How to get over the end.., p.15
How to Get over the End of the World, page 15
I wondered if I was stretching time thin so these images, past and possible, sluiced backwards from the future at us like rainwater off a roof, or if these visions were just us, feeling something that had always been here to feel.
My dad stared at me in horror, eyes wide with red rims, mouth slack. His eyes rolled back in his head. Suddenly, I felt scared; I felt him. I was him. I was inside him. His stomach turned and his bile rose and his lungs contracted. I felt the uncomfortable pressure in his bladder. I could taste his cigarette breath.
I dropped his hand, breathing hard. Jukebox let go at the same time, and he sank to the ground. His eyes fluttered shut and he lay on his back in the mud. I could feel that I was shaking, trembling, unable to stop.
“He’s pissed himself,” Jukebox said. Sure enough, I could see a dark stain creeping down from the crotch of my dad’s jeans. I was unable to open my mouth to speak. I wasn’t sure what I would say. I backed away from him, turned to Agatha, and bent to hold her. Her cold, horrible body was the wrong size against me. She should have been bigger, and breathing. My hands sunk into her.
“He’s just unconscious,” Jukebox said, behind me. I hadn’t thought to wonder if he could be anything else. “Better get that box, and your other stuff.”
Terror in every organ. “Then we’ll get out of here, yeah?”
I went and got the boxes from inside. Jukebox stood by the car, smoking, looking at the inert figure of my dad on the ground in the mud. It took me three trips to carry everything. Jukebox didn’t try to help, and didn’t try to go into the house. I was fine with that.
“That was incredible, you know, Orsino,” they said to me as I put the last box in the trunk. “I can’t believe what we just did.”
I couldn’t believe it either. I wanted to leave.
I carried Agatha over to the car, and wrapped her in a tarp that had been just inside the garage. I emptied a plastic bin of camping and hunting gear next to the door of the house and threw it all into the garage, where it was dry. Then I put Agatha in the plastic bin and snapped the lid on. I wasn’t sure how much it would stink up the car, but I’d render her body for bones or rebury her later.
We pulled out of the drive, Jukebox looking back over their shoulder. My dad still wasn’t moving, but I got out to look again and saw that he was breathing. His eyelids fluttered and he mumbled something, and I backed away. We pulled the car around him, down onto the country road.
“Roll the windows down,” Jukebox said. “Agatha loves you, but she’s gonna stink.”
They hit the gas. The wheels scraped the road, and the chicken barn moved past their window and faded away. Ranger’s barks subsided. I wasn’t gonna see him again, I thought. But my dad liked Ranger. He’d be fine.
I thought of the feathered creature in the woods. Was it going to be fine?
But I couldn’t go back for everything.
“Thank you for back there,” I said.
Jukebox grinned, and reached out and grabbed my hand, tight. “Hey man, any time. I’m sorry I didn’t come back sooner. But I’m glad you fucked him up. And now we know what your powers are, right? You can do that to anyone evil.”
I didn’t feel sure about that. “I don’t know if it would work like that,” I said.
Jukebox and Robin and I parked outside Compton at sunset that night. The building was one I’d passed a couple times before. It was ugly as sin, as my mom would say.
“I’m gonna go get a drink,” Robin said. “Meet me after.” She seemed irritated. She went into the building next door with a rainbow flag hanging on its window.
The bubbles appeared on the screen and James texted back: on my way!
A minute later, I heard a door slam at the end of a hall, and the door we were standing in front of burst open. James was panting a little, and grinned at me. He was wearing the same shirt as in the selfie he’d sent me earlier.
“Hey,” I said. It felt so fun to see his face after such a short time, smiling.
“Sup,” he said. “Come on up. We’re just starting, there’s snacks.” He stuck his hand out to Jukebox. “Super glad you could make it. We’ll talk about what we’re doing when we get upstairs.”
We followed James inside. The hallway was gray and dingy, and I thought the ceiling looked like there was mildew in it somewhere—the brown on the edges of those little square panels.
At the top of the building, where all the heat seemed to have gathered, there was a big room full of bulletin boards. I recognized James’s friend Ian from the show, and his friend Opal. There were a couple other kids there too. On a whiteboard on one side of the room, Ian was writing THE WORM ALIEN ROCK OPERA: A PLAN.
“Hi,” one of the older adults said. She stood up and shook my hand, then Jukebox’s. “I’m Spruce.”
“I’m Natalie,” said the one who was drinking a coffee. The sides of her head were shaved.
“I’m Gemma,” another one said. “Jukebox, thanks for coming.”
Jukebox smiled like they knew everyone already. “Oh yeah,” they said. “It’s so sick.”
“I think everyone’s here now,” Opal said. “Jukebox, thank you so so so much for being here.”
“No problem, bro,” Jukebox said.
I went and sat next to James, who was eating carrots and hummus on an orange couch in the corner. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re trying to do like, a fundraiser, and we need punk bands to help us. We gotta butter Jukebox up cuz they know people.” He said this in a low whisper that made the hair on the back of my arms stand up.
I nodded. I could see how that could be a thing.
Ian came over from the whiteboard and sat on the arm of the couch on James’s other side. James was looking at Ian. Ian wasn’t looking at James. It was like they were magnets, but I wasn’t sure whether they were getting pushed away from each other or towards each other.
At the front of the room, Opal had gotten their chair up to the head of the table and was passing around something that looked like a book report, stapled on one side. Each of the older queers looked at it in turn and reacted with raised eyebrows.
“So look,” Opal said.
“Yeah, let’s start,” James echoed. He went and stood up next to Opal and clapped his hands. Opal looked up at him with what I thought might be annoyance.
“Look,” Opal said. “We’re in emergency mode. We have to do a fundraiser. I know this. You know this. There aren’t any grants.”
“We still have the Pell-Whitman-Duff grant,” a woman at the table said. “But that’s just for houseless youth.”
Opal stared at the women angrily.
“Well. I was watching The Transfused at Barb’s house, a couple days ago, and realized like, we need to do something like that.” They paused for a second, and took a deep breath. “A rock musical.”
The adults in the room were staring at Opal with a measure of respect, careful empathetic smiles, and fear.
“As representatives of the now-defunct Speakers’ Bureau,” Opal said, “we want to make sure that we get this rolling. We’d like to ask for the Board’s support. To start, we need to spend the remaining programming fund for supplies. I know we only have like $200. The main support we need is social. We need cheap scrap lumber from someone’s yard. We need to promo this to every school GSA in the county. We need rehearsal space and performance space. We need musicians.”
One of the adults opened their mouth and shut it again.
“Opal,” one of the board members said. “This is a great idea. That’s why we’re here. But it’s maybe not the right year to do it. We’re stretched thin right now.”
“That’s the point,” Opal said. “We’re stretched thin, but that’s why we need this now. We can’t afford not to do this. I need a place to come every week. I need this for my resume. But lots of kids depend on Compton’s programming to feel like they have any community at all. We have to make sure it’s funded. We need to remind the community that it’s up to them to make sure places like this stay around.”
“A show could also bring in new people,” Ian said. “I never come to Compton stuff because I don’t like support groups.”
“It can be just like Gay Music Camp,” Opal said. “We admit it’s an emergency, and we rally people. Jukebox knows everyone. If they put the word out, talk to friends, make an announcement at every show in the next week and a half, we can get this going.”
Jukebox had a sudden fire in their eyes. They were grinning their crooked grin right at Opal.
“So,” Jukebox said. “It’s like a big festival of social justice punk. To raise money?”
“Yeah,” Opal said. “A rock opera of punk.”
“We haven’t had the best luck with all-ages shows, in terms of PFLAG support,” Natalie said quietly. “There’s a lot of questions about substance use and safety for youth, especially after the incidents in August with the kombucha turning out to be alcoholic.”
“For teens,” Jukebox said. “And we’ll get a big audience.” They smiled, chin in hands, and turned their septum piercing with two fingers, like they did when they were excited and thinking. “Cute. Cute cute cute cute cute. Remind me. The show is like, already written, right?”
James had this one. He held up some sheets of notebook paper. “We have a plotline—it’s about some worm aliens that come to earth to teach people peace and love. They abduct a cow and then the cow tries to spread the word but it gets turned into a burger but then everyone who eats the burger has a kind of revelation about capitalism and homophobia.”
And I could tell that was it. Jukebox stood up and practically jumped on their chair. “Yes, yes yes yes yes.”
I felt scared.
Everyone’s eyes, including mine, were on Jukebox. Their dark eyeliner and their birdlike mullet. They looked like a comet.
Jukebox went over to the board with the summary. “Bands. You want to get Dirt Mama, we gotta get RIND and Emu Union. I know Jenny and Dogman and Rex, those are no problem, they don’t go on tour until February.”
The board members sat there, looking more and more like those little dolls in antique shops that look like they could be alive but aren’t. Jukebox walked around the room, making plans, talking just to Opal.
“I think that the Metroplex Vintage Theater would let us use space toward the end of December if we didn’t bump any of the mini horror film fests out of the way,” Opal was saying.
I realized Jukebox was the main show here. James was looking at Jukebox. James didn’t necessarily want me sitting next to him at all. Maybe it had just been about Jukebox the whole time. I felt kind of sick, thinking that.
“I’m going out for a smoke,” I said to James, who was taking notes to build a timeline of when they were going to be calling which people about using what space. James nodded, then looked at me and stuck his tongue out and rolled his eyes a little and smiled.
“I’ll come out in a bit,” he said. “I wanna hang with you after this, don’t disappear, okay?”
I nodded. I looked at Ian, who was now sitting at James’s feet, with a laptop open, working on a spreadsheet. I looked between Ian and James, and wondered what the deal was with them.
I went out into the parking lot. It was cold for September, but it felt good to sit in the cold and shiver a little. There weren’t any cars. I dug out my cigarettes and sat down on one of the cement blocks that marked the parking spaces. The stars were coming out overhead, and the moon was rising over behind the trees on the east side. I watched some cars drive by, and listened to their music booming a little through their windows.
The moon rising over the edge of the city looked pink to me. I thought about Agatha, and how I would clean her bones, what bucket I could use. I wondered if my dad had woken up yet. What if I had really hurt him? But his eyelids had fluttered.
I wondered if this rock opera was what was supposed to be happening. Were we doing it right? Could Jukebox cut a hole in time with music, somehow cut back to whatever point we were meant to locate in the past and reroute us like a train shifting tracks?
When James came downstairs, I heard the sound of his steps a few seconds before the door swung open. He walked up and I felt his hand on my shoulder.
“Want a cigarette?” I asked him, holding out my pack. I looked at him again. He was so pretty in the weird streetlight. I didn’t like that I thought he was so pretty. What if I couldn’t be with him the way I wanted to?
“Yeah,” he said. He took one. “I’ve been trying to vape but, eh. Light it for me?”
I lit it.
“What was this whole deal about?” I asked him.
“It’s insane,” James said, which wasn’t an explanation. He sucked on the cigarette. “They’re not like, happy, but they’re letting us move forward.”
I finished my cigarette and stamped it out, stood up. I wanted to touch him, but didn’t know if that was the vibe.
“Why are you here, if it sucks?”
James’s face went funny. He looked at the ground, frowned. He stuck out his tongue. “The support groups here are dumb, but they saved my life when I was younger. I used to self-harm and was super lonely and lived my whole life on the internet. I got here and finally had a group of people. And they’re annoying, but they made me less crazy.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “That you had that.” I felt jealous. Deeply jealous. I felt sick.
“It’s just like, there are so many things wrong with it and they’re broke all the time. I’m kind of ready to let it go to hell, but Opal doesn’t want it to. Which is more ethical. So I want to make this fundraiser thing go off.” He shrugged. “Also I’m here so I don’t have to give my dad my car keys, which he’s taking away because I’m suspended. I hid out at Opal’s last night so I could keep my car one more day.”
He sat down where I had been sitting.
“Is this based on what I said about the aliens?” I asked.
“Not really,” James said. “Not originally. It’s more so we could get Jukebox. Since they had an alien vision too.”
His arm went around my waist. I shivered in spite of myself. I tried to focus on the feeling of it. I just wanted him to touch me.
“Okay. Hey,” I said. “What’s the deal with you and Ian? Your friend.”
“What?” James asked.
“You were looking at him. And he was avoiding looking at you.”
James looked embarrassed. “Oh,” he said. “That’s—this weekend we had a weird moment after his show where we made out for fun, and it was weird and we both feel weird about it, so it’s like, we’re recalibrating from that.”
I knew what the look James was giving Ian meant. It was the same one he’d given me.
“Oh,” I said. “Cool. Yeah, I was just wondering. Gotta find out what I’m getting myself into and everything.”
“Just so you know, I’m maybe a slut,” James said. “I didn’t realize it before, but I think I am. Making out with you felt good and gave me weird visions and made me want to make out with more people, and . . . well. I’m dumb, I guess. Sexuality activated, or something.”
“That’s cool,” I said.
“But I didn’t get visions with Ian. It was nice, but really awkward . . .”
“Sure,” I said, uncertainly. “Just trying to know whether I can make out with you again, or what’s going on.” I paused. “I’d like to.”
James blushed. He took a drag off the cigarette and tucked one of his longer strands of hair behind his ear. “Yeah,” he said. “I like you. I’m supposed to be home to talk to my dad about the suspension stuff, but let’s go make out somewhere first.”
We went to James’ car, which was parked at the library. There were no other cars in that lot, either. He had to turn the key twice in the ignition before the car turned on. The windshield wipers went back and forth across the glass.
“We could just . . . in the car,” I said.
“No, I know where to take you,” he said. “I can lend you a coat, if you want. There’s a couple on the floor in the back.”
“Where are we going?” I asked. I texted Robin, impromptu date with goth boy. Text you in an hour.
You have to bury Agatha or do something with the body when you get home, Robin texted back. Stacey is freaking out.
“There’s this park,” James said. “With waterfalls. You can see the waterfall and the whole lake from the bottom of the trail, and there’s this place off to the side that’s like, kind of magic.”
That sounded good.
James drove for just a little way. He didn’t put music on—the only noise was the whir of the defrost going on the windshield glass to keep it from fogging up. I watched the dark trees and the moon from the car window. We pulled down a hill and into a parking lot. There was a gate locked in front of us. James pulled off to the side, one wheel of his car in a ditch.
“Now we walk,” he said.
We had to walk around another closed gate in order to get to the trail.
“We’re not supposed to be here,” James said. He looked giddy.
I could hear the rushing water from a ways off. It was dark—there weren’t any lights except on the paved sections of the trail that looked over the river. I watched James move in front of me.
“There’s salmon ladders here,” he said. “They’re super scary to look down at. Look. Look.” He got out his phone and turned on the flashlight function. He grabbed my hand and pulled me forward, toward the fence at the edge of the river. The river hit this cliff and went over in a series of white, noisy falls, and the pavement around the edges of the river had these metal grates. James shone the light down into the cavern under the grates, and I watched the white, churning water bubble around the steep mossy salmon ladders in the dark.
