Pretty (28 page)

At the end of the day, after Javi has styled my hair to perfection, Javi, Vi, and I decide to change into our party clothes. Candy follows us back to the locker bays. She has been tailing me around all day trying to get the dirt.

“Bebe, oh, my God. Did you get kicked out for sex? Come on. Tell me about it. Please. I'd tell you.”

“No. Sadly. Not sex.”

“Was it drugs? You can tell me. Do you have some? Can I buy some?”

Javier styled Candy's hair into the most incredible white girl afro-puffs I've ever seen, complete with red and orange and pink extensions. The height of it (and probably how tight he pulled it) does wonders for her double chin. She's on my nerves less than usual today. I even feel kind of sad that I won't see her again. The sad isn't about her specifically, but about Serenity. Where will I go now?

I change in the cramped bathroom, trying my best to clean the smell off me from last night before putting on my party dress. I spritz on a little vanilla oil and pull the dress up, the slight curve of my belly etching a wrinkle into the taffeta. I fasten the zipper, the stiff bodice encasing me like comforting armor. I look down and realize the thing I've forgotten. The thing I never forget—my fishnets. Emerging from under the bell of the dress, my legs look like the logs of ground turkey meat you see in the butcher's display case. The thick keloid scars snake from my feet to the tops of my knees, the memory of the crash engraved into my every day. I don't want to take off my pretty, pretty dress and put my polyester pants back on. Instead, I step my bare feet into my shoes, slip the straps around my heels, and don't look down again. I look straight ahead to where I'm going and resolve that if people stare I'll look them dead in the eye. I'll look right through them.

I join Javi and Violet where they are primping in front of their stations.

“The dress, darling. It's perfection. You're Grace Kelly meets the B-52s. You do honor to the hair,” says Javi.

My hair is magnificent. The candy-apple red, foot-high confection took him a full three hours.

Javi is dapper in his shiny boots, black bell-bottomed pants, and a Pucci pattern blouse that perfectly matches his new hair. Violet wears a veil and a hat fashioned from an enormous black silk rose. She made her own outfit and it's a floor-length, Victorian-inspired, deconstructed dress complete with corset and bell sleeves and chicly shredded edges. She's much better with clothes than with hair.

I take my place next to them, all of us fixing our makeup in the mirror. I dip into Javi's iridescent white eye shadow, Violet does her lips burgundy blood red, and for Javi it's about the lip gloss and just a touch of glitter on the eyelids.

We declare each other flawless. Javi and I turn toward the mirror and don our tiaras, the crowning touch.

Twenty minutes later,
Javier's sister is blending margaritas by the shampoo bowls. Mrs. Montano has already broken into Paul's cupcakes and she carries a double chocolate in one hand and a margarita, no salt, in the other.

Me, I'm not drinking. Because yesterday was yesterday and today I am probably still pregnant, though I can't be sure. Some days seem like the end of your life but then they aren't and you still have to figure out how to wake up again.

Buck shows up and she's made an impressive effort to look like Nick Cave instead of Johnny Van Zant, which makes me think she really loves Violet. Violet glides around in that somber Victorian mourning getup but she can't help it; she looks happy.

Buck barely says hello before she starts talking San Francisco. She's on fire with a plan for our future; she's been at home plotting all day.

“Here's the evil plan,” says Buck as Violet reaches over with her pinkie to wipe a spot of frosting from her upper lip. “You stay on Javi and Paul's couch for a couple of weeks. We wait for you to pass the State Board and then we hit the road. The three of us and baby makes four.”

“I can't go with you. I can't just leave Jake. How can I?”

“So what? You can't. So neither can I. So come anyway. What the fuck? What else are you doing? You want to stay here and wait for your crazy-ass boyfriend so that the two of you can find a freeway underpass where you can hang out and sniff glue for a while? He doesn't want a real life. You do. Or if you don't you should.”

“I don't want to talk about this now. I want to dance.”

Lila brought a boom box and her
Hits of the Seventies
cassette tape. The Armenian girls love it and Miss Hernandez loves it and a quake can even be detected in Mrs. Montano's wide rear when “Celebration” comes on. The cultural walls and teacher-student hierarchies dissolve and we all start dancing with each other in the aisles. The students who are graduating are all flushed and dressed up. The students who are still working on their hours wear their uniforms and look jealous, but are having fun anyway. It's a long time, 1600 hours. Let me tell you. It's a long year of your life.

“Dancing Queen” comes on and I find an open spot in the aisle where I sing and spin in my own world with my arms up in the air
. Having the time of your life
. I stop in midspin facing the back door. Through the milling, laughing crowd in the shampoo room I see a figure looming in the doorway, backlit with the yellow late afternoon sun. Eddies of dust catch the light from the open door as they swirl through the air.

Jake. How did he get out? How did he get his clothes back? He wears paint-splattered army fatigue pants and a filthy thermal shirt with the cuffs cut off at the wrists so that the sleeves are frayed around his broad forearms. He has his usual combat boots on and a torn T-shirt tied around his head like a gangster or a pirate. The crowd instinctively parts, forming an aisle in front of him. His arms hang down at his sides and he looks straight ahead, which is to say straight at me. In his right hand is a dense, magnetic presence: the L shape of a gun. The same gun I shot off his cousin's back porch in Joshua Tree. Violet approaches with a couple of sodas and she sees him at the same time I do. I hear her suck in a lungful of breath.

“Call Susan,” I say.

“Susan?”

“Just call her.”

I don't know why my mind turns to Susan but I feel somehow that she'll know what to do. I think that maybe I haven't been fair to Susan. That maybe I haven't been seeing people right.

Vi fades backward into the front room. I glance around quickly. I don't think anyone else has spotted the gun. They ignore the weirdo in the doorway and go on with their party. Javier's sister keeps up the constant white noise of the blender.

Jake hovers with a menacing, caged energy. I walk slowly toward him and I am floating, drifting. He scopes out the landscape, looking for enemies hidden in the bushes, under the shampoo sinks, in the chipped pink Formica cupboards, behind the door of the supply closet.

As I approach, he lifts the gun low at his hip like a cowboy, pointing straight at the center of me. I keep moving forward.

Jake grows more rigid with tension the closer I get. I walk until I can feel the gun pressing into the bodice of my dress right at my solar plexus.

“Jake.”

“I'm not Jake. That is my false name,” he says in a whisper through clenched teeth. “That's only on one of my birth certificates. I have four. This is my right to be known by my real name. They steal it, the baby killers. The rapists. Who are you? Have they hollowed you out yet? This is what I have come to find out.”

Abba has changed to the Bee Gees' infectious falsetto.

“They haven't got to me yet, Jake.”

“I'm not Jake,” he says, eyes straining, fat beads of sweat forming on his unshaven upper lip and across his forehead. “I am the Christ. I am Jesus of Nazareth. And if you are not yet a zombie I'm here to save you. You have been waiting so long to be saved. I have heard you in my sleep. There is no more time. They are here, the zombies, I can smell them rotting. Zombies with only one eye and with twelve names and as each man is a house so each man will fall. But here I am for you. Cover your face now. Do you smell it? Horrible, horrible. The smell.”

Jake flares his nostrils and sniffs at the air like there is a fire. Then he drops the gun to his side, grabs me by the arm, and pulls me toward the supply closet. He quickly opens the door, glances behind him, shoves me in front of him, and closes the door behind us.

“We can wait here until nightfall. It is a myth about zombies and night. Zombies do not need the death of the sunlight. Only the death of the sunlight of the soul. The zombies of this age are day dwellers. That way they can see better who has lost faith. I can protect us here. If I don't sleep, I can protect us.”

He locks the door and faces it, sitting down with his back against the unopened boxes of hair product that are stacked against the wall. He holds his gun between his legs, pointed at the door.

The supply closet is barely big enough for two. The perimeter of the floor is lined with boxes and the walls are shelved to the ceiling with rows of hair color and developer and perm solution and facial products and gloves and applicator bottles and industrial-sized refills of shampoo and conditioner. It smells like perfume and latex and bleach. My own hair reeks of the whole bottle of hair spray that Javier used to cement it into its sculptural beauty.

I stand there for a minute, stiff in my dress like an overgrown doll in the corner of a dark closet, the light and sounds of the party bleeding in around the edges of the door.

He listens theatrically, like a dog with his head cocked.

“Can I turn the light on?” I ask.

He seems startled by the question, as if he forgot I was there. “Yes,” he says, not looking at me, keeping his watchful gaze on the door with its off-white paint chipping and yellowing with age. I turn on the light and the bare bulb above throws harsh shadows.

I slip my shoes off and sit down cross-legged next to him on the cool, speckled linoleum, my dress puffing out around me like a muffin top.

“Do we really need the gun? What about love thy enemy?”

“I love them. I love them so much. I just can't stand the smell of them. Every age has a Christ. I'm the Christ for this age and therefore I carry a gun. I am here to protect you.”

“From who?”

“From Caesar. He is a bloodthirsty madman. He believes he is God. He is not even an emptied-out god. History will try him and reveal this. We must be careful of our prophets, He said. We must be careful of our prophets but we must have faith in our angels.”

Jake gestures in the air with his gun for emphasis. He smells like chemicals and b.o. How could I have been so wrong about everything?

“They shot me up with mind control drugs and they tried to convince me I was someone I was not. But halfway through, I remembered my true identity. I remembered that I am Jesus and that is my birthright. They tried to tell me there are no zombies but at the same time their flesh was rotting off their faces in front of me. I told them I could save them but they didn't want to be saved. They will destroy me rather than be saved, but I will not let them. I had to escape from there to do God's work. I know your wish. I've always known your wish. I could grant it.”

The wish thing makes it sound like a bit of Santa Claus got mixed in with his Jesus. Truthfully, I do. Of course I have a wish. But even Jesus was no genie.

Jake probably hasn't slept in days. Beyond the party noises and the music, I start to hear another kind of bustle outside the door—hushed and official voices. The music stops abruptly.

“You believe you are a slave and that you are being punished,” he says, putting the gun down on the floor beside him and placing a hardened palm on either side of my face. His hands smell like dirt and metal. “You wish to be saved. But you already are. You already are saved.”

I can't save Jake because he's already saved, too. But saved doesn't equal healed and his healing isn't mine to give. And there it all is, clear as an L.A. sky after a winter rain scrubs the smog away. Jake has got to finish this zombie battle without me. I'm going to San Francisco with Buck and Vi.

“If I have another wish, will you grant that, too?

“I wish that you'd hand me the gun. I wish you'd surround us in golden light and that you'd take my hand now and walk with me out the door.”

I hear the whispered discussion, see the shadows passing by the light from under the door.

I lean in and kiss him on the forehead. The gun is heavier than I remembered it, tucked into the scarred cradle of my palm.

I
600 hours down. Plus five minutes, even.

I'm done. Graduated. The clock on the wall over the shampoo bowls says 5:05.