Thin Ice (4 page)

When I
reached Walt’s, everyone was there. 

I had trouble finding the place
, ’cause I’d only been there that one time before, and hadn’t paid much attention.  But, somehow, I found it.  I felt my way there.  Paul was a lighthouse guiding the way. 

Walt’s house was a
tiny, unimposing, one-story house with a flat porch, no steps, and beams that held up an awning.  There were also beams in the basement, I knew, holding up the ceiling.

Walt came and leaned on the screen door
.  Walt’s hair was a different cut of punk.  Paul’s hair wasn’t cut punk at all, nor Raj’s.  Tom’s was spiked like in the pictures on punk-rock album covers, but Dave’s was the punkest of all.  Practically a Mohawk, and eventually he did grow a full-on Mohawk.  Walt looked like he’d been to the beauty shop for his punk haircut.  It was snipped and clipped to an artistic scissor fringe around the ears and shoulder, and then spiked at a slope from his ears to the top of his head. 

             
Walt leaned a little more forward and glanced at the sidewalk, at Dad’s black car.  His slanting eyes were sparkling and black, darting, tiny marbles.  He seemed ready to ask me where my car was, but instead opened the screen door further and slunk up next to it to let me pass. 

As I passed him
, I had to rub up against him.  He snuck a little peck on the back of my neck, sending a pleasant shiver down my spine.  I went through the kitchen, straight to the basement stairs.  I saw photos of both him and his dark, beauty-              queen sister on shelves in wooden bookcases, along with trinkets from foreign countries.  I saw his mother in the far distant corner of the room, this mysterious, ornamental creature from Mexico. 

The basement was dark
, like it had been the last time I’d been here.  Everyone was ready to go.  We piled into my car.  The leftovers tried to fit in with Walt and Gay in Walt’s two-seater. 

             
“God!” Gay shouted. “Can’t you fit in Jane’s car?’

             
“That’s not Jane’s car; that’s her dad’s car,” said Krishna.

“Both cars belong to her parents,” said Ziggy.

              “Can’t you fit in that?”

             
“Just let me in.” Krishna butted Gay over.  Some guy came in and sat on Krishna’s lap.  They looked plain ridiculous.

             
I didn’t know who all climbed in my car; I lost count.  My dad’s car was always super clean, while mine was a mess.  The cigarette lighter in his dashboard worked perfectly well; I liked that.  I also liked the lights in his dash much better than in mine—or, I should say, in my mom’s.  But it felt like mine.  That car’s dash had old-fashioned everything, and wasn’t well lit.  Dad’s was downright beautiful.

             
I wished I could drive it all the time.

             
“What happened to your car?” asked Chrystal.

             
“Lucy slashed my tires.”

             
“She let the air out of them,” Paul said.

             
“You’re kidding, really?”

             
“No.”

             
“Did you see her do it?” Ziggy asked.

             
“No,” I said.

             
“Then how do you know it was her?”

             
“She passed me and called me a slut.”

             
“That doesn’t prove she did it,” Ziggy said snottily.  “Maybe someone else did it.  Ever think about that?”

             
“It had to be her,” I said.  “It had to.  Who else could it be?”

             
“Plenty of people.”

             
“Are you saying everyone hates me?

             
“Hey, can I put on a tape?” Paul asked.  He pulled one out of his pocket and put it in.  “Nice tape deck.”

             
“Wow, Jane,” Ziggy said. “Is anything not about you?”

             
“What do you mean by that?” I snapped at him. “How could someone slashing my tires not be about me?  I was scared, even.  It had to be someone who hates me.”

             
“The tires weren’t slashed, someone let the air out of them,” Paul said.

             
“But someone had to do it.  So what did you mean, Ziggy?  That I think everything is about me.”

             
“You figure it out, Janey Lou.  You like doing that.” 

             
Ooh, I hated him.  I decided to keep perfectly silent, only quietly leaning over to ask Paul for directions, even though Ziggy kept yelling them out: “Go here, turn here, take a left here; it’s about five miles.”

             
“Where is it?” I would lean over and whisper to Paul.

             
“I just told you!” Ziggy yelled from the back.

             
“I don’t know where it is,” Paul murmured. “Just follow his directions.”

             
The rest of them talked to one another in conversations that seemed pleasant compared to ours. 

             
After a while Ziggy said to Paul, “What is this tape?  It’s pretty good.”

             
“It’s mine.  I wrote it,” said Paul.

I sat silently simmering and thinking about how much I hated Ziggy
.  Meanwhile, Ziggy talked and laughed and had a great time.  After he had hurt my feelings and basically called me a—a what?  I didn’t even know what he’d called me. 

I
had a foggy, vague feeling and a pain in the pit of my stomach as I drove in the dark toward the quarry.  Why were we going there?  I didn’t feel comfortable enough to ask.  I didn’t feel comfortable enough to talk.  I’d been insulted and I was the one driving everyone.  I glanced at Paul.  At least he wasn’t being mean to me.  And the guys in the back seemed neutral enough. 

             
The drive seemed dark and somber: not speaking, not high, and out on whatever that street turns into after New York Avenue ends or merges into something else and then becomes the lonely road that goes south but feels like it goes north.  I felt so alone in that crowded car. 

They were just using me for my car
.  Well, maybe not Paul.  He was watching me.  When I looked at him, he smiled and grabbed my hair and wrapped it around his fingers.  Ziggy had asked him a lot of questions about his song and had his damn elbows on each of our seats, his face right between us.  I could see him in the mirror.  I adjusted the mirror so I didn’t have to look at him.  I heard him laugh immediately, like he’d seen me do it.

“Your elbow is bothering my head and making it hard for me to drive,” I said to Ziggy, and tried to shake it off the seat.

              “You focus on your driving,” he said.  “It’s bad enough without you complaining.”

             
“Bad! You’re making it bad with your elbow in my face.”

             
He moved his elbow, and continued talking to Paul about which bands had influenced him.  Ziggy was actually trying to argue with Paul over his musical influences.

             
“Don’t you think Paul would know who his influences are?” I snapped at Ziggy.

             
They looked at me for quite a while, as if I were being unreasonably angry, and then Ziggy said, “Not necessarily.”

“Look out!” Paul yelled,
grabbing the steering wheel.  I had nearly hit an oncoming car.  I secretly blamed Ziggy for this, and simmered more.

             
“Turn left here,” Ziggy instructed.  All I could think was:
These people are using me for my car.  Why am I driving them?
Driving my dad’s car was making me extra aware of this.

“Is this some kind of city
-wide party?” I asked Paul.

             
“I don’t know.”

             
“Yeah,” Ziggy said, “a lot of guys from West High had a keg party going and I—”

             
“I didn’t ask you,” I said. 

             
I tuned back in on the conversation after I had cooled down a bit, and heard Ziggy saying, “Punk was a thing on the coasts.  It’s dead already where it started, but we’re just getting it now.”

             
“Like the stars,” I said.

             
“Huh?”

             
“Light-years,” I said, and took a drag off my cig. “Like when you see a star.  Some of them have burned out already by the time we see them.”

             
He did that Ziggy thing, where he squinted and moved his jaw back and forth in thought.

             
“Wow,” Paul said. “That’s a cool thought!”                He looked at me like he’d never seen me before.

             
“What is?” Dave asked from the back.

             
Paul explained it. Ziggy said nothing, and Dave and Jenny and Chrystal began a conversation that went on and on about punk music not being dead.  Punk was just starting.  “Look at the Dead Kennedys,” Chrystal observed.

             
Ziggy sat back in the middle of the backseat with his arms folded, staring out the window.  He didn’t jump in to the middle of the fray when I started in on how terrible I thought the Dead Kennedys were.

I tapped
my cigarette ash out in my dad’s ashtray.

             
“Ow!” I screamed.  “Ouch, ouch, ouch, put it out!  Put it out!” I was swerving off the road and into oncoming traffic.  Paul grabbed the wheel.  I slapped at my leg.  The burning cherry from the cigarette fell under my feet.  It had already burned a tiny hole in Glinda’s alligator pants and was now burning a hole in the floor mat.

             
“Pull over!” Dave yelled.

Ziggy sat
—arms folded the entire time—like nothing was happening, jaw still moving back and forth, and a mild grin on his face like he was enjoying the show

As the horns sounded, he was jostled back and forth between
Jenny and Chrystal, both of whom were screaming and yelling out advice.  I had the sense that his arms didn’t come unfolded.  I pulled onto the gravel to a stop, hearing the pebbles fly up into the metal under the hood.  I stomped out the cherry, which had burned a two-centimeter hole in the floor carpet underneath my brakes.  I lay over the steering wheel and gasped a sigh of relief.  Everyone was breathing hard and saying, “Oh my God!”

All e
xcept for Ziggy.

Walt’s car pulled up behind me
.  Walt leaned out the window, asking why we’d stopped.  Krishna climbed out, came over, and crawled into the back, butting Chrystal over till she was dumped frontways on top of Jenny.

“There’s no more room in this car
!” Chrystal shouted.  “We almost got into an accident.”

“Just drive,”
Krishna said.

I heard the guy with the thin nose slam Walt’s car door before
it swerved out in front of us.

“I thought they didn’t know the way there,” Paul said
.

Dave said
, “They don’t.  Get in front of them so they don’t lose their way.”

“Just drive there
; don’t worry about them,” said Krishna.

W
hen we arrived, I parked near a big pit and some trees.  Everyone started leaving and slamming doors.  The dirt lot was chock-full of cars.

There was a keg
, and deafening, headbanger music.  It was mostly freaks at the quarry—from all over town—hardly any punks.  Of course, we were the only punks in town. Nobody else in town from West High or North knew anything about punk.  We only knew because of Ziggy, who had brought that kind of music into Oshkosh, along with punk clothing.  Krishna said no one had been punk in Oshkosh before Ziggy started listening to it, and then the jocks were known to listen to it from time to time at their keg parties.  Then the Transistors formed their band and played at the parties. 

After everyone
left the car, they stood around complaining and heading for the kegs.  Everywhere there were people talking, cigarettes burning, competing boom boxes blaring.  REO Speedwagon competed in one area with the Rolling Stones in another and Black Sabbath blared from across the water.  Teenagers had come from all over the city, which was odd for a Thursday night.

             
“Krishna?” I said. 

Gay
sat in the front seat after everyone else had left except for Krishna and me.

             
In the backseat, Krishna was having some kind of trouble with a beer bottle.  She was completely drunk, and kept kicking the bottle under the front seat.                “Christ!” she yelled.

             
“What the fuck?” Gay shouted at her.

             
“Ugh!”

             
“What are you doing?” I asked.

             
“God!” Krishna yelled. “Chill!”

             
“You chill.  You’re fucking wasted.” Gay tried to grab the bottle.

Krishna
kept kicking it.

             
“Ow!” Gay shouted, pulling her bruised hand back.

             
“What the fuck is your problem?” Krishna demanded.  She was coming unhinged.  I’d never seen her do this before, but this time she actually became violent and shoved the front seat into Gay’s back.

             
“Uh, excuse me,” Gay shouted back and cuffed her.  And over what?  Nothing!

             
“God,” Krishna yelled, kicking her.  Kicking!  “I can’t wait till I go to camp, and fucking get the fuck away from you!”

Krishna
was going to camp for two weeks in the summer.  School was almost out.  Summer was almost here.  I would be going to California to stay with my aunt for a couple months.

“Good, go to fucking camp,” said Gay
.  She grabbed the beer bottle, climbed out of the car, and walked off. 

In the distance
, I could see Glinda in a crowd of jocks standing under a clump of thick, heavy trees.  I could see her, talking, and laughing her soft laugh that somehow carried above the music salad.  Her hair was cut in another new, strange cut.  Where did she find those cuts?  Walter was the only other person in town whose hair was that stylized. 

Gay strutted over to them.
 

             
“Gay!” they shouted.

             
Krishna started giggling inexplicably in the backseat. 

“What’s
funny?” I asked.

             
“What happened to Glinda’s pants?” she asked. 

             
I looked down.                “Holy shit,” I exclaimed.  The cigarette burn was much bigger than I’d thought.

             
“How did you know these were Glinda’s pants?” I asked.

             
“I don’t know.  They look like her?” she said.  “They sure as hell don’t look like you.”  Krishna lit one of her Marlboro Reds. 

I wanted to ask, but
already knew what she meant.  I knew they didn’t look like anything I would wear.  But they made me look great.                “I can’t believe I did this to them,” I said, shaking my head.

             
“I know, what a blown deal,” she said, and blew out a puff. “Can you blow smoke rings?”

             
“Aren’t you guys getting out?” some random guy stuck his head in the opened car door and asked.  Krishna blew a stream of smoke in his face in response.  Wait a second.  He was familiar.

             
“Come on, Krishna, everyone is skinny-dipping,” he explained.

             
The mall.  I knew him from the mall.  Krishna had pointed him out as a guy she had flirted with in her geography class.  She said she’d only flirted with him because he’d sat to her left or something like that, and had a policy of flirting with anyone who sat to her left in geography class.  If they moved and sat to her right, she completely ignored them, and began flirting with whoever had replaced them to her left.  “I only do this in geography class,” she’d said.  She’d giggled and giggled.  She’d said she was waiting for one of them to figure out what she was doing—but, of course, none of them ever did, although it was directly related to geography.  “What if a girl sat there?” I had asked her once.  She had shrugged and said that had never happened.

             
“You two gonna go?” said the boy from her geography class.

             
Krishna blew another stream of smoke in his face.  Then she turned to me and said, “Hey, that’s one way you could get out of Glinda seeing you in those pants: go skinny-dipping.”

             
I nodded thoughtfully.  “Glinda would kill me if she saw these.”

             
“Glinda Sinclair?” asked the boy.

             
“She’s not going to kill you,” Krishna said. “Look, if you couldn’t do it to yourself, kill yourself I mean, why would she be able to?”

             
“What do you mean?” the random boy asked.  We ignored him, of course.  What was he doing, standing there, talking to us?

             
“That’s true,” I said. “That’s a good point.”

             
“Glinda Sinclair is fucking hot!” the geography guy said.  He sat in the passenger seat where Gay had been.

             
“Just tell her to chill,” said Krishna.

             
“I love these pants,” I said. “I do feel bad about ruining them.”

             
“Those pants are cool,” the guy said.  “You look great in them.”

             
“Ugh, would you shut up?” said Krishna, turning to him, like a fly she was ready to swat.

             
“Why aren’t you talking to me?” said geography-class guy.

             
“Because,” she said, finally turning her black eyes on him, “I’m talking to Jane.”

             
He left, slamming the door behind him.

             
“That was that guy from your geography class,” I said.

             
“Yes!  How did you know?”

             
“Ha ha!  You decided only to flirt with the guy on your left.  He sat on your left.”

“Oh my God,” she exclaimed
. “Are you psychic?”

             
“No, you told me,” I said.

             
She burst out laughing. “I did?”

             
“Yes!”

             
“I thought I didn’t tell anybody that.  Freak!” Was she talking about herself or him?

             
“What I don’t get is”—and I lit a cigarette, getting ready to ask this question—“If you only flirt with him in class, how does that work?”

             
“I ignore him everywhere else,” she said, giggling.  Then she said, “You smoke like a chimney.  That’s why you burned those pants.  I can’t believe how big that hole is.  I’m surprised you didn’t light yourself on fire.  It would be cool to light yourself on fire.”

             
“Is everyone really going skinny-dipping?” I asked.

             
“Seems that way,” she said. 

B
y the trees and rocks floated burning cigarette ends like fireflies in the forest.  Still we heard the boom boxes, none of it punk music—none of it our music.  I saw naked teenagers jumping off cliffs.  I heard splashing and screaming and laughter and incomprehensible shouts.  There were jocks.  There was the football team quarterback, Jim Todd, who always tousled my hair when he saw me and insisted on calling me Janey Lou, which I hated. 

             
“You mean ‘tussled,’” Krishna corrected me. 

What
?  I guessed I had said that out loud.

             
“I don’t want Glinda to see the pants.  I don’t want to get out of the car.” I hesitated, fully planning to take them off and leave them in the car.  “I can’t believe this happened to me.”

             
“What do you mean, you?  They’re her pants.”

             
“Yeah, but she will be mad at me.”

             
“So?  Oh my God, you chickenshit—what is she going to do to you?”

             
“Beat me up?” I suggested.

             
Krishna burst out laughing.  “Glinda?  Beat up somebody?  You, I could see beating someone up.  You’d kick her ass.”

             
I didn’t want to kick her ass.  It would be like shattering a blown-glass vase, the kind we brought back from Venice when I was a kid.  I remembered watching them blow the hot glass out of the ovens.

             
Chrystal climbed in the car, sat next to Krishna, and slammed the door.                “I hate that fucking music,” she said.

             
“What are you doing?” I asked, because she’d started taking off her clothes.

             
“Going skinny-dipping.  I’m going to leave my clothes in here.  They’re safer.  What happened to Glinda’s pants?”

             
“I burned them when I almost crashed.  That’s why I almost crashed,” I said. “My leg was burning.”

             
“Oh man,” she said. “Glinda is going to be fucking pissed.  She is going to beat the crap out of you.  Those pants are so cool.”

             
“I know.”

             
“I wonder where she got them,” Chrystal added thoughtfully.

             
“She made them herself,” Krishna said. “She can make another pair.”

             
“I wonder if she can make me a pair.  Only with different material.  I don’t like that material.  What is it?” Chrystal asked, rubbing the strange corduroy between her fingers.

             
“I know, it’s weird.  It’s not corduroy,” I said.  “It’s got those tiny squares.”

             
“They’re amazing,” Chrystal said. “Too bad you did this to them.  They’re irreplaceable.”

             
“No they’re not,” Krishna said, rolling her eyes, “Glinda can make another pair.  That’s what she’ll do too, sew another pair.  That freak.”

             
“Oh no she won’t; you can’t get that material anywhere,” Chrystal said. “What could go more wrong?  All you need to make this worse is to get your period in those, Jane.”

             
“Gross,” Krishna snapped. “Can we stop talking about the pants?”

“
Come skinny-dipping with us and then Glinda won’t have to see them.  Later you can try and sew them,” suggested Chrystal.

             
“Who fucking cares?” Krishna shouted. “Here, give me those fucking pants. I’ll burn them.”

             
“Krishna you are fucked up.” I tried to stop her. “You’re wasted.  Stop!”

             
But she didn’t stop.  She took her cigarette and ground it right down into my thigh, burning another hole through the material and singeing my skin.