it
can’t be true. Unless I drank so much that I don’t remember being
stupid—eating a brownie or drinking out of someone’s canteen. But I
wouldn’t do that. I’m always careful.

Okay, this is
making me cry. And the tears really sting, which makes me feel
sorry for myself, so I want to cry even more. Stupid, stupid,
stupid. But I feel like I was abducted by aliens or something, as
if there was a piece of my life when I lay bare-assed under a big
light and everyone stared at me
only I can’t remember it
. Instead
there’s this thing I do remember that can’t have
happened.

Must not be crying next time Mom
comes in.

Mom stayed home from work to take
care of me. She hasn’t done that since I was in third grade. She’s
taking the emergency room nurse’s instructions pretty seriously.
She pops in to check the Gatorade level in my glass, and no matter
how much I’ve drunk, she makes me drink more, and then she refills
it. You’d think I’d be peeing like a horse. Shows how dried-out I
am.

She came in when I was writing. I
told her this was homework. That was the first time she sounded
pissed off since it happened. She said, “The school won’t expect
you to do your damn homework with your brains cooked out.” I
remember it exactly because I liked the image. My skull like a
busted pressure cooker, and all my nutritious brains coming out
like steam.

I wouldn’t hurt as much if I’d lie
still, but if I don’t write this, I think it instead, and it goes
round and round until it’s a little brain tornado. At least if I
write it down, it seems like it goes in a straight line. And on one
of these Gatorade runs, Mom will tell me to quit or else, so I want
to do as much as I can before then.

She was so scared in the emergency
room.

It was a great party Until. Riding
there with my arms around Bob’s waist—I feel stupid about it now,
but I thought, Tonight he’ll see me dancing, and he’ll be really
into me. We’ll dance together like Belle and the Beast, alone in
the desert and as the sun comes up he’ll kiss me. It makes me feel
crappy just to write it, but I have to.

We got to the last set of
coordinates, which turned out to be an alley between two long
rockpiles, and followed the line of tiki torches stuck in the rock
cracks over our heads. At the end of the alley I could feel the
space open up, as if there wasn’t anything for my body’s sonar to
ping off of. The sky was like a black sequined dress—no moon, but
all the stars in the universe, gathered to watch.

The party was
marked off by a huge circle of torches ten feet high. Outside the
circle, I couldn’t see a thing. I knew there was a lot of
there
out
in the dark, but I couldn’t tell if the desert went up or down on
either side, or just lay flat forever. The DJ stand was at one end
of the circle, with its red work lights and secret movements—not
whole people, just parts moving in and out of the light. There must
have been a hundred people in the circle, being restless and
noisy.

We stepped out of the alley—and an
organ chord swelled up from everywhere. The whole circle went dead
quiet. It was like the party had been waiting for us.

Bob went to find the beer. I wanted
to follow him, but that chord began to throb, right in time to my
heart. I ran toward the torches. The chord turned into the intro to
an old Prince song, with the DJ scratching it so it had a new
rhythm. Then he let the song go.

I let me go. I was sweating like a
hog in about a minute, when he started cross-fading between Prince
and the Ramones. Someone near me started to laugh, as if they’d got
a joke.

He spun up some Moby after that,
and I danced till my legs felt wobbly. Then I found the kegs and
got a big red plastic cup of beer. It was thin and acidy, but it
was like cold lemonade after dancing. I chugged it.

I like remembering the beginning of
the night. I just want to write about dancing and getting my buzz
on, and the cool things I saw in the circle. I did see cool things,
like the woman who’d glued rhinestones to her arms and chest and
face in patterns until she was one shining diagram, and the guy
who’d smeared the stuff inside the Cyalume lightsticks on his hands
and was drawing patterns in the dark as he danced. There were a
bunch of people in masks made of leaves and feathers, dancing
together, and when the torchlight shone in their eyes, it was like
seeing a coyote watching you through the bushes. They were cool
enough that I figured they’d come in from L.A.

I danced and drank until I didn’t
feel either cool or uncool. The point wasn’t see-and-be-seen. The
point was to be there, part of this mob in the dark. I felt as if I
had to be there, or there’d be a break in the circuit, that the
juice wouldn’t flow. If I stopped dancing, there’d be a rolling
blackout. If I stopped dancing, even the DJ wouldn’t be able to
mix. I was invisible, unnoticed—but connected and
necessary.

But I did stop dancing, didn’t
I?

I went for beer—and there was Bob.
He was shiny in the torch light, and his shirt was unbuttoned. He
looked like a big, sweaty romance novel cover. “Beth,” he said.
“You look way hot.”

I pretty much stopped breathing.
“So do you.”

“Yeah.” He grinned
and flapped his shirt. He meant temperature-hot. I replayed the
conversation—okay, then so did I.

“You know, I really
like you,” he added.

I was drinking beer. It slopped
over my upper lip, down my chin, and onto my tank top. “I like you,
too,” I got out past the back of my hand as I wiped my
face.

“I like that shirt.
You should wear more clothes like that.”

It was just a tank top. I wanted
him to like me, not my clothes.

“You should wear it
without a bra, though. If you wore tight clothes, guys would notice
you more.”

Okay, he’d found
the Ecstasy. Sure he liked me—right then, he liked
everyone
.
But maybe he liked me a little bit more...?

“Hello, Goddess,”
said a voice off to my right. It was New Girl.

“Huh-uh,” Bob said.
“This is Beth.”

New Girl shook her head. She looked
even more deer-like in the dark, with her eyes black and shining.
She’d stuck a line of sparkly bindi down her cheek below one eye,
like tears. Her hair in the torches made her head look like a
little moon. She had on a black sleeveless T-shirt with a glitter
snake on it.

“You can’t be a Beth.
What’s your real name?” she asked. She didn’t look at
Bob.

“Tabetha,” I
said.

“Excellent! The
Goddess Tab, who dances in the desert to bring secrets to the
surface!”

“Ooo-kay. Way too
much X.” I turned to get away and drink my beer. Inside my head I
was yelling “Follow me!” at Bob. Instead, New Girl followed, and
Bob trailed after.

“No X. I don’t do
that stuff. It’s too embarrassing afterward,” said New Girl. “It
makes me tell people I can’t stand that they’re wonderful human
beings.”

My sentiments exactly, but I wasn’t
going to tell her so. “What the hell is your name?” I
asked.

“Alice. The female
incarnation of the Hanged Man from the tarot. A woman on a perilous
quest of self-discovery down the rabbit hole of life.”

I actually opened my mouth to blow
her off when I realized that I was hearing the kind of thing that I
think but never say. “Is it really Alice?”

“Uh-huh. Is it really
Tabetha?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then we know
each other’s true names. And you know what that means.”

And I actually did. Jesus, nobody
else in town would, but I did. All those years of reading weird
shit, and it finally seemed as if it had a point.

That’s when Bob said, “You talk
really strange. Either of you give blow jobs?”

I don’t know what I was about to
say or do before Bob’s little conversation starter, but suddenly I
was scared of whatever it was. Real terror, like I’d almost walked
in front of a speeding car and barely jumped back in time. I don’t
remember what I said, but I chugged my beer and headed straight for
the center of the circle where it was darkest.

Even that was no good. If something
got slipped into my beer, it must have been before that, because
suddenly I didn’t feel safe. The whole mob was watching me, waiting
for me to do something I wasn’t supposed to. But what was I
supposed to? No matter how loud the music was, every noise I made
was louder. When I moved, I was in someone’s face. I wasn’t
connected anymore. And “darkest” wasn’t dark enough to hide in. I
had to get away.

I shoved out of the dancers, past
the torches, and stumbled over rocks and tufts of grass. Then I
just kept going. After a minute my eyes adjusted to the starlight,
as much as they ever would.

Everything was horrible. Bob wasn’t
going to kiss me under the sunrise. I was the slut with beer on her
shirt who’d maybe do him because it wasn’t as if guys liked me. And
Alice New Girl had seen the whole thing.

That’s when I put my foot in a
hole, twisted my ankle, and fell down. Another wake-up call. I just
sat there and cried like a jerk.

I had to go back to the circle. To
being who I’m supposed to be—too stupid to bruise, too dumb to
imagine, hard and happy and in hiding. I’m the tortoise, pulling my
body parts back under cover, saying, Who, me? Oh, I’m just a
rock.

Of course, I couldn’t find the
circle.

They’d made it hard to find,
because if you could see it from anywhere, then so could the
rangers. But I couldn’t hear it, either. I’d gone a lot further
than I thought.

I got scared. That’s what screws
you when you’re lost in the desert. I should have stayed where I
was till morning. I could have been right next to a park road.
Instead I went stumbling through the dark.

I remember the sun coming up. I was
in the middle of a plain, and the plain had joshua trees all over
it, spaced out like an orchard without rows. Real trees, maybe
thirty or forty feet high, not like the crummy little tree behind
Mike’s garage. Every one had a big crown of twisty branches, but
there was no shade. When the wind blew, it hissed through the
leathery knife-blade leaves, but nothing moved.

Rockpiles stuck up around the
plain. I couldn’t tell how far away they were. No road, no trails.
Not even footprints.

I just kept walking. I didn’t know
what else to do. Little lizards slid off rocks when my shadow fell
on them. Ravens flew over, making ugly laughing sounds. A rabbit
with black ear tips crossed in front of me and didn’t even look at
me. A coyote sat and scratched his ear with a hind leg, then
trotted off between the rocks. It got hotter and hotter. I remember
noticing I wasn’t sweating anymore.

Now comes the part I remember that
didn’t happen. I don’t know when, except that there was still
enough light to see by.

I thought it was a tree. I saw its
feet first, and they were twisted and dry and dark like juniper
roots. Its legs were like the trunks of the big joshua trees,
corky-looking bark where the old leaves have fallen away. Above
that, dry leaves hung on it like brown daggers overlapping. Only
its head and hands were green. Knobs of green sword leaves like the
ends of the joshua tree branches. Mistletoe was scattered around
its head, the dark red strands like tiny bones. It had a face, but
it was made of leaves, so I almost had to imagine it, like seeing
pictures in clouds. That bent leaf in the middle is the nose, that
line of leaf-ends there, that’s the mouth. And those deep pits
between the leaves are where its eyes would be.