Call Me Jane (2 page)

I didn’t know what I would say to her when I found her. I wanted to confront her, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. Then she appeared again near Lynn. I moved toward them, through the people. The music was so loud you couldn’t hear anything else.

Once I came up close to them, I heard Lynn talking. She was saying that she needed to go home. She was supposed to have been home by ten.

I thought she was staying longer. Then I heard Gay say, “You’re leaving? You’re the only reason I’m even at this stupid party.”

Someone behind me tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around to talk to them. They started telling me something but I didn’t know who they were or what they were saying.

I turned around again and now Gay was lying facedown on the beanbag chair by the wall. I glanced back over at the chandelier, and sure enough, the dripping things still hung there, one from each spindle.

When I turned back, I was looking straight into Glinda Sinclair’s face.

“What happened to her? Did she pass out?” I asked her and pointed at Gay.

“You look beautiful in that hat,” Glinda said. She had a very soft voice, and put no effort into raising it, but somehow you could still hear it over the pounding music. The song playing from the stereo was “Time Is On My Side.”

“I think maybe you could be a model,” Glinda continued.

I was stunned to hear her say this. I looked back over at the heap that was Gay. She still held a beer in her hands, though it was tilted and spilling on her shirt, which was a shirt only a boy would wear: only a boy. I moved closer to her, because I wanted to confront her, but I still didn’t know what to say.

Then she did something I didn’t understand. She raised her wrist and pointed to her watch. Then she put her wristwatch to her hip and hit it three times. She repeated this three times, and while she did she looked me in the eye, as if she were trying to convey something, only I couldn’t figure out what.

Somehow we were all now out on the front porch, though I remember hearing Gay say in the living room that if Lynn went home, she was leaving too, because Lynn was the only reason she was even here at this stupid party. But she didn’t go home when Lynn left, she just stood yelling on the porch, something about where they could all go next.

And all the cool ones, the popular kids, did traipse out of there with her. There were a few stragglers, but they were passed out on the floor, and though I was talking to someone, I don’t know who it was. I just started to feel sick then, and went to my little gold bathroom, which oddly matched the living room, although it was a whole room away. In between them was the back room, which only seemed black, where I slept. There I found a whole box of tampons that had been rifled through, the contents strewn about the floor. So that’s where she found them.

The bottle of Mad Dog red wine we’d been passing around lay dripping on the floor next to the box.

It felt nice to go to sleep, even if the room was spinning, with Mick Jagger singing in my ear ... time, time, time, is on my side, yes it is.

THREE

Music was very important to me. I was very particular about what I liked. Everyone seemed to like certain songs just because they were popular. I couldn’t understand that. I became very attached to the musicians I liked, felt like they were members of my own family. My favorite band was the Beatles, and my favorite member was John Lennon.

So the morning my dad opened the door to my back bedroom, letting in the cold morning light, and said in a quiet, respectful voice, “John Lennon is dead,” I sat up on my fold-out bed and said, “No.”

We picked up Lynn Bonner every day for school. When we picked her up that morning, she climbed in the car cautiously, eyeing me warily, sitting next to me in the backseat. I wouldn’t even look at her. My eyes were all red.

We arrived at school, and I still couldn’t stop myself from openly weeping.

“What’s her problem?” I would hear them say behind me and around me. Lynn did her best to warn people ahead of me about it so they wouldn’t say the wrong thing.

It was useless, though. They did say the wrong thing. I sobbed my way through the first period, and later—on my way to second—I heard two girls, one of whom, Jill, I’d known since St. Mary’s. The other girl said, “What’s wrong with her?”

“Jack Lemon died,” was the answer.

“Jack Lemon?” I stopped in my tracks and turned around. “Jack Lemon? It’s John Lennon.”

The two girls just stood and stared at me. Then more gathered round in a group to look at the spectacle.

“Who’s John Lennon?” said Jill.

“How can you not know who John Lennon is?” I shouted. More gathered round me as I went on, “Have you ever heard of the Beatles?”

No one said anything; they all just stared at me. Finally a kid named Doug told me to calm down. He had already nicknamed me “Skitz” so he said, “Calm down, Skitz.”

“I don’t want to go to that school anymore; I’d rather just go to North.” I told my mom when she picked me up in the round drive-through area.

She didn’t put up any fuss whatsoever. She said, “Why don’t we go over and register you right now then.”

I wasn’t surprised. My mom was pretty unpredictable, which made her oddly predictable. We registered, and I started the next day. I did one more thing. I asked her to let me borrow the car. I drove to Appleton, taking the back roads, and went to an Army surplus store and bought a combat outfit. I wore it the first day. And on the first day, for some reason, she let me drive there myself.

I parked in the big lot and walked into the school, dressed for combat. This time I was going to focus on my grades and my future, not on my hair and makeup. In fact, I deliberately left it alone. I just wanted to look like me. I just wanted to be myself, to be myself, to be the girl who cried when John Lennon died. To be “Skitz.”

That’s exactly how I felt. Like I was going into combat. I didn’t need any friends; I didn’t even want any. When I walked down the halls, I carried my books in front of me like a shield. I marched through the dimly lit hallway just like that, just like I was oblivious to anyone.

That’s why I was surprised when Krishna Vedanta jumped out and grabbed me by the arm. She grabbed my army jacket and pulled me toward her little group of people. She said, “It’s Janey Lou! You’re going here now? How great! Look everyone; it’s Janey Lou, from the party!”

“Just call me Jane,” I said.

“We’re going to have to get you some friends, Jane, now that you’re here,” Krishna said, and she began introducing me around. I found myself standing in a little group of people. She introduced me to a dark-haired, pretty girl named Lucy Bacchus, who said, “Why did you decide to leave St. Peters and come here?”

“Because yesterday John Lennon died, and nobody there knew who he was.”

Most of the kids just looked at me weird, but Krishna immediately cracked up laughing, gave me a big smile and said, “That’s great! Just like Siegfried.”

“Who?”

“Siegfried. We call him Ziggy. He was running up and down the halls yesterday screaming, ‘Why did it have to be John Lennon? Why couldn’t it have been anybody else, even my mom, but not John Lennon?’” Krishna told me. Several of them laughed at this and nodded, and said they remembered. One of them said, “Wasn’t he the one who got Sid Vicious elected homecoming queen?”

Suddenly I felt a hand on the top of my head. It covered the top of my head, and the fingers gripped it softly, but firmly. It spun me around.

It was Glinda Sinclair. She didn’t look at me at all, but rather was looking across the hall at someone who stood staring at me. He was dark like Krishna.

“Here she is, Raj,” said Glinda, “here’s Blondie.”

FOUR

“Come on,” Glinda said as I was leaving school, “you’re coming with me to a party,” and she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me along all the way to my car. “You’re driving.” We drove somewhere near the university, and entered a large old house. It seemed I had been in this house before, a long time ago.

Glinda’s name was really Sieglinda, but who could blame her for not wanting to go by that? She had curly, brown hair that was cut in some strange style, I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was long at the bottom, short right around the face, asymmetrical around the ears. She wore the strangest clothes. Pleated balloon pants made with extra-thin corduroy, only it wasn’t corduroy.

I reached out and felt the material. “What is that material?” I asked her. It turned out she had made it herself. “Made it yourself? How do you even do that?” I asked. “It’s easy,” she said, but she didn’t elaborate.

Well, no wonder you couldn’t copy her style. Even the material, the designs couldn’t be found anywhere. Certainly not in those pattern packages in the fabric stores or magazines or anywhere like that.  

Glinda spoke in an infuriatingly soft voice, even when she yelled.

“Hey Paul,” she yelled across the room. “Look at this one,” pointing at me. I turned to see Paul. He was up on a stage near the back of the party.

The party was in a basement with rectangular rooms going every direction. The ceiling seemed to be held up by wooden beams. We stopped at a keg near the front. “Have a beer,” Glinda said, and handed me a foaming cup.

Then she pulled me by the hand over to someone dressed like a garage mechanic, who stood leaning against the wall, with his arms folded, staring at the band. “This is my brother Ziggy,” she said. He didn’t look at me. He made me feel as if I weren’t there.

“Come on, play,” he said, and then leaned toward Glinda, and with his eyes still on the band he said, “Punk bands need to play their songs back to back. There should be less than one second between the songs. That’s how they need to play. They need to speed it up. Go tell them to speed it up.”

I looked up at the band. There was Raj, the dark-skinned guy to whom Glinda had pointed me out in the hall. There were several other very unique and interesting-looking guys on that stage, each one holding his instrument, one holding a microphone. The one holding the microphone looked Asian. The one named Paul, at whom Glinda had shouted, looked like a very young Paul McCartney. He was gorgeous, needless to say.

Standing near him, talking to him, was Lucy Bacchus; the girl Krishna introduced me to that afternoon.

Lucy watched Paul intently all night. If he stopped playing his guitar between songs, she ran to find him a beer. If he looked around as if he were confused, she rushed over to find out what he needed. Then she bullied anyone near her to help her find it for him, “
Right now
!”

Krishna milled around her occasionally, drinking her beer, watching the band, yelling a comment into my ear from time to time, but Lucy just sat and stared daggers at Paul, like a cat with a mouse. Her black hair was cut in a low-key punk style, and while her clothes were punk, it seemed her clothes were the least of her concerns. Krishna came over to me at one point and told me Walt had been looking at me. She leaned way over me and breathed the alcohol into my face when she said this.

Everyone was slam dancing, so I tried it. There wasn’t much to it. The worse you were at it, the better you were at it.

The band played songs I’d never heard before, fast songs, with insistent rhythms. Raj never moved, except his wrist over the bass. The drummer slammed on those drums all night, and smiled, and man did he have a workout. Sweat rolled down his face. He stood up every now and then for just a brief second to drink something, probably beer, though you’d think he just needed water.

Ziggy also rarely moved from his spot, leaning against the wall with arms crossed. I slammed out on the dance floor, which really just meant jumping up and down. Rather silly if you asked me. You couldn’t talk except to yell something right in someone’s ear.

At one point Lucy screamed in my ear, “Paul needs a new guitar pick! Go find him one!”

“Why don’t you get it yourself?”

“I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Just go get it,” she screamed and stomped her feet.

“Where do I look?”

“I don’t know, go ask Ziggy, he’s the band manager,” Lucy screamed over the music.

You really needed to stay away from her if you didn’t want to be sent out on a mission.

I approached Ziggy, feeling the way you would feel upon approaching a bear in a cave. As I came closer to him, the room behind me began to recede.

I moved up, within about two feet of him, and just stood there. I was afraid to move closer. I just waited for him to look at me, but he wouldn’t look. He just stood there with his arms folded, watching the band. I moved a foot closer.

Finally he completely startled me. He turned his face toward me suddenly and barked, “Okay, what?”

I couldn’t answer for a moment. I stood there with my mouth open like an idiot. Then I said, “Paul needs a guitar pick.”

At this, all he did was crack up laughing, so I walked away embarrassed, and ran right into Jenny and Crystal, two of the punkest looking girls I’d ever seen. They started talking to me while I was burying my face practically to hide the feeling of shame and embarrassment that I had. But after a while I focused my attention on them. They really should be applauded. They should have won some kind of award. They really looked punk.

They had the colors, the clothes, the hair spray sticking their hair up, the zippers, the spikes, the pins, the attitude.

“Oh my God!” A scream in my ear from my left side.

“What?” Good God, I had ended up back over by Lucy again somehow.

“He’s hot!” screamed Lucy.

“Yeah he’s pretty cool,” I screamed.

“No, I mean he’s hot! Look at him sweating! Run and get me some beer to give him! Right
now
!”

So with fury—partly built of the embarrassment I was feeling from being laughed at after the last errand that she sent me on—I ran upstairs and grabbed a pitcher. I had to go all the way upstairs and hunt around in cabinets to find it. I filled it up at the keg and the froth spilled over the sides.

I stormed over to Paul on the stage. Walked right up next to him, under some red lights.