Anonymity (17 page)

AS USUAL, Emo's had a slamming band playing. During a break, the massive speakers blared Devo and everybody piled out on the dance floor cracking an imaginary whip. Travis doubted if any of the bar crowd was old enough to remember the early 80s.

He was nursing his third beer when he spotted Emily in the pulsing crowd. She was with a group flinging themselves around like high school kids. Maybe some of them were.

Her friends laughed and tumbled toward the bar, knocking into each other. They ordered and the bartender handed them clear plastic cups of iced yellowish liquid, probably vodka and Red Bull.

Like magnetism, Emily's eyes fell on his. She waved, and he lifted a few fingers her direction. The music cranked up again. She came toward him. Bass vibrated the bar under his fingertips.

“Hi!” she shouted as she shoved through people lined up at the bar.

“Hi.”

“Are you following me?” She leaned into him. He could feel the heat coming off of her.

“Maybe.”

She bit her bottom lip and something stirred in him.

“You like the band? Aren't they totally awesome?” Her T-shirt hugged her curves. Jeans rode low on her hips.

“Yeah, awesome.”

He swirled beer around in his bottle and wished for a cigarette, anything to take his mind off the sections of sweaty hair stuck along her neck.

“Oh my God, you've got to come over to my house and see some of my photographs.”

She was persistent. He had to give her that.

“Okay. When?”

“How about now? We're all just getting ready to go hang at my place. I'll show you my shots.”

“A party at your house?”

“Sure. Come on over. I'll give you the address.”

He handed her a pen. Emily shoved up his sleeve and wrote her address on the inside of his arm.

“You could have just written that on a napkin.”

“What fun would that be?” She flung her hair over her shoulder and bounced away into the crowd.

Emily's friends were basically the same people Travis had hung out with in his twenties. The longhaired musicians went straight for the CDs and started fighting over what to play. The pale, thin vegan girl and her overly stoned boyfriend sat in the swing on the porch all night. There was the obligatory loud guy trying to impress two fashion victim girls with his shirt. The front pictured George Bush Sr. with the thought bubble, “I should have pulled out.”

People came and went, the party swelling, getting loud and hot enough inside to push people out to the porch. At other times, the gathering would ebb until only a few people were scattered around listening to music. A debate raged on possible bands for future Austin City Limits and South by Southwest festivals.

Travis sauntered into the kitchen to grab a beer from a cooler. Outside the back door, two girls were perched on the top step, their outlines grainy through the screen door. One was crying while the other comforted her. The only thing missing was someone puking in the bushes in the side yard.

Twenty-something gatherings could be so weird when you passed thirty. His conversations at parties were typically more elevated than which beer had the most foam. Of course, if he drank enough beer he might regress.

But the thing that really marked you as an older dude was low-party endurance. About two he started to fade. He sat in the swing with Emily, trying to hang in. He suppressed a yawn.

“So, are you ever going to show me your photos or not?” he chided.

“Oh, I forgot. Stay right here.” She was back in a moment with her MacBook. When she opened her photography file, Travis was suddenly awake. She'd captured gutter punks crawling out of dumpsters, some of them piled together sleeping in an alley. She had a series of action shots from a Hacky Sack game in the park. A couple of girls panhandled with a mangy mutt in front of a pet store. They had scored a bag of dog food far too large for them to carry.

“Impressive.”

She smiled. “Thank you. Now, I'm going to show you something that I promised I wouldn't show anybody.” She giggled, clearly more than a beer past her limit.

“Okay.”

She clicked around on her laptop until she found the right image. The girl in the picture was hollow-eyed and haunting, a tattoo raking her face, her stomach nearly concave. She looked young and vulnerable and sexy and strange. Emily had shot her slightly overexposed, as if the girl were caught unawares, startled by the flash.

He turned the screen for a full-on study.

“This is an incredible shot. We have to use this one.”

“Oh, sorry. No can do. I can't use any of this, girl. I promised her.” She twisted her mouth in a contemplative way. “She's a strange little thing.”

“We have to use this image. Get her permission.”

“She'd never give it. She doesn't like to be photographed.”

Suddenly, ZZ Top blared from the house.

“That's it, I'm pissed,” she said. “Here, hold this.” She passed the laptop to him and stomped over to her open front door.

“Guys,” she yelled inside. His eyes followed the curve of her back under her tight shirt. “Guys!”

The music stopped.

“I hate to tell you this, but you know the drill,” she said. “You don't have to go home…” They joined her in finishing the old bartender adage,
“But you can't stay here!”

“That's right! Closing time. Vamoose. Chop. Chop. Get the hell out!” she said.

A few minutes later, the last of the late night partiers spilled out onto the front porch.

“Hey, man. Have a good one,” one said as he walked off into the night.

“Yeah, see ya, man,” Travis said. Emily crossed her arms and watched them disappear.

“That go for me too?” Travis asked her.

She smiled that crooked smile. “What? Am I running you off too?”

“Yeah.”

She leaned against the doorframe. “Um, well. That depends.”

“On what?”

“On you.”

It was his turn to make a move. Travis ambled over to her, his eyes wandering down her neck, over her breasts and then lower to where skin peeked from the crevice between her shirt and jeans. She wasn't shy. She just stood there and let him look. He liked her confidence. Lust surged through him.

“Take off your bra.”

She reached up under her shirt, unhooked her bra and pulled it out a sleeve. Her breasts fell heavy and full against the thin fabric.

“Anything else you'd like?”

“I'll see what I can think of,” he said. He leaned in for the kiss, his hands cupping her, her nipples alert to his touch.

She tasted like honey beer. He walked her backward into the house. He pressed her into the sofa and kissed her, feeling her sharp little teeth, her warm willing tongue. Travis wedged himself between her legs and pressed. She ground against him until the metal buttons on their jeans caught. It caused them to laugh and broke their momentum.

“Come on,” she said and took his hand.

He let himself be led to a back room where a queen-sized bed was still unmade from the previous night.

“Didn't your mother ever teach you to make up your bed?”

She laughed again. “What? And waste time on that when I could be doing this?”

She stripped off her jeans in one quick motion. She slid her tongue into his mouth and pulled him into cool, rumpled sheets. She ran her fingernails through his hair, and chills tingled his shoulders.

He pushed her away, shed his jeans and kicked them to the floor. He flung his shirt on a chair.

When their flesh met it was like smooth fire.

Her breasts were soft as clouds, her nipples like velvet. He ran his tongue over her, in her mouth, along her salty neck, over the silky skin of her stomach, down in the heat between her legs. She swam in the sheets, breathless, quivering under him.

She pulled him up, and when he pushed inside her, he was rushed with pleasure so intense he had to concentrate to hold back. He pulled out and focused on her. He wasn't going to disappoint. They fucked for half an hour, hard and physical, like a competition.

Afterward, spent and proud of himself, Travis gathered his things and left Emily drowsy and content, her cheeks flushed, her hair sinuous across a pillow.

THE LAST time she had been with Lorelei was the day they went to that nasty apartment to retrieve her backpack. Lorelei had been sick and weird, had yelled at Emily in the car, then jumped out and stomped away. Emily hadn't heard from her in weeks, and then suddenly, out of the nowhere, Lorelei was on the phone, in crazy good spirits, asking if Emily would like to meet some of her friends. She promised to give her a feel for real street life, to show Emily things to photograph.

Emily found her talking with an older girl on the front steps of University Baptist. They were laughing, watching three guys kicking around a Hacky Sack. Lorelei wore a ratty plaid schoolgirl skirt with ripped black tights and a flouncy blouse Emily hadn't seen before.

“I like your new look,” Emily said to ease into things.

Lorelei looked down at herself, and Emily could see she'd decided to be casual about the compliment.

“It's amazing what you can get from the library lost and found,” the girl replied.

Emily just nodded. Did she really dress from lost and found boxes?

“This is Fiona,” Lorelei said. “This is Emily.”

“Hey,” Emily said. “You're the friend who rescued Lorelei's backpack. That was cool.”

“Right on,” the girl said. “So a bunch of us are going over to this guy's house. He's got an old PlayStation 2. Wanna come?”

Emily hated dating gamers, so watching a bunch of juvenile guys yelling at a television had no appeal. But if she didn't go along she could forget about an afternoon with Lorelei and friends.

“This isn't going to be another skanky drug den like that Lawrence dude's place is it? Because I really don't feel like getting pierced or watching some snake digest a rat,” Emily said.

“Ha,” Fiona laughed. “That's funny. No. It's Mook's mom's place. She's cool. There's nothing going on there.”

“Mook has a home?”

She shrugged. “A lot of us have homes, just not like, good ones with a warm bed where good ol’ mom and pop are waiting up for us with milk and cookies.”

Emily had never envisioned Drag kids as having any sort of home life. But it was reasonable that a few of them had families simply unable to care for them or parents who were plain ol’ disinterested.

Within a couple of blocks they met with a familiar group of guys—Mook, Minion and Freestyle. Mook recognized Emily.

“What's she doing here?”

“She's with me,” Lorelei said. “She's chill.”

“I don't think so,” he said.

Fiona interceded. “Oh, come on, Mook. You're bringing those idiots, so why can't my friends come? Betsy won't care.”

He thought about it, then said, “No pictures, photo girl.”

“No pictures,” Emily promised.

“Well, let's go then,” he said impatiently, as if his time were a most valuable commodity. He took off down the street. Freestyle let his skateboard clatter to the sidewalk. He stepped on and pushed off, his wheels making a zipper sound. Minion carried a guitar.

The girls followed. Fiona stopped to gaze in store windows, but the boys plowed ahead.

“Don't we need to keep up with them?” Emily asked.

“No biggie,” Fiona said. “They'll be playing all afternoon.”

Oddly, Lorelei and Fiona were drawn to pretty dresses, unlike their rough, ripped street style. Perhaps there was a time in their lives when they had party dresses, a time when they had been prized children. Emily imagined them without their rough edges, in pastels instead of black. Clean and rested and fed girls. Girls who went to high school and proms and took dance lessons and learned to play the piano. How were they before they hit the streets? How long had they lived this way?

The apartment complex had seen better days. The pool had been dry so long that people had filled the bottom with flowerpots and plastic patio chairs. Summer's plants were wilted. A couple had only stalks left, which made Emily think something must have been harvested from them.

Fiona led the way upstairs and let herself into a unit by the street. Inside, the boys surrounded an old thirty-inch television, their faces scrunched in concentration. Emily recognized the rapid-fire blasts and thundering detonations of
Call of Duty.
They groaned in unison. A frail woman smoked a cigarette in the kitchen. Fiona went forward and kissed her on the cheek.

“Hi, sweetie,” the woman said, and pushed back the dreads around Fiona's face.

“Hey, Betsy. How you feeling?”

“Some days are better than others.”

“These are my friends, Lorelei and Emily.”

They both said, “Hey.” You could tell that Betsy had once been attractive, but her face had the furrowed look of a smoker and her voice was gravely and deep. Her winged 70s hairstyle was flecked with gray.

“I'd offer you girls something to eat, but I just don't have a thing in the house,” Betsy said.

“That's okay. We just ate,” Fiona said, although that was unlikely.

The den erupted in hysteria, but in ten seconds there came another massive groan.

Betsy grinned thinly. “They sure do like those games.”

Minion was perched on an arm of the sofa, his guitar balanced on one thigh.

“Can you play that thing or is it just for effect?” Emily asked him.

He began to pick out chords, and she immediately recognized a Radiohead song. He had a nice voice. His music drew the girls to him. Within a few bars the game was paused and all the kids had joined in. They sang about being a creep, about being a weirdo. About wishing they were special.

Betsy put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled.

“I hate that song,” she said to Emily. “These songs these kids like, they're so sad and negative.”

“Sometimes it's hard to stay positive.”

“You got that right,” Betsy said. “I've got this fibromyalgia, and I can't work no more. Disability barely gets me by, and my son can't live with me or I lose my apartment, but you don't see me moaning about it. Singing songs about how bad I got it.”

“They're kids.”

“I love ‘em all. They're good, you know. They're all good kids. They got their whole lives ahead of them. I try to get my son to go back to school, but he thinks it's romantic to live on the street. Well, he won't think that when he's my age. I've never been homeless, but I've been damn close. That shit ain't funny.”

They finished their song, and Betsy broke in.

“You girls come outside with me so I don't smoke everybody out,” she said.

They followed her tiny frame out onto the second-story walkway that looked down on the forlorn pool below. From the back, Betsy appeared young in her worn jeans and baggy T-shirt. You could feel the girl inside, but hard life had nearly extinguished her. She had smoked her cigarette down to the filter, so she lighted another from the butt.

“You girls being careful?” she asked. “There's lots of crazy people out there, crazy men. You stay around my Johnny. He'll take care of you. Johnny's a good boy.”

“Johnny?” Emily asked.

Fiona laughed. “Mook. Johnny. Whatever.”

“Where's Elda?” Betsy asked.

“She's taking the GED today,” Fiona said.

“Well, good for her,” Betsy said. “Good for her. I like that Elda.” She reached up and touched Fiona's cheek. “But you'll always be my favorite.”

Fiona saw Emily's curiosity, so she said, “I used to be Mook's girlfriend. We broke up. Elda's cool with it, but I don't get to see Betsy as much as I'd like to. Betsy's like my mom. Betsy's like everybody's mom.”