The Suburban Strange (7 page)

“Brenden!” Patrick kissed him on both cheeks and then looked curiously at Celia.

“Patrick, I’d like you to meet Celia. This is her first time here.”

“Hi, Celia, thanks for coming!” Patrick took her hand and kissed her cheeks, too. She felt like a celebrity, looking out over the room from the booth while Patrick and Brenden talked. This place was the opposite in every way of what Celia had been tempted to imagine based on the miserable school dances she’d endured. There was no jumping or running around, no yelling. The people in this room behaved as though they were part of a stylized performance. Whether they stood or sat, it was as if they expected to be photographed. When they talked, they looked almost formal, bending their heads together and speaking carefully. When they danced, it was minimal but expressive, with deliberate steps and gestures. Many of them moved their lips along with the lyrics of the songs, making it clear they knew the music intimately. When Brenden was done chatting with Patrick, Celia returned with him to the others, who had taken their places at one side of the room.

A new song began and Brenden started as though he’d been pinched. “ ‘Whispered in Your Ear,’” he told her in haste on his way out to the dance floor. “Patrick knows I love this song!” The other four moved just as quickly to join him. Celia hadn’t contemplated dancing, and she stayed behind, unable to summon the confidence to join them. She desperately wanted to avoid making a fool of herself in this place, so she watched them, hoping to learn some sort of proper dance technique by observation. Ivo’s dancing was restricted almost completely to a stately step-touch back and forth, his eyes often closed. Liz tended to work in a small circle, hands clasped behind her back, looking down as though she had lost something. Brenden occasionally made small gestures that illustrated the lyrics. Marco was the loosest of them, moving his hips and raising his arms. And Regine had the most elaborate style, windmilling her arms around her in an exotic manner, pushing and pulling the air with her hands as though she were performing an incantation. Other people watched her admiringly. Celia badly wanted to dance, but she had no intention of attempting it and being exposed as an amateur.

The inner sanctum of Diaboliques was so much better than she could have imagined, even if she had let her fantasy run wild. Instead of looking the same and doing the same things, as people often did in the outside world, in here everyone clearly valued individuality as long as it was executed well. They seemed to have noticed Celia, but to her relief, no one scrutinized her as if she might do something wrong. The ones who came over to greet members of the Rosary nodded in her direction, and she assumed she was being introduced in absentia. The room, the people, the night—everything was beautifully theatrical, and now Celia understood: the Rosary attempted to reproduce this feeling, this experience of Diaboliques, elsewhere in their lives. Being here helped her to understand the choices they made and the way they lived during the rest of the week. The next time she was in the middle of the chaotic school cafeteria Celia was going to find it that much easier to ignore everyone around her, as her friends did. Spending Friday nights here in this beautiful room, where everyone else from school would have been so obviously out of place, was the prize for enduring everyday life for the rest of the week. Celia realized she only had been on the outside, fearful of the eyes that dismissed her, thinking it was easiest just to disappear, because she hadn’t figured out where the inside was. It wasn’t with those kids at school any longer. It was here at Diaboliques. It was with the Rosary.

“How do you like it?” Liz asked her at one point when they were standing off to the side again.

“It’s beautiful. I didn’t know anything like this existed,” Celia replied. “If you had described it to me I wouldn’t have believed you, and now here I am, in the middle of it!” Every song was strange and amazing. Every time she looked around she found something or someone new to admire. There were elaborate wall sconces that dripped cut glass like chandeliers. A woman in a fitted smoking jacket and floor-length gown used the mirror in her compact to check the flat, shiny waves of hair on her temples. A man arrived dressed completely in ivory. A sort of shawl-collared knee-length coat over a cream ribbed sweater and wide-legged canvas pants made him look like some kind of heavenly longshoreman. Celia studied everyone at Diaboliques, wanting to take as much of it home with her as she could. She felt the familiar impulse to re-create all of it in her sketchbook, knowing she could spend the rest of the weekend capturing all these stunning people. But for the first time, underneath that impulse was a new one: Celia wouldn’t be content to know this world from behind a sketchbook—she wanted to take her place in it.

In the midst of this sensory overload Celia noticed a tall boy with closely cropped black hair on the other side of the room. His broad shoulders and thick forearms made him look powerful even standing still. He wore a black shirt and pants that were plain by Diaboliques standards, but Celia was more taken with the silvery sparks in his gray eyes, which she could see from twenty feet away—because he was staring at her. She looked away and then looked back, and still he stared. Celia felt a strange current flow through her, a mix of anxiety and pleasure. She wanted to decode the boy’s gaze, but she wasn’t sure she dared.

“Who is that?” Regine asked, easily locating the source of Celia’s distraction. Regine turned to Liz and pointed at the boy without even attempting to be subtle about it. Liz looked and then shrugged at Regine. Celia was embarrassed, but the boy across the floor didn’t seem to care. He continued to stare at Celia, keeping his hands deep in his pockets. “I don’t know about him,” Regine said. “Maybe I’m being overprotective, but I’ve never seen him before. We know all the regulars in this room.”

As it turned out, no action was required. The boy never came over, nor did he try to speak with any of them. A few times Celia saw him dance to the most abrasive songs Patrick played that night, and Brenden told her the names of the bands: Fields of the Nephilim, Christian Death, and Virgin Prunes. The boy had a leonine grace, gliding surely from foot to foot, but he kept his eyes down, and to Celia he looked as though he were hearing the music through headphones rather than loudspeakers. He didn’t seem to notice anyone around him until he finished, returned to his place across the room, and raised his silver eyes to find her again.

“If you keep watching him, he might think you’re interested,” Regine said.

“He’s the one watching me!” Celia protested. “I don’t know if I’m interested, but he
is,
well . . .” She studied the boy the way one searches for lightning in the night sky or peers down over mountain cliffs from an airplane window. The danger was beautiful as long as it stayed at a distance. As unexpected, as unprecedented as it was to be stared at this way by a boy, Celia wasn’t disconcerted by it. She had been transported to an alternate universe where everyone was brilliant and stunning, and everything was perfectly appointed, and all the new secrets she cherished were brought out into the open; why wouldn’t there be a brooding, handsome boy waiting there for her to arrive? Celia wasn’t about to question the rules of this new world, whom it would contain or what role he might play. And she wasn’t about to exert her own will, either. She had gotten this far with barely a single decision of her own. Celia was keenly aware that she wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for the Rosary, so if Regine and Liz told her to be wary, she would play by their rules.

Throughout the night Brenden gave her background details about the music she heard. “Ah, this is a classic! Killing Joke, ‘Love Like Blood.’ I’ll make a copy of it for you. The lead singer decided the world was going to end, and he moved somewhere like Iceland to prepare for it, and then it didn’t happen, at least not yet. The words are really intense.” Celia made another mental note to look up Brenden’s blog the next day.

“How did you find this place?” she asked Liz.

“Ivo found out about it. But if you start looking around for places to hear this kind of music, there really isn’t anywhere else. When Ivo and I started coming here, it was like we had found Wonderland. We never expected to hear these songs anywhere outside our own houses, and we definitely didn’t think there were all these other people who loved it, too! We were so reverential about it, we didn’t talk to anyone here for six months,” Liz said. “Brenden was the first to crack. He was hearing songs and having no idea who they were by, and it drove him crazy, so he started asking Patrick. And then we gradually met the rest of Patrick’s regulars.”

Too soon it was midnight and Ivo rounded them up to make their departure. Celia stole a final glance at the silver-eyed boy as they started off. She had a twinge, wondering if he would be there next Friday, if she would feel the strange current flow through her again. When she looked over at him she thought he could tell she was leaving, and he almost seemed to be fighting the impulse to approach her, but that could have been wishful thinking on her part. She processed with the group to the booth, where Patrick kissed them all again. “Leaving so early?” he asked.

“We’re still earning Celia’s mother’s trust,” Ivo told him. “So it’ll be early for a little while.”

“You could stay,” Celia said to the other four, hoping Regine wouldn’t resent her for having to take her home.

“No, we’re a group. We arrive together, and we leave together,” Ivo said firmly. Celia was touched. It was the clearest demonstration the Rosary had made that they considered her one of them. She wished they could have stayed until Diaboliques closed.

They made their way through the other rooms, down and out to the cars. The aura of Diaboliques gradually lifted as Celia traveled farther from the inner sanctum where Patrick was king and mysterious tall boys waited. Rufus called her Paperwhite again and wished them good night.

“Did you have a good time?” Marco asked as the other four walked ahead.

“I loved it! Thank you so much for bringing me,” Celia said.

“Well, we do it every Friday. It’s like church,” Marco joked. “Were Regine and Liz keeping you from talking to that guy?”

“I wouldn’t have talked to him anyway. They’re just being protective.”

“Sure.” Marco’s tone was a little sarcastic. “And the two of them manage their own love lives so well. Someday I’ll have to tell you about Regine’s unrequited love for Ivo and Liz’s unrequited love for one of the football players, of all people.”

“The guy in the parking lot on the first day of school, right? Who is he?”

“His name is Skip—I know, Skip, right? His favorite color is
orange
. What more do you need to know? Liz refuses to talk about him, so don’t bring it up or I’ll just get in trouble for gossiping again,” Marco said.

They said good night by the cars. As she put the key in the ignition, Regine told Celia, “When you’re allowed to stay out later, we can stop at the all-night diner and get food before we head home. On a good night we don’t get back until three or four.”

Celia sank back in the passenger seat, enveloped by the sumptuous music on the second half of Brenden’s mix. She thought life really was better with the right soundtrack. Out the window she could see the stars, and she felt as though all of it had been made for her. After she slipped in her front door and crept up her stairs, the thing that kept Celia from falling asleep was her happiness. The beginning of school had been a lovely adventure, but now another adventure had overshadowed it, one that felt even more vivid, more life-changing. Celia wondered if moments like these would happen all her life, or if they were a special kind of alchemy that was only possible for teenagers. She took out her sketchbook and made a quick drawing of Regine at Diaboliques, her arms unfurled, one foot touching lightly in front of the other, her head tilted to the side. She was tempted to draw the silver-eyed boy, but she resisted. It felt like a girlish, lovesick thing to do, and not at all behavior of which the Rosary would approve. She wanted to be cool and unaffected like her friends. Celia looked around her bedroom, full of pastel colors and frills, and thought,
I need to redecorate
.

THE NEXT DAY CELIA SAT
in front of her computer and typed in the website address Brenden had given her for his blog. The dark and lush graphic design reminded her of the d´cor at Diaboliques. There were categories of posts from which to choose, and she clicked on "Strangers in Open Cars —Songs You Should Know." The first entry on the list was Cocteau Twins— "The Spangle Maker." In the margin she clicked on an audio player to hear the song while she was reading Brenden's essay-length post.

“The Spangle Maker” was unlike anything Celia had ever heard, even including all the new music she’d encountered in the previous months. It was a song that would have mystified her just a few months ago, but now it seemed to unfold like a treasure map, revealing details and ideas as Brenden pointed them out to her. When the song ended, she clicked the player link to start it again. As it began a second time, she felt that already she was hearing it differently. The song’s strangeness was wrapping around her like a shawl.

Brenden had been right about the lyrics. Celia barely could make out more than a word or two, and those didn’t really add up to anything. In the chorus she heard what sounded like “It’s pomegranate” and smiled. It felt as if the song was about her, just a little. Celia played the song yet again, and she reread Brenden’s post. Then she kept clicking the link, until she had heard “The Spangle Maker” a dozen times. It was just as strange and wonderful as Brenden had described it, and his writing was the perfect tour guide to embrace the strangeness, wade into it, accept it on its own terms. Celia remembered what Brenden had said about having heroes to inspire her, and she wondered if she should tell him he, and the rest of the Rosary, had attained that status for her.

The aroma of Diaboliques lingered in her memory—a mixture of industrial space, exotic perfumes, and alcohol. The people posed and danced in her mind. Celia’s first impulse was to open her sketchbook again and see how well she could re-create it all. But her hand stopped on the cover.
I have to learn to dance,
she thought.
And not just dancing acceptable in a high school gymnasium. I have to learn to dance well enough for Diaboliques.