By Lisa Locascio
In kindergarten I told the other kids that I was a cat princess, a royal escapee from Venus. To prove it, I crawled. Everyone still remembered this in eighth grade. By then, every day, I wore a pair of tight black pants that crunched when I walked and a thick spiked leather collar. When my crunchy pants were dirty, I wore a pair of bright blue trousers with fifty-four inch cuffs, whichswung around my feet like the skirt of my chorus costume in our sixth-grade production of Oklahoma! I had an eyeshadow compact with a black rectangle and a red rectangle and a tube of liquid eyeliner in “Scab.” I swabbed these colors around my eyes and wore t-shirts with nude women and strange symbols printed across the chest. I didn’t know where the pictures on my clothes were from. I didn’t care. I wanted to be different from what I was.
I had spent years collecting my few cool things. I found the crunchy pants in a mall in Florida when my parents took Sophia on vacation to Disney World (they said the trip was for me, too, but it wasn’t, I was too old for Disney World). After two days of riding Dumbo and various small trains, I convinced my parents to take me into the gray area our Disney maps called “off-campus,” to the blocky building that stood at the end of the parking lot where we caught the bus to the Magic Kingdom every morning. Most of the mall’s merchandise was broken. All of it looked dingy in the miserable light. So the crunchy pants were even more of a miracle, glowing in the dust like a butterfly’s dark wings.
I found the shirts in catalog descriptions that spun out dreams of what would happen when I wore them. GODDESS SKATEBOARDS TEE: Proclaim your divinity with this one hundred percent cotton crew neck; DOVE SILHOUETTE TOP: Bring peace with this nylon-blend pullover in puce and navy. I dog-eared the pages and asked for Christmas gifts. The “Scab” eyeliner was from Walgreens, the eyeshadow from Jewel, and the blue trousers from a store that sold skaters clothes. I wanted to ride a skateboard, too, but I had terrible balance. I wanted to fly, but everyone wanted to fly, and I didn’t want to want what everyone else did.
My parents didn’t mind buying me things because I had good grades and because their parents had always made them feel guilty about wanting things.
“It’s good to want things,” my father said, “if you’re willing to work for them.”
My mom agreed, even though once a week they locked themselves in their bedroom and screamed at each other about money until the sun went down. I made up stories about why they were fighting. They were angry because of the way I had looked at my mother, because my sister Sophia had refused to go to sleep the night before, because we had both had nightmares and woken them.
Sophia was four years younger than me, with fluffy limbs and a perpetually sweet expression that belied her tendency to dissolve into fits in the cereal aisle of the Jewel. My parents enrolled us in an ever-changing curriculum of afterschool activities. This schedule kept my mother in her car for five hours, afternoon into early evening, as she chauffeured us to different corners of the towns surrounding our town.
My father was a lawyer without a firm who went to an office alone every day. My mom got checks in the mail. In actuality their fights were mainly about the amount of time my mom spent in the car, about her checks, about my dad’s office loneliness, about the fact that dinner was often not ready when he returned home. When they stopped yelling and came out of their bedroom to cook—that year my mom favored frozen bags of vegetables and rotini pasta that she could dump in a pan and walk away from—I hugged them and smelled their sweater smells.
In the winter of eighth grade, my mom saw a t-shirt she knew I’d like at a store in the city and brought it home for me. The shirt bore a band’s name, three words in spiraling script across a green-gray background like paint splashed on a cement wall. Behind the words was the outline of a farm animal, maybe a goat.
My mom knew I wanted to be someone else. She came into my room as I lay on the floor drawing in my notebook, sketching breasts and dark eyes in smeary ballpoint, and left the t-shirt on my bed. At first it was stiff and smelled like plastic. Then I dropped it in the laundry basket and it reappeared on my bed folded and as soft as everything I loved.
That winter my only friend, Alix, moved back to Warsaw. Everyone else at school always whispered about the lies I had been telling since I was a small child. The girls were meticulous historians of my weirdness and the boys liked to watch the girls’ mouths when they talked. I told them and everyone else that I didn’t care.
The first day back at school without Alix, I wore so much red eyeliner that when I went to the office to drop off the attendance sheet, the receptionist thought I had pink eye.
I didn’t think my stories were lies, not exactly. I didn’t care what the other girls thought, the ones with the skin as clear and plain as blank sheets of paper who wore spaghetti-strap tank tops over crewneck t-shirts. They said they would be cold otherwise but I knew the truth, I knew that they were afraid of their bodies, of the aching little bumps rising up on their chests like symptoms of an infectious disease. In the locker room they performed conversations about brassieres and lipgloss, like it was 1960. They were the liars.
My breasts had swollen out of my body in sixth grade. I pretended I was over it, but I ached to join in, to tell them about the way my body hurt and was strange.
One Saturday in January, I wore the goat shirt on a trip downtown designed to make me feel less sad about the end of winter break. We were going to The Stars Our Destination, a bookstore on the north side of Chicago. My father owned a building in the neighborhood. We went there first. My mom and I waited in the empty kitchen of the unoccupied upstairs apartment as he filled out a form on a clipboard. There was a large white ceramic sink in the bedroom, next to a window that looked out on a scrubby patch of grass and a row of rusting garbage cans. I didn’t like the idea of sleeping so close to a sink.
“College girls normally rent this place,” my dad said.
We walked from my dad’s building to The Stars Our Destination, a storefront between a locksmith and a small Jewel-Osco. The windows of the bookstore were bright orange rectangles against the purple dusk. The wind blew hard against the huddled buildings.
“These used to be huge residences for rich families, but now the insides are divided into apartments,” my dad said, pointing at brownstones. I felt sad for the houses that had been broken up inside. Hunched clumps of old snow lay at the feet of the parking meters on the curb.
Inside, the bookstore was about the size of my kitchen: a large kitchen, but a small bookstore. The Stars Our Destination sold comics, science fiction, fantasy, and art books. Every surface was covered in printed material, even the glass cabinets near the register that you were supposed to lean over and look into. I closed my eyes and inhaled the smell of books: aging paper and special glue. I was alone with my parents. Sophia had choir practice, and she didn’t like places like this anyway, fluorescent-lit rooms divided by pillars of weird magazines.
I went to the fantasy section first. They didn’t have any Piers Anthony books I hadn’t already read, so I drifted to the tall racks of comic books against the far wall. I looked into the heroes’ tiny painted faces, wishing for a surprise.
Part Two
My parents read comics in bed, the two of them sitting up against big red pillows, my mom’s giant clay lamps shining down on the kingdoms of villains and angels in their hands. At night, my mother wore her hair loose around her face and my father stripped down to funny boxers printed with playing cards or water-skiers. They had taught me to read from a comic book about how letters looked like pieces of furniture. Little h is like a chair, it said, little a is like a car, and the drawings showed how this was true. I remembered my dad watching me draw the shapes. He kissed me on the cheek when I did well and his mustache tickled my nose.
When I was little my mom bought me Archie and Betty and Veronica at the grocery store and my dad brought home Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men from One Stop Comics. When I was eleven, Rick at One Stop started setting aside a little pile for me next to my dad’s big pile, a stack of EC Comics—Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, War Stories—and independent comics about teenage girl superheroes and cool serial killers. I loved the stories because they had pictures and words, because the pictures helped me move the words. People always said that boys liked comics, but I had never met one who did. My parents were the only other people I knew who read comics.
At the bottom of The Stars Our Destination’s comic racks I found a thick anthology called Taboo 9. The cover showed a gray woman, possibly dead, curled up against a pink splotch. The first story was about a “skin artist” who paid a pregnant woman to let him make her stomach transparent, rendering her body a permanent art object. I sat down with the book on an egg crate, pressed my back against the wall, and read.
When I was two or three stories in, a leg in soft gray pants bumped my hand. I looked up. A man with golden stubble on his chin looked down.
“Oh hey,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. He had blue eyes, a broad square face, tawny hair cut close to his skull. He reminded me of Dr. Green, my favorite character on the hospital show I watched with my parents on Thursday nights. I dropped my eyes back to Taboo 9, ready for him to ignore me, but instead he pulled an egg crate out from the wall and sat down.
“You like comics?” he asked. He carried a square leather bag on a strap. Dr. Green had a troubled teenage daughter who accidentally gave his baby Ecstasy, but he didn’t hold it against her. He just hugged her a lot.
“Sure,” I said. I pushed a braid behind my left ear. That day, like most days, I had parted it straight down the middle and made twin plaits on either side of my face.
“I really dig love and rockets. Man. Y’know?” he said.
I looked up at his chin. His stubble fascinated me. It was like a little hidden city under the skin of his face. He hung over me, trying to look at Taboo 9. I held out the book to him and watched him read, a smile growing at one corner of my mouth. I felt my clothes on my body, the baggy t-shirt, the baggier pants. On the other side of the store, the door to The Stars Our Destination banged open, ringing a bell. Cold air curled into the room. I watched my father’s back, bent over a book, and willed him not to turn around. My mom sat in a rocking chair in the far corner of the room, paging through a French magazine. I stared dumbly at the Reservoir Dogs poster above the cash register, wondering what the movie was about.
“Me too,” I said. He handed Taboo 9 back to me, stood, and went on talking. Love and Rockets was a comic, it turned out. The man rested one hand on the edge of the comic rack just above my head and talked about different types of drawing, ending every other sentence with “man” and occasionally throwing in a “y’know.” He spoke of motion lines and muscular legs. I nodded emphatically at appropriate times. When he was done, he looked down at me and pursed his lips. I had read that phrase before, “pursed his lips,” and immediately understood what it meant; it was kind of like a pucker, but subtler, less intentional. But I had never really seen anyone do it. I tried not to stare, failed, and looked instead at his neck.
“Would you?” the man asked.
“Huh?”
“Would you like to, y’know, get a coffee?” He raised one eyebrow, something I had been dying to learn how to do. I tried to clasp my hands over my left knee but my fingers were too long and fell apart. My scalp was on fire. I knew I was blushing.
“Uh, no, I shouldn’t,” I said eventually, in the lowest voice I could manage. I felt like Cinderella leaving the ball before midnight. “I’m here with some people.” My stomach turned over as I smiled apologetically at the floor.
“Oh, cool. Well, take it easy,” the man said. Before I could look at his face he turned and walked a few steps away, squinted at a bookshelf, and then left the store. At the sound of the door my mom briefly glanced up from her magazine, then returned her attention to her lap. I glared at my knees, my cheeks burning.
One morning in seventh grade I had stood in front of the wide windows in my school’s gymnasium. Everyone had to wait there for the first bell to ring. I wore my purple parka even though it was April and supposed to be warm. Outside was the little field where we played Capture The Flag during the last two weeks of school, when the sun was finally strong enough to bake the bluish mud into cracked brown. That morning it looked to me like a moor, a word I understood to mean a rainy field in Scotland. A silver mist hung over the sodden grass, obscuring the houses across Chicago Avenue on the far end of the little field. I had forgotten my glasses that day, so the moor was blurrily magical.
I gazed out at the field. It seemed somehow exciting, like a foreign place, like somewhere new. I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead against the condensation on the slick glass, trying to forget the hot gym, its odor of sweat and peanut butter. To my right a group of boys was yelling a word they’d made up, “Schnikes,” over and over.
“Schnikes! Schnikes!”
Behind them, little pods of girls sat in lines, braiding each other’s hair and making friendship bracelets. I wanted something, I wanted someone, I wanted so bad that my eyes flew open and my heart banged around inside my waterproof parka. What did I want? I wanted a boy, but not one of the boys in the gym; I wanted a girl, too, but no one I knew. I wanted to go to a place I had never been. The cars on Chicago Avenue pulled smoothly by, glinting in the rain like memories of color. The giant tree at the far edge of the field nodded in the wind.
The bell rang, school started, the sun came out. But after that, whenever I was left alone, my thoughts returned to the moor morning, the deep pitch of my longing matched by my confusion. At The Stars Our Destination I shook my head hard to clear it and looked up. My father leaned over my mother’s chair in the far corner of the store. They were watching me.
I walked over to them, carrying Taboo 9. My father bought it for me. The man behind the counter slipped it into a thin paper bag.
We went out into the gray-black Chicago night. The sharp cold melted the edges of buildings into dark. The El rattled over an overpass, filling the air with screeches and hiss.
“Who was that?” my dad asked.
I ran ahead of them, leaping over the snowdrifts and karate-kicking at the automatic double doors of the Jewel-Osco grocery store. My parka stretched tight against my chest. The doors swung open and I barked a laugh at the open, yellow-lit interior of the store. I wasn’t going in, that wasn’t the point. The point was that I could make the door move and no one could stop me. My parents kept trying to look at me but I wouldn’t look back.
In the car my father put old music on the radio. Light from street lamps striped my hands and boots. I tried to read my new comic in the dark, and then gave up and looked out the window. We passed a fancy bar with a blinking neon martini glass in the window, a woman with a stroller breathing white clouds as she waited for a car to parallel park, the shining sign for the Belmont stop on the Blue Line. My father pulled onto Lake Shore Drive and the lake appeared suddenly beside me, glimmering black-and-gold in my window. The water held the reflections of the skyscrapers, tall buildings and deep water staring each other down in the quiet cold night as we sped south, to the crystalline cluster of the Loop.
My mom laughed.
“I bet he had no idea how old you are,” she said.
I couldn’t see her face. I flushed in the backseat and pitched my voice too high.
“What?”
But my dad had the old music up too loud. They didn’t hear me.
Part Three
During my last spring in middle school I was Language Arts partners with Raine Weller, the only nice popular girl. She had dead straight purple-black hair and white bellbottoms. On some days all the red makeup in the world couldn’t make me not want to be friends with Raine. She smelled smoky and clean, like a beautiful mom, and she was nice to me even though she didn’t have to be. “You’re so smart, Nina,” she said to me once, and I carried the words around in my ears for days.
I knew that to earn her kindness I had to show that I knew we were not really friends, not try anything stupid like sitting next to her at lunch or trying to talk to her about her life outside of Language Arts. One day she told me about an “awesome new song on the Top Nine at Nine” and I got it into my head that if I heard this song, I might have a shot with Raine. I’d casually drop its name into our discussion of The Merchant of Venice and she would love me.
I had stuck a black sticker that said “FREAK” in white letters to the battery panel of my silver clock radio. The radio had been a birthday gift a few years earlier, a nice model with a CD drive and a tape deck, and it sat next to my pink lamp on my white bedside table. For two weeks I listened to the Top Nine every night at nine with Jimmy Szuba on Q101, Chicago’s Alternative! But there were too many songs; I couldn’t tell which one Raine thought was awesome.
The idea of being her friend revealed itself as stupid. I kept listening. On Saturday night there was a show called Zero Gravity with electronic beeping and heavy drums. On Sunday afternoons a man talked about records and then a woman told stories. On Sunday nights there was a talk show about sex hosted by two men. Sometimes, when a woman called in with a problem, they made fun of her “little girl voice” and asked if her father had raped her, and usually he had. I began to do my homework lying on my stomach on my bed so that I could listen to the radio at the same time. I put my notebook on my pillow and reached up to write. My handwriting was bumpy, but I liked the strange voices in my room at night, the songs playing over and over again.
One Friday afternoon in March, I turned on my radio and heard a man whispering about twilight. Winter was officially over, but snow was still heaped in front of the stores on the corner of Lake and Harlem. On the way home from school I had walked through a deep concrete ditch of slush, soaking my baggy blue trousers to the knee. I had misjudged the gray ground, not seen how deep the icy puddle was. I half-ran the rest of the way, shivering. At home I threw my pants over the top of the shower stall to let them dry. For a moment I looked at myself in the big mirror over the sink: yellowy stick legs jutting out of pink underwear, too-big breasts under my ribbed blue turtleneck. My flat hair was the color of brown rice.
When I pressed my face close to the mirror I saw that my skin was uneven, with little bumps like something awful waiting to press out. I thought of the Dr. Green lookalike at The Stars Our Destination, saw us together at some coffee shop, our heads bent over steaming red ceramic mugs. A flash of desire ran over my body, searing me, then vanished. I shrugged at myself in the mirror, opening my eyes very wide and peering at my familiar face. In my bedroom I put on gray sweatpants. My Science homework was to read the textbook chapter about soundwaves.
The radio was on very low when I came into my room from the bathroom, which meant that I must have forgotten to turn it off before school. When my mom found my radio still on after I went to school, she turned the volume down as far as it would go instead of switching it off. Sometimes I heard the low voices as I brushed my teeth at night and was scared before I realized that it was just the radio. I pulled my textbook from my backpack and tossed it onto my pink quilt. It fell open to the picture of a liger, the baby of a tiger and a lion, that I liked to look at when I got bored in class.
I threw myself onto my bed and flipped to the soundwave chapter. From the radio came a little piece of a whisper. I reached over to turn up the volume. Music began behind the whisper: a banjo, then drums.
The amplitude of a sound wave is the difference between the pressure of the undisturbed air and the maximum pressure caused by the wave, the book said.
The whisper grew into a soft voice, high for a man, and the idea of kissing came unasked into my mind. It was such a nice thing people did, kissing; so kind to put your mouth on another person’s mouth, let your lips touch theirs. What a nice thing, I thought over and over again, and blushed against the sound of the man’s voice. Just then he said “you.” I blushed brighter, embarrassed in front of my two little lamps, my rose shag carpeting, the double-door closet with my beloved clothes inside.
The man’s voice climbed inside my head and sat down in the room of my mind. It started unpacking the cardboard boxes of my secrets. The song was about driving at night, about summer, about being real – that was the word he kept singing, “real,” but I wouldn’t know that until later. It unfolded in my mind as “we” and “we’ll”: together we would go, me and the man with the high voice.
Sound’s propagation speed depends on the type, temperature and pressure of the medium through which it propagates.
I looked up from my textbook and stared at the radio. The last light of the day was peeping through my thick rosy blinds. I walked to the window, shag carpet pushing up under my feet, and raised the shade. Outside was the snowy winter yard that I had seen every day of my life: curved cement circular driveway, neat rectangles of lawn dressed with melting gray slush. “Nature’s snot,” my mom called it. Sometimes when she drove me home from school we started talking, and kept going even after we had pulled into the garage, sitting there in the warm dark holding hands. It seemed like this used to happen a lot more than it did now.
A red sports car sped past my house, shredding a pile of gray snow. The whispering man on the radio hit a keening tone. I turned the volume up as high as it would go and went into the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror again. My eyes flamed bright, bluer than the winter sky had ever been, and my cheeks were filled with color. My hands touched each other, rough and warm. I took off the sweatpants and stood there in my sweater and underwear again, poked the places my flesh swelled away from my bones. I turned off the bathroom lights and stared at myself in the dark, my blue pants dripping dry behind me.
I wanted to be in a dark room with a pulsing red light and a shaking voice above me. I wanted wet breath in my ear and unsteady floor beneath my feet. I wanted to be pressed into violent motion, I wanted hands sliding under my clothes like eels, I wanted to be turned around and made to face the wall. I closed my eyes. I imagined slim pale bodies of dancers in my blood, a bruise-yellow afterglare behind my eyes. I wanted a man to lay his palm down on my neck. I wanted a thunderhead in my heart. Behind me, around me, the music swelled.
Part Four
The radio told me the name of the band. It was the same band as on my goat t-shirt, the shirt that had made the man at The Stars Our Destination speak to me as if I were a woman. This was clearly a sign. The next day I followed the man’s voice to the Coconuts in the newly constructed strip mall on Lake and Harlem, the fancily titled River Forest Shopping Center. For a moment I stood on the curb, looking at the Gap across the street. I could almost see myself just the day before, cold and wet in my baggy blue pants, a completely different person. Today I was wearing the crunchy black pants, which seemed to actively repel the slush. My mom, waiting in her car in the parking lot, beeped her horn at me and pointed at the store.
I went into Coconuts and bought the CD. My parents had been giving me an allowance for a long time, but I had never had anything to spend it on before. I wasn’t expected to buy my clothes and books with my own money. I had nibbled off little corners the mass of twenty-dollar bills accumulating in a shoebox under my bed, buying popcorn at movies or shiny Lucite rings, but I had never spent more than ten dollars at a time. The CD cost fourteen ninety-nine.
Every night after that, I listened to the entire album before bed. The first song was my song from the radio, but I liked the others, too. None of them was as quiet or whispery as the first song, my song. They had throbbing guitars and pointy keyboard tinkling. The man stretched his voice into a growl and flattened it out into a screech. I looked for pictures of him in my parents’ magazines. I had read some of the articles before, but now it was as if I had only just begun to understand what words meant, like when Sophia had finally begun talking like an adult after four years of baby-speak. Even though it was normal, we had all acted like she was a miracle.
The man was tall, with blue eyes and very big hands. In one picture I saw that he had a birthmark all along his left arm, a grape-juice colored stain splotchy against his pale skin, as if God had dropped something horrible on him. I looked into the man’s blue eyes for just a moment before I closed the magazines and stacked them carefully under my bed. When the schedule of summer school classes came out I asked my parents if I could take group guitar lessons. They said yes.
“Good idea, Neeners,” my dad said, smiling.
Over the rest of the spring I spent all of my saved-up allowance money buying the band’s other albums, then their singles, then all of the t-shirts I could find in trade catalogs printed on cheap newsprint. My parents delivered these to me as they came in the mail, my mom shaking out the t-shirts and exclaiming over their smell of mothballs and cigarettes, my dad asking me to model the newest shirt for him. Sophia wrinkled her nose at whatever was in front of her—she was a picky eater—and touched her beautiful dark hair.
“I don’t like that shirt,” she said. “It’s weird.”
“Your shirt has a dolphin with a bow on its head,” I said. “Dolphins don’t have hair, how could they wear bows?”
Sophia lowered her eyelids, superior. “It’s a princess dolphin,” she said. “The rules are different.”
My parents had instructed me never to mention Sophia’s birthmark; they didn’t want her to become self-conscious of the quarter-sized patch of skin below her right eye a half-shade darker than the rest of her face. I envied her her little difference. I resisted the urge to reach across the table and pinch the birthmark. She grinned suddenly, revealing her missing front tooth, and I felt guilty.
In June, when school was almost over, the radio told me that the band was playing a concert in Tinley Park. I wrote the information down on a small notepad I had received for Christmas and had been waiting to use. I tore the sheet off and went downstairs. I had never been to a concert, but I had to go to this one. I began to calculate scenarios: the man would see me in the crowd; he would reach for me, draw me up onstage and into his world. He would love me.
It was a Saturday, and my parents were both home, but I did not know where in the house they were. The midday sunlight entered my house through the two-story window at its center, next to the big staircase. When my parents fought, I heard their heavy noises and low voices through the walls, volleys of insults arcing between them. I thought I heard these sounds as I walked towards the kitchen. I pressed my ear against the door. To my left I could see our lilac bushes out the long rectangular window. I closed my eyes and listened to my parents’ low voices, rapid and hard. Then my mom’s laugh rang out through the door and I felt such relief I thought I might collapse, but instead I pushed the door open and walked into our long kitchen.
My parents stood at the breakfast bar, talking and laughing. They were eating roast beef and provolone sandwiches.
“Want one, Neeners?” my father asked, wiggling his eyebrows at me.
“Yes,” I said, ravenous and happy.
My dad took a grinder roll from a clear plastic bag and sawed it in half with a long serrated knife, then drizzled each half with olive oil. He put the split roll in the toaster oven and turned the dial to “Dark.” My mother stood silhouetted in the light from the windows, her red shirt glowing like a lantern. She took a bite of her sandwich and then put it back down on her brightly colored plate.
“You guys,” I said to them. “I want to go to a concert.”
“When is it?” my dad asked. I watched his mouth move in his beard. He had a strong nose and brown eyes with smile lines at the corners under huge black eyebrows. For as long as I could remember, my father had had a beard. When I was little it was all black, but in recent years the lower half had turned white. I read him the information I had written down on my notepad.
“That sounds fun,” my mom said carefully. I knew that she would not take me to the concert. She did not like loud music or standing up for long periods. I waited for my father’s answer. The toaster oven ticked down the seconds.
“Well, sure,” he said. The toaster oven dinged and he walked to the cupboard, pulled out a red-and-turquoise plate and transferred the bread. My mom called these plates “the Acapulco set.”
He went to the blooming white paper packages of roast beef and provolone on the counter and pulled out several slices of each, layering them on the warm bread. The smell made my mouth water. My father cut my sandwich in half with a different, heavier knife, and then handed it to me. “We should go.” He said finally. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a concert.”
“You’ll take me?”
“I’ll take you, Neeners.” He smiled and watched me dance around the kitchen. He said he was excited, too.
* * *
The show was in Tinley Park, a southwest suburb near my dad’s lonely office. He drove almost without looking at the road, occasionally taking his hand from the wheel to straighten the teal t-shirt he had worn for the occasion.
“Now, it’s going to be loud,” he said.
“I know, Daddy,” I said.
When we neared the concert venue, a teenager in a long t-shirt holding a posterboard with the word PARKING scrawled in red marker directed my dad to an open field. Everyone at the concert was older than me, and most of them clutched transparent plastic cups of yellow beer in one hand. Women in patchwork skirts sold hemp jewelry and tiny ornate glass pipes at stalls surrounding the bar. Our seats were further back from the stage than I thought they would be. When the lights went down and men came out on stage, I was horrified: the man with the voice was not one of them.
“Dad,” I said, “This isn’t right.”
“It’s the opening band, Nina,” he whispered. “They play first.”
“Oh,” I said.
“This is an all-ages show. Do you know the difference between all-ages and other shows?” My dad took a sip from his transparent cup of beer, leaving a second mustache of foam atop his regular mustache.
I had heard that term—“all-ages”—on Q101, but I didn’t know what it meant.
“Some shows are eighteen and over,” my dad explained, over the blare from the stage. “Others are twenty-one and over. But we got lucky because your favorite band must know that they have young fans, and they made it so that you could come tonight.”
I watched a group of beautiful women walk down the aisle towards their seats. The one in the middle had long curly black hair and wore a gray dress like something out of a fairy tale, with a tight bodice and long floaty skirt. Where did people buy clothes like that? If the man with the voice saw her, he would fall instantly in love.
Years passed as I waited for the opening band to finish. The lights came up and I tried to talk to my dad about concerts he had been to, but I couldn’t focus on his words. I felt short of breath. I couldn’t stop thinking about the moor morning, the sick wanting feeling. An eon passed, and then finally the lights went down again. The band’s drummer came out, then the bassist, then the second guitarist. I knew them all. I should have cared about them, too, but I did not.
But when the man walked onstage a smile climbed up from deep inside me and settled on my mouth. He wore a black suit with a black shirt and black tie. The man put his hands on his guitar and opened his mouth to sing. My mouth ached with curving and my teeth glistened dry.
“It must be really hot on stage,” I whispered to my dad. “It must be too hot.”
My father just smiled.
I had been saving this smile for a special occasion. His voice pulled it out of me and made me wear it on my face. The man’s voice was even better live, even higher and softer. He said “You” and my smile stretched wide open.
He looked the same as in the magazines: a tall bald man with a shining pale head. I knew from pictures that his eyes were wide and understanding, that there was a well-developed crease of concern between his eyebrows and a small scar under his nose. As he sang he spread his fingers wide and sliced them through the air. The music crashed up around him in waves. The crowd screamed and reached for him when he closed his eyes. It was so hot, but I was steady. I would not reach, I would not scream. I sang my love for the man out of my eyes. Sometimes the top half of his body swayed while the second guitarist played a solo. The movement reminded me of the giant tree on the edge of the moor, bobbing in the wind.
I slept that night in my goat t-shirt and wore it the next day to my summer school guitar class. The teacher wanted us to work on a round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” but all I could hear was the song, my song, the first song I heard on the radio. My favorite song.
Part Five
That fall I started high school. I didn’t know how to get the right clothes. Everyone else had everything. The halls of my new school were full of girls with blueblack hair and smooth legs flowing from their hitched-up skirts. The boys had eyebrow rings and laughed dangerously. I told a guy in my gym class with a pink Mohawk that he should come over on Saturday, I gave him my address, and when he didn’t come I yelled at my mom for suggesting we go see a movie. The crunchy pants and the collar were not cutting it. They were only attempts, and they had been so hard to find. I had had to collect them, like flowers to press or butterflies to pin in boxes.
I didn’t know that a person like me could buy the things I wanted. I thought you had to be famous or at least have a car. Everyone else had changed. But I didn’t feel any different.
“Don’t worry,” my mom said in the kitchen, making rice and peas for dinner. “It takes time.”
“What takes time?” I snarled, playing with one of the new sharp steak knives.
“Making friends,” my dad said. He took the knife away from me. “It took time at camp, didn’t it?”
“No,” I said. At my camp in the north Michigan woods, everyone in my cabin had been my friend. Cathy had a father who was seventy years old and a boyfriend who wrote her endless letters riddled with misspellings. Janine lived on a farm in Missouri and slept with a Tickle Me Elmo whose laugh woke us all in at the darkest part of the night. Jaclyn had a crossed eye, a boyfriend named Seb, and a soft neck that I liked to touch, Katie always tried to come into the bathroom when I was in the shower to talk to me, Ursula was from Montana and wore more makeup than I had ever seen on one person, and Toby was from Chicago, like me, but she had a documentary crew following her around. My best friends were Amali, who played the cello, and Beth, who had once had a shotgun pointed at her by her older sister’s boyfriend. “He pulled the trigger,” she said, dragging on a forbidden cigarette she had bummed from the retarded man who worked the lunch counter at the cafeteria. “But he missed.” No one there had been able to smell the weird on me, had been able to guess who I was at school.
In October my family went on a weekend trip to Indiana. A store in the mall there sold shirts made of fine mesh and silver blades earrings that sliced down to the shoulder. My mom bought me one of each because she was charmed by how happy the dark colors made me. She saw the way I looked at the blue-haired girl behind the counter with a ring through her septum. In the car I touched the mesh and the earring, then felt my crunchy thigh. Everything I had was outclassed by my new things.
When we got home from Indiana I took my mom’s credit card out of her wallet, which she always left sitting on the counter in the kitchen, a big pink leather rectangle like some sort of cake. I wrote the number down on a little piece of paper and folded it inside a transparent plastic ring box that she had given me years before. I put the box in the drawer my mom said she would never check, the place where I could keep secret things.
For the next two weeks I bought everything I wanted from the store in Indiana’s website. I had the clothes sent overnight delivery. There was a new package waiting for me nearly every day when I got home from school. It was my chore to collect and sort the mail from the basket on the porch where the man left it, so I was able to gather the boxes before anyone else saw them. I got a baby pink vinyl corset, bright blue fake snakeskin pants, patent leather shoes with a pilgrim buckle and a square heel, a fake leather jacket trimmed in cheap faux black fur that I insisted on wearing as my winter coat. I wanted to wear them all at the same time, but I learned to stagger my new things, to mix them in with clothes my parents were used to.
“Did you buy that with your allowance?” my dad asked once, eyeing the lace minidress I had stretched across my body. I nodded vaguely without looking up.
As the weather got colder, my mom and I began to fight every morning about the jacket.
“It’s not warm enough,” she said, blocking the front door with her body.
“I don’t care,” I said, and pushed past her.
When I got to school the Student Center opened up in front of me, full of yellow light. Every girl who passed me, normal or not, had to touch my coat’s fake fur. The Drill Team girls wearing their uniforms over warm-up pants and the pale Goths in crushed velvet doublets and the burnout sluts in floral skirts and men’s shoes all liked my clothes. Their fingertips dragged along my slick shiny pants and their eyes dropped to the bottom of my short short skirt.
“Cool,” they whispered, and were gone.
I wanted the clothes to take me into the world of my music, where guitars swam into muted yells and the man’s voice was a series of yellow exclamation marks. I wanted to be the girl in the video and the girl in the movie, standing half in shadow, eyes down. I started to meet people. Janet had long long hair and ditched gym everyday to smoke cigarettes at Ridgeland, Billy was a fifth-year senior with a smooth black pompadour and a scar from falling through plate glass. Susanna, my pale French partner, disappeared midway through first semester. But none of them were what I was looking for. I was still waiting.
Soon the normal girls had fake leather pants, too. They teased up their hair with long strips of extensions dyed in rainbow raccoon stripes. Then even the special ed girls had t-shirts that looked like the ones I had liked in eighth grade. One day Mike Basta ran his hands around the faux fur at my wrists and throat and sang “I like your coat, I like your coat,” over and over. His hand touched my neck but that wasn’t what I wanted, either. A short boy told Janet that he liked seeing things reflected in my ass when he went upstairs behind me. She relayed this to me, shaking with laughter, and I felt my chest burn with hot purpose. I found the boy and told him to fuck off. He wrote me three pages of apologies in tiny cursive.
When I got home from school that day my father was there, too early, wrinkling a paper in his hand. The bill had come, and my mom wasn’t home to protect me.
“What,” my father asked, “do you think you’re doing? Where is this money going?”
I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t even want the clothes anymore, that they were all used up.
“I’ll get a job,” I said. “I’ll pay it back.”
My father waved his hand over the bill. “How much could you ever pay back?” he asked. He rubbed his face and sighed heavily. “What’s gotten into you?” His beard poked through the gaps between his fingers.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, edging back towards the door. My mother came in with Sophia. They walked around to sit next to my dad at the table. My sister was wearing her bright red soccer uniform, her hair dark-wet with sweat, her bangs smeared across her forehead. My mother wore a denim jumper over a purple turtleneck, her blonde hair—the same color as mine, she always said—pulled messily back into a bun. Their faces were innocent ovals, a mutual question blossoming on their mouths. My father stroked his two-tone beard and frowned into the collar of his bright white shirt.
I had plans for that night, a poetry slam at the public library. My new friends had invited me. I saw myself reflected in their eyes, dressed in my ill-gotten finery: a leopard-print knee length skirt edged in black lace, fishnet tights, a black t-shirt with a V cut deep into my chest. I had switched to black eyeliner and I felt it now, crusting the corners of my eyes. I had stopped wearing my hair in braids and let it fall like curtains on either side of my face.
I stared at my family, arrayed in front of me like strangers waiting for a photograph to be taken. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth to tell my family a story. I didn’t hear the words I spoke. I heard my favorite song, the man’s voice singing about twilight.