My Tiki Girl (21 page)

Dahlia’s bed is a boat and there are no storms tonight, only calm waters that rock us gently in and out of each other’s arms. Then we’re not in the boat at all but swimming, swimming to shore, laughing our mermaid laughs, giving each other saltwater kisses. If I could speak, could say
I love you
out loud, it would come out as a low trilling sound, the song of a whale or dolphin, the language of mermaids. My fingers move over her, around her, inside her. She clicks in my ear, breathes softly, then hard, bites my shoulder as she makes little gasps that sound slightly desperate, that beg me not to stop, not to ever stop.

“You stop and I’ll kill you,” I think I hear her say.

Then I think her words have turned into a song, a chant, it’s my name she’s saying. “LaSamba, LaSamba, LaSamba.”

I remember my first dance with her in the living room, the drink she made with bananas and Mrs. Butterworth’s—how she said it was a cure for my LaSamba blues—and it occurs to me now that she’s both the cause and the cure, and
I know
, I mean I really know for the first time, what it means to love someone right down to the bone.

Dahlia whimpers softly, shivers, rolls over on top of me, her skin damp and salty as the sea.

“Forever,” she whispers into my hair, speaking English now, breathless but distinct. “Say it.
Tiki and LaSamba forever.
”

“Forever,” I whisper, wanting to believe it, and she runs her fingers over my lips, puts them in my mouth, filling it so I cannot speak, as if I would want to; as if there was really anything more to say.

20

The week has
gone by and we’re living three lives now.

In school, we’re Maggie and Dahlia dressed in black, eating licorice allsorts and cheating on quizzes in Earth Science (I always show her my answers). We sit at Troy’s table at lunch, where we get envious looks from just about every girl in school. Dahlia pretends not to notice, but I can tell she’s eating it up. I mean, here she’s done the impossible, leapfrogged her way up through the social castes—freak no more. For the first time in her life maybe, she has a taste of what it’s like to be the girl everyone secretly wants to be.

At Troy’s, Dahlia and I are just two best friends in a band who maybe touch each other a little too much, but no one seems to notice.

But back at the apartment, we’re Tiki and LaSamba, locked in Dahlia’s room whispering to each other in the dark, time flying by because there’s so much to say, so much to do. We give each other energy, feed off each other’s currents.

Dahlia shoplifted two matching mood rings from the 5 & 10, and we wear them on the third fingers of our left hands, our secret LaSamba and Tiki wedding rings.

When we’re alone in Dahlia’s room, we can go anywhere we want, do anything, be anyone. With my eyes closed and my secret mermaid wife pressed into me, whispering into my ear, anything is possible.

We take a boat, which is actually Dahlia’s bed, across the ocean. Tiki and I swim with dolphins and navigate by star-light, ending up at the Memory Motel, the red neon sign guiding us to the dock. The
motel
part of the sign is broken, so only the red
memory
flashes over and over, guiding us in, a strange dream beacon. My head is full of the sound of crashing waves. I can’t see the color of my mood ring, but I know it’s dark blue, because dark blue, according to the chart, means you’re in love. I want to turn on the light to look at Dahlia’s ring, but when I reach for the lamp she stops me.

“It’s night, LaSamba,” she says, holding my hand in hers. “Don’t you see the stars?”

And I look up and it’s the vague outline of Jim Morrison’s face I see, some new constellation, bigger and brighter than Orion or Ursa Minor.

Dahlia tells me to close my eyes as she moves up against me, kisses my neck, breathes in my ear.

“Tiki loves LaSamba,” she whispers, and then we’re surrounded by waves, covered, pulled under, but I am not afraid because, just as Dahlia promised, we know we will not drown.

And always, always, when we’re close like this, we’re Tiki and LaSamba, our doll selves. That’s the biggest rule, the one we can’t break. It’s Dahlia’s rule, just like the way I always have to close my eyes—if I open them I’m scolded, and she stops whatever amazing thing she’s doing until I shut them again.

The Tiki and LaSamba rule is a good one, though. We can say or do anything we want when we’re our doll selves, and it’s not supposed to count. It’s not supposed to carry over into our real lives, but it does. Little by little, it does.

I think of the fault lines we learned about in Earth Science. Of little fissures that open into huge cracks and swallow whole towns.

I wonder if secrets can be like that.

This afternoon at Troy’s, Dahlia gets her notebook out and is making some final adjustments to the new song she’s been working on before she plays it for us. Troy’s tuning his guitar. Joey’s on the couch with a bag of chips. Albert is beside him, flipping through a comic book. He comes to practice almost every afternoon now and stares at me with these puppy-wants-a-bone eyes.

“So, Mags,” Albert says, putting aside his comic book. “I was wondering . . .”

Here it comes. The moment I’ve been dreading.

“I thought maybe . . .”

Everyone is staring at him now. Dahlia is eyeing him over the top of her notebook, and she seems to be biting her lip to keep from laughing.

“Maybe you and I could go get an ice cream sometime. Or go to a movie or something.”

Dahlia can’t hold it in any longer. She lets out a hearty chuckle and says, “What about it, Mags?”

“I don’t think so Albert,” I tell him, feeling awful. “It’s just that I’m so busy these days.”

“Yeah,” Dahlia adds. “Her social calendar is full. So now that that’s out of the way, are you guys ready for the new song?”

Dahlia straps on her guitar, strums a few chords, starts to hum, then sings, her voice a throaty murmur:

“Your kisses like waves, they rock me so deep,
I am the mermaid that haunts you in sleep.
Pull me out of the water, taste the salt on my skin,
When it’s all over, we’ll do it again,
Go down again, drown again,
I’m drowning in love for you.”

Dahlia puts down the guitar, and Albert whistles and applauds.

“It’s great!” Troy says. “Truly!” He looks ecstatic, and then it hits me that it’s not because it’s a kick-ass song, but because he thinks she wrote it for him. He’s grinning from ear to ear and looking a little misty-eyed. I almost feel sorry for him.

He picks up his guitar, asks Dahlia to play it again. He watches her fingers, messes around until he’s matched the tune; then they go through it again, Dahlia strumming the same three chords, Troy adding more layers with his Stratocaster, using the whammy bar to make the notes quiver and shake. I stand up to add a little clarinet. I play in this rhythmic, breathy way, trying to mimic waves. Joey’s over at his drum doing these gentle finger taps that build, then come back down again when Dahlia sings the last line, “I’m drowning in love for you.” Troy is behind her, strumming his guitar, when it’s painfully obvious he wants to be strumming her. And then he leans in and blows everything.

“I’m drowning in love for you, too,” he whispers, but it’s loud enough so that everyone hears it.

Dahlia bursts out laughing.
“What?”
she asks.

He turns so red he’s almost purple.

“You think I wrote that song for you, Farnham?”

Albert lets out a nervous laugh. Troy’s face turns purple, and I can see the veins standing out on his thick neck. His hands tighten around his guitar like he’s trying to choke it.

Dahlia’s laughing louder and Albert has joined in. Hell, even Joey is laughing, I think just because he’s nervous and doesn’t know what else to do.

“Fuck you all!” Troy says, raising his red guitar above his head, swinging it like an ax down into the floor, where the neck snaps off the body with a loud, painful crack. The amp screams with feedback. Joey jumps about a foot, knocking over the drum. Dahlia just looks disgusted.

“Way to go, asshole,” she says, then slips her coat on to leave.

It’s snowing out, and I do up the snaps on my coat, pull the black wool beret over my ears. Dahlia keeps her own sheepskin coat open. She never buttons her coat no matter how cold it is. It’s like she’s always way warmer than anyone else. Maybe she just doesn’t like the feeling of being closed in.

Joey says, “See you,” as he jogs off down the street in the other direction. I don’t know where he goes when he’s not with us. Home to see his dad, maybe. Or to check on things in the cave.

After all this time, he’s still a complete mystery to me. I’ve wanted to ask him about his accident and tell him about mine, but it never seems to be the right moment. I’m never alone with him, and it’s not something we’d talk about if anyone else could hear. Not that I know Joey would talk about it at all. I just hope he would. To me anyway.

Dahlia teases me about having a secret crush on Joey.

Do
I have a crush on Rio? Can you have a crush on one person when you’re already in love with another?

I think of Joey’s scar. Of the accident that killed Joey’s mother. We’re connected, Joey and I, by our own similar tragedies. Scar siblings.

The sidewalks are covered in brown slush, and my feet are soaked through before we’re halfway to her apartment building. The tip of my cane slips and slides, so I quit using it and just drag it along next to me, making our tracks look like two girls walking a snake.

We walk almost all the way back to her apartment in silence, and only when we get to the building does she say something.

“The song’s for you, you know,” she tells me.

“I know,” I say. “Thank you. It’s a beautiful song.”

I don’t get how it’s happened, but suddenly freaky Frankenstein girl is the luckiest person on the face of the earth. Dahlia Wainwright has written a song for me. A love song.

We get into the hallway and stop on the stairs to kiss. There’s this added thrill of danger that we might be caught. Some neighbor could open their door. Jonah could come racing down the steps. Anything could happen. It makes my freak-girl heart pound all the harder.

When we step into Dahlia’s apartment, we see a refrigerator box sitting on its end in the back corner of the room, opposite Leah’s sewing table. There is a doorway cut out of the front of it, covered with a black scarf. Above the door, someone has painted in red nail polish: CONFESSIONS 10¢

Jonah comes bounding out of the box in his pajamas. He stayed home from school because Leah said his forehead felt a little warm. She does this sometimes when she doesn’t want to be alone. Mr. Twister is sitting on the couch, munching a carrot. There are small brown pellets of shit all over the brightly colored patchwork cover.

“You’ve gotta try it!” he says. “Mother Mary’s in there waiting. Hurry! Bring a dime in when you go. One at a time. Who’s first?”

Dahlia’s gaze moves from the box to me. “I think LaSamba should go first,” she says, smiling slyly. “I think she has the most to confess.”