Dirty Wings (14 page)

“Why are they singing about caribou?”

“Ree-pent!” Cass yells with relish. “I don't know, it's the Pixies.”

“Is that punk?”

“Sweet child of mine,” Cass says, “I don't know what I'm going to do with you.”

The show is at a falling-apart house in the old industrial neighborhood by the locks. The yard is a sea of teenagers dressed in black, smoking cigarettes and drinking out of bottles in paper bags. Cass laughs at Maia's huge eyes. “Nobody'll bite you,” she says, patting Maia's hand on the gearshift. “Promise.” Maia parks a block away, double-checks the locked doors. She follows a few steps behind Cass, pulling her shoulders up to her ears and hunching into herself. She wants to go home and crawl under her piano and never leave her house again.

These kids are terrifying. They're arrayed in rags, their hair standing up in spikes or ratted out in snarled manes. They have safety pins through their ears and hoops through their lips and chains around their necks and big black boots, on their feet, and they stare at Cass and Maia as the girls walk by. Cass slows until Maia bumps into her and takes Maia's hand. “You're doing great, princess,” she murmurs into Maia's ear, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. “These fuckers've never seen a girl as pretty as you, is all.”

“I think they hate me.”

“No way. Their faces are all just frozen like that. Come on, let's find something to drink.”

Cass drags her into the house. It's even more crowded inside, a mass of white kids in black clothes, drinking beer out of red plastic cups. Cass lets go of her hand and Maia shrinks back against a wall. The house is almost devoid of furniture. There's a wretched couch pushed against a wall, a collapsing shelf filled with dog-eared copies of
On the Road
and
Siddhartha.
“You wait here,” Cass says. “I'm going to find the keg, okay? I'll be right back.” Cass shoulders her way through the crowd. Maia bites her lip, hoping she doesn't look as terrified as she feels.

“You don't look like you're having a good time,” someone says next to her. Okay, then. She does look as terrified as she feels. The speaker's a boy, tall and lanky, with dirty brown hair that falls in tangles down his back. He's wearing leather and spikes like the rest of them, but his eyes are kind.

“I'm not really—uh, I'm fine,” she says.

“I'm Todd. You want a drink?”

“My friend went to get me one.” He raises an eyebrow. “Oh. Sorry. Maia.” He shakes her hand gravely, as if they're at a tea party, and takes a silver flask out of his pocket.

“You sure?”

“Oh, what the hell,” Maia says, and takes the flask from him. She unscrews the top and takes a gulp of whatever's inside. It burns going down and she coughs, laughing. “Holy shit!”

“Not a whisky drinker?”

“Not until now.” A warm, buffering glow is already spreading through her. “I could get used to it, I bet.”

“That's my kind of girl,” he says, winking, and Maia realizes in astonishment that he is flirting with her. A
punk boy
is
flirting.
With
her.
What a day this is turning out to be.

“You ever hear these guys play before?”

“What?”

“The band,” he says patiently. “Elephant Feticide?”

“Oh,” she says. “No. Cass didn't tell me their name.”

“You're here with Cass?”

“You know her?”

“Everybody knows Cass.” He holds out his hand, and she realizes she is still clutching his flask.

“Sorry,” she says, handing it back to him. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Elephant Feticide? That's not, like—” She falters. “I mean, that's sort of a terrible name. No offense.”

“It's not
my
band. My band is called Necronomicon.”

“That's a mouthful.”

“Part of the whole metal aesthetic,” he says, and she can't tell if he's teasing her.

“Heavy,” she agrees. “Heavy metal.” He laughs, and she is delighted with herself.

“Ah, shit, girl,” Cass says behind her, “I leave you alone for three minutes and you find yourself the biggest trouble in the room.”

“Cass, Cass, Cass,” Todd says, and scoops her up in a bear hug.

“My beer!” Cass cries, one hand aloft, holding two plastic cups.

“Sorry,” Todd says, releasing her. Cass hands one cup to Maia, who takes a cautious sip.

“She's never had a whole beer of her own,” Cass explains.

“Hey,” Maia protests.

“It's okay, he's good people.”

Suddenly, a terrible noise like a trash compactor crushing a car full of cats screeches through the room. Maia jumps. “That's the band,” Todd explains. She and Cass follow him into another room, where a sweat-covered, shirtless boy is banging furiously on a drumset and another shirtless boy is on his knees, howling passionately and extracting repetitive, dissonant chords from an electric guitar with vigorous enthusiasm. Maia winces and covers her ears with her hands. Around her, black-clad teenagers in various states of undress reel and crash into one another in a frenzied, violent dance that does not seem to correspond in any way to the music. An inebriated dancer slams into her and careens away, sending her beer slopping over the edge of her cup.

“Is it all like this?” Maia asks Cass.

“WHAT?” Cass shouts.

“IS IT ALL LIKE THIS?” Maia shouts back.

“IS ALL WHAT LIKE THIS?”

“ROCK MUSIC?”

Cass laughs so hard she doubles over, and Todd looks over at Maia, amused. Wheezing, Cass shakes her head. “COME ON, PRINCESS,” she yells. “LET'S GO OUTSIDE.”

In the yard, the din is considerably less, although the crowd is no smaller. They hunker under the eaves, unnoticed. Maia leans against the house and takes another delicate sip of her beer. Todd, she is pleased to note, has followed them outside. “You don't have to come out here,” Maia says to them. “If you liked it.”

Cass is still laughing. “Are you kidding? They're fucking terrible.” She pulls her tobacco out of her pocket and rolls a cigarette.

“They are?”

“Pretty bad,” Todd agrees.

Maia eyeballs Cass's cigarette and Cass catches her looking, passes it to her without comment. Maia takes the tiniest of drags and manages not to cough, though she hopes Todd can't see her eyes water in the dark as she gives it back to Cass. He offers Maia the flask again and she hands him her beer while she unscrews the stopper and takes a swig. The burn is no less but she expects it this time, and the warmth that follows it feels even better.

“I
like
whisky,” she says.

“I like your hair,” Todd says.

“Cass did it. Just today.”

“It looks good. Really good.”

“You know what,” Cass says, “I'm going to go see if Felony is here, I need to ask her something.” She leans in to kiss Maia on the cheek. “He thinks you're
cute
, you should
kiss him
,” she hisses in Maia's ear. “I'll find you again in a bit, okay? Don't leave without me,” she adds in a normal voice.

“What do I do?” Maia says, panicked.

Cass looks at her and grins. “Don't drive away until I'm in the car,” she says, and then she's scampering off into the house. The noise has abated for the moment; perhaps the shirtless boys grew tired of their efforts and are resting.

“Well,” Todd says.

“Well,” she agrees.

“You go to school?”

“No, home-schooled. You?”

“Oh, school,” he says. “We didn't really get along, me and school. I went to the community college for a bit, but it seemed better to just work. Travel a little.”

“Where?”

“I went to Spain for a while. Met some people. I stayed in a squat in Amsterdam for a year.” He tells her about the beaches in Spain while she drinks more of his whisky. The sun. Swimming naked in the sea.

“Why'd you ever come home?”

“Got my heart plumb broke,” he says wistfully.

“I went to Barcelona,” Maia says. “For a piano competition.”

“Piano, huh? You must be good.”

“I won.”

He laughs. “You don't look like a pianist.”

“I did until this afternoon. I'm trying out being a different person.”

“Is that so,” he says, looking down at her. He is much taller than she is. He reaches forward and tucks a piece of her hair behind one ear, his thumb gently stroking her cheek. “What kind of different person?”

“A braver one,” she says, and kisses him. He smiles against her mouth and then kisses her back. He tastes like whisky and cigarettes and smells like sweat and leather and something else underneath, wild and musky. Kissing him is nothing like kissing Nicholas Bernière, mediocre pianist and practiced jerk, who'd jammed his tongue down her throat and covered the entire lower half of her face with his mouth. Todd's stubbled chin is scratchy but his mouth is soft, and there is a warmth spreading through her now that has nothing to do with the whisky. He puts both his hands in her hair and takes her earlobe gently between his teeth, and she shivers in delight.

“You're beautiful, braver girl,” he says softly into the whorl of her ear, and a thrill goes through her all the way to her toes. No one's ever said it to her like that. She rests her forehead on his chest, drinking in the smell of him, and he kisses the top of her head. The band has started up again, with an even more awful noise; Maia would've thought such a feat impossible. “Not the classiest place for a first date,” he says into her hair.

“I should find Cass,” she says.

“It's early,” he protests.

“I have parents,” she says. “I mean, the kind that pay attention.”

He takes her by the shoulders, holds her away from him, studying her face, and then he kisses her again. “I could throw you over my shoulder and carry you off,” he offers.

She giggles. “You just met me.”

“Some things do not require a long acquaintance, braver girl.” He rummages around in his pocket and finds a pen, takes her hand. “Here,” he says, writing on the back of her hand, “is my phone number. Do you make use of it.” He gives her hand a little squeeze.

“Okay,” she says, grinning like an idiot. It takes a force of will to make herself let go of his hand. She turns around as she goes back into the house; he's still watching her. He gives her a little wave and she returns it, nearly walking into the doorframe.

Cass is inside, talking animatedly to a girl with green and purple dreadlocks wearing a halter top made out of an old shirt. Maia catches her eye and makes a driving motion with her hands, and Cass comes over. “So soon?” she asks.

“At some point even my dad will notice I'm gone. But stay here, if you want.”

“Nah,” Cass says. “I see these people all the time.”

“You want to sleep over?” Maia asks.

“Like a slumber party?”

Maia blushes. “Sorry, I guess that's sort of little kid-ish.”

“No, it sounds fun. I'd love to.”

Maia is quiet on the drive home. She can feel her tiny, claustrophobic world blowing wide open, all the possibility rushing in like a rising tide. The world is so much bigger than she had ever guessed; all these people in it, like Cass, like Todd, making their own decisions for themselves. She cannot imagine Cass ever doing anything she does not want to do, ever being told where to go or what to believe. Maia has been trapped for so long, surrounded by people who are as bound as she is—her father, Oscar. Who knows, maybe even her mother, stuck in a marriage she does not want, a house she cannot ever clean into a place she actually wants to be, a defective daughter she paid for and cannot return. Maia thought piano was her only path out; she'd never even imagined so many other roads existed.

“What are you thinking?” Cass asks, breaking the long silence.

“About today.”

“Your first show,” Cass says. “Sorry it was so terrible.”

“It wasn't! I mean, the music was. But I—” Maia blushes so violently Cass can probably tell even in the dark car.

Cass chuckles. “He's cute.”

“Yes.”

“But trouble,” Cass says. “Heartbreaker. All the girls love Todd. And Todd loves all the girls.”

“Oh,” Maia says. “I don't think I can see him again, anyway. My parents.”

“It's not natural, caging a teenage girl like that.”

“They'll never let me go out.”

“Just tell them you're going anyway.”

“I wish it was that easy,” Maia says. “I don't even want to think about what will happen when my mom sees my hair.”

“What are your parents going to do? They can't actually stop you from anything.”

“I don't know,” Maia says. How can she explain to Cass, a girl with no family, the power her mother has? It's a force that's almost physical. And if Maia went, where would she go? To Cass's? To Oscar's? Not likely. “It's complicated,” she says.

“Fair enough.”

“I'm going to audition. For this school. This music college in New York. If I get in, my parents will pay for it, for my life there. And they love me, and I guess I sort of owe it to them not to fuck up.”

“You want to go?”

“It's the best school,” Maia says.

“That's not what I asked you.”

“I know.” Maia bites her lip. “It's what I'm supposed to do.”

“But do you want to do it?”

“I don't know if I know what I want.”

“Hmmm,” Cass says. “I guess that is complicated.”

Maia makes a nest of blankets on the floor of her room, and Cass burrows in like a rabbit tunneling. “So clean,” she says happily. “Everything smells good.”