Peaches of Immortality

  By Cat Rambo

  Copyright 2015 Cat Rambo

  Published by Cat Rambo at Smashwords

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This story originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, 2012, as “The Immortality Game.”

  Peaches of Immortality

  Decades later the music was what really tipped Glen off. He heard a song on the radio, a brand new release, and remembered the day he'd first heard it, twenty years earlier.

  Everything began to fall together then. Or maybe that was when it really started to shatter.

  ***

  There were four of them in high school. Glen wasn't one of the quartet. Instead, it was Fred Lipton and his gang.

  But you could have said that of any of them. Derek Cho and his gang. Penelope Nantes and her gang. Casey Lucas and her gang. Casey Lucas, Barbie-blond, eyebrows and fine as wispy as fledgling feathers. Graceful Casey, but smart too, planning on becoming a journalist, colleges salivating at the thought.

  Shiny happy careers lined up before all five. Glen's post-high school future was murkier. He was a D&D player and artist, trying not to be thought the only queer in a Catholic school while not above exploiting his sensitive side to get girls, a pursuit that beguiled him than studying.

  Casey hadn't yielded to his best brooding looks. He suspected she thought herself above him, but the heat in the way she looked at him egged him on.

  Once she'd laid her hand on his arm to steady herself, a delicious trusting pressure, and ever since then he'd always stood as close as possible to her.

  So – perhaps not entirely a surprise when she invited him to the loft.

  "What for?"

  "We like to play music," she said. "We're pretty good, even. Come and listen to us." She laid her hand on his, this time not to catch herself, but to snare him. He turned into his locker to hide his sudden erection.

  "All right," he said, half over his shoulder. He'd found a magazine a few weeks ago while in the library that advised boys to play it cool at first. He didn't want to play it cool though. He wanted to turn and look into her blue eyes, lean close enough to smell the perfume she wore, a lemon and musk scent unlike any other girl's perfume.

  The Lipton's house was within walking distance, but Casey gave him a ride over, along with Danny and Penelope. They knew who he was – their entire class was a few hundred, and only the most aloof didn't know the names of the rest. They creaked up the stairs and into the loft, a high-ceiling, drafty space smelling in equal measures of marijuana and incense.

  Fred was there, along with Jenny, a girl from the Social Studies class Glen shared with him, and another boy, Alf Reidle, who looked up as Casey entered and tried to catch her eye. Unsuccessful, he settled back like the others. The pellets in his grimy beanbag chair scrunched and rescunched as he passed around an enormous bong with layers of skull shaped bubblers in the stem. Casey swung open the door of an old-fashioned refrigerator and gestured.

  He stared in. It was stocked with soda and beer, an emphasis on the latter. Casey took one. He hesitated. Beer made him sleepy and stupid. It might make him say or do something dumb around Casey.

  "What's the matter, worried the folks will smell it when you get home?" Fred sneered.

  The door banged open and Penelope and Derek barged in, grabbing the bong, discarding their jackets, a bustle that allowed Glen to grab a soda and resettle in the beanbag.

  "We're all here," Fred said. He slapped Jenny's thigh jocularly and stood up. "Let's play."

  ***

  The four of them sang. It was November, 1980, and they began with some of the most popular songs of the day: "I Love Rock and Roll," and "Purple Rain", "Time After Time" and U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." They all played instruments, and sometimes between songs, they'd trade off according to some system Glen didn't understand, combination of challenge and self-declaration. The boys strutted and pranced like TV tough guys. Derek's snarl like dark, bitter honey; Fred's husky and sincere voice. The girls' voices seemed interchangeable at first, but Glen began to pick out nuances. Casey's was lower, more syrupy; Penelope's edged with crystal.

  Like Glen, Jenny and Alf were onlookers, sitting in the beanbag, watching the enchanted four play.

  Then they switched to other things, music that seemed all new. Often they resorted to the synthesizer in the corner for beats and effects: ethereal glass flutes or tiger yodels or a rhythmic sandpaper rasp, magnified a thousand times, almost painful underneath the screamed defiance of the song.

  As they changed instruments after something that somehow seemed more disco than disco could ever be, Glen leaned over and touched Casey's elbow.

  "Who wrote these?" he said.

  She paused. She was rising from the drums, still breathing hard from playing the last song.

  The moment stretched longer than it should have. He found her looking at him with an inability to answer the question, a lack of preparation that surprised him.

  "We all do," Fred said. "Someone comes up with an idea and we all contribute. We like to improvise." He began a bouncy beat, staring at Glen.

  They joined in. The words flowed along, strangely ominous. "It's a bitch convincing people to like you," Fred sang, and his speculative black eyes watched Glen as though assessing his reaction to each word.

  Casey broke off. "Our friend Ana's visiting," she said, warning in her tone.

  It meant nothing to Glen, but Derek nodded as though in confirmation.

  "It doesn't matter," Fred said. He waved a lazy hand at the bong and shrugged. "We can play anything we like. We're just a crowd of stoned zombies."

  Penelope picked out the first few bars of a Beatles song, Yesterday, and Derek half-laughed. He picked up the bass and they launched into a version that was somehow campy and mocking one moment, and heartbreakingly sincere the next. Tears welled in Glen's eyes as Casey sang, "Now I long for yesterday," and he swallowed hard. Looking up, he saw Alf watching him with a frown on his face.

  He could have listened all afternoon, all evening, long into the morning hours. But they could not play that long. All too soon, they were putting down their instruments, exchanging wry smiles as Alf and Jenny and Glenn applauded.

  "What do you call your band?" Jenny asked.

  Derek shrugged. "It doesn't really have a name," he said. He was a skinny Asian boy who kept a proprietary hand on Penelope at all times. "I call it the Peaches of Immortality, but you can call it anything you like."

  "That's a pretty name," she said. "Where's it from?"

  "In Chinese legend, the gods eat them and become immortal," Derek said. "My grandfather believed in them. He was an alchemist back in China. I remember him telling me stories about them when I was just a little kid."

  Alf departed after a whispered, angry conversation with Casey in the corner. She shrugged off questions and settled into the beanbag next to Glen.

  They smoked more pot and drank more beer and watched a movie on the dilapidated VCR set off to one side.

  "My folks like to get the latest thing, so they let me have this," Fred explained. Glen thought that Fred had one of the luckiest existences: permissive parents, beer and technology, cool friends, the brains to get through classes while seeming to coast, bored and above it all. He sighed.

  "What's wrong?" Casey breathed in his ear. She leaned over from her beanbag, half settling on his. He wondered if he could slide an arm around her. How would she react? Maybe best not to.

  But the article had said be bold.

  His arm raised and curled around her shoulders as though by itself. She rested against him, and he could feel her warmth like a burning coal along his side. He could smell her perfume.

  It made it hard to focus on the film, even more than the pot. He couldn't make out the plot, but gathered that it was a love story, lovers being kept separated and meeting each other at intervals through the years, never at the right time.

  Casey nudged him. "This is my favorite part."

  The lovers in a garden.

  Him to her: We only meet when we're tangled with others, it seems.

  Her to him: Someday we'll meet at the right time.

  He takes her hand, moonlight silhouetting them, a cut paper portrait.

  His voice lowers. Till then, a kiss to dream about, he says.

  The inevitable clinch. It seemed cliché and sappy to Glen. The sort of thing girls liked, he supposed.

  Casey's perfume filled his senses, and he was focused on the soft round breast pressed against his side. He held still, as though afraid of frightening her, breathing in a mix of smoke and happiness.

  But the next day at school, Casey was distant again. He saw her in the corridors but she didn't look at him.

  Fred clued him in when he caught Glen waiting near her locker.

  "Don't let Brad Effer catch you," he said.

  Brad was captain of the football team, a hearty handsome hunk with a touch of the bully about him.

  "What?" Glen stammered.

  "She's dating him now. You'll have to wait for your chance."

  Disappointment engulfed Glen, shading the hall a few colors darker. But he tried to keep it off his face, conscious of the odd avidity with which Fred watched him. He muttered something and turned away.

  High school passed like high school. He never got that close to Casey again. She flitted from boyfriend to boyfriend, but by the time he was aware she'd left one, she'd already be with someone else. Once, for three days, it was Alf. Then they broke up, leaving him red-eyed and ragged.

  Most of the kids watched them, knew what they were doing (which instantly became cool, whether it was bowling or wearing baseball hats), but didn't socialize with them. It was as though the rest of the school provided a backdrop, scenery against which their stories played out.

  He wasn't sure what most of the teachers thought of them, but Mr. Laskowski warned him at one point when he caught Glen trying a cigarette (some girls liked the taste, and it never hurt to have a touch of bad boy about you) in the school parking lot.

  "Don't become like Lipton or Cho," he said. "They're just phoning it in, waiting to get through high school. Missing out on some of their best years. You can do better than that."

  Glen thought later, years later, that perhaps every high school had them. The boys and girls who ruled the school, whose favor or lack of it could shape a lesser kid's personal existence. He thought, though, that usually everything after high school was uphill for them, that they would never achieve their glory days again.

  But it wasn't so for the group. Fred started a software company halfway through his time at Harvard that made him a millionaire by the time he graduated. Penelope's novel made the best-seller list, somehow expressing the zeitgeist in a way that had every young adult in America clutching a copy. Derek was rumored to have gone to work for a government think tank.

  Casey went to journalism school. Her lively, informal prose led her to television journalism, where her looks and personable delivery netted her an early morning show.

  It surprised him that they hadn't kept up with the music. They'd been so good. But nothing of it as though, ascending to college, they'd abandoned adolescent passion.

  Life overtook him. He forgot about them for the most part. He met a woman, Eloise, in grad school and married her. They had no children, but successful careers.

  Periodically he remembered that music. He'd hear something on the radio, some new release, and he'd think that it reminded him of a song played in the echoing loft. They had moved effortlessly from one style to another, sometimes a hard driving metal beat that had acquired a gritty edge, an undertone of concrete and late night steel, then bubble gum as vacuous and sweet as cotton candy, singing it half-laughing all the while.

  He still drew sometimes, although by himself. He never showed the pictures to anyone. Complex landscapes with machinery buried underneath, showing through like a skeleton, gears gleaming in the rent of a tree's bark, screws bolting a clump of grass to the sidewalk.

  When he ran into Casey, he knew her immediately, despite the decade and a half since he'd last seen her. He could tell she knew him from the way her eyes widened, even though she tried to play it off as though she didn't. He bought her a frappachino and they caught up.

  As he might have expected, the four of them had stayed in touch with each other. Fred had been off in Tibet, she said, and added, "Studying some sort of transcendental stuff." Penelope had recently approached Casey about a film project.

  "A chance to break into films." Casey's dimples were still deep enough to lose his heart in. "It's very kind of her, to give me that."

  Something odd about her tone. Perhaps she and Penelope had had a falling out? But in that case, they'd hardly be working on a film together.

  "I bet the others would like to see you," she said. "Fred's got a box at the baseball stadium, and we're all going there next Saturday."

  His wife would be out of town. There was no reason to say no.

  At the game, deferential ushers showed them down a hallway to the luxury box. Again, a fridge full of beers, but this time wine and champagne as well, and harder stuff, all dispensed by a bartender with teeth as white as his apron.

  No one seemed surprised by Glen's appearance after all this time. In fact, Fred said, "I was just wondering when we'd see you again."

  Glen accepted a Heineken from the bartender and settled down to nurse it. The seats were covered with soft red velvet, clean and fresh. The rug underfoot was sculpted with deep swirls. Penelope and Derek were in a corner, arguing in low whispers. Penelope looked unhappy: dark rings splayed themselves underneath her eyes.

  The rest of them played "Whatever Happened To." Time had not dealt well with most of their classmates: several suicides, a public and inadvertent outing that destroyed a political careers, multiple scandals (one involving a teacher).

  "What about Alf?" Glen said.

  A silence fell on the room like a curtain. Even Penelope and Derek glanced over from their argument.

  "He jumped off a building," Fred said. "Isn't that right, Casey?"

  Glen was uncertain whether or not to laugh. Fred's tone implied he should; Casey's angry face said he shouldn't.

  "We don't talk about Alf," she said briefly.

  After the game, they went back to Fred's loft, this time a place of exposed brick and floor-to-ceiling windows and stainless steel appliances and an enormous balcony somehow joined onto the side of the building. Casey followed him out onto it. She laid her hand over his. Her perfume hadn't changed after all these years.

  He closed his eyes, inhaling. The sounds of the street floated up, cars and shouts, and distant rap music. He could feel her next to him. When he opened his eyes again, the light dazzled him.

  "I've always liked you, you know that, don't you?" she said.

  He flashed on moonlight and a grainy screen. "I have a wife," he blurted out.

  "It's like high school again," she said. "Never the right time. Maybe someday we'll meet when the moment's ripe."

  He wanted her, she wanted him, but thoughts of Eloise fettered him. "Give me something to remember," he said. "Something to fantasize about till then." Years of longing pressed his mouth to hers.

  ***

  When he woke the next morning, his lips felt bruised and raw. He stared into the mirror, wondering what to tell – if to tell – Eloise. He didn't want to leave her, he realized. He was done with fantasies, illusions. They had built a good life together, one that outweighed any castle in the air.

  Something about Casey made him wary. He'd sensed it before in girls and then women along the way. Ones who thought themselves in total control of the relationship. Sometimes arrogance, sometimes just a deep belief in the power of the pussy. Casey thought she had him sewed up, and that set him on edge.

  He had left his hat at Fred's loft. When he called, Fred said sure, come over and get it.

  He took a cab, thinking about Casey, going over and over the memory of the kiss on the balcony, the way she had looked at him when he'd stammered goodnight. She burned in his mind. He felt himself fluttering too close. Eloise, think of Eloise, of the comfortable house and the deck they liked to sit out on and read passages of books to each other. Eloise understood him, and liked him more than he liked himself, truth be told. Was the same true of Casey? Was she amusing herself, another three-day wonder like Alf, or was she in it for the long haul?

  He complimented Fred on the loft again. Fred was blue-striped bath-robed, barefoot, sleepy-haired.

  "The place is alright," Fred said with a twist of his lips. "The view is nice, anyway. Have you seen Casey's place?"

  Embarrassment struck Glen. What was Fred implying?

  "No," he said.

  "Not yet, eh?" Fred said.

  "What do you mean?"

  Fred looked at him, surprised. "She wants you. You can tell that, certainly."

  "Yes," he said. The wonder of it fluttered in his chest. He added, "But I'm married, I told her that."

  "Ah, a touch of frustration to up the tension. Well played."

  Glen had the sensation of treading water far out of his depth. "I don't…"

  Fred said, "Do you love your wife?"

  "Beyond any question," Glen replied without hesitating.

  "How sad." Fred shoved the hat towards Glen and gestured him at the door.

 

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