I moved into the hallway, around the nook where we kept the Mac SE on a tiny table, its only companion a tidy plastic box of floppies. As the roar of the vacuum cleaner sank into me, it became a soothing overlay on everything that had happened this afternoon. I wondered if I should have stayed to talk with Tess for longer. Maybe she could have told me more about what was going on. Or maybe she would have kept insisting that I dump Lizzy as a friend. Which—it’s not like I hadn’t considered that on my own. But I loved Lizzy, and we’d been best friends since we were little. I couldn’t imagine my life without her. I wasn’t going to stop being friends with her just because some asshole from my future said so.
I was so deep in thought that I almost jumped when my father’s hand wrapped around my shoulder from behind. Thankfully I remained outwardly calm and switched off the motor. In the years since that night—the one Tess confirmed was real—I’d learned to make no sudden moves.
“Thanks for doing the vaccuming, Beth.” His pale blue eyes revealed nothing. I couldn’t tell what his mood might be, which meant the best tactic was to play along. Pretend I’d done the cleaning to be nice, rather than to avoid punishment.
“No problem.” I smiled brightly. Were we friends today?
He smiled back and I didn’t relax at all. “Let’s see how it looks.” He walked into my room and swept his fingers through the rug, leaving a jagged claw mark behind. One long hair was snarled between his fingers. “Huh.” He sounded perplexed, as if he couldn’t understand how the strand had gotten there. Then he looked meaningfully at me.
“I’m not really done yet. Almost, though!” I smiled again, his friendly daughter, having a perfectly normal conversation with her perfectly normal father.
He walked back downstairs without saying a word. I wasn’t in trouble, but I’d been warned.
A few hours later, the rug was clean enough that it was safe to call Lizzy. The answering machine was on, and I had to yell after the beep. “Hey, Lizzy! It’s Beth! Pick up, pick up, pick up! Are you there?”
A series of bumps and clicks. “Hey, Beth! Can you go out tonight? I found out about this awesome backyard party in L.A.! It’s a total lucky edit. Grape Ape is playing! It’s going to be fucking amazing. Can you come?”
I glanced over at my father, who was swirling a stir-fry together in the wok. The kitchen smelled like garlic and ginger. “Can I go out to the movies with Lizzy tonight?”
He smiled and nodded: I was in his good graces for now. I’d gotten pretty good at tiptoeing around his moods, but he could still be unpredictable. This time I got away without a scratch.
Lizzy picked me up around eight, and we headed up the I-5 into L.A., inhaling the fossil fuel stench of street and air, blasting a Screamin’ Sirens song. We sang along, and talked about how ska was more intersectional than punk, and then wondered what the modern equivalent of a band like the Sex Pistols would be. Maybe Green Day? Maybe Nirvana? We didn’t like either of those bands: they were definitely the slick, mainstream face of punk. As traffic thickened around us, brake lights occasionally flaring red like an ephemeral river of blood, I wondered whether there were any flecks of evidence left in the back of Lizzy’s station wagon. But I didn’t ask. It was nice to have a conversation that never once touched on the topics of men or murder.
I hadn’t been to a backyard party before, though I’d heard a lot about them from people we knew in the scene. Lizzy had scored a flyer from somebody at Peer Records. I touched its uneven edges and took in the sketchy, Xeroxed graphics of headless mannequins and skulls. Letters and words cut from magazines spelled out the evening lineup: GRAPE APE x CHE MART x XICANISTAS x BRAT PUNXXX. The address was on a narrow street off Whittier in East L.A. I glanced at the flyer again as we cruised for parking, and wondered if we’d need to show IDs to get in. I had a really shitty fake ID that I’d never used, tucked into the inner pocket of my craziest plaid pants. It was still warm outside, so we left our jackets in the trunk and did a final outfit check. Lizzy readjusted the skinny black suspenders over my Grape Ape T-shirt, the one with an aerial view of the Machine stamped with the word “STOLEN.” I held up a mirror so she could darken the mascara rings around her eyes. She had on a ripped-up, glittery ’60s dress and Docs.
“We look amazing. We are total babes,” Lizzy said in her best Valley Girl accent. We giggled before joining the clot of kids waiting to pay the bouncer. The venue was on a nondescript row of single-story family homes, slightly faded and cracked around the edges. There was no way to know what kind of backyard lurked behind these facades, but I couldn’t imagine it was very big. Two dollars and we were inside, walking down a long cement passageway that smelled faintly like beer, until we emerged into an enormous open space. Nobody in my neighborhood had a backyard like this, with a sound system on one end and a perfectly modified gazebo for selling booze on the other. A few little kids peeked out the windows of neighbors’ houses and waved. If we’d been in Irvine, somebody would have definitely called the police by now. Here, the promoters had rigged up a huge bank of lights, their whirling beams visible from the street.
Some of the lights illuminated the stage, which was in a corner of the yard covered by a canvas shade structure. There was no formal bandstand; the musicians played on the same level as the audience, sometimes indistinguishable from it. Brat Punxxx thrashed and howled and shoved the hurtling bodies who swirled past in the mosh pit. That was the final shock for me, after the size of the yard and lack of cops. At Irvine Meadows, the mosh pit was a tiny spot near the front of the venue. Here, the mosh pit was the venue. There were chairs and spots to stand still around the edges of the action, but I could tell right away that nobody stayed there for long.
We went to the bar to get some beer, listening to the girls behind us move fluidly between Spanish and English, talking about how the Xicanistas had started their own zine. Finally I got up the nerve to say something.
“I’m so excited for the Xicanistas! I’ve never seen them.”
One of the girls gave me a weird look. “Where you from?”
Suddenly, I could hear my suburban white girl accent clearly. I’d come to this backyard party in East L.A. from my middle-class Jewish family in our freshly painted neighborhood and I felt like an interloper.
Lizzy jumped in quickly with a vague answer. “Down south?”
“Where… like Santa Ana? Long Beach?”
I didn’t see the point in lying. “Irvine.”
Now all three of the girls were looking at us dubiously. “Irvine? You got punk rockers down there?”
“Some. Not much. We came because we love Grape Ape. I have all their EPs.” I sounded so stupid. I thought about my dad scoffing at the goyim and wondered if I was like that to these girls, right now. Wasn’t gringo another way of saying goy?
Then one of the girls cracked a smile. “My cousin lives in Irvine. He says it’s totally dead down there.” Her eyeliner was as thick as Lizzy’s.
“It’s the worst.” I shook my head.
Another girl threaded thumbs through the belt loops on her jeans. “What did you think of ‘See the Bitches’?” She was talking about the newest Grape Ape song, which was only available on a compilation from this tiny riot grrl label called Fuck Your Diet.
“I love that song.” It was true. I had listened to it over and over again, rewinding the tape so much on my Walkman that I worried it would snap. “Also, the bass sounds really good now that they have Patty G. playing with them. I’m glad she’s doing something since Team Smash broke up.”