My Tiki Girl (18 page)

Dahlia and I eat lunch with Troy, Albert, and Joey in the cafeteria every day now. Sometimes I catch Sukie looking over at us—at Troy in his shark-tooth necklace, at Dahlia, who is usually working on a song—and I feel this weird pang of guilt. It’s the same kind of guilt I feel when Albert looks at me all dewy-eyed and I just know he’s thinking we’re getting back together any day now, but I don’t have the heart to tell him that it’s never going to happen. Ever.

Dahlia complains about eating in the cafeteria, but it’s pretty obvious she likes all the attention she gets sitting with Troy. People are always stopping by the table to talk to him—guys from the football team, girls who make fools of themselves falling all over him while they ask some inconsequential question about how he answered a certain question on an algebra test. And the hot topic of conversation in the cafeteria is
Just who is that new girl with Troy and is she going out with him?

Dahlia eats it up, and is always doing little things to keep them guessing. The other day, with everyone in the cafeteria watching, she painted the nails of Troy’s left hand blue. I looked over at Sukie and was pretty sure she was about to spontaneously combust.

We have this totally dorky school paper called
The Chatterbox,
and this year Albert Finch is the editor. He decided the paper should do a story on The Paper Dolls, and he’s been bringing his camera to rehearsal to get shots for it. He also interviewed Dahlia for an hour, asking her everything from musical influences to if she could be an animal what she would be (a dolphin, if you’re interested).

Dahlia found me a cane in the thrift store, and I’ve started using it at school. It’s made of dark wood and has a dragon carved into the handle. Dahlia says the cane makes me seem more exotic, makes my limp seem cool and mysterious. She also bought me my very own black beret.

“We should accentuate the things that make us different, not try to cover them up,” Dahlia says.

She stenciled
The Paper Dolls
onto the front of black T-shirts with silver spray paint and gave one to everyone in the band. Joey wears his just about every day. It got so filthy that I finally took it home to wash it for him, along with some of his other clothes. He’s been crashing in Jonah’s room lately, because his dad’s been on the mother of all benders and it’s getting too cold to sleep in the cave. I just snuck his washing in with my own and didn’t mention it to my dad, who would be totally weirded out to know I was doing the laundry of our drummer, who lives in a cave.

When we get back to the apartment, we find Leah hard at work at the sewing machine. She’s making new curtains from all of Dahlia’s old, nonblack clothes. She started with the kitchen and bathroom, then made a cover for the couch. Now she’s working on curtains for the big window in the living room. They are like little crazy quilts—none of the pieces match, they’re all different sizes, shapes, and colors.

“Good practice tonight, lovies?” Leah asks.

“As always,” Dahlia says. “Hungry?” she asks, holding out the steak Troy gave her when we left. He’s been raiding the big freezer in the basement for Dahlia since she told him food is always on the scarce side the second half of the month.

“Tiki, you always come through!” says Leah, then goes back to cutting up the skirt with the elephants.

“Thanks to Troy,” Dahlia says, and my stomach clenches. I hate all the little things he does for her. The way he sends her home with food, and always makes sure she has a pack of clove cigarettes. And all these obvious attempts to buy her seem to be working. I mean, she’s actually falling for it. She smiles at him more, mocks him less.

He’s teaching her to play guitar a little, too. He has shown her the three most important chords and told her that for now, that’s all she needs. She complained about her fingers being sore and blistered, and Troy gave her this old, beat-up acoustic guitar with nylon strings that wouldn’t hurt as bad as the steel strings. He actually gave it to her. He said it was hers to keep, and now she carries that damn guitar everywhere with her. She even sleeps with it at night so she’ll have musical dreams.

Today, at practice, her hair fell into her eyes while she was strumming away on her guitar, and damned if Troy didn’t lean over and tuck it behind her ear. Dahlia did not punch him in the mouth or rip into him. She actually smiled.

Dahlia and I head into the kitchen to cook the steak. She smears it with oil, grinds some pepper onto both sides, and puts it under the broiler.

“You should have your own cooking show,” I tell her. I flatter her, but I don’t come close to Troy.

“Great idea, LaSamba. . . . I’ve got it!” she says excitedly. “It would be called
Cooking with The Paper Dolls.
I think people would like it. It’s MTV meets Rachael Ray.”

When the steak is done, we eat in the kitchen. Jonah comes out of his room to see what’s going on, but soon retreats. He doesn’t approve of us eating meat and claims the very smell of it makes him sick. He’s not eating much of anything these days, and he looks skinnier than ever. His spirit guide tells him meat holds the pain of the slaughter and when you eat it, you take that pain into you. The invisible guide tells him all kinds of other things, too, and Jonah spends hours hiding out in his bedroom, receiving messages and important lessons. Once in a while, he’ll come out to tell us what he’s learned. He says his spirit guide is teaching him to be able to see into the future. Sometimes he comes out of his room ashen-faced and silent, afraid of what he’s seen.

To tell you the truth, I’m a little worried about Jonah, but when I try to talk to Dahlia about it, she brushes me off, says he’s just going through a phase. And Leah says she thinks it’s perfectly normal for a wizard to have a spirit guide and go on vision quests, so it’s obvious she’s not about to intervene.

While we eat our steak, we talk about “The Big Plan.” It was something Leah thought of—it came to her in a dream, actually—and now it’s what we’re all waiting for. We’re going to build a gypsy wagon and travel around in it, all five of us, Joey included. We’ll buy some old beater pickup truck and build a little house on the back with a peaked roof and shutters on the windows. Leah knew a man named Phoenix who had one when she was living out in California. It had a shower made from a black water tank bolted to the roof and a hose with a nozzle that came down to the back of the truck. There was a wood cookstove in it and a table that folded down.

Leah says the gypsy life is the only life worth living, that we’ll be free as birds. Each town we stop in, we’ll do a little show. Dahlia and Joey and I will play Paper Dolls songs. Jonah will tell people’s fortunes and sell magic potions. This is how we’ll earn money for gas and food. Dahlia says this is how we’ll be discovered. In order to make it big, a band has to go on the road.

There’s been no mention of taking Troy on the road with us, and I’m just fine with that. I mean, what do we really need with him now that Dahlia’s learning to play the guitar?

I try to imagine what my father will do when he wakes up one morning and finds my note saying I’ve left.
Gone with the gypsies
is all I’ll say, because I don’t want to get the Wainwrights in trouble. He’d probably think they brainwashed me or something, when the truth is, I want the gypsy wagon as badly as they do, maybe more so. I’d do anything, go anywhere, to be with Dahlia day after day.

“How come you haven’t brought Dahlia home yet?” my dad asked this morning.

“I don’t know. We’re always so busy with the band and stuff,” I said.

He’s been bugging me about wanting to meet Dahlia for weeks. And now, between the beat-up-girl eyeliner and the closet full of black clothes, he must feel like I’m slipping away into this whole other Dahlia-centered universe that he’s desperate to get some kind of handle on. I think he’s also bummed that I’ve been too busy with the band and Dahlia lately to play music with him in the living room. Some nights, I hear him out there, banging away at the piano, and I know he’s hoping I’ll come out and join him with my clarinet, but I’m always so behind on homework that I just can’t do it.

“How about having the whole band over for a special after-Thanksgiving pizza night on Saturday? Everyone will want a break from turkey and stuffing by then.”

“Sure,” I said, knowing I couldn’t put it off forever. “That would be great.”

I haven’t told him Troy Farnham is our guitarist. He knows we have a guitar player and drummer, but I’ve been a little shaky on the details. Troy used to come over the house sometimes with Sukie. My dad loved him. All parents love Troy. It’s kind of revolting. My dad’s going to be thrilled to learn the identity of the as-yet-unnamed guitarist. He’ll be happy, but he’ll think it’s weird that I haven’t told him, which maybe it is. I’ve gotta say, I feel like the queen of secrets these days. Once you keep one, especially a huge one, like me being in love with Dahlia, it acts as a sort of magnet, and before you know it, your life is full of secrets, big and small.

Joey goes in to Jonah’s room after supper. He’s the only one allowed in there these days. Joey brings little gifts: trash dolls he’s made, a penny smashed on the railroad tracks. His sleeping bag is now a permanent fixture on Jonah’s floor.

Leah’s in her room with the dolls getting ready to make something new happen. She picked up this big toy truck at the 5 & 10, and it sits on her altar now, too, representing the gypsy wagon that we’re all going to run away in.

Dahlia and I are on the couch. She’s braiding my hair, and I’m thinking that I live for moments like these: times when we’re alone and there’s some excuse for us to touch each other.

“My dad wants to have the band over Saturday for pizza,” I say, my voice all fuzzy from the buzz of having Dahlia’s fingers in my hair.

“Wow, LaSamba, you mean I actually get to come over to your house?” I turn to look at Dahlia. Her eyebrows are raised and her mouth is open in this over-the-top look of shock. She even clutches at her chest for emphasis.

“Oh yeah, like you’ve just been dying to.”

“I think it’s a little weird that you’ve never offered. That I’ve never seen where you live, where you sleep every night. You could be going back to the mother ship when you leave here for all I know.”