Dirty Wings (10 page)

“Maia, please don't make me tell you again to put your bag—” and then she sees Cass and stops dead. It's the only time in her life Maia has ever seen her mother at a loss.

“Mom,” she says. “This is my friend. Cass.”

Maia's mother's eyes flicker cold, up and down, taking Cass in. “We don't wear shoes in our house,” she says. Cass meets her freezer-burn stare with a wall of ice.

“I was just leaving,” Cass says. Cass, dirty and ragged, but she's all queen again now, her back straight, her chin high. Cass, undefeatable. Maia knows how badly she will be in for it later, wishes herself underground, underwater, dead. This was far and away the worst idea she's ever had. But she can't help yearning for Cass's poker-straight spine, her cool grey eyes, the barest hint of a sneer at the corner of her mouth. Cops, adults, teachers, shopkeepers: Cass is immune to the will of authority, made ballistic by any hint of shackle.

“It was nice to meet you, Cass,” Maia's mother says, in a tone that conveys the exact opposite sentiment.

“It was nice to meet you, too,” Cass says. Maia could swear she's trying not to laugh. She watches Cass walk across the room, her back still straight, waits until they hear the clomp of Cass's boots on the floor, the click of the front door closing behind her.

“What in god's name was that,” her mother says.

“A girl I met,” Maia says. Then, idiotically: “A friend of Oscar's. I met her at Oscar's.” Her mother stares her down until she looks at the floor.

“Don't you ever bring her into this house again,” she says. “Get back to practicing.”

It's only when her mother has left the room that Maia sees the track of Cass's boot prints, marring the pale carpet all the way to the door.

 

 

Somehow Cass has become her friend. Maia is afraid to even think such a thing, terrified lest she jinx this sudden magic; but for weeks Cass has shown up on the same corner, and Maia has to admit to herself there's no other possible reason than that Cass is waiting for her. For her. Maia, loafers and khakis and concert-pianist future and all. The day her mother has her afternoon seminar, Maia has two entire blessed hours of freedom to spend with Cass. They don't steal beer again. Maia is disappointed, but too timid to say so. They have coffee—Maia pays—or Indian buffet if Cass is looking particularly starved, or if the weather is nice they wander around. Cass likes to look in the thrift stores that line the Ave. Sometimes she goes into the dressing room to try things on and emerges looking ten pounds heavier, and when they get outside she giggles and shows Maia her haul: sweaters stuffed under her T-shirt, or jeans pulled on under her army pants. As far as Maia can tell, she gives away most of what she takes. It's the thrill of the theft that brings her back. Once, heart pounding, Maia tries it herself. Nothing special, just a grey thermal that's worn especially soft. In the fluorescent-lit cubicle she puts it on under her shirt, puts her coat on over them both. She's certain someone's noticed, but she walks out the front door without occasioning a second glance from the bored-looking woman at the register, and the shirt is hers.

“See,” Cass says, grinning. “I knew you had it in you.” Maia smiles, bashful. That afternoon when she gets home she tucks the shirt all the way at the back of her dresser, where her mom's least likely to notice it. The thought of her new secret makes her smile.

After that, grift gets easier, though it always sets her heart to pounding. She pockets lipsticks in drugstores, candy in the checkout line. She eats the candy, leaves the lipsticks unopened in coffee-shop bathrooms. She's nothing like as good as Cass, too clumsy and afraid of getting caught to even begin to try the kinds of tricks Cass gets up to. Return scams, walking out on restaurant bills, palming whole bricks of cheese in the grocery store, helping herself to wool hats on cold days and umbrellas when it rains. Maia can be by Cass's side the entire time and never notice, Cass is so fast and so good.

“Aren't you scared?” Maia asks.

“Scared of what?”

“Getting caught.”

Cass shrugs. “I don't think about it,” she says. “It's easier that way.”

 

 

When Maia practices the piano now she thinks of Cass. Cass on the street, Cass on the corner with her dirty friends. Cass asking strangers for change. Cass cutting her own hair. Cass eating meals she hasn't paid for. Where Cass sleeps. Cass won't take her to the squat—“It's dirty there,” she'd said—and so Maia can only picture it in her head. She saw a TV movie of
Oliver Twist
once, and she imagines Cass's squat as something like Fagin's lair, cramped and lousy with snaggle-toothed waifs. Girls in dirty velvet jackets with tarnished gold buttons, breeches, cravats. Wool caps with brims, fingerless gloves. Cooking porridge over a wood-burning stove. She likes to think of Cass presiding over them, the orphans' queen, demanding they turn out their pockets with the day's loot so she can take her pick of the best of it.

Of course she knows wherever Cass lives is nothing like
Oliver Twist.
Cass has told her as much. Cass doesn't ever bring any of her friends when she spends the afternoon with Maia, but she tells Maia stories about them. Mayhem, who is always getting arrested because she picks fights with cops. Felony, who set her parents' house on fire before she ran away from it. Earth, who's been in and out of foster care and institutions so many times he can't even remember who his parents are supposed to be anymore. Maia doesn't comment on the names of Cass's friends, doesn't ask why all of them decided to be nouns instead of people. It seems obvious, anyway. A name like Felony was a disguise you could step into, along with your torn black clothes and steel-toed boots. Felony, Crowbar, Digger, Chainsaw, Mayhem. With names like those to live up to, you had to be tougher than you actually were until you actually were that tough. Tougher than parents, tougher than teachers, tougher than cops. Tougher than adults and norms and the riptide of your past. Tougher than all your ghosts. Cass herself dropped fey and prissy
andra
for the brevity of Cass, one syllable, sharp and short. Cass could be a thing that cuts or strikes. The hard edge of a stone. Cass is mean where Cassandra is feeble. Cassandra: always predicting trouble and too much of a girl to do anything about it. Cass? Nobody fucks with Cass.

NOW: LOS ANGELES

Later, Cass will think,
I could have stopped it before it even started.
She could have said
No
or
I'm tired
or
We're almost out of cash and all the way out of speed and let's go rent an apartment by the beach and find dishwashing jobs and learn to surf, let's get clean and stay away from trouble and forget about sad-eyed boys that don't spell us any good.
But she doesn't know, then, to say any of those things. When they see the flyer stapled to a telephone pole, their hands still shaky with the comedown, their veins lonely and aching with want, when Maia says, “What do you think?” Cass says, “Sure.” The band is nobody they've heard of.

“Argo?” Maia says. “What kind of band name is that?”

“A bad one,” Cass says.

But surely at this show they will at least be able to forget the loom troubles for the space of some angry chords and sweat. Every day Cass wakes with dread in her throat, sure this will be the morning that Maia says, “I'm done,” and drives away forever, back to her piano and her shiny house and her normal life and her gleaming future. It's not too late for Maia. She can grow out her hair, wash the dirt from her clothes, shake herself free of road dust and greasy diner food and gas-station coffee and one bad decision piling up on top of another like dominoes in a line waiting for the push that'll bring the whole thing crashing down. Maia's still radiant underneath the patina of sweat and beach sand; Cass, dirty from the heart outward, said goodbye to the bright future a long long time ago.

So now she says yes, yes to everything, yes to every time Maia wants to stop and buy apples they won't eat or pee or brush her teeth in a roadside rest area or look through seaside-town gift shops, tilting snow globes one after the other, laughing at the whirl of white and glitter. Yes to scoring and yes to hotel rooms and yes to rock and roll, and who is Cass kidding, it's not like she ever said no to sex or death or music before now. If Maia wants to get sweaty in California to a badly-named boy band, who is Cass to keep her from it. Maia, her eyes bright as a child's, her chin tilted just so, her bleached hair falling in her face. Every time she sticks out her lower lip to blow the strands out of her eyes a thrill goes through Cass, as sharp as a scalpel and as bright. If Cass could memorize Maia, she would; she would hold every piece of this girl in her heart for the long winter the rest of her life will become when Maia leaves her and her world goes dark again.

They ask directions from a couple of sneering punks on the beach who sneer a little less when Cass rolls them a joint. “We're going anyway,” says the boy, who's next to bald save a dusting of pink-dyed fuzz and whose spiked dog collar is at odds with his baby face. Underneath the sulk he looks about twelve.

“You can come with us,” his girlfriend adds.

“Thanks,” Maia says drily, but her sarcasm is lost on Babyface and his paramour.

It's a club the kids take them to, somewhere down in Venice Beach. Maia follows the punks' car, so anxious not to lose them she's almost riding their bumper. Neither Cass nor Maia knows a thing about LA, and they keep getting lost in the tangled maze of freeway. “I just want to find the ocean!” Cass had cried to a man in a gas station. “Pacific or Atlantic?” he'd smartassed back. “It's rush hour, sweetheart, gonna take you awhile either way.”

But Babyface doesn't lead them astray. The show is at a real club. More or less. Maybe less, Cass thinks, as she crosses the threshold, blinking at the sudden dark. At the back of the room she can make out a low-lit stage: a big wooden box painted black, but still. It's something. There's the usual grubby bar, sullen bartender who won't ask questions as long as the girls pay cash, wallpaper of tattered posters gone yellow-grey with cigarette smoke.

“Classy.” After all their travel together Maia's still delighted by dark places, the thrill of the true dive. Cass can see the old anew through Maia's eyes and grins, too.

“Only the best for my girl,” she says, and she is grateful for the dark that hides her blush. Maia kisses her.

The club is peppered with a sparse crowd, Babyface and more of the same, and a few bored-looking older punks made haggard by drink and hard living. Someone here has drugs to unload, for sure, but for once she's content to set aside the hanker. Her mood must be catching; Maia doesn't say anything about it, either.

The first band is bad, the second worse. The club empties until it's just Cass, Maia, a few stragglers. Cass is bored and tired, but they have nowhere to sleep and nowhere to go and neither of them is particularly eager to go back out into the night. There's a long lag between the second band and Argo, the only name Cass remembers from the poster. Maia sidles up to the bar and charms a free beer out of the stony-faced bartender, a feat so improbable Cass wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen it happen. The mood in the room is listless. The eldest of the punks, a decrepit creature near-mummified in fraying band patches and filthy black denim, has fallen asleep standing up, leaning against the wall.

And then Argo comes onstage. They aren't charismatic. Outside of the singer they aren't even notably cute. But there's something about the way they carry themselves, a surety, a grace, that makes Cass stand up straighter and pay attention. They move like they mean business, and they have a confidence about them that makes her wonder for a second if the room hasn't filled with people when she wasn't looking. Maia's noticed it, too, looking up at them like a robin eyeing a spot in the earth she thinks might yield a worm.

When they start to play Cass could swear she's heard this song before, but she hasn't. It's familiar and somehow not, polished smooth but with a rawness behind it that pulls her in. “Are they playing Pixies covers?” Maia murmurs in her ear, but Cass shakes her head.

The singer is skinny and tall, and his bleached hair falls in his face. He's wearing a Misfits shirt and dirty jeans. His voice is the whisky-soaked croon of someone far older and bigger and filled up with sorrows, and it winnows its way into Cass's hard heart in spite of herself. There is a charge in the air around him. Even from where she's standing Cass can tell his eyes are an uncanny shade of blue, and when he looks up, once, from the microphone she feels sheared straight through by his intensity until she realizes he isn't looking at her at all. He's looking at Maia, singing as though he's singing only for her. Out of all the bars in the world they could have come to, all the clubs in this nightmare sprawl of a city, they had to pick this one, this night, where Maia shines alone in the near-empty room like a beacon. You can practically see her fucking halo. The chorus of the song is a lilting refrain that rises clear and incongruous over a wailing thrash of guitar. “I came here to find you,” he sings, the anguished rasp suddenly gentle. Cass doesn't have to look to know Maia's mouth is hanging open, her eyes alight.

“Ah, shit,” Cass mutters to herself, reaching in her pocket for her tobacco. All this time she's watched Maia, terrified, waiting for the moment when Maia gets tired of being dirty, tired of being cold, tired of sleeping on the ground and spending the last of her parents' money, tired of ragged no-good Cass, the crazy bitch with bad dreams. But for all her vigilance it never occurred to her to keep her eye out for something like this. She wants to grab Maia's hand, drag her out of the club and back to the car, take off in a screech of burning rubber like felons capering out of a fresh-robbed bank. But Maia's unraveling, even as Cass hatches escapes, undone by this stupid sky-eyed boy with his stupid stupid guitar. Cass lights her cigarette, chews her thumb between drags, looks at the bartender, the floor, the filthy old punk who's listing to one side with his jaw slack, anywhere but at Maia or at the stage. Now, she knows already, it's too late to run for safety.