Bombshell Page 21

  “Oh,” she said. “Guin told me that Kit wanted to remind you to come to their show tonight. It’s at Trunk Space. I told her you were grounded, but she said he really hopes you’ll come.”

  Kit, huh. Right.

  She added, “Even though I told him everything and showed him the Tumblr.”

  I felt a pang of rage but let it pass. Rhiannon was allowed some kind of retaliation.

  “Great,” I said, covering my eyes with my hands.

  Trevor took a vape out of his blazer pocket and puffed on it a few times before passing it to Rhiannon, who stared out the limo’s moonroof, evidently done talking.

  “And what do you think of all this?” I asked, turning on Mae, who’d stayed suspiciously silent.

  “Hey, I don’t do drama,” she said, holding up her hands. “I hate drama.”

  “Ugh.” I groaned.

  “What?” Mae asked.

  “Sorry. That was an automatic reaction to someone saying ‘I hate drama.’ ”

  Mae laughed.

  “Anyway, of course you like drama! Everyone does! Everything is dramatic! God, that phrase—”

  “You know what I hate?” Mae said. “ ‘It is what it is.’ ”

  “ ‘Love and light’!” I said.

  “ ‘Right on’!”

  “ ‘Right on’ is a good one,” I agreed. I hadn’t believed Mary-Kate when she said Mae and I were similar, but suddenly it seemed obvious.

  “Justin, please stop doing drugs—” Mary-Kate hissed at Trevor. Out the window, our moms appeared at the front gate, talking animatedly. Mine had somehow gotten ahold of a glass of wine.

  “Look at them,” I said, catching Nina as she rolled her eyes almost imperceptibly, nodding along to whatever Mrs. Mahoney was saying.

  “Your mom has great eyebrows,” Mary-Kate said.

  “What are they talking about?” I prompted, hoping Mary-Kate would play along.

  She imitated her mom’s voice.

  “Mary-Kate’s turned into a lesbian. I don’t know what I am going to tell my mother at Thanksgiving—”

  I imitated my mom in response. “Would I be one of those Scottsdale bimbos if I got a little Botox? I mean, I wake up every day shocked I’m not thirty anymore. Would it be so bad, if it makes me feel more confident? Is that setting a bad example?”

  “Oh, now, I don’t know about plastic surgery, Nina. The Bible doesn’t say anything about it.”

  Right when Mary-Kate said that, her mom leaned in toward my mom’s face, and my mom pointed out the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes. Mary-Kate and I dissolved into laughter.

  “Have fun tonight,” I said, opening the car door. “And uh, I’m sorry. To you too,” I added, for Rhiannon.

  “We know,” Mary-Kate replied. “We’re sorry too. We’re here for you, okay?”

  “Aw, all right.”

  I stood with my mom and we giggled together when Mrs. Mahoney climbed into the passenger seat of the limo using a tiny ladder that extended out from a side panel with a robotic whir.

  “Yeah,” my mom said, draining her wineglass. “She definitely thinks you’re the bad seed now.”

  As they drove off, I leaned in and gave my mom a hug. I hadn’t touched her since the emergency room, when there’d been two of her swimming in front of me and I’d spent the long wait trying to combine the Ninas into one mega-Nina. She kissed the top of my head, and I felt her body relax.

  “Do you wish that was us?” I asked.

  She hmmed and started stroking my hair.

  “Do you wish I was going to prom tonight? Like—like a normal person? In a normal dress with a normal date?”

  She didn’t answer. I separated myself from her a bit, tried to read her face.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “No,” she said firmly, wiping a tear away. “I am so, so glad you’re exactly who you are. Obviously you need help, more help than I can give you. I really hope you know that everything you did was not okay.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But all this shit, whatever energy makes you want to act out this way, I know you’re going to take it and direct it toward something amazing someday. And I wouldn’t want you any other way.”

  The foundation dropped out when my dad died. I’m not sure my mom knew how to build it back up. But she was trying.

  When we went back inside, Dylan was waiting with news. Sylvie’s visa had been approved and she’d be coming to Arizona to study. This meant Dylan wasn’t going back to Chile and would be staying at home for the foreseeable future. My mom, already high from my show of physical affection, was ecstatic.

  That’s how I convinced her to let me go to Kit’s band’s concert. A little bit of good old-fashioned in-person emotional manipulation. She liked the idea of me doing something social, and she loved the idea of Dylan chaperoning. I begged for my phone back too, but she was a genie who granted only a single wish. A phone was one request too many.

  I showered and blow-dried, careful with the stitches on my head, arranging my hair to cover up the puffy yellow bruise that surrounded them. Singing along to a Neil Young song, I thought of Shane and what he might be doing. My mom mentioned she was surprised he hadn’t stopped by. As far as I knew, our time as James and Rosie hadn’t come out during Leah’s big reveal—she was still the only person who knew how Shane felt and what he’d done to try to show me.

  I watered the plants in my room with water I saved from a bucket in the shower, and as I did, I thought I caught a glimpse of him out the window, riding his bike to my house like he’d done hundreds—probably thousands—of times. Riding through the memories that surrounded us, same old stories, same old street.

  It was some other kid though—younger, lighter, happier.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Dylan asked as we pulled up outside Trunk Space, a roving performance venue whose current home was in the back room of a Lutheran church.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You have no problem attending a large gathering of people? In public? Without a phone?” Dylan said, teasing me.

  “Don’t remind me I don’t have a phone,” I said. “I have an Altoids tin in my purse, and I’m just going to hold it if I get scared.”

  I tried to convince Dylan to drive off and let me go to the show alone, but he insisted on playing bodyguard. I warned him it might be awkward, and told him that if Kit came up to talk to me he was to make himself disappear immediately.

  Unlike the Conor Oberst show, Trunk Space was all ages and there wasn’t a bar. Thirty or forty people crowded into the small room, leaving a little half circle clear at the back wall, where equipment was set up beneath a tattered tapestry depicting the Roman goddess of the hearth and the namesake of Kit’s band—Vesta.

  “Wow,” Dylan said, eyeing the crowd’s weird demographics. “Eclectic.”

  I scanned the room for anyone from Xavier or Brophy who might have decided to ditch prom for something better. I looked for Kit but didn’t see him, and imagined him getting ready, meditating. I couldn’t picture him nervous, but maybe he was.

  I’d decided to go not because I was dying to see him, or sick of being cooped up in the house. I just wanted to be somewhere, in a crowd, surrounded by people who didn’t know who I was. It was a kind of relief, something approximating the feeling of disappearing into a character.

  Guinevere appeared, serene and breathless.

  “Joss! And Dylan!” she exclaimed, hugging us both, her long hair falling over our faces. “You came!”

  She said she’d tell Kit I was there, and we should try to get a spot up front for “something really special.”

  Before she left, she repeated, “It’s going to be really special tonight, guys. Mercury just left retrograde!”

  Dylan watched her back as she drifted away toward the equipment and picked her bass up. It seemed huge against her bony frame. The drummer, a guy named Paris, came out from a door marked EXIT, an
d he and Guin started a droning melody that skirted the edge of atonal. The lights lowered and Kit came out, hair flopping over his high, smooth forehead.

  The first song was their most popular, the one they’d been getting played on the local indie radio station for the past few weeks. Dylan wormed his way toward the front, but I stayed back, unsure how to deal with Kit’s liquid gaze, his searching eyes. It crossed my mind that the situation was one I’d dreamed of months ago, when I’d first stalked Kit online. This magnetic boy, looking for me as he sang.

  The song ended with Kit and Guin harmonizing beautifully—singing poems to a roomful of strangers, channeling their energy.

  “Hey. Thanks for coming everybody.” Kit spoke into the microphone, looking at the floor, adjusting pedals with his feet. “This is new, this is Normal. Normal War.”

  My stomach jumped.

  He sang with a smile.

  It’s a normal war we’re waging right here

  And in the heart a clash

  With the comedown near

  A normal war of broken treaties

  A normal war of unbreakable ties

  The song worked to transport me. I couldn’t take my eyes off Kit.

  These young players present electricity

  To the virgin goddess who hides the supplies

  Out of the daydreamer’s reach

  In her secret cave of impossible lies

  He was standing perfectly still, but then the droning broke and he bent over the guitar and played it wild and crazy so everyone started moving. I felt absolutely sure then that he would move to Los Angeles and become a famous rock star, and someday I’d have to send him a text message reminding him who I was.

  Possible lies

  And impossible lies

  In a normal war

  It’s a normal war

  Everyone was dancing, except me.

  • • •

  After the show, most of the crowd seemed to hang around despite there being no bar or room to party. Dylan and I followed the wave up a set of wide white steps and came out onto a lawn wet from recent sprinklers.

  I watched Kit talk to several people before he made his way over to me, his face shiny with an adrenaline-sheen. We hugged, only slightly awkward, and Kit said something playful about how busy I’d been. Dylan came up and I introduced them to each other—they bonded immediately, and I caught Dylan’s eye and smiled at the first mention of Neil Young. See, it’s not anecdotal; it’s every single time, I wanted to say, but realized I would have been responding to something Shane said, and Shane wasn’t there.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about him. If anyone pinned me down during the week and forced me to admit what was on my mind, chances are I’d say, “Shane and James and Rosie, and what am I going to do about it.”

  Before leaving, I told Kit I liked the song, and hoped he was sensitive enough to understand what I really meant.

  I like the song. I can’t be your girlfriend. I wouldn’t know how, and even though there aren’t twenty different guys talking to twenty different versions of me anymore, it still wouldn’t be just us. Someone else has a claim on me.

  Driving home, Dylan was unusually quiet. His phone was connected to the truck’s stereo, and its sentient shuffle tarot selected a song from one of the bargain-bin cassettes I’d bought for Shane. He’d played this particular tape so often that it had deteriorated and he’d had to throw it away. I tried not to see it as a sign, but it felt like one anyway.

  On the freeway, each overpass shocked the cab with a brief moment of darkness, and presented a new mosaic—Gila monster, rattlesnake, roadrunner, a stylized four-pointed sun.

  The Kokopelli was next, exactly 1.5 miles ahead, guarding the exit that led to the outlet mall. When it rushed past my window, I turned back to look. The design receded quickly into a shadow, just a flat combination of square turquoise tiles pressed into cement, a bit of sad cultural appropriation decorating the side of the road.

  I’d had to work hard to convince my mom I didn’t need to be medicated for my hallucinations. Dr. Judson and I talked about how they might be a side effect of all my time spent immersed in fantasies—my guilt, manifested. She and I persuaded my mom to give it some time, see how I reacted to the new reality. I was supposed to be keeping a journal.

  But I knew I’d never see the Kokopelli’s henchman, the coyote, again. I’d locked him in the Dream Palace with the others—he was powerless, prismatic. He burned himself on my world.

  “You know what Dr. Judson said?” I asked Dylan as we exited the highway and slowed to a stop at the top of an off-ramp, waiting to turn left. “She says she’s never once doubted the integrity of the real world.”

  There wasn’t any cross traffic, but the red light lasted forever.

  “How can someone live like that?” I went on. “Never being skeptical, never imagining another possibility? Accepting everything around you without a second thought?”

  Dylan reached over and opened the glove compartment. A square hunk of purple plastic fell out and he handed it to me.

  “What is this?” I asked, turning it over in my hands like an ancient artifact.

  “Your new phone,” Dylan said. “It’s for old people who are confused by technology.”

  My mother had made a concession in the name of safety and practicality. A flip phone that could only text and call preprogrammed numbers, protected by a secret password.

  “This is humiliating,” I said, flinching as the phone powered up, a pixilated starburst chiming across the tiny yellow screen.

  There were six numbers in the contacts folder. My mom’s work and cell, Dylan, Mary-Kate, Rhiannon, and Shane.

  “I picked the color—‘galactic fuchsia,’ ” Dylan said. “Thought you’d appreciate.”

  “Thanks?” I said, scrolling down to Shane’s number, wondering why he’d made the cut.

  “She pretty much put people in there who might give you rides,” Dylan said, reading my mind. “And she told me to tell you that she’s monitoring your texts, but I don’t know if she really is.”

  “Why didn’t you give this to me before the show?” I asked.

  “I just wanted to see if you could do it without,” Dylan answered.

  Encouraged by the inanimate Kokopelli and the shuffle playing Shane’s favorite song, I composed my first text on the old-people phone, making typo after typo on the sticky keypad as I tried to decide what to say.

  Me: Shane, it’s me

  Me: Joss

  Me: Need to talk

  I stared at the screen, hoping for a response, until we got to the neighborhood entrance gate. Then I gave up, flipping the phone shut. Dylan laughed as it chirped good-bye.

  “Shut up,” I muttered.

  Shane wasn’t going to text me back. At the park, with his feelings exposed and laid bare before me, I’d rejected him and said I never wanted to talk again. The difference between Shane and James seemed insurmountable then. Accepting them as the same person was too big a stretch.

  I remembered something George said after I’d confessed and told him Emma was a lie. He’d said he wanted to get to know me as Joss Wyatt. I told him I was a minor and I wasn’t allowed to talk to people anymore, which was the line I used with everyone, but he pressed.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to know me? I’m not Emma.”

  “Yes you are,” he said. “You made her up.”

  As Rosie, I’d revealed more of my true self to Shane than I ever would have if we’d just been talking like we normally did, and he’d done the same. Our masks provided freedom to explore aspects of our personalities that were just beginning to form—secret hopes for our future lives, urgent desires, shades of people we wished we could be.

  Dylan drove past the electrical utility box and I craned my neck to try to see the top—

  A light. Some blue glow. Shane sitting there, looking at the text from my new number, not responding.

  “Hey, drop me off?”

  Dyla
n stopped the car and I got out, indicating the box, pointing up at the now-visible form—Shane, encircled by the striped pink Hula-Hoop he was holding upright in his lap.

  When Dylan was gone, I sat at the base of the box, propped against the warm metal, legs stretched out in the dirt, and texted Shane. I heard his phone indicate he’d received the message. I was trying a new tactic.

  Me: Hi, James.

  Me: It was so good meeting you in Arizona.

  Somewhere across the greenbelt, a dog barked, and a few seconds later another one responded with a lonely, paranoid howl.

  My phone lit up.

  New message from SHANE.

  CHAPTER 27

  Shane: We met, didn’t we? I thought it was a dream.

  Me: It was real. We met at the park, and we touched.

  Shane: I kissed you?

  Me: We kissed. And then we drove around listening to music and we came across that street fair.

  Shane: I’m sorry you had to learn about my deathly fear of carnival rides so early in our relationship.

  Me: That was a little disappointing, I’ll admit. But you made up for it, when you hijacked that paddle boat and took us out—

  Shane: There was a lake?

  Me: —on that magical lake that appeared out of nowhere.

  Shane: What happened next?

  Me: We paddled so far out we couldn’t see a shore anymore. And it was just you and me, Jimmy Grace and Rosie Rose.

  Shane: And afterward?

  Me: I’m not sure.

  Shane: Why did it have to end?

  Me: Maybe it didn’t.

  Me: There’s no shore, no desert, no Arizona. There’s just James and Rosie, floating side by side in a daydream. And in a daydream they can do whatever they want.

  Shane: I think they got married. Even though they both claimed they never wanted to.

  Me: Okay. They got married, had kids, traveled the world, and wound up in a tree house on a cliff somewhere above the ocean, growing old together.

  Shane: Someday their kid gets in trouble for making up stories and lying to people via the chip in her brain.

  Me: Hahaha

  Me: They can tell her that’s how they met, the second time.