Lullaby for the Rain Girl (22 page)

“Still...”

“Nah. I gave that up. I’ll stick to poetry.”

I looked down at the paper on the grass. “So—your mother’s dead?”

“Mm-hm. Both my parents, actually.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Nope.”

I looked at her. “You’re alone in the world?”

“Well, there are some aunts and uncles. I haven’t had any contact with them in a long time.”

“And your mother was an alcoholic?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t matter. She died a long time ago.”

“What about your dad?”

“Cancer. Almost two years ago, now. I’d just turned eighteen.”

Her voice was flat, affectless, yet I found myself feeling sad for her. For just an instant she seemed to my eyes very young, very helpless: a lost child.

“I didn’t get any money, in case you’re wondering,” she said, looking off toward the traffic on Anacapa Street. “Dad was in debt up to his eyeballs. Everything was sold. The house, the property. The whole farm.”

“I have a hard time picturing you as a farm girl.”

“I was, though. I didn’t dress like this, I can tell you. Dad would have tanned my hide. He was
very
old-fashioned.” She paused for a moment, then said: “He was a good guy, though. My dad.”

“I’m sure he was. You seem to have come out all right.” I don’t know what made me say it; in many ways it was obvious she
hadn’t
come out all right. But she smiled then, a big smile, the first really full smile I’d ever seen on her: there was a gap between her two front teeth, I discovered, like the model Lauren Hutton. It gave her a cute, slightly goofy look.

“Thanks!” she said. “To be honest, I didn’t think you liked me.”

“Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know. People don’t. It didn’t seem like you did. I
know
Sherry doesn’t like me.”

“Sure she does.”

“C’mon, Ben. She hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you. She just...Sherry’s—what’s the word? Conventional. She’s very conventional. We come from a small town too, you know. She—
we
haven’t seen too many girls like you.”

We finished our cigarettes.

“So you like the poem?” she asked.

“I think it’s beautiful. I mean it. It’s—painful. Sad.”

“I guess it is.”

“I’m serious about you sending out your stuff. You should.”

“Maybe sometime.” She put the poem back into the folder and closed it. “It’s not like those movies I tried to write when I was a kid. These are more—personal.”

“Sure.”

“So I’d have to think about it.”

“Okay.” I pointed. “What else have you got in that bag?”

“This?” She took it up and poured out its contents. There were several books, mostly Holocaust-related: Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel.

“Heavy stuff,” I said, flipping through them. “How do you afford to buy them?”

She snickered. “What do you mean, ‘buy’?”

“Ah!” I tossed Primo Levi onto the grass. “And so I learn your secret.”

“Yeah, well. It’s pretty easy to shove a paperback into your pants. You should try it sometime. Go to the used store, the Book Den, on Anapamu. It’s easier to steal from a used store than a new one.”

“You know, there
is
a public library in this town.” I pointed. “Right over there.”

“Aw, you’re no fun. Live a little.”

“I’m living. I don’t think I’m dead.”

“You and Sherry need to loosen up. You’re too goody-goody.”

“You called me a hippie a few minutes ago.”

“Oh God, hippies are the
ultimate
goody-goodies!” She laughed and flopped to her side in the grass, looked at me for a moment, then reached out and took a lock of my hair in her hand. “Doesn’t it get in your eyes?”

“All the time.”

“You should cut it,” she said, tossing it back at me. “You look like a refugee from 1968.”

“Want me to tell you what
you
look like?”

“Definitely not!”

“Well, then.” I reached out and gently touched a silver hoop in her eyebrow. “Do these hurt?”

“Only if you try to rip them out.”

She rummaged in her pants pocket for a moment and brought out a small, crumpled envelope. She glanced into it, then looked at me. “Hey,” she said quietly, conspiratorially, “do you want to drop acid?”

“Acid?”

“Yeah. I’ve got two tabs here.”

“Um...” I felt myself scowling. “I, um...”

“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you’ve never dropped acid before, hippie boy.”

“Hippie boy has never dropped acid.”

She smirked. “Shit.” From the envelope she brought out two small rectangles of what looked to be gray plastic. “It’s easy. You just chew it. Leave it in your mouth for a couple of minutes, chew it like gum. Then swallow it. It’s cool. Peter and I do it all the time.”

I studied the little blocks, trying to conceal my surprise that we were talking about this so openly—quietly but openly—on the grass in a public place, with people passing by on the sidewalk.

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

“From Peter. I don’t know where he gets this stuff. He can get anything. C’mon. They’re not real strong. They won’t fuck you up—well, not too much.”

Today the idea of dropping something so powerful into my mouth, not knowing where it came from or exactly what it was, would simply be out of the question.
(Known
poisons—cigarettes, alcohol—are another matter.) But at nineteen one’s mind works differently. Mine did, anyway. I worried that Rachel would think I wasn’t cool. Why I cared about Rachel Blackburn’s opinion wasn’t completely clear to me.

“How long does it last?” I asked.

“A few hours. It takes an hour or two for it to really get going.  You peak for an hour or two. Then it fades.”

“You’ve taken these? This exact type?”

“Are you kidding?” She grinned. “I was tripping on this shit the day I met you guys.”

“I—I don’t think so, Rachel.”

“Come
on.
It’s no fun to be tripping on your own.”

“You’re going to do it?”

“Ha. Watch me.” And she popped one of the little rectangles into her mouth, chewing it slowly. I watched her for a long moment.

“Okay,” I said finally, my pulse suddenly racing. I couldn’t imagine it would be very bad—not here, in the bright sunlight, on the smooth green grass. “Give me the other one.” I held out my hand.

She leaned close. “Open your mouth.”

I did. She placed the little gray thing on my tongue.

“Now chew.”

I did. The taste was metallic, like the taste of tin foil. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. After a minute or two we swallowed.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just let it do its thing.” She reclined back onto the grass. I did the same. We stared up at the blue sky. It looked no different from before.

“My dad is too,” I said. “An alcoholic. Like your mom.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

We lay there for a long time. I was very aware of her next to me, our shoulders only inches apart. Sherry seemed far from me then—far physically, far emotionally. For a moment I had trouble remembering what she looked like. I wondered why I was here, taking drugs with this girl, staring at the sky. It wasn’t that I disliked Rachel—not anymore, at least; learning something about her background had humanized her for me, kept me from seeing her as just another person, interchangeable with many others like her that one would see on the streets of Santa Barbara. The punk fashion, the hair, the piercings and tattoos and ripped tank tops. No, I didn’t dislike her; but she wasn’t my type. She was into things I had no interest in, like punk music and, until the past few minutes, drugs. Physically I found her unattractive, though her big gap-toothed smile had a certain charm. But her body was so
different
from Sherry’s. Sherry was a big girl, big-shouldered, big-hipped. There used to be a word for her physical type:
blowsy.
Like all so-called redheads, she was pale. Tan-colored freckles covered her cheeks and shoulders and ran spottily down her back and to her bottom. Sherry wasn’t necessarily the prettiest girl in the world, but she could be sexy as hell in the right outfit, with her sleepy eyes and all that lustrous hair pouring over her shoulders. Rachel was her complete opposite physically. She wasn’t really pretty either, but she was small, tightly and compactly built, dark-featured. Her body had a sharp, hard outline, judging from what I could see of her arms and shoulders and legs, whereas Sherry was softer, blurrier. Rachel almost appeared to be a child at times, a pubescent girl dressed like someone older, a teenager or young adult, while no one would ever mistake the busty Sherry O’Shea for a child.

We said nothing for some time. As I stared at the sky I began to notice that it seemed to be intensifying in color—the blue was turning truly
blue.
Within the color little sparkles seemed to materialize and glitter. Oh shit, I thought, it’s actually happening. For a while I’d hoped that Rachel had been kidding or that I’d gotten some sort of dud—that nothing would occur, that I would walk away from this perfectly normal and yet with Rachel’s approval for my guts in trying it. But the longer I stared at the sky, the more I realized that I was out of luck. The blue seemed to be growing
deeper
somehow—not in color, but in my sense of its dimension, the limitlessness of the sky. It seemed as if I could reach out my hand and extend it forever into that blue, that it would never end.

“Anything happening?” Rachel asked. I was surprised to hear her voice, surprised to realize that she was still there next to me.

“Yeah,” I said, surprised also that I still had a voice. “Yeah. That
blue.”

“I know what you mean. I see it too. Wow. It’s like forever.”

The sky was sparkling now, blue on blue, little blue bursts like tiny exploding stars. It was an amazing sight, precisely because it was so obviously real: I felt that what I was seeing had always been there, but that my eyes had been too imperfect to perceive any of it until now.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

I was still aware enough of my surroundings to wonder how we must look to the people around us. Surely we were sparkling ourselves, or levitating, or something else that would reveal what we’d done, what we were doing. But when I looked toward the street I suddenly felt calm: no one would notice a thing, mostly because they were all so far away. Anacapa Street appeared miles off, the cars and people like toys in the distance. Someone spoke into my ear: I started. But when I looked I saw that it was a man talking to a child as they walked through the archway of the courthouse. They weren’t close at all.

The colors of the world were changing, lighting up. Suddenly everything seemed so very much
more
than it had been. I looked over at Rachel’s arm, which was bare. I studied her skin, the little dark hairs on her forearm, and felt myself almost sinking into them, as if I was inhabiting her forearm,
her.
Our eyes met. She was both yards away from me and only an inch or two.

“How do you feel?” she asked, turning to me, her voice oddly murky, as if she were speaking from underwater.

“Good,” I said, my voice loud within my skull. I whispered, “Weird. But good.”

“Don’t shout.”

“What?”

“I said,” she whispered, “don’t shout.”

“I wasn’t shouting.”

“It sounded like you were.”

A translucent screen seemed to have materialized between Rachel and me. I reached for her arm to see if I could break through the screen. It gave easily and vanished. I touched her arm, fascinated at its texture, its warmth, its feeling of being something
alive
.

“Look over there.” She pointed. There was a police cruiser moving slowly along the street. The cop behind the wheel had on big black sunglasses, but I was sure I could see past them, to his black eyes beneath. I was sure he was looking at us, judging us. I was sure he was about to jump out of that cruiser, pull his gun and come charging across the street at us. At the same time I was perfectly aware that nothing of the sort would happen.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rachel said suddenly, grabbing up her things. I stood too, shocked that the world didn’t lurch or slip away as it did when I’d drunk too much. No, the ground was firm, level. She took my hand and led me to the sidewalk. The colors everywhere were riotous now, party-colored, neon. A girl in a pink track suit went jogging by—the track suit and her jiggling breasts seemed ready to bounce out and beyond her, roll and tumble all over the street. A little boy’s red lollipop seemed to hold within it a spiraling circle of rainbows. An old man’s white hair was silver silk, silk that was alive on his head, moving and waving. The fact that it was the wind that was picking up his hair was something I understood, just as I understood, damn it, that the hair was
alive.