Angels on Sunset Boulevard (13 page)

They walked inside the dark room. “This is it? Nothing's happening,” Nick whispered.

“Wait,” Taj said. “Just wait, and be patient.”

Someone handed them cups to drink. “TAP?” Nick asked.

“Yeah. Drink it. It makes it better.”

“Okay,” he said dubiously. It was only the second time he'd taken it. The sweet liquor hit him in the back of his throat and he began to feel woozy. A basket was being passed around. He watched as Taj reached in and grabbed something. Condoms.

The music—Johnny Silver's—was hypnotic and haunted. A light shone on a girl dancing in the middle of the room, with a needle.

A boy stepped forward.

Nick gasped as he watched the girl take the needle and start cutting him on his forearm.

“What the hell?”

“Shhhh,” Taj said.

“What's going on?”

“He's just getting Tapped,” she explained. “A tattoo. To show your allegiance to the divine Spirit.”

“Spirit?”

“Can't you feel it?”

“No …”

Then he realized the room was stacked with pillows, and in the dark he could see bodies falling into them, and people disrobing. Was this for real? He looked to his side and noticed Taj was unzipping her top. She tossed it to the ground. Next she took off her blouse, then her bra.

She was dancing, sinuously, gracefully, and others were dancing with her. They were chanting. TAP kicked in, and he felt delirious from a feeling of infinite joy and ecstasy. He looked around, and thought he recognized a dark-haired girl slithering across the floor. Oh, yeah. It was Maxine. How funny was that. He gave her a smile, and she met his eye. There was a flash of surprise when she recognized him; then she turned away.

He pulled off his sweater and his shirt. Taj danced over to him. She was a goddess.

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

“What's in this drink?” Nick slurred, feeling dizzy.

Taj lifted her chin up and Nick swayed on his feet, so they fell back into the pillows, together, skin to skin, mouth to mouth, feeling the heat of the room and the other bodies and letting the beat of the music pull them toward each other.

Nick laid his body on top of hers, put his hands on her chest, felt her damp skin sliding on his, and Taj twined her legs around his to pull him even closer. He put a hand on the zipper of her jeans and she guided it downward. They embraced.

Then there were other people around him, touching him, pulling them apart, and soon it wasn't just Taj he was kissing, but other girls. There were other hands, a million hands, all over his body, and he was falling back, back into the pillows, into the pile.
Disappear Disappear. Disappear.

He didn't know what he was doing, he didn't know why he was doing it, only that it felt good, it felt really good, and he hadn't felt this good in such a long time.

WHEN IT WAS OVER, TAJ EXPLAINED THE RITUAL
over burgers at Mel's Diner, in a matter-of-fact fashion, as if they were discussing the weather.

“It's called the Initiation of the Spirit,” Taj explained, taking a huge bite and stuffing a few french fries into her mouth. A night in the back room always made her hungry.

“Uh-huh,” Nick said.

God, he was so shy and so cute about it. He was obviously embarrassed about what they had done in there, but there was nothing to be embarrassed about. That was the whole beauty of the ritual. It was about being free, about being liberated, about being yourself. It was a ritual that celebrated your body and the love it could bring, without emotional consequences. And they were always careful. It was the one place where you could be yourself.

That's why it was so addictive. It was so against everything they'd been taught—that hooking up was bad, that bodies were something to be ashamed of, that it was wrong to feel the way they felt. They were young and carefree, and the ritual celebrated this.

To be one with the Spirit was to commune with angels. This was The Angels' Practice.

Taj remembered the first time she realized she'd even fooled around with Deck during one of the rituals. But both of them had been cool about it, had joked about it, even. She loved Deck; she loved Johnny. In the back room, she loved everybody. Johnny had hooked up with Div in the back room, too. It didn't matter. It was all about sharing love in there.

At least, it was at first. That night, it was like the first time, innocent and sweet. Lately the back room had taken on a darker meaning, and she hadn't felt so comfortable. There were too many boys just standing around watching. It was creepy. But that night, with Nick, she'd felt safe.

“It's based on a pagan fertility ritual, a dance to celebrate the crops,” Taj said. “I think someone in TAP read too much Marion Zimmer Bradley and decided they wanted to try it on their own.”

Nick nodded. “Who's that?”

“Some author, wrote a bunch of goddess-themed novels. Good trashy stuff.”

“And you buy it? The whole Spirit thing?”

Taj took a handful of fries and chewed on them before answering. She thought about his question. “I guess I didn't at first, but then I took TAP, and it enhances it. Makes it … I don't know … dreamy somehow. It's like a really good dream, the back room. It's not real.”

Nick still couldn't look at her.

“C'mon, I told you it wasn't anything bad. Your sister … she's a little young for it, but no one is forced to do anything. It's free will; you only go so far as you're comfortable with. And maybe she was just there to watch the Tapping.”

“The cutting?”

“Yeah. The tattoos. The angel wings.”

“What's up with that?”

“Oh, it just means you're part of it for real. You're supposed to pledge your allegiance to TAP for a million years. It's kind of silly, really. But there's no harm.”

Nick's face blanched. He'd seen that tattoo on Fish's arm. Was that what it meant?

“C'mon, Nick, now that you've seen what it is, you have to agree there's nothing wrong with it. I mean,
TAP didn't exactly invent free love, did they? I mean, it's been around before. This is just the latest version. They used to call us hippies. Now they call us hipsters,” she joked.

She wondered if she had been right in taking him to the back room. But it was too late now.

ON MONDAY THE FOLLOWING WEEK NICK STILL
couldn't get over what had gone down in the back room. Taj was acting like it was nothing, like it was something she did all the time, with anybody. But to him it felt different. Eric wasn't at school that day, and his buddy wasn't picking up his phone, either. He wanted to ask Eric if he'd experienced the same thing in the back room. Oh, well.

Nick saw Maxine at the cafeteria—and an image from the ritual, unbidden, came to his mind. How long had she been participating? Was that where she first hooked up with Sutton? he wondered.

He went through the motions of school—AP classes, lunch, more AP classes, college-counselor session, then soccer practice, and he was done.

The school parking lot was almost empty when Nick came out of the locker room. He zapped his keys at his car and got inside. As he drove off, he noticed a black Escalade with tinted windows pull out from across the street. It looked similar to the one he had seen earlier that morning, tailing him down the canyon on the way to school.

Nick thought nothing of it. Tons of people in L.A. drove black Escalades. You couldn't go down Beverly without seeing at least two. He drove up to Mulholland. It had gotten dark early, and the street was winding and curvy.

There was a sharp curve on the road, and Nick slowed down, only to notice a black Escalade bearing down on his right.

“What the fuck,” Nick muttered, trying to shake the car off his tail.

But the lumbering SUV powered up, and Nick turned the wheel one hundred eighty degrees to get out of the way, spinning the convertible into the ditch. The car rolled over, bouncing Nick against the ceiling and shattering his right cheek into the glass, and he passed out into blackness.

When Nick woke up, a paramedic was shining a light into his eyes.

A FEW DAYS AFTER SHE HAD TAKEN NICK TO THE
TAP party, Taj geared up in a Santa Monica school yard for the qualifying rounds for the Vancouver tournament, one of the most respected annual skateboarding contests. Even the pros attended. Only those who made it to the final rounds at the regional level made it to Canada, glory, and skater history.

Div and Deck were already there.

“Check it out—we got sponsors!” Div said, holding aloft a new board decked out with dozens of stickers for Lost Angeles, an up-and-coming skateboard company based in Venice Beach.

“Big pimpin'.” Deck grinned, pointing to his Lost Angeles logo T-shirt.

“Nice.” Taj smiled.

“If we get flicked in a magazine, we get five hundred cash. Plus, each sticker in the photo is fifty bucks. Twelve stickers is six hundred bucks, even if it's in the same photo,” Div explained proudly.

“And if we make it through, they'll pay to send us to Vancouver, maybe even Tampa,” Deck added, meaning the biggest tournament there was—Tampa was the mother lode. Mount Everest. Even if you didn't place at Tampa, just the fact that you were there was enough to send your hits skyrocketing.

“So what else did they send?” Taj asked. She'd heard about the sponsor packages—large cardboard boxes that came with tons of loot.

“A coupla boards, some shoes, T-shirts. But Deck's already sold half of his for drinks and smokes.” Div smirked.

“Typical.”

Taj squinted against the sun, waiting for her turn while her friends lined up by the half-pipe. They were wearing their matching Lost Angeles T-shirts, and the logo was all over their shorts, their shoes, even their socks. Not to mention screaming out of their boards. For their sake, Taj hoped they got
shot for something. They looked like walking billboards.

Most skaters didn't even care about the checks—the cash prizes that came with third, second, and first place. It was about footage—kids and adults watched videos millions of times online, traded the most popular ones, studied them for moves. It was about infamy, admiration, a certain kind of fame.

Sure, some skaters ended up with MTV shows or their own Xbox video, but most kids simply craved the respect of their peers rather than a taste of the limelight. Choice video footage of Taj doing a half-cab off a nine-set that Deck had shot in a secret spot off Manhattan Beach had been accessed on TAP more times than the latest Tony Hawk video.

Div flubbed her aerial, and Deck fell down hard on a full-pipe loop, but Taj rolled down, feeling good, feeling the adrenaline high. Now she had to just set up for the jump—but at a sharp turn the wheels suddenly locked, tipping her head over feet down the ramp, crashing down into the concrete. There was a gasp from the crowd, and when Taj opened her eyes, she was confused as to what she was doing on the ground.

“Are you hurt? Don't move!” a med tech advised, checking Taj's pulse.

“I think I'm okay,” Taj said, gingerly lifting herself up. She waved to the crowd to indicate she was all right, and limped off the course. She was bleeding from both knees and her elbows, and there was a gash on the side of her head.

“Oh my god, Taj, are you okay?” Div asked, rolling over. “What happened?”

“Dude, that was one wipeout,” Deck marveled.

Taj picked up her board and checked the wheelbase. “I'm not sure—I think the wheels locked,” she said, turning it over. “Wait a minute—these aren't my wheels.”

“Are you sure?” Deck asked.

“Yeah, look. I just got new wheels put in, and look, these are already concave. And the wheels I got were red—these are black.”

“Are you saying someone changed them?” Div asked incredulously. “Just to fuck up a competitor?”

“I don't know,” Taj said, holding the side of her head and still feeling dizzy. But somehow she didn't think the faulty gear was due to a skater having a Tonya Harding moment.

She went to the bathroom to clean up the wound, and opened her backpack.

Inside was a note.

YOU BROKE THE RULES. WE BREAK YOU.

THIS IS YOUR FIRST WARNING.

Fuck! Why had she brought Nick to the ritual? What had gotten into her? Now she was really in trouble.

THE ACCIDENT HAD BEEN SCARY, BUT NOT SERIOUS.
He'd spent a few hours in the hospital for observation. Rosa had checked him out, since she was the emergency contact on his insurance. Still acting as substitute mom even though the family had fired her. Their former housekeeper weepily declared her innocence, and Nick assured her that he, for one, didn't believe a word of the accusation.

When he got home that evening, he logged in to TAP to ask Eric if he could help him figure out something. Eric hadn't been at school all week. There was a mono bug going around, and Nick had assumed his friend had caught it. But Eric wasn't logged in all day or all night, and when Nick went to his page, he realized the last time Eric had logged in was the same night he'd sent Nick all that information about how the Werner Music conglomerate owned TAP.

That was unsettling. Eric was
always
online. He was obsessed with checking his e-mail and comments. Nick sent him an e-mail, telling him to get in touch as soon as he received it.

But several days went by, and whenever Nick checked, Eric's page still wasn't updated, and his last login time was the same. Now Nick was truly worried. Was Eric really sick? Had they gotten to Eric, too? It just wasn't like Eric to suddenly be so hard to get a hold of. No one was picking up his cell phone, and when Nick called Eric's house, their housekeeper told him Eric's parents were in the Bahamas. If Eric was gone, no one would even notice.