June Doom pinched her own leg.
Madame Woo-the dead shifted in her chair. Her robes went swoosh. Then she nodded, repeating, “Married, yes. It’s a certainty.”
“Is anything certain?” asked June.
“Love is,” Madam Woo-the Dead said.
I paid the three dollars. We left.
K was gone from the bench. We found her standing on the fringes of the crowd of spectators looking up at the Ferris wheel.
There was talk of the fire department coming with a cherry picker, one of those machines that could extend up forever. It’d pull the people out of the sky one by one and reintroduce them to the ground where they belonged.
That girl was still screaming up there. Her horror-stricken voice was strained to the verge of hoarseness. It’d been some time, but her desperation had not lessened. She wasn’t getting any more comfortable with her isolation. She hadn’t figured out isolation can be a gift.
Someone in the crowd said, “You know whether or not the thunderstorm’s coming?”
“They said …”
“Think they’ll cancel the fireforks?”
I tuned out the girl’s calls for help. It all became a silent hum to me. It was almost that time of night. My eyes went to June. I looked at her tight, ripped cutoffs and wondered how she’d taste and smell if we could somehow get alone.
12
The crushed seashell driveway was packed solid with cars. Everyone was blocked in, and they were in no condition to leave anyway. Walking up, the gardens were bright, pulsing with nectar-heavy flora throbbing beneath a full yellow moon. K was throwing a party in the ocean manor. “My family will be back any day. Make it count!” was the theme.
She was a party person, a rave girl, and would look for any excuse to throw one. Your band broke up? Let’s throw a party. You’ll be homeless any day now? Let’s throw a party. You’re lost, directionless, motherless, and fatherless and looking for some scraps for fun in the wild? Let’s throw a party.
Music poured from the upper windows. Strobe lights flickered vividly with the music that seemed to float, stutter, and pulse like life itself.
The house was locked tight; no-one was allowed in there except June, K, and me. Everywhere you looked, the kids were wrecked — laughing and shouting on the slate steps, leaning on the white columns, standing in the brick path that led through the fence; rocking and rolling in white plastic chairs, or sitting on my boulder walclass="underline" animated, yelling, smoking, drinking strange serums from red solo cups. Life: full and blur buzzed with slanted beauty on a Saturday night.
It felt that good to be that close to the ocean. We could all feel it and were responding accordingly. The dune grass swayed. In the distance, if you squinted on the horizon, the Ferris wheel could be seen spinning again.
It was close to midnight. Things shifted into a drunken fog. I leaned over the railing, looking at the kids crowded around the kidney shaped pool below.
Feral and Trish were swimming in the pool, drunk and looking like they were gonna drown. They were all pilled up. So was K. So were a lot of the guests.
Some kid I didn’t know, dressed in backwards red Yankees cap, was heckling Feral savagely, saying, “I feel like I’m at the Philadelphia zoo watching the polar bears swim.”
“Careful, bro,” Feral called, his arms flailing in the water ineffectively.
“Why?” the kid asked with a smirk.
“Bears bite heads off.”
“I got a head for you to bite,” the kid said, grabbing his own nuts through his board shorts. The kid was a typical Jersey douchebag.
I yelled down, “Hey, Feral — you’re gonna fucking drown, man. Get over to the shallow end.”
Dale appeared through the gate with Steph at his side. I waved, but they didn’t seem to notice me in my perch.
Feral laughed, swallowing more water as he drifted over to the kiddie side. Trish swam to him, and they embraced next to the pool light, obscuring it, sending shadows across the water, altering the light for the whole backyard.
I looked down at all of the people from my chair, not sure who half of them were. June was across from me. She had a gin gimlet in her hand. She kept half smiling, half grimacing.
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just not feeling so good.”
“Well, you’re at a party,” I said.
“Just because you’re at a party doesn’t mean you have to be the party.” She was full of wisdom beyond her years.
I pointed to her drink, “Give it time.”
“Like, where’s K, right now?” June asked. “I never see her when there’s a party, and there’s always a party. That bums me out.”
“She surrounds herself with people.”
“Exactly. There’s always got to be someone else,” June said, “always.”
“But you’d rather be alone.”
“I’m not so sure,” June said. “You seem like good enough company.” June looked at me sideways. “You should let me cut your hair.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Don’t be an asshole. I’d shave you too.”
“Shave me? Shave yourself.”
She laughed. “I’m good with a straight razor. My foster mom raised rabbits. I skinned them. Made stuff out of the fur.”
“That’s weird as hell, but it makes me like you more.”
“In school, I used to cut hair. All I’d do is hang up a little sign by the soda machine, and they’d come to my dorm or call me to go to theirs.”
“Beats working at Taco Bell,” I said. “Fuck it, cut my hair.”
“That’s how I met K.”
“Cutting her hair?”
“I went to her apartment and didn’t leave for three days.”
“Déjà vu,” I said, but June didn’t hear.
The sliding glass door opened behind us. K Neon stuck her face out and said, “Look who I found.”
Seth and Denise were right behind her.
“Look at this house,” Seth said. “Unbelievable.”
“Yeah, something else,” I said, shaking his hand.
Seth had grown up like me, without any money and living in a small ranch house without much to his name. Actually, he’d had it worse than me. He didn’t have a mom or dad. He lived with his aunt at the end of our dead-end street. But at least he used to have the lake house on Mount Mercy to escape to every summer with his older brother. I used to hear plenty of stories about how nice it was there, but I never got to go myself.
K let everyone onto the balcony. Then, as June Doom opened her mouth to say something sweet to her, K closed the sliding glass door — vanishing into the house without saying goodbye.
“What’s that cunt’s problem?” Denise screamed, referring to K.
Denise looked like she was already wasted. Seth didn’t look much better. Droopy eyelids. Quivering jaws. On the verge of nosebleeds.
She repeated herself, “Seriously, what’s that cunt’s problem?”
I ignored the question. June didn’t say anything either.
“She gives me one more dirty look, I’m gonna break her teeth right out of her bitchy little mouth.”
“Hey, cool down,” I said. “There are no problems here.”
Denise was on edge, but Seth offset it by saying, “Look, a jacuzzi. Wanna go in?” He looked at me then looked at June. “Can we go in?”
“You should,” June said. “Yeah. Go ahead.”
That’s all Denise had to hear. She started pulling her dress over her head. In a moment, she was inside the hot tub wearing just the same purple bra and thong that I’d seen on Seth’s floor.
The three of us sat in the chairs, having a pretty adult conversation and drinking our adult beverages, while Denise bounced around in the hot tub, singing songs to herself and saying, in a high whine, “I’m lonely. Someone come in here and play with me.”