Pasadena (7 page)

J
uly is going out in a blaze of glory, and the fires have marched from here to Malibu. All across the LA Basin, the sunset is gory with smoke and a deep red haze.

Eppie and I stand on the bluff at the edge of Blue House's backyard and watch the sky over Eagle Rock dim into night. Behind us, Hank's band is playing something fast and guitar-filled, wordless and loud, bouncing their sound off the back wall of the house. Blue House leans to the left as if it's dancing, a two-story drunk of a clapboard shack painted every single shade of blue. Eppie's dad bought out the remainders at a paint store years ago. Whenever the wind and sun strip the wood of color, he slaps on another layer.

I had to ask my mom for a ride here tonight. She loved it. After pre-manicure weirdness and a lunch chaser, it was yet another chance to “participate,” as the counselors call it, to play the supportive parent. She didn't even mention a curfew, bless her heart. Just said to call her when I was ready to come home. It was easier than chasing after Joey. He's around here somewhere. Just not around me.

Eppie clacks her plastic cup against mine and I can smell the alcohol spiking her 7Up. I'm a water-over-ice girl, myself, but I like the way the booze rises warm and sharp off Eppie's breath. It makes me feel like someone else, like we're both other people in another place that's not quite so fucked up.

“Here's to the simple things,” she says.

“Tic-tac-toe and algebra.” We hoist our glasses and drink.

“Still mooning over Maggie?” she asks me after a second sip.

I look out at the moon hanging low and bloated in the eastern sky. “Is that supposed to be a pun?”

Eppie grins. “Naw, girl, just a question. I'm worried about you.”

“I know. But don't be. I'm a big girl.”

“Yeah.” Eppie drops the grin. “But so was Maggie.”

“What's your deepest, darkest secret?” I ask suddenly. It's been on my mind since seeing Keith this morning. I'd been so sure my best friend shared everything with me. But she hadn't.

If I'd thought about it, there were lots of little hints, morsels of secrets surrounding her, like crumbs from an earlier meal. Sure, she'd told me about Dane the minute it happened, and I thought I knew about her own dalliances, up until Luke. But there was Scott, who used to want her, and maybe still did, despite what Keith believed.

And what was it Edina had asked me the other night?
Did she ever talk about me?
She hadn't, not really. Or maybe I just hadn't asked.

Eppie flinches. “Wow. That's a big question. And we're not even high. I don't think I can answer that.”

“You
can't
answer, or you won't?” I ask.

She looks at me for a minute, no longer laughing it off. “Won't. It's none of your business.”

I nod. “Fair enough. But is there anybody you
would
tell?”

Eppie takes a long time to answer. When she does, her drink sits forgotten on the lawn and she shivers as she says it. “Maggie. Maggie knew.”

I laugh and I know it sounds bitter. “Yeah, she was the
one I told too. It's like the end of the King Midas fable, the guy with the golden touch that kills everything he loves? There's another myth where he's punished with donkey ears. He keeps them hidden under his crown, but someone catches him with his ears out and Midas swears him to secrecy. But this guy can't keep a secret that huge, so he runs out into a field, digs a hole in the ground, and shouts into the hole, ‘The king has the ears of an ass!'” Eppie smirks at that, but she's listening. “So he shouts his heart out, then fills in the hole, burying the secret, or so he thinks. Over time, reeds grow over the hole, and when the wind blows hard enough through them, it sounds like they're saying ‘The king has the ears of an ass!'”

Eppie starts laughing outright and I join her because it feels better than making my point. But, when the laughter stops, she asks me, “What's that got to do with anything?”

“Maggie. We all told her our secrets, every single one of us. And now we're filling in the hole. What do you think the reeds will say when the wind blows?”

Eppie smiles, then frowns, attempts another smile and fails. “It's just a story, and not a very good one, Jude. It doesn't make sense.”

“Maybe we just have to be listening,” I say.

Whatever happened to Maggie, she might have been
telling us all along, and I'd missed it, mistaking it for so much wind.

So I tell Eppie another story, this one not so old.

“How many months before you start to show if you're pregnant?” Maggie asked.

We were lying out by the pool again, our perpetual California pose. Towels draped on lounge chairs laid flat for sunbathing and catnaps.

I peeled open an eye. “Five months? Maybe four if you're rail thin, or six if you're tall?”

Maggie sat up, looking at her mother's roses. Explosions of white and pink flowers made the upper terrace look like a French dessert.

“How far along can you be and still get an abortion?” Her voice was neutral, matter-of-fact, but I could hear the strain in it. It was the same voice she used when she talked about Parker's surgeries, careful not to care.

I turned to look at her—almond skin, perfect hair, perfect body. Her stomach was as flat as her voice.

“Three months.”

Maggie looked at me. “And you know this why?”

I pulled on my sunglasses and shrugged. “You're the one who asked. I know things.”

She snorted, then looked alarmed. “Sweetie, you weren't . . .” She petered out like a vapor trail of concern.

“Knocked up?” I asked, eyeing her over my shades. “No. My aunt miscarried a few years ago. She was four months along and I couldn't tell she was pregnant. I got curious and looked it up. And the abortion thing is . . . bonus-round trivia. Late-term abortions, women's rights . . . Don't you watch the news?”

Maggie lay back down on the lounge chair. “It's bad for my complexion.”

“Right.”

We were silent for a while. The cackle of wild parrots filled the warm Saturday sky. Legend had it a pet store burned down and those were the escapees, a mass of feral noisemakers thriving in the not-quite-tropical desert air. But the truth was there were several of these colonies all over Southern California. That's a lot of pet stores burning down for no good reason.

I looked up and caught a flicker of green and yellow in the distance. They screeched and clacked like geese in a box of castanets before flying on to another berth.

“Why do you ask?” I said in the descending quiet.

Maggie grimaced, a flash of white teeth, lipstick vanishing into a thin line. She shook her head. “I'm a little slutty, Jude, but I'm not stupid. Parker got the genetic
short straw this time, but any child of mine could turn out to be partly cloudy with a chance of tumors too. Who needs that at seventeen?” She sighed. “Besides, there
are
other people in the world. People I'm concerned about.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Can we ever really know anyone?” she parried.

I softened my tone, giving in. “Sure. I know you, Saint Margaret, patron of lost causes.”

The tension left her shoulders and she gave me a wry smile. “I think that's you, dear. Saint Jude.”

I had to laugh. “I
am
a lost cause,” I agreed.

Maggie grinned. “That makes two of us.”

Eppie gazes down at the city lights.

I'd taken a chance—maybe she knew something I didn't. Maybe Maggie had been pregnant and depressed and I'd missed all of it. Because I'd needed Maggie Kim to be invincible and sure of herself. Because she was my shield from the world.

“I saw Keith this morning,” I continue.

Eppie sounds far away when she says, “Oh, yeah. He and Scott couldn't be here tonight. How are they?”

“He's fine, but I hear Scott's a mess. He had a thing
with Maggie. I thought it was over. But maybe it wasn't. Then I remembered, he was home on leave last year when Maggie started asking me those questions, and it kind of made sense.”

“It wasn't Maggie,” Eppie tells me. “Not everything is about her.”

She's so quiet, I can barely hear her. I lean in, pulling up my hood to block the sounds of the party. The music is loud, out of place here on the edge of the world. “What?”

The sky tilts as I try to rack focus from one story to another. Eppie. Not Maggie after all.

She takes a deep breath, and when she speaks, it's like she's pulling water from a well deep inside her. “It was spring break. Hank and I went down to Mexico to surf Rosarito right after his grandma died. He was having a hard time and we wanted to relax, take a load off for a while.” She laughs nervously and pulls out another clove cigarette. “Mexican condoms,” she says, and shrugs. “It was . . . tough, Jude. I mean, we love each other, but we're kids. We just couldn't have handled it.”

A real friend would have known, or guessed. But Hank and Eppie had been drama-free in my book and I've been tearing out every page that doesn't say “Maggie.” I've seen so much, it's hard to admit I've been blind.

“I didn't know,” I say.

She shrugs. “Nobody did. Except Maggie. I went to her for advice. I guess she just seemed more worldly than the rest of us.”

“Did she help?” I ask, thinking of how little Maggie really knew, how she had come to me in turn.

But Eppie nods. “It always helps, to have a friend listen. But it was still hard. Very hard.” She shakes her head, remembering. “Say, don't bring it up with Hank, all right? He doesn't need to go through it again.”

I hear the reprimand in her words, even though she doesn't say it. He doesn't need to relive it, but neither does she.

“I won't,” I promise.

Eppie is one of the last good ones. She deserves to be happy. I'd hoped that was already the case, but she had me fooled.

Now I'm starting to wonder if Maggie was the only real innocent in our circle, or did she have other secrets of her own?

“Why are you digging this up, Jude?” Eppie asks. She sounds angry and defeated and sad.

I take her hand in mine. “Because ever since Maggie died, I've felt alone. I'm starting to see I'm not the only one.”

Eppie looks at me then, really looks, and I wonder what she sees. Someone like Scott who can't let go? A delusional girl with a death grip on the past? Or a friend? She squeezes my hand.

“Do you know why I went to New Jersey?” There were a few reasons, but I would only share one. “To see my dad. On neutral ground, at my aunt's place.”

Eppie shifts positions, trying to follow the change of subject.

“It was . . . bad when my folks split up. I haven't seen him in four years,” I explain.

Eppie relaxes. This is quid pro quo. Secrets are better shared, so I'm giving her one of mine.

“How'd it go?” she asks. The spotlight is on me now. She breathes deeper. I don't. But I keep going.

“It didn't. Maggie died before I could see him. And she's the one who encouraged me to go.”

Eppie's face crumples with dismay. “I'm sorry, babe. That sucks.”

“It's fine,” I lie. “He's remarried. Some woman with a daughter my age. They sent me wedding pictures after the fact. A surprise elopement to an island somewhere. I guess you can't get there from LAX, or they'd have asked me to come. Right?”

Eppie is giving me soft eyes. “That's bogus,” she says.

“Yeah.”

We sit for a moment in raw silence. Quid pro quo's a bitch.

“You're not getting too heavy over here, are you?” It's Eppie's dad, Mike, come to check on us.

Mike has an easy way about him that's a thousand miles distant from my own parents. I can imagine my mother at this party if she'd stayed, voice pitched too high, tottering around in inappropriate shoes for a barefoot, flip-flop night. She'd be oh-so-friendly to everyone while they laughed behind her back. My dad would just sit in his car, dialing the cops.

But Mike takes a swig from his beer and says, “Come on, Shasta's reading cards.” He reaches out a rough, weathered hand and pulls me to my feet. Eppie waves good-bye and steals the chance to recover herself while I follow Mike through the crowd.

Tallulah and Dane are here. She's perched on his lounge chair like a teacup on the edge of a shelf. Dane lazes back, a drink in one hand, the other playing with her hair. I've seen it before, the Appearance. She's counting the minutes until she's been here Long Enough and can leave. Dane's got his hand on her and his eyes on the girls
dancing near the fire pit. He looks like a lion in a cage, each stroke of her hair like the lazy swish of a tail.

I follow his gaze through a mosh of blond- and red-haired girls from school, and spot Luke Liu on the far side of the fire. He's drunk. It doesn't take more than a look to know it. He's in his uptight Windbreaker with the unironic '80s Nehru collar over a polo and pressed jeans, but there's a bottle in his hand and his face is red the way some Asian people get with their inability to metabolize alcohol quickly.

Maggie never turned red. She'd had too much practice, or better makeup.

I wave, but Luke doesn't see me, his eyes intense and watery, glaring into the flames of the pit, as if daring the fire to stand up and fight. No point in questioning him tonight. I doubt he can string a sentence together, let alone a coherent thought.

I wonder where Joey is.

A twist, a turn, and Mike pulls me inside the house toward the sunroom that backs onto the yard. Outside, the heathens leap and thrash to Hank's music. Inside, there's a short line for the bathroom and the telltale scent of pot seeping from under a closed door down the darkened hallway. A sharp giggle verifies the illicit goings-on.