My Tiki Girl (29 page)

Joey and I are together a lot at school. He doesn’t ask me if I’m gay or straight or how many times Dahlia and I had sex. I get these questions a lot when I’m walking through the halls. Words shouted from kids at lockers, or girls snickering behind books. I just do my best to ignore it, the same way Joey doesn’t listen when people call him a retard.

Sometimes I go hang out with Joey at his place after school. It’s a dingy house that three other guys live in. It’s cramped and dark and smells like pee. He has to share a room with a guy who hears voices and stuff. There’s an office with a cot, and a staff person is there twenty-four hours a day, doling out medicine, reminding the guys to do their chores and homework. Joey doesn’t seem to mind living there, and says it’s way better than the cave, or being knocked around by his dad at home. A social worker comes to take him out for burgers once a week and buys him clothes and stuff. Joey thinks it’s a pretty good setup, and he’s got my dad to thank for it. My dad kind of took charge of things and made some phone calls, and now he’s like Joey’s biggest hero. Joey’s a regular at our pizza nights, and his drum is a permanent fixture in our living room next to the piano. After dinner, I get out my clarinet and the three of us jam until midnight. Some would say it’s a pretty geeky way to spend a Friday night, but it’s the highlight of my week. All our weeks actually, I think.

Joey’s supposed to graduate in June, and then he says he’ll just work full-time doing lawns and odd jobs. There’s this guy, Duke, who has a small engine-repair shop, and he’s been letting Joey help out there after school. He says Joey’s got a good set of hands.

The admissions committee is seated at a long table facing me. There are two faculty members, a woman from administration, and a student who I’m scared to look at for too long. She’s got short pink hair and is wearing a miniskirt with these rainbow-striped tights underneath. Every time my eyes meet hers, she gives me this smile that makes my whole body tingle.

“So what would you say are the areas you need to work on?” she asks.

They’re all taking turns asking questions, and for the most part, I think I’m acing the interview. One of the music teachers has just asked me to list my strengths—academically, musically, and personally. Pink Hair’s question is the obvious follow-up.

But I get all flustered, can’t look her in the eye.
Not getting all crushed out on cute girls.
That’s what I need to work on.

“Confidence,” I tell her.

“Don’t we all,” she says, smiling.

Then it’s time for me to play.

I take out my clarinet. “This is an original piece,” I tell them. “I wrote it with my best friend. It’s called ‘LaSamba Blues.’ ”

Then I play.

“Songs are portals,” Leah once said, and now I get what she means.

The notes carry me back through time to the day I met Dahlia on the soccer field. I see the past nine months in movie-scene flashes, all bright and Technicolor. There’s me being named LaSamba and meeting the dolls. Me falling head over heels for Dahlia, never daring to hope she might feel the same. But she did, I know that now.
Tiki loves LaSamba,
she whispered there on our made-up beach by the Memory Motel. Sometimes at night, when I’m drifting off to sleep, I can still hear her voice whispering in the waves. My mermaid wife.

But now, for what might be the first time in my life, I am making truly beautiful music on my own.

It’s like everything has led me right here, to this moment where the music can enter me, wash over me. Like I’ve been rehearsing for it all along. It was the music I played with Dahlia that led me here, the months of studying rhythm with my sweet Tiki girl, swimming through water, rocking on land. A rock ’n’ roll girl waltz, a tequila tango, our sweet sultry island limbo—
How low can you go? How low can you go?
—backs bent, hand in hand, we became so much more than ourselves. We played like we had wings, like Birdwoman was right all along. Sometimes the song was slow and steady, sometimes it was a wild girl, shake-everything-you’ve-got kind of tune that swept us off our feet and left us breathless.

That’s what the song I’m playing is about.

You can’t think about the whole journey. You just have to move step by step, note by note.

As I go along, I realize I’m playing a whole new song from the one Tiki and I wrote together. There are sad parts, bluesy riffs that take me way down low, but I come back up to find that it has a happy ending after all. The girl is released from the body of the doll and comes out this shiny, new thing, ready to take on whatever the world throws at her.

When I put down my clarinet and look up, the pink-haired girl is smiling at me. The whole committee is grinning. And then this crazy thing happens: they actually applaud.