All Our Pretty Songs (20 page)

“Okay.”

He lets me go and I step out into the cold morning air. He leans across the seat. “No matter what. Call me if you need anything. I’ll come get you. Okay?”

“Who will take care of Oscar Wilde if you have to drive to California?”

“Oscar Wilde loves the car. I’ll buy him driving goggles. Be safe.” I nod and shut the car door, hitch my backpack straps on my shoulders, take a deep breath. Raoul doesn’t drive away until I’m inside.

At the counter I buy a ticket on the next bus to LA. When I reach into my coat pocket for my wallet there’s a crackle, and I take out a wad of bills. Raoul slipped me nearly fifty dollars when he was hugging me. Fifty dollars he doesn’t have to give away. I contemplate running after his car, but he’ll be long gone by now. “Are you all right?” asks the lady at the counter. “Miss?” I’m crying again.

“Something in my eye.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, bored now. She was hoping for histrionics or confessions. A jilting. I’m sorry I can’t humor her. “Your bus leaves in an hour and a half.”

I take out my sketchbook, but I’m too antsy to draw. I pace around the station, buy a cup of coffee, drink it, buy another one, smoke, pace some more. I think about how long I have until Cass figures out I’m gone, what she’ll do. It was shitty of me not to leave her a note, but the longer it takes her to realize what I’ve done, the more likely it is I’ll make it to LA. She’ll know where I went as soon as she figures out I’m gone, and all she would have to do is call the bus company to get me taken off at the next stop. I’ll call her when I’m there, tell her I’m okay. Tell her I’m coming home. As soon as I have them. I refuse to think about what will happen if I can’t find them. If Aurora isn’t with Jack. If either of them tells me to go home.
I’m not this tough for nothing
. I stare down at my booted feet, turn up the collar of my leather jacket. If I tell myself how tough I am enough times, surely it will be at least a little bit true.

At last I shuffle aboard the bus, consoling myself with the thought that I’m far and away the least desperate-looking person boarding. A guy in a dirty white T-shirt, bare-armed despite the cold, sits next to me and asks where I’m from. When he opens his mouth I can see he’s missing most of his teeth, and the remnants of a nasty bruise are fading from one cheek. Before I can answer, he tells me he’s just gotten out of jail and is on his way home to see his woman. I nod, get out my headphones, hold them where he can see them, but he keeps talking. “You like to get high?” he asks.

“No thanks.”

“I got good stuff. The best.”

“Really. No thanks.” I make a show of putting my headphones on, choosing music.

“You like to fuck?” I hear him say, and then I turn up the volume and look out the window. I can see his reflection in the glass. His lips are still moving.

The bus ride is like a fever dream. I can’t sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. Sometimes the bus stops and we stumble out, smoke cigarettes by the side of the road in the cold air. Night falls. My seatmate gives up on me and moves on to some poor girl at the back of the bus, with more success. I can hear their soft grunts in the intervals between songs. I’m strung out on no sleep and nerves. I buy a cup of shitty gas-station coffee and a package of Pop-Tarts at the next stop. The sugar and caffeine don’t make me any calmer. Cass will have figured out I’m gone by now, and every time the bus stops I chew on my nails, sure it’s the cops. But it never is. When the bus rolls into Los Angeles, I can breathe again. It’s Halloween morning, and I am going to find them, and everything is going to be fine.

This far south, the ocean seems like a different creature altogether from the moody grey monster I know at home. Gem-colored waves roll across the white-sand beach. Even this late in the year it’s full of people sunbathing or playing volleyball. Ponytailed girls rollerblade past me on a boardwalk that stretches as far as I can see in either direction. Condominiums edge the beach, and I can see women basking on their balconies in neon bikinis. I can’t remember the last time I ate. I buy a hot dog at a cart and walk down to the edge of the water.

I watch bodysurfers paddle out into the turquoise waves. Down the beach a boy is flying a kite, and a man is anointing his tanned, muscled body with oil.

“Read your palm?” someone says, and I look up. Blue-eyed surfer, straight out of a magazine. Shirtless, bronzed muscles, long blond hair, puka beads.

“Is that your line?”

“Line of work.” He sits down next to me. “You look like a girl who needs answers.”

What the hell. “How much?”

“Five bucks.”

“Seriously?”

“Can’t make a living selling weed alone.”

I roll my eyes, take one of Raoul’s bills out of my pocket, and hand it over. He pockets the five and takes my hand. His fingers are calloused and warm.

“Look at you,” he says. “Wow.”

“You tell that to all the girls?”

“Nope. You see this line?” He traces a long crease that crosses my palm. “This is some gnarly shit, girl. Serious destiny.”

“Serious destiny,” I mutter, mimicking his surfer’s drawl.

“Oh, girl. Who did you piss off? You doing battle with some dark forces or something? This line says your life is about something way bigger than you.” I scowl. Whatever, that’s a thing you could say to anyone. Make them feel important. “This one,” he continues, touching a different line now, “This is love. You got it bad for someone, right? Follow them to the ends of the earth, that kind of thing? This is a strong palm, sister. A strong, strong palm.”

“I’m not your sister.”

“You want me to read your palm or not?”

“Sorry.”

“You’re determined, right? You have a lot of anger. A lot of strength. But maybe too pigheaded. You have to learn to apologize.”

“
I
have to learn to apologize?”

“You get in a fight with someone you love? Maybe it’s your fault, maybe it isn’t. Is it worth it to lose someone over the details? You are someone who has trouble letting go. You know that thing they say. Love something, set it free, it comes back to you maybe, maybe it goes for a trip. Outside your purview, sister.”

I stare at him. He’s serious. He’s also totally stoned.

“What am I supposed to do?” I ask him.

“Come on, girl. I can’t tell you that. I can only tell you what it says here. Something about a dad, right? You looking for a dad?”

“I don’t have a dad.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re not looking for one. But I think you’ll be fine. Also, this line here? This one means you have stomach problems. You need to eat more yellow vegetables.”

“Yellow
what
?”

“You know. Like squash. Butternut. Spaghetti squash is good too. Has to be vegetables, though. Bananas won’t work.” He gives my hand a squeeze and gets to his feet. “Here,” he says. “My compliments.” He produces a joint out of nowhere and tucks it behind my ear. “Good luck, sister.” I’m still staring as he saunters away down the beach.

The sun is warm on my back. I squirm out of my leather jacket and take out my sketchbook, draw the boy, the kite, the sunbathing man—who’s stretched out now on a towel, glistening like a rotisserie chicken—the edges of the waves. Water is hard to draw, like any malleable thing, fickle in its lines and shadows. I think I’m catching it, but when I look at the page I’ve made it insipid and lifeless. Stupid. High school. It’s hardest when what I want to put on the page is so much bigger than what I’m capable of, when I know how it should look but not how to make it that way, because I’m nowhere near as good as I need to be.

I turn the page and draw a beer bottle sticking out of the sand, a dead crab, an empty shell. I draw until for hours, until the sky blazes around the sinking sun in a gory, gorgeous mess like ink blowing out of a tattoo. I remember reading somewhere that pollution makes for better sunsets. I haven’t eaten since the hot dog, who knows how many hours earlier. I stand up, my legs creaking in protest. I have to pee, and I’m so hungry I can barely walk. I give the surfer’s joint to a homeless guy with a baseball cap upended in front of him on the sidewalk. “Hey, thanks,” he says, surprised.

I walk away from the beach, with its fancy glass-fronted restaurants, elegant people inside sipping wine from goblet-sized glasses and daintily forking a bite or two of salad into their mouths before pushing their plates away. All the women here look hungry. I see a divey Mexican restaurant wedged between two clothing boutiques. It’s well lit and noisy, and even from the sidewalk I can smell the siren scent of cumin and fryer grease.

I order cheese enchiladas, and they come on a platter half the size of my table, swimming in mole sauce. The lady at the cash register brings me chips and guacamole and an apple soda in a glass bottle. I don’t think there’s any way I can fit all that food in my belly but I do it, scooping up mole and avocado with my chips and wolfing down the enchiladas. I watch the families around me, children running amok between the tables and begging scraps off their parents’ plates when they’ve polished their own clean. No one looks at me. The restaurant is so normal, so cheerful, so full of people and light and chatter. When I finish eating I show the cashier the poster. “Is that near here?” I ask her, pointing to the club’s address.

She looks at me for a while before she draws me a map on a paper napkin. “Not too far. Be careful there.” I ask her what she means. She touches Raoul’s rosary where it peeks out from my collar. “Be sure you take this with you.”

Minos’s club is near the water. I can’t see the ocean, but I can smell it, and the air here is lighter. The club is a big, windowless building at the end of a dead-end block. The other buildings on the street are lifeless and dull: another warehouse, a shabby cinderblock building with a dirty white sign that reads O
RTIZ’S
M
EATS
. There’s an alleyway cluttered with Dumpsters, next to an empty lot full of scraggly weeds and ringed in chain-link fence topped with razor wire. So this is what rich people go for. Real authentic.

Outside Minos’s club, the street is alive. Sleek black cars disgorge sparkling women and men clad in leather and metal, spiked collars at their throats and spurs on their pointy-toed boots. Across the street, I lean against a wall and pull my hood up around my ears, watching as the squat building swallows skinny, sad-eyed girls with their hair spiked into Mohawks, skeleton charms dangling from their tiny wrists. Many of them are in costume: gossamer-wrapped fairies whose naked bodies are clearly outlined underneath yards of sequins and tulle; gore-spattered zombies draped in bandages; ghouls in sleek white, knotty hair hanging to their waists. I catch a glimpse of furred haunch and lean forward. It’s the goat-limbed man from the rooftop party, wearing a feathered mask. He stops as if he can feel my eyes on him and turns, searching the darkness. I shrink back into the shadows and turn my face away, hoping the alleyway is enough to hide me. Finally he goes into the club. Some of the girls could be the blood-covered dancers I saw at the penthouse party. I thumb Raoul’s rosary and shiver.

I wait until the flood of people slows to a trickle. At first I think there’s no sign, but when I get closer I see that
EREBUS
is painted in neat red letters on the door. There’s a bored-looking guy in sunglasses and a knit hat leaning against the wall. He’s casual, slouching, but I can tell under the facade he’s paying attention.

I knot my fists in the sleeves of my hoodie and walk up to the door. The bouncer looks me over without expression, looks away. “Not your kind of place.”

“My friend is playing.”

“You don’t have friends here.”

“I have to go in there,” I say. “You don’t understand.” He’s already waving forward the people behind me, holding aside the velvet rope to let them in. I chew the inside of my lip in frustration. He’s too big for me to get past him. I take out the wad of Raoul’s money and offer it to him. “Look, little girl,” he says. “Go back to Kansas.” I can feel the lump of Cass’s quartz in my pocket, digging into my thigh.

“I have to get in there,” I say again.

“I don’t care what you think you have to do. I’m not letting you past this door, and in a minute I’m going to get angry with you. You don’t want to see that.”

I open my mouth again to protest, and then there’s a noise like dead leaves rustling and Minos is standing behind the bouncer. Dressed in black, like always.
Like me
, I think suddenly. His flat eyes watch me. I have nothing to lose but the people I love most.

“You know why I’m here,” I say to him. “Let me in.” He lifts one shoulder, drops it. The same shrug he gave me in Aurora’s bedroom. He points two fingers at me, curls them toward himself.

“Looks like Kansas grew up fast,” the bouncer says. I shoulder past him and follow Minos into the huge warehouse. The inside of the building seems bigger than the outside. I can’t see the ceiling, or any of the far walls. The air is so hot and thick with cigarette smoke and the stink of bodies I nearly gag.

“Where are they?” I shout after him, but he doesn’t turn or answer. He doesn’t look like he’s moving any faster than a tall man walking, but I have to run to keep up with him and he still draws ahead of me. Minos vanishes into the swirl of grey, his black coat flapping behind him. Who wears coats like that in California?
Goddammit, Aurora,
I think.
You have the worst taste.
I trip over my own feet, stumble into a woman dressed like a storybook witch: long black dress and straggly black hair, wrinkled face, terrible eyes. She puts out one red-streaked hand and pushes me away. Her fingers leave wet red prints on my skin. A man with goat horns peeking out of his dark curls leers at me and sidles closer, running a hot hand down my leg. Disgusted, I push into the crowd to get away from him, men and women turning to look at me as I jostle through. The heat is overwhelming.
Get out of here get out of here get the hell out of here
. But I can’t go until I’ve found them. A light flares to life on a makeshift stage across the room and a harsh, ugly cheer rises up from the crowd. I fight my way to the front, kicking at women in silk and fur. Disapproving snarls snake past me. The mass of bodies presses me up against the edge of the stage.